An Acceptance Analysis Of Foreign Influencers’ YouTube Videos About Chinese Culture,Based On David Morley’s Audience Theories

As General Secretary Xi Jinping has emphasized in the report to the 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,we should extend the reach and appeal of Chinese civilization.We will accelerate the development of China’s discourse and narrative systems,better tell China’s stories,make China’s voice heard,and present a China that is credible,appealing,and respectable.We have been exploring possible ways to promote Chinese culture.There are some official institutes who are playing such important roles,like CGTN and Confucius Institute.Besides those institutes,some individuals producing content related to Chinese cultures,like Li Ziqi and some foreign influencers,also become popular on social media home and abroad.They might not mean to do this,but they actually enhance the intercultural communication and promote Chinese culture worldwide.Therefore,such interculture communication is even considered as the practice of the new public diplomacy,which hance draws the attention of more and more researchers.This study comprehensively applied the method of text analysis,corpus-driven research method and in-depth interview,combining qualitative and quantitative research methods.Focusing on foreign influencers’ Chinese-culture-related videos and their international audiences,this research tried to complete an acceptance analysis of the mentioned videos.The research results are mainly divided into three parts:(1)the characteristics of foreign influencers’ Chinese-culture-related videos;(2)the results of corpus-driven analysis on foreign influencers’ Chinese-culture-related videos;(3)the results of in-depth interviews.Foreign influencers’ Chinese-culture-related videos have the characteristics of low cultural context,which enables international audiences to understand the content easily.The positive emotion generated by watching the video are transformed into action intentions.Therefore,these foreign influencers and their videos play a positive role on enhancing intercultural communication and encouraging more people to learn Chinese culture.However,driven by fame and interest,these videos exist the problems of being superficial and repetitive.There are even potential ethical problems.From the perspective of international audiences,this research tried to find out the strengths and shortcomings of foreign influencer’s Chinese-culture-related videos through an acceptance analysis,so as to provide suggestions for better presenting Chinese culture to the world.Four suggestions are given:(1)attach importance to individual-based international communication mode,taking good advantage of the power of cultural others;(2)abandon grand narratives and lower cultural context,telling stories of ordinary people;(3)set up online Confucius Institutes and give full play to the appeal of Chinese;(4)promote the elements on superficial cultural layers which are easily accepted;(5)manage ad regulate foreign influencers with the help of MCNs.