This Special Issue examines screenwriting and fictional storytelling devices within the context of documentary filmmaking from a global perspective, exploring a range of practices from those found on mainstream streaming services to those developed in first-person documentary work. The six articles comprising this collection highlight how industrial curation, personal practices, established narrative techniques and hybrid strategies have shaped the influence of fictional storytelling devices on documentary form. A primary aim of this Special Issue is to explore analytical frameworks that can deepen understanding of screenwriting and fictional storytelling devices present in documentaries, benefiting scholars, students and filmmakers alike.

In June 2025, the hashtag #NoChineseCanLeaveTheBritishMuseumSmiling circulated widely on the Chinese platform RedNote, sparking public debate over the British Museum's Chinese collections. This article examines how displaced Chinese artefacts are framed differently in the Museum's Chinese galleries and on digital platforms. Data were collected between October 2023 and August 2025 through two rounds of exhibition fieldwork and through a stratified sample of 622 RedNote posts drawn from 2,310 items. In addition, 18 semi-structured interviews were conducted with museum professionals globally. Drawing on Heidegger's concept of care, we argue that curatorial practices enact spatio-narrative hegemony by embedding artefacts in universalist narratives, while digital publics exercise narrative sovereignty - renegotiating authority, memory and belonging across physical and digital contexts. Theoretically, the article advances a phenomenologically grounded framework for analysing contested heritage in hybrid environments. Practically, it suggests that museums adopt more participatory curatorial strategies when addressing displaced collections in the digital age.

Mystery boxes are probabilistic consumer products with no practical utility, but have become a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon in China. Existing scholarship largely treats them through psychological and behavioural lenses without interrogating their significance within the changing nature of symbolic value in contemporary Chinese consumer capitalism. This study addresses that gap by drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s sign value in dialogue with Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism, Walter Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, Douglas Kellner’s critique, and Russell W. Belk’s extended self. Employing triangulated methods, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling of 1813 Xiaohongshu user comments and semi-structured interviews with 10 collectors, the analysis identifies three interlocking dimensions: structural mechanics of dissatisfaction, difference, and set completion; co-production of consumer identity through community and platform; and ritual reinvestment of meaning in post-auratic commodities. Findings reveal that consumers are neither passive sign-absorbers nor autonomous meaning-makers but occupy a condition of frustrated lucidity, exercising creativity and critical awareness within structures they cannot escape. Mystery box consumption represents an intensification of sign hegemony through platform-mediated social commerce, gamblification, and Chinese cultural logics, while consumers partly resist through culturally grounded symbolic sacralisation and singularisation.

Abstract Virtual pets are anthropomorphically created by content creators who construct digital personas for their animals by presenting content from the pets’ supposed viewpoints. Through qualitative thematic analysis of 30,900 user comments from viral pet videos, this research reveals emotional bond formation mechanisms and their commodification within surveillance capitalism structures. The findings uncover a fundamental paradox wherein viewers demonstrate emotional bonds with virtual pets while indicating awareness of commercial exploitation. User comments reveal complex negotiations between care and critical consciousness. However, understanding of animal welfare implications in the digital ecosystem remains limited, as sentiment analysis shows that 73.2% of 30,900 comments are positive. These findings extend anthropomorphism by showing how Douyin turns psychological processes into extractable value and viewers knowingly engage in potentially exploitative commercial relationships. The research offers key insights into ethical tensions surrounding animal welfare, privacy, and commercial exploitation within China’s platform-based pet economy.

This article explores the way that documentary screenwriters shape narration in long-form documentary series, which are becoming increasingly common on streaming platforms that have embraced non-fiction storytelling as part of their offering to subscribers. Of particular interest is the use of dramatic re-enactments, which allow documentary filmmakers to embrace a range of storytelling techniques typically associated with screenwriting for fictional drama. Using a case study of Netflix’s Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War (2024), which delivers 80 per cent of its content through re-enactments, we examine the screenwriting decisions involved in organizing the historical material using re-enactment, voice-over, interviews with subject-matter experts and archival material. Our research reveals telling insights about the ways in which re-enactments provide increased narrative control for the screenwriter and how the delicate interplay of scripted re-enactment with scripted voice-over allows for screen narration to efficiently set out factual exposition whilst creating emotional engagement, thereby balancing dramatic storytelling with historical accuracy.

This research scrutinizes the implications of the ‘national style’ in Chinese ink-painting animation, with a focus on the digital era transformation, utilizing Deep Sea (2023) as a case study. The authors employ a visual and critical analysis of the film’s innovative three-dimensional (3D) ‘particle-ink technology’, invented by director Tian Xiaopeng, which digitizes traditional elements like water and ink. They find that this shift from physical to digital media has resulted in a unique aesthetic experience and altered the reception of this animation style. The film’s blend of Chinese and Disney/Pixar styles presents a nuanced interplay between tradition and innovation, Chinese and global, reconfiguring the ‘national style’ paradigm. However, the shift has elicited tension between modern reinterpretations and inherited artistic practices. The authors argue the importance of balancing this tension in Chinese animation to avoid limiting the ink-painting form’s potential evolution and to facilitate a diverse, globally evolving narrative of Chinese national identity.

This study examines Black Myth: Wukong, China's first AAA (Triple-A) game, as a transformative medium that bridges traditional Chinese mythology and modern digital storytelling. Drawing from Journey to the West, a cornerstone of Chinese literary heritage, the game integrates advanced gaming technologies with immersive narratives, offering an organic reinterpretation of classical mythology for a global audience. Employing Walter Benjamin's theory of storytelling and Carly Kocurek's insights on interactive media, this research highlights how the game revitalises cultural narratives, fostering cross-cultural connections while maintaining authenticity. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study integrates content analysis of narrative and visual elements, sentiment analysis of audience reception, and a dual deductive-inductive thematic analysis to uncover key trends and insights. This study also addresses controversies surrounding inclusivity and ethical storytelling, emphasising the challenges and opportunities in adapting traditional narratives to contemporary global contexts. By analysing the reception and cultural implications of Wukong, we underscore the potential of interactive media to serve as both a cultural bridge and an educational tool.

This study assessed Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination knowledge, willingness, and status among University of Nottingham Ningbo undergraduate students, utilizing the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) and Health Belief Model (HBM). Self-administered questionnaires covered demographics, sexual behavior, and factors influencing vaccination intentions. Quantitative and qualitative analyses included t-tests, ANOVA, Pearson correlation, logistic regression, and linear regression. Of 373 surveyed students, the HPV vaccination rate was notably higher than in previous studies (45.84%). While participants demonstrated good HPV knowledge, male students were less aware. Intentions to vaccinate were high, influenced by gender, profession, parental education, family/friend cancer history, and health status. The study confirmed TPB and HBM’s efficacy in predicting vaccination intentions, enhancing media-related aspects and perceived barriers. Gender differences in HPV information exposure, media use, and representations were identified, offering insights for optimized health communication strategies.

China’s fertility policies have shifted dramatically from birth incentivization (1949–1952) through population control (1952–2011) to the three-child policy (2021). Despite liberalization, birth rates continue declining, reaching 6.39

Digital platforms have revolutionised the feminist movement in China, offering an unparalleled platform for voicing grievances and seeking justice. Using the well-known accusation of sexual harassment against renowned screenwriter Shi Hang (which first emerged on the social networking service Douban) as a case study, this article explores the potency and peril of digital vigilantism in contemporary Chinese feminist discourse. It shows how the singular anonymous post metamorphosed into multiple corroborating allegations, thereby underlining the empowering nature of digital platforms, but also how the proliferation of the discourse across Weibo and the divergent reactions it triggered raised poignant questions about the social context in which digital vigilantism and digital feminisms in China today are manifesting. The Shi Hang case demonstrates that social media platforms such as Weibo offer unprecedented opportunities for women to expose sexual harassment and seek justice, but it also highlights the inherent risks for digital feminism as it becomes the target of discourses around false accusations, wrongful incrimination, and misinformation. Through a multi-method inductive thematic analysis and discourse analysis of the Shi Hang case on Weibo the article traces the evolving social discourse surrounding the case and identifies its broader social implications for digital feminisms in contemporary China.

The abstract culture is a youth subculture characterized by the incomprehensible, vulgar, and even abusive presentations of live streamers in China. Through online viewers' second creation, remixing, and dissemination of these presentations, the live streamers become memes widely recognized by Chinese young generations. This subculture started catching netizens' attention with the establishment of the Abstract Studio from the game live-streamers Li Gan and Sun Xiaochuan on the livestreaming platform Douyu. With subcultural studies and Raymond William's notion of the structure of feelings, this study analyzes the abstract culture from the perspective of its reception among Chinese youth. Through qualitative survey and thematic analysis, this exploratory study contends the abstract culture constructs a structure of feeling composed of four dominant feelings: participatory and creative for entertainment, emotional utopia, freedom of expression, and herd mentality. The simultaneous presence of these four feelings reflects the diverse means of expression and complex emotions that exist in abstract culture, which arise from Chinese young people's responses to Chinese social norms, state and grassroots discipline, and technical traits of social media.

This paper examines the "Fat Cat Incident" (2024), where a young Chinese gamer's suicide after an online relationship breakdown sparked intense online discourse. Through inductive thematic analysis and qualitative sentiment analysis of 1,200 user comments from the female-oriented Xiaohongshu and male-dominated Zhihu platforms, we demonstrate how Chinese social media facilitate the social construction of polarized gender realities. Xiaohongshu users predominantly framed Fat Cat as an emotionally impulsive "hopeless romantic" while defending his ex-girlfriend's right to financial compensation, whereas Zhihu users portrayed Fat Cat as a manipulated victim while characterizing his ex-girlfriend as a calculated "gold-digger" employing PUA tactics. The incident reveals three key processes: (1) gender norm construction via polarized discourse, (2) tragedy commodification into "liuliang" (traffic) and memes, and (3) transactional relationship normalization and digital gender segregation. This demonstrates how platforms shape social realities by reinforcing gender divides, monetizing emotion, and commodifying personal loss, offering critical insight into gender politics in China's digital public sphere.

This Special Issue examines the multifaceted challenges faced by women journalists globally, exploring safety risks and gender discrimination across diverse contexts. Women journalists encounter disproportionate threats including physical violence, sexual harassment and online abuse, with 73 per cent experiencing digital violence according to recent studies. The intersection of gender with race, religion, class and ethnicity intensifies these risks. Discrimination manifests through unequal pay, limited career advancement and segregation into s'oft news' beats. The six articles in this collection investigate these challenges across theoretical frameworks including postcolonial feminism and intersectionality. Topics range from safety intervention ethics and women's leadership in newsrooms to online harassment and the unique barriers facing Dalit women journalists. The research reveals both the resilience of women journalists and the urgent need for institutional reforms including inclusive hiring policies, equitable resource allocation and effective safety mechanisms to create a more equitable media landscape.

This study investigates the integration of transmedia storytelling (TMS) within immersive extended reality (XR)-enhanced museum experiences, focusing on its potential to transform cultural engagement. Employing Heidegger's fourfold model as a theoretical foundation, along with the authors' conceptual framework illustrating the synergy of fourfold elements in XR-enhanced museums, the research explores how interactive narratives align with the dimensions of Earth, sky, mortals and gods to create richer, more participatory museum experiences. Drawing on interviews with 27 experts from Asia, Europe, Canada and the United States, the study examines the challenges and opportunities of integrating TMS into museum practices. The research highlights the transformative potential of storytelling and interactive narratives to shift museum experiences from passive observation to active participation. This phenomenological orientation towards dynamic storytelling offers implications for designing richer, more engaging cultural heritage experiences and invites further inquiry into the role of TMS in the digital age.

This article examines (sic)(sic)(sic)(sic) Yinru Chenyan 'Return to Dust' (2022) (henchforth Dust), directed by Li Ruijun, as a powerful critique of rural marginalization and socio-economic inequities in contemporary China. The film illustrates the hardships faced by Ma Youtie and Cao Guiying, representing rural individuals marginalized by prevailing urban narratives and enduring institutional neglect and exploitation. Using narrative analysis and building on the surrounding paratextual film reviews of Dust, this study engages the notion of subalternity to reveal how the film amplifies the voices of rural communities through narrating about three disparate subaltern subjects: the peasants; the marginalized in the rural society; the rural women. Then, through examining the film reviews from state-sponsored media and social media, this paper explores how the subaltern narrative engenders an ideological confrontation between the state-sponsored media discourse and the grassroots discourse from the rural communities. Although the subaltern narrative may be misrepresented as a series of positive messages by state-sponsored media, it concurrently possesses the capacity to provoke public critique of both films and state-sponsored media on social media platforms, advocating for more just representations of social responsibility.

This article explores how vernacular aesthetics have been re-appropriated from pictorial to modern documentary photography over the past century to instigate a modern collective imagination of the industrial disintegration in the Chinese urban milieu. Within the scope of a discursive visual process, Jean Philippe Gauvrit (b.1963) documents the departure of the industrial urban society in his photo-essay Shanghai in JP Gauvrit (2008). The paper claims that Gauvrit’s documentary photography can be understood as a visual critical discourse of several representational perspectives of time that render visible anachronistic and new social structures that come into being: between utopias of the past and visions of the future in an alternative chronotopic ‘present’ cartography. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) conception of chronotope, in this study, the sublime industrial comes to be represented as an intelligible reconfiguration of linear and cyclical time. By linking that socio-economic reality of that time with a collective consciousness, documentary photography can serve as a chronotope that reveals both the tension and the assimilation relating to the historical myths that lie between the fall of an industrial mode of production and the birth of a post-industrial cultural city in an era of de-industrialization.

This study delves into the use of visual rhetorical strategies in 中国奇谭 Zhongguo Qitan ‘Yao-Chinese Folktales’ (2023), particularly focusing on 鹅鹅鹅 E E E ‘Goose Mountain’ (henceforth ‘Goose’) directed by Hu Rui. We assert that ‘Goose’ transcodes and reinterprets the ancient Chinese zhiguai novella 阳羡书生 Yangxian Shusheng ‘The Scholar from Yangxian’ (henceforth ‘Scholar’) for a contemporary audience through the use of visual rhetoric, leading to a compelling contemporary rendition of this tale. As a silent animation, ‘Goose’ does so by adeptly incorporating visual depictions, especially animal-related imagery and ink painting aesthetics, drawn from the broader traditional zhiguai myths, or tales of the strange and traditional Chinese culture. The core argument hinges on visual rhetoric’s transformative potential. In ‘Goose’, the connection between tradition and contemporaneity is established through metaphor and metonymy. Initially a literary figure of speech, metaphor and metonymy now encompasses ‘visual rhetoric’, widely applied in interpreting visual arts. Visual rhetoric often employs various elements such as colour, shape, size, objects, composition and texture to convey information. This study highlights the role played by the inseparable link between traditional zhiguai narratives, the minzu /national style, and the contemporary animation technology in ‘Goose’, a transformative role that revitalizes ancient traditions to resonate with today’s viewership. Keywords contemporary Chinese animation , /national style , supernatural , traditional Chinese culture , visual rhetoric , (tales of the strange)

This study explores the Yu-C (language cosplay) community, a female-dominated digital subculture within the Chinese internet landscape. Yu-C, a text-based role-playing platform, enables participants to construct and perform diverse identities-including cross-gender, non-human, and fictional personas-cultivating a unique site for storytelling, social interaction, and feminist expression. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 36 female participants, supplemented by online ethnographic observations, this research examines how Yu-C facilitates identity exploration, challenges patriarchal norms, and serves as a microcosm for feminist resistance and subcultural innovation. Utilising theoretical frameworks of cyberfeminism, queer theory, and intersectionality, the study analyzes the dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and subcultural capital within the community. Findings reveal that Yu-C offers women a space for self-expression, emotional connection, and the reimagining of traditional gender roles. At the same time, it highlights the complexities of balancing exclusivity and inclusivity. This study contributes to feminist literature by demonstrating the transformative potential of digital spaces for identity reconstruction and collective empowerment, emphasising Yu-C's role in challenging and reconfiguring societal narratives around gender and power.

This study delves into the use of visual rhetorical strategies in Zhongguo Qitan 'Yao-Chinese Folktales' (2023), particularly focusing on E E E 'Goose Mountain' (henceforth 'Goose') directed by Hu Rui. We assert that 'Goose' transcodes and reinterprets the ancient Chinese zhiguai novella Yangxian Shusheng 'The Scholar from Yangxian' (henceforth 'Scholar') for a contemporary audience through the use of visual rhetoric, leading to a compelling contemporary rendition of this tale. As a silent animation, 'Goose' does so by adeptly incorporating visual depictions, especially animal-related imagery and ink painting aesthetics, drawn from the broader traditional zhiguai myths, or tales of the strange and traditional Chinese culture. The core argument hinges on visual rhetoric's transformative potential. In 'Goose', the connection between tradition and contemporaneity is established through metaphor and metonymy. Initially a literary figure of speech, metaphor and metonymy now encompasses 'visual rhetoric', widely applied in interpreting visual arts. Visual rhetoric often employs various elements such as colour, shape, size, objects, composition and texture to convey information. This study highlights the role played by the inseparable link between traditional zhiguai narratives, the minzu/national style, and the contemporary animation technology in 'Goose', a transformative role that revitalizes ancient traditions to resonate with today's viewership.