This thematic issue examines how artificial intelligence, metaverse imaginaries, and decentralized Web3 systems have become arenas for states to build infrastructures, set technical standards, and project geopolitical power. It reconceptualizes technology not merely as an object of regulation but as a medium of statecraft through which sovereignty, security, and leadership are contested and remade in a multipolar digital order. This issue analyzes three interconnected dimensions: (a) the impact of global AI competition on state-making processes, enhancing coercive, extractive, delivery, and informational capacities similar to earlier state formation phases; (b) the nature of technological leadership as a relational and dynamic process influenced by interactions between leading and following states; and (c) the role of security logics in transforming external rivalry and internal governance through securitization. Through comparative analysis of the US, China, the EU, and emerging economies, this issue explores how diverse political systems encode openness, sovereignty, and accountability into their technological regimes, demonstrating that technological governance is inseparable from state-making. The contributions map competing logics—sovereign, liberal, entrepreneurial—showing that digital governance emerges not as convergence toward a singular model but as recursive entanglements of imagination and infrastructure.

The vital role of international broadcasting during times of international conflict has gained increasing attention; however, national variations in terms of communication strategies have rarely been explored in depth. This study fills this research gap by providing a comparative analysis of the communication strategies of Chinese and Russian state-sponsored international broadcasters. By examining CGTN’s coverage of the South China Sea arbitration and RT’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, we find that the Chinese international broadcaster preferred official Chinese sources and a peace frame during a time of conflict, whereas its Russian counterpart tended to engage with Western countercultural speakers and present conflict frames. We further interpret the two media’s different usage of sources and frames in the light of the media’s organizational culture and the sponsoring states’ national identities. The research advances the scholarship on the increasingly intensive information war between the East and the West through the way international broadcasters cover international conflicts. It enriches our understanding of the cultural and national dynamics underpinning the non-Western emerging countries’ approaches of international communication.

e15605 Background: Proctectomy remains pivotal in rectal cancer treatment for 70% of patients, even post-neoadjuvant therapy. The determination of an appropriate distal resection margin (DRM) in proctectomy for rectal cancer is critical for achieving both curative resection and organ preservation. However, the prognostic impact of DRM length, especially measured before the shrinkage caused by fixation in pathology, remains unclear. Methods: This retrospective study include 224 stage II-III rectal cancer patients who underwent proctectomy between 2015 and 2020. Patient demographics, tumor characteristics, and follow-up data (median: 44.4 months) were collected. The lengths of mesorectal and rectal DRM were both measured on fresh specimens before pathological processing. A specific metric, (rectal DRM - mesorectum DRM)/rectal DRM > 10%, identified patients with shorter mesorectal DRMs, denoted as the "MS group". Results: Out of 224 patients, 68 (30.4%) had a rectal DRM ≤1 cm, and 156 (69.6%) > 1 cm. There were no significant differences between the groups in terms of gender, use of neoadjuvant therapy, or high-risk factors like extramural venous and perineural invasion. The local recurrence (LR), disease-specific survival (DSS) and overall survival (OS) rates did not differ significantly between groups, with P = 0.66, 0.082, 0.054, respectively. Cox univariate analysis identified pT, pN, gender, and CEA level as significant factors for OS and DSS, while DRM group was not (p = 0.06). A 5-year OS predictive model (AUC = 0.864) indicated DRM's insignificant impact on OS, validated against SEER and TCGA databases. Further analysis in 182 Dixon surgery cases revealed no significant OS or DSS differences between patients with mesorectal DRM < 1cm and those with > 1cm. Notably, 23.6% (43/182) belonged to the MS group with shorter mesorectal DRM, showing significantly inferior OS (P = 0.026) and DSS (P = 0.000265) compared to the ML group. Conclusions: In this study, while a 1 cm DRM in mesorectal and rectal regions is validated as safe for rectal cancer proctectomy, our findings indicate this is not an absolute measure of oncological safety. Patients with a mesorectal DRM shorter than the rectal DRM had inferior outcomes, suggesting the need for a more nuanced approach. Thus, a comprehensive DRM evaluation, beyond a fixed length threshold, is essential to improve surgical outcomes and patient prognosis.

Norm contestation is a burgeoning area of research within International Relations (IR), particularly in the context of the evolving multi-order world. While critical constructivists have shed light on the dialogical nature of norm evolution and the significant role of discourses in norm construction, they have given little attention to the communicational process underlying these discourses. This paper argues that state-funded international broadcasters play a pivotal role in the contestation of the validity, meaning, and applicatory parameters of international norms. Unlike institutional contexts, international broadcasters do not contest norms through arguments but by projecting narratives using strategic assemblages of verbal, aural, and visual elements. Through an analysis of RT's coverage of the Ukraine Crisis (2014), the paper explicates how Russian state-sponsored propaganda has employed techniques such as liberal performance, liberal mimicry, civilizational essentialization, and counter-norm entrepreneurship to advance a favourable understanding of norms for Russia. The paper aims to contribute to the scholarship on norm contestation by authoritarian states, particularly by applying and attesting to Bettiza and Lewis's (2020) typology of norm contestation. Furthermore, it seeks to explore and theorize the relationship between norms and narratives in the ever-shifting global media ecology.

This study investigates the emotional management strategies employed by the Chinese maintream media Huanqiu Shibao (HQSB) , through the use of nationalistic rhetoric during the Covid-19 pandemic. By conducting a discourse analysis of the coverage of Covid-19 on HQSB ’s WeChat account, this research reveals two primary emotional management strategies: defensive nationalism and aggressive nationalism. Defensive nationalism utilizes fear and positive emotions to uphold and defend Chinese politics, while aggressive nationalism employs disgust to counter external criticisms and delegitimize the US democratic system and international leadership. By examining how HQSB emotionally differentiates the world, the study unveils that tactics Chinese mainstream media use to construct national identity, drawing a divisive line between a despised ‘them’ and an innocent ‘us’. The Covid-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the emotionalisation of Chinese digital propaganda and the evolution of state-led nationalism during a public health crisis. The research concludes that the use of emotion in HQSB ’s Covid-19 coverage aligns with China’s broader strategy of nation-building and global influence promotion. It underscores the need for greater awareness of the emotional mobilization used in political communication, particularly during times of crisis.

The article retrospectively looks at Russia’s strategic communication during the Ukraine crisis (2013–2014) in light of the ongoing Russian-Ukraine conflicts. Russia’s strategic communication campaign, especially the sophisticated use of state-sponsored international broadcaster-Russia Today (RT)-has been proven to raise sympathy, distract attention and delay effective reactions from the Ukranian government and NATO. RT’s strategic mediatisation of the Ukraine crisis not only fermented a favourable environment for Russia’s annexation of Crimea but set up the meta-narratives and operational framework for the subsequent influence operation practiced by the Russian government during the current Russo-Ukraine war. The article adopts a multimodal discourse analysis to elicit RT’s identity narratives about three main actors during the Ukraine crisis: Russia, the West, and Ukraine. By analysing RT’s YouTube audio-visual representation of the Ukraine crisis, the research finds that RT has applied a victimisation strategy to legitimise Russia’s military intervention in the Annexation of Crimea as a defencive counterattack. The West is accused of provoking a divide between Russia and Ukraine and being an unreliable partner and hypocritical norm-upholder. The Ukrainian components are dichotomously represented. While the pro-Eu protestors and the interim government are framed in line with violence, disorder, and neo-Nazism, the ejected pro-Russian Yanukovych government is legitimised as a democratically elected government, and its policy is aggressively crushed by the pro-Eu protestors. The empirical research suggests that RT’s discursive construction of the Ukraine crisis is built on a divisive script between a victimised pro-Russia club and an aggressive pro-EU camp. By reflecting upon RT’s strategic mediatisation of the Ukraine crisis, the paper seeks to illuminate the historical continuance and variation of Russia’s strategic communication in the post-cold war era. It thus aims to make a meaningful addition to the study of Russian propaganda and shed historical insights to make sense of Russia’s ever-intensifying information campaign during the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War.

IntroductionSocial media infuses modern relationships with vitality and brings a series of information dissemination with subjective consciousness. Studies have indicated that official Chinese media channels are transforming their communication style from didactic hard persuasion to softened emotional management in the digital era. However, previous studies have rarely provided valid empirical evidence for the communicational transformation. The study fills the gap by providing a longitudinal time-series analysis to reveal the pattern of communication of Chinese digital Chinese official media from 2019 to 2022.MethodThe study crawler collected 43,259 posts from the People’s Daily’s Weibo account from 2019 to 2021. The study analyzed the textual data with using trained artificial intelligence models.ResultsThis study explored the practices of the People’s Daily’s Weibo account from 2019 to 2021, COVID-19 is hardly normalized as it is still used as the justification for extraordinary measures in China. This study confirmed that People’s Daily’s Weibo account posts are undergoing softenization transformation, with the use of soft news, positive energy promotion, and the embedding of sentiment. Although the outburst of COVID-19 temporarily increased the media’s use of hard news, it only occur at the initial stage of the pandemic. Emotional posts occupy a nonnegligible amount of the People’s Daily Weibo content. However, the majority of posts are emotionally neutral and contribute to shaping the authoritative image of the party press.DiscussionOverall, the People’s Daily has softened their communication style on digital platforms and used emotional mobilization, distraction, and timely information provision to balance the political logic of building an authoritative media agency and the media logic of constructing audience relevance.

Identity issues have been an area of focus in language learning motivation scholarship. However, the role of national identity in language learning motivation has not received sufficient attention. In response to the timely call for reflections on nationalism and language education, this study examines how political nationalism and cultural nationalism shape Chinese learners’ motivation to learn Japanese. Our analysis suggests that cultural nationalism considerably enhances Chinese learners’ motivation whereas the motivational impact of political nationalism is bifurcate. Our research helps illuminate the mechanism of the rooted L2 self and national interest in language learning motivation, especially in the Chinese context.

Using the methods of literature review and logical analysis, from the perspective of healthy sports, this paper combs the development of campus football, and analyzes the impact of campus football on students' health and the prevention and control of potential risks. To further promote the development of campus football. The research shows that: the development of Chinese campus football has gone through three stages, and then it begins to get on the right track. In the process of development, it brings beneficial influence to students, but also has some potential risks. We should attach importance to it and guide campus football to develop in a virtuous circle through reasonable control.

Although recent scholarship has advanced our understanding of status, little attention has been paid to the factors that shape states’ status-seeking behaviour. Consequently, existing theories are unable to explain why Russia has been more aggressive and confrontational in its status-seeking than China. What is missing is a detailed examination of the ways in which status-seekers’ power trajectories affect their status-seeking behaviour. Whether a status-seeker is rising or in decline shapes its propensity to take risks in pursuit of status, its calculations regarding the utility of attaining more status, and its ability to use non-confrontational and non-aggressive status-seeking strategies to induce other states to accord it higher status. Declining powers, such as Russia, engage in aggressive status-seeking to avoid imminent status losses. Decliners need to initiate confrontations with other states to compel them to recognise their status. Risers, such as China, are more cautious and restrained. Recognising that aggressive status-seeking can jeopardise imminent gains, they are conscious of the costs that accompany elevated status. Their admirable successes and growing power, moreover, make other states all the more willing to accord them higher status. Risers, therefore, can enhance their status without resorting to aggressive or confrontational methods.

International competition over soft power has largely transformed from image promotion and cultural diplomacy to benchmark setting. Benchmarks breed discourses and discourses embody power. The article argues that the soft power index building has turned into a battlefield where different values, norms and development models struggle for legitimacy through quasi-scientific validations. By critically examining the methods employed by two soft power indexes, Portland Soft Power 30 Index and China National Image Global Survey, this article unpacks the mechanisms by which institutions from western and emerging (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS)) states embed political values, interests and agendas in the selection of data, indicators and treatments of data. The article finds that while the soft power indexes originating from Western organizations largely normalized liberal values and the current international hierarchy, the Chinese national image survey provides a more self-reflective approach to soft power measurement.