A visit to a Chinese city of any size – looking up at downtown billboards, riding public transport, shopping at a mall – is to be in the presence of a Chinese celebrity endorsing a product, lifestyle or other symbols of “the good life.” Celebrity in China is big business, feeding off and nourishing the advertising-led business model that underpins the commercialized media system and internet. It is also a powerful instrument in the party-state's discursive and symbolic repertoire, used to promote regime goals and solidify new governmentalities through signalling accepted modes of behaviour for mass emulation. The multi-dimensional celebrity persona, and the public interest it stimulates in off-stage lives, requires an academic focus on the workings of celebrity separate to the products that celebrities create in their professional roles. The potential to connect with large numbers of ordinary people, and the emergence of an informal celebrity-making scene in cyberspace symptomatic of changing attitudes towards fame among Chinese people, marks the special status of celebrity within China's constrained socio-political ecology. The motivation for this article is to further scholarly understanding of how celebrity operates in China and to bring this expression of popular culture into the broader conversation about contemporary Chinese politics and society.

Situating external engagement within the broader context of developments in Western higher education (HE) and technologies that are changing many aspects of academic life, this research note draws on the experiences of a large number of China scholars to assess the merits of Twitter for individual academics and the field as whole. Celebrating its tenth anniversary in March 2016, Twitter has shaken off its earlier image of celebrity stalking and inane ephemera and has become a tool used by many professionals working on China. Despite initial scepticism, many academics have recognized the utility of Twitter for various professional activities, including networking, increasing research visibility, gathering and disseminating information, and building a public profile. As external engagement activities become a routine expectation for academics in many Western universities, social media like Twitter have drawn attention as potentially useful tools. However, there are numerous obstacles to effective use, which this note addresses.

Public interest in China, as reflected in the level of media attention, is burgeoning in the West and elsewhere in the world. This interest is driven by China's increasing presence and importance in the lives of people around the world; and for the same reason is likely to continue growing. Since media discourses are the main way in which Western publics receive information about China, contributing to media reports and helping journalists reach deeper understandings is an important task and opportunity for academics whose specialist knowledge of China is often more nuanced than that of generalist China correspondents. Although developments in the two professions are demanding closer and more frequent interactions, many scholars are reluctant to engage. This is partly due to structural disincentives within the academy, and partly due to obstacles in the scholar–media relationship. Focusing on the latter, the objective of this article is to illuminate how China scholars and journalists currently interact, and to identify means to increasing their efficiency and sustainability.

Negative campaign advertising is a major component of the electoral landscape, and has received much attention in the literature. In many studies, political scientists have tried to explain why some campaign ads contain more negative messages than others and to identify the determinants of this form of campaign behavior. In recent years, a number of studies have acknowledged the differences between alternative measures of negativity, but, in most cases, it is assumed that since these measures are highly correlated, they are unidimensional and essentially interchangeable. In this article, we argue that much of the debate in the literature over negative campaigning is a result of inadequate operationalizations of negativity. Although debates over negativity have often been framed in conceptual terms, there is a methodological explanation for why they persist We begin our analysis by constructing reliable scales of negativity, and model them with salient predictors reported in the literature as significantly associated with campaign attacks. Our findings show that scaling does matter, and while some of the explanatory variables are robust predictors of negativity, most of them are not.

The objective of this article is to survey the abundance of primary source electronic data, and appropriate methods, which could be used to advance the study of elite politics in Taiwan. Research on public attitudes and voting behaviour has benefited enormously from open scholarly access to systematically collected, reliable data resources. Research on elite political behaviour in Taiwan could similarly benefit from the creation of supplementary datasets derived from electronic primary sources. I argue that the primary resources and methods needed are already in place, for instance, to produce quantitative estimates of the policy preferences and ideological positions of parties and individual political actors over time. A variety of political texts created by political actors at all levels of office (and indeed, in opposition) are readily accessible online. With a small degree of processing, these electronic texts can easily be rendered in machine-readable format for analysis by means of computer-assisted content analysis software. Despite successes in other contexts, these data and methods are currently underutilized in studies of elite political behaviour in Taiwan.