Research Projects

Based on one-year ethnography in Chinese screen industries, this project provides a rich description of the shifting production cultures in convergent Chinese television industries, through the examination of daily production practices, showing how they embody a new set of opportunities and tensions across strategic, programming and individual levels.

​

Through its in depth study of ethnographic data across Chinese broadcast and digital streaming sectors (including CCTV, Hunan Broadcasting System, and Tencent Video), this book illuminates how Chinese producers have placed their aspirations for creative freedoms within technological advancements and rhetorical strategies, both demonstrating compliance with ideological control, and leaving room for resistance and resilience to one-party state ideology.

​

L. Lin (2021) Convergent Chinese Screen Industries: Policy, Strategy and Practice. Palgrave Macmillan: London. 

The rise of subscriber-funded video-on-demand (SVOD) services has altered the terrain of video storytelling. This project explores whether and how these services are changing norms of television and film storytelling in countries around the globe. Although we remain in the early stages of changing viewing habits and industry relations, this book looks beyond the US to begin the work of updating existing theory about storytelling for national audiences and the industrial and cultural implications of content commissioned by SVODs.

​

L.Lin (2022) ‘A New Era of Creative Freedom: How Tencent Originals are reinvigorating Chinese talk shows’, in Streaming Stories: Subscription Video and Storytelling Across Borders, Amanda D. Lotz and Ramon Lobato (eds.) NYU Press: New York.

The Global Internet Television Consortium is a network of media studies scholars seeking to understand the implications of internet-distributed television. I am currently researching the landscape of Chinese digital streaming services and how the platform model has rejuvenated storytelling norms and narrative aesthetics in Chinese media industries. In particular, I examine how Tencent originals has positioned itself as an alternative space for authentic factual content that pushes the boundaries of creative and critical expression, empowered by the unique hybrid convergent model of the Chinese digital giant.

​

​

Drawing on a bottom-up ethnographic approach, this multidisciplinary project examines how to use media to engage researchers and stakeholders in a wider discussion on social injustice behind air pollution. This project explores how environmental documentaries can be employed to create visual evidence and engage a wider community of researchers and stakeholders in the debates on the causes of environmental injustice among the low social-economic statuses communities.

With a research team from the University of Kent, Institute of Development Studies and Beijing Normal University, this project adopts a highly innovative research design to combine documentary filming, policy and political analysis, and anthropological observation into one research inquiry on the social injustice behind air pollution and the more recent pandemic in China and India.

​

• Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF) Project – Principal Investigator (2019-2020)

The October of 2018 saw the creation of BBC Earth Tribe, a global online brand representing BBC Natural History Unit (NHU)’s programming on Tencent Video, one of China’s leading online streaming services. Besides providing over 650 hours of BBC documentaries to Chinese online audiences, BBC Earth Tribe delivers unprecedented access to creators from BBC NHU through interactive screen forms and offline events. This project offers a study of BBC Earth’s global strategies in its partnerships with one of the largest Chinese digital platforms, Tencent, in terms of coproduction and online community building beyond traditional canned television distribution. It examines Project Penguin, which has formalised coproduction partnerships between BBC Studios and Tencent Online Media Group (OMG) since October 2018. The distribution partnerships involve not only pre-sales of BBC Earth’s flagship documentaries but also coproduction and online community building on Tencent-run platforms, from streaming services to social media platforms. By examining BBC Earth’s distribution strategies in the Chinese media landscape from the early 2000s, the project theorises distribution strategies between BBC Studios and Tencent Video and its socio-cultural implications on television distribution in the digital, multiplatform era of convergence.

​

L. Lin (2020) ‘Beyond Canned Television: BBC Earth’s Global Community Building and Coproduction Adventure in the Case of Tencent Video’, VIEW Journal, Special Issue Canned Television Going Global, 9 (17): 21–34. DOI: http://doi.org/10.18146/view.224.