Rethinking Governance in China: Connecting Global Health Communication and Internet Governance
Share via
PhD Workshop
Monday 28 September 2026
1:30-3:30pm
Arts Hall, Old Arts Building, Parkville Campus
Presented by the Asian Cultural Research Hub
Abstract
This workshop explores how communication shapes governance through two complementary perspectives on contemporary China. The first presentation draws on China's engagement in global health communication and malaria control to examine the roles of trust, expertise, risk communication, and international collaboration in addressing public health challenges. The second presentation extends these questions into the digital sphere, reconsidering the internet as a cultural artefact and internet governance as a process shaped by shared values and collective belief systems. Using China as a site of investigation, the workshop invites broader reflection on governance, communication, and social life in Asia and beyond.
- China’s practice in global health communication
In this talk, Jing Xu’s will reflect on her more than 30 years experience in teaching and researching health communication, especially global health and public emergency risk communication. Specifically, the talk will take China’s engagement in global malaria control as a case study, this talk analyzes key challenges confronting China’s participation in global health communication and governance. In doing so, the talk will explore directions for future direction on the intersection between health communications and health governances through the Chinese experience.
- Internet Governance: An Approach from the Perspective of Cultural Value
Is the Internet in your smartphone or computer, in servers housed in data centers, or in undersea cables? In fact, the Internet is a kind of consensus, and the cyberspace should be perceived as a cultural artefact. By locating the experience of China, this talk will re-examine the Internet from the perspective of cultural value and advocate for rewriting the history of Internet governance. The core approach is to extract the momentum of faith from technical systems, then to re-examine how order forms and develops with faith.
Speaker: Prof. Jing Xu holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the School of International Studies at Peking University. She currently serves as Director of the Health Communication Program, Deputy Director of the Institute of Culture and Communication, and Dual-Appointed Professor at the Institute for Global Health and Development, Peking University.
With 34 years of teaching experience at Peking University, her research focuses on Health Communication, especially global health and public emergency risk communication. She has led and participated in over ten national and international research projects, authored, co-authored, and edited five academic books, and published more than 70 journal articles.
Prof. Xu has a rich international academic background, having visited and delivered lectures at renowned institutions including Waseda University (1996-1997), the University of Oxford (2001-2002), the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), City University of Hong Kong (CityU), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), and Università della Svizzera Italiana. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medicine, Humanity and Media (JMHM) (ISSN 2817-5166).
E-mail: xujing@pku.edu.cn
Speaker: Dr Jinhe Liu is an assistant professor, research fellow, and doctoral supervisor at the School of Journalism and Communication of Peking University. He obtained a doctoral degree from Tsinghua University and has an interdisciplinary background in journalism and communication, law, management. Before joining Peking University, he conducted post-doctoral research at the School of Public Policy and Management of Tsinghua University and the Tsinghua Internet Governance Research Center.
In recent years, Dr Liu has carried out interdisciplinary research on media governance, presided over multiple vertical research projects such as those funded by National Social Science Foundation, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, and Beijing Social Science Foundation, and published papers in CSSCI and SSCI - indexed journals.
Facing the digital society and digital civilization, he advocates integrating the theories and methods of multiple disciplines into journalism and communication studies, and emphasizes that culture, as a constructive force in media governance, needs to be theorized to achieve innovation in the basic theories and even paradigm shifts in digital communication research.
Email: liujinhe@pku.edu.cn
Enquiries:
Dr Wilfred Wang: wilfred.wang@unimelb.edu.au
Prof Fran Martin: f.martin@unimelb.edu.au