Chinese Television and English-Speaking Audiences: in Chengdu!

Following on from the call for papers in November, the first of two workshops about English-speaking audiences for Chinese television was held at Chengdu University on 3 July 2025.

The project has evolved from its original conception, with a change of location for the meeting in China, and division of presentations between the two workshops to better reflect the strengths of each host institution. The eight Chengdu presentations focused on streaming platforms, translation and subtitling, and preliminary analysis of survey results about how non-Chinese audiences encounter and understand Chinese television. In the spring, Stirling will host the complementary set of presentations about gender, sexuality, and fandom studies. Following both meetings, a full set of papers will be published as a journal special issue.

Travel to this workshop was funded as part of a British Academy project, designed to bring together early career researchers and PhD students from China and overseas, alongside more established scholars, to share new scholarship on cultural exchanges between China and the Anglophone world, and to develop further understanding of the impact of Chinese media in a global context. We are pleased that the Chengdu meeting hosted scholars from Canada, the UK, India, and the EU, as well as Chinese nationals, and we look forward to a similar range of engagement in the spring when we meet again at Stirling.