By screening and clustering column articles from 23 core and comprehensive journals in Chinese journalism and communication, this article provides an overview of the impact and shaping of the intelligent communication context on the research foci and thematic orientations of Chinese journalism over the past year, across eight key areas: journalism theory, systemic transformation of mainstream media, assessment of mainstream media effectiveness, Chinese journalism, news production, news practitioners, news consumption, and the history of Chinese journalism.
Based on four key criteria—problem awareness, methodological norms, theoretical construction, and practical relevance—this article selects 148 research papers from 18 Chinese academic journals (including those from Hong Kong and TAIwan regions) published in 2025. It delineates the intellectual landscape of communication research in China over the past year through thirteen thematic areas: the history of communication thought, digital labor, platform studies, algorithmic practices, human-machine communication, media cultural practices, digital interactions, mediatized governance, health communication, media studies and the philosophy of media technology, the history of the internet, and new developments in classical theories.
In 2025, breakthrough progress in open-source large models, represented by DeepSeek, marked a new stage of deepened application for generative artificial intelligence, leading to profound changes in the social communication ecology. This year, the academic community conducted systematic and in-depth research centering on the new communication ecology and the new conditions of human existence in the era of artificial intelligence. Based on criteria such as the frontier nature of topics, the novelty of theoretical perspectives, and the depth of research, this paper identifies six major themes from new media and intelligent communication research papers published in core journals in 2025. These themes include: the transformation and reconstruction of human-machine relationships, human-machine affective practices, the transformation of knowledge production driven by generative AI, DeepSeek open source and new horizons in international communication research, “visibility” research in the platform context, and new media as “infrastructure.” Through the review and synthesis of these themes, this paper aims to provide references and insights for relevant researchers.
During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the construction of an indigenous knowledge system in Chinese philosophy and social sciences has become an important theoretical agenda for academia. In the field of journalism and communication studies, Huaxia Communication Research has actively responded to this call with a distinct problem-oriented approach and accumulated knowledge. Against the backdrop of the evolution of knowledge production and communication modes throughout China’s five-thousand-year history and culture, Huaxia Communication Research is committed to integrating the values of Chinese culture and responding to contemporary communication practices. Compared with previous periods, this phase of research not only starts from contemporary Chinese communication issues, activating problem consciousness embedded in local experiences and promoting the development of Chinese communication discourse, but also systematically revisits historical resources, transforming the conceptual wisdom of the Huaxia cultural heritage into theoretical tools for interpreting contemporary communication problems. Gradually, it has established an internally coherent theoretical and methodological foundation. With an autonomous and self-conscious disciplinary awareness, Huaxia Communication Research is actively participating in and advancing the construction of an indigenous knowledge system in Chinese communication studies.
In 2025, research on Marxism Journalistic Views in China achieved profound and far-reaching advances with fruitful outcomes. Scholarly communities in journalism and communication have clarified its core connotations and conceptual boundaries through theoretical genealogical analysis, revisited its historical origins to delineate the formative pathways and evolutionary trajectory via classical textual studies, and examined how CPC has deepened and practiced this perspective by anchoring on pivotal historical junctures in the CPC’s journalistic development. Researchers have also expanded the research agenda to encompass institutional policies, discursive texts, and educational practices, elevating both theoretical and practical inquiries into the Sinicized Marxism Journalistic Views. Furthermore, guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Culture and the Recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan, scholars have advanced studies on the Marxism Journalistic Views in the new era as an integral part of constructing an independent knowledge system for China’s journalism and communication discipline.
There are different deformations in the implementation of different policies in county-level converged media center, such as symbolic policy implementation, selective policy implementation, copying policy implementation and wait-and-see policy implementation. Based on the analysis framework of three-level bureaucratic organization model, the reasons of such policy deformations lie in the attention allocation dilemma of county-level converged media center, which leads to the localization of policy implementation under multitask principal-agent; the incentive dilemma of the county publicity department, which leads to the path dependence and lack of innovation; the dilemma of control rights distribution of the provincial publicity department, which leads to the elasticity of policy implementation in vague goals and easy examination standards. The correction of policy implementation deviation needs to redistribute attention, establish a working mechanism and evaluation system that adapts to multitask; redistribute salary performance to stimulate innovation vitality; redistribute control rights to encourage positive policy innovation.
The prevalence of digital technology is profoundly reshaping the media trust structure of middle-aged and elderly people. Based on the theory of technology domestication and using data from the 2021 China Social Survey, this study empirically examines the impact of online communities on media trust among middle-aged and elderly people in China, as well as its heterogeneity. It also delves into the underlying mechanisms and the differential impacts of various types of online communities. The study finds that: firstly, online communities participation significantly weakens trust in media among middle-aged and elderly people, and this negative effect intensifies with age and the absence of intergenerational support, but social networks can mitigate this effect. Secondly, technology domestication operates through dual pathways of “institutional authority deconstruction” and “trust compensation relationship reconstruction”. The former, with the decline of political trust as an intermediary, intensifies the loss of media trust, while the latter improves media trust through enhanced social evaluation, forming a partial masking effect revealing cognitive adaptation characteristics of authority dilution and relationship proliferation. Thirdly, there are differential impacts among types of online communities, with utilitarian communities significantly eroding media trust, whereas relational and interest-based communities have no significant effect on media trust. The findings suggest that media trust reconstruction among middle-aged and elderly people is not a non-linear replacement, but rather the result of a dynamic game between institutional authority and relational trust, highlighting the important impact of the dialectical interaction between algorithmic logic and social logic on the construction of media trust systems in the process of technological domestication.
In the public discourse shaped by the “media risk” narrative, restrictive mediation has become a widely adopted parenting strategy among Chinese families. This study investigates whether restrictive mediation safeguards adolescents’ mental health by curbing entertainment-oriented Internet use or, conversely, exacerbates depression by triggering reactance towards parental authority. Based on survey data from 7,965 adolescents, the results show that frequent restrictions indeed reduce entertainment-oriented Internet use, thereby lowering adolescents’ depression. However, these restrictions also provoke reactance towards parental authority, which not only directly harms mental health but also increases engagement in entertainment-oriented Internet use, undermining the intended protective effects. Notably, in families with better parent-child communication, restrictive mediation can significantly enhance adolescents’ mental health without triggering reactance, allowing its protective effects to prevail. This study highlights the complexity and context-dependency of restrictive mediation effects, offering valuable insights for optimizing digital parenting practices.
In the context of contemporary debates on artificial intelligence and robot ethics, the “Machine Question” has moved from the margins to the center of theoretical and practical concern. Rather than treating intelligent artifacts as a purely technical problem, David J. Gunkel’s work in The Machine Question, Robot Rights, and Person, Thing, Robot interrogates the modern moral and legal ontology built upon the person-thing binary. He shows that controversies over “robot rights” expose the limits of existing classificatory schemes when responsibility and agency are distributed across complex socio-technical assemblages. This interview traces the intellectual trajectory of the Machine Question, examines Gunkel’s proposal to rethink the person-thing-robot nexus, and discusses the difficulties of assigning accountability in human-AI systems, as well as the emerging roles of intelligent artifacts in intimate and everyday contexts. Against the backdrop of Chinese and other non-Western perspectives, Gunkel calls for a relational turn in ethics and law, urging us to reconsider the historical expansion and blind spots of the moral circle and to envision a reconstructed moral and legal ontology adequate to the twenty-first century.
