Walled cosmopolitanization: how China’s Great
Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives
Dublin Core
Title
Walled cosmopolitanization: how China’s Great
Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives
Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives
Subject
censorship, cosmopolitanization, Great Firewall, social media, urban gay men
Description
This article explores the role of censorship as a communication technology in shaping experiences of cosmopolitanization. Drawing on interviews
with urban Chinese gay men who circumvent the country’s Great Firewall, the article studies how censorship shapes people’s media choices,
practices, and social outlooks. It presents three findings. First, censorship produces a domesticated media ecology characterized by controlled
exchanges with the outside world, constructing the perceived “localness” and “foreignness” of media artifacts. Second, censorship creates an
exclusive “cosmopolitan digital class” that establishes a hierarchy of desirability based on people’s media practices. Third, censorship promotes
a paradoxical intertwining of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, popularizing a mindset that is at once open—willing to move across the Wall
and access alternative information—and closed: subscribing to territorial understandings of selfhood. Based on these findings, the article
proposes the concept of “walled cosmopolitanization” to describe the vulnerability of the cosmopolitan self in censored environments.
with urban Chinese gay men who circumvent the country’s Great Firewall, the article studies how censorship shapes people’s media choices,
practices, and social outlooks. It presents three findings. First, censorship produces a domesticated media ecology characterized by controlled
exchanges with the outside world, constructing the perceived “localness” and “foreignness” of media artifacts. Second, censorship creates an
exclusive “cosmopolitan digital class” that establishes a hierarchy of desirability based on people’s media practices. Third, censorship promotes
a paradoxical intertwining of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, popularizing a mindset that is at once open—willing to move across the Wall
and access alternative information—and closed: subscribing to territorial understandings of selfhood. Based on these findings, the article
proposes the concept of “walled cosmopolitanization” to describe the vulnerability of the cosmopolitan self in censored environments.
Creator
Lin Song1 and Shangwei Wu
Source
https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmac039
Publisher
Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association.
Date
12 December 2022
Contributor
PERI IRAWAN
Format
PDF
Language
ENGLISH
Type
TEXT
Files
Collection
Citation
Lin Song1 and Shangwei Wu, “Walled cosmopolitanization: how China’s Great
Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives,” Repository Horizon University Indonesia, accessed October 31, 2025, https://repository.horizon.ac.id/items/show/8652.
Firewall mediates young urban gay men’s lives,” Repository Horizon University Indonesia, accessed October 31, 2025, https://repository.horizon.ac.id/items/show/8652.