Chinas media landscape has evolved greatly over the last few years. Technological innovation, the transformation of the traditional media industry and the explosion in the use of new media have changed not only the outlook for the dissemination of entertainment and information, but also the communication methods and models adopted between the media and the public in China. Together with the promotion of Chinas Soft Power worldwide, the media industry has been pinpointed as one of the priority cultural industries for further economic development. These evolutions have been studied by Chinese scholars from different perspectives and at different stages over the years, contributing much to recording the changes in the media landscape in China, but very little of the fruit of their research has been shared with the western world. Most of the studies have been carried by scholars from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore or Chinese scholars overseas but, partly because of the language barrier, mainland Chinese scholars academic achievements have received less attention in the international academic literature. Understanding the important role of Chinese researchers, who are at the frontier of the media industry in China with their growing capability and desire to communicate with the world, the China Media Observatory (CMO) at the Universit della Svizzera Italiana (USI) has worked hard to get in touch with scholars and experts in the media and communication elds in mainland China in recent years. Not only has the CMO paid visits to different universities in China, given seminars there and cooperated on several joint research projects (i.e. the research project with the Communication University of China Encoding the Olympics was published by Routledge in 2012), it also tries to invite prominent Chinese scholars to Switzerland each year to share their most recent research and their in-depth understanding of the media in China. The idea of organizing a special English publication for mainland Chinese scholars on Media Studies in China was born at the end of 2011 when Zhan Zhang, researcher and PhD candidate at the China Media Observatory, went to Shanghai for an academic conference organized by Fudan University. On that occasion she met Prof. Dan Huang and Prof. Ye Lu from Fudan and talked with them about the problems of local Chinese scholars entering the international academic eld, as well as the exiguity of Chinese scholars publications in the English-speaking world. This idea was then approved and encouraged by Prof. Fei Jiang, professor and director of the Communication Department of the Institute of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. With the backing of Prof. Richeri, director of the China Media Observatory, CMO and the Communication Department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences decided to promote the project and garnered the interest of the editors of Studies of Communication Sciences in publishing a special edition of the Journal. The call for papers was sent in June 2012 to universities throughout China
and more than 20 abstracts were received. The organizers selected
8 and arranged for the full papers to be peer reviewed. Finally, 4 papers were submitted before the deadline for publication: On the three waves of Chinas communication studies: A commemoration of the 30th anniversary of Schramms visit to China & Chinas communication studies in post-Schramm times, by Prof. Fei Jiang; Participative Chinese audiencesA case study of the reality show Switching Spaces, by Prof. Kuo Huang; Media exposure and Chinese cultural identity, by Prof. Yibin Shi; and Social network service and social development in China, by Prof. Chengyu Xiong and Yuxiang Lv. On the three waves of Chinas communication studies provides an historical overview of the relevant literature on how communication studies in China were carried out before and after Schramms visit to China in 1982. It provides a very clear picture of the efforts made by Chinese scholars over time to bring Communication Studies to China, and of how Chinas communication studies were nally conducted from multiple perspectives. Participative Chinese audiencesA case study of the reality show Switching Spaces, looks at how Chinese audiences participate in reality shows and how this specic show reects the audiences participation. It draws a map of patterns and degrees of audience participation from cross-analysis of the variables, and provides some important ndings to understand this eld. Media exposure and the Chinese cultural identity is about the relationship between media exposure and Chinese culture identication. A city-wide sample survey is used to show that Chinese cultural identity is positively associated with the amount of media exposure in terms of both media format and content (Chinese and foreign content). Social network service and social development in China systematically details the development of SNS (Social Network Services) in China, and divides it into 4 stages based on the following characteristics: traditional networked socializing, the embryonic stage of SNS, the rapid growth of real-name socializing, and the thriving stage of socialized media. We hope you enjoy this special edition and we also hope that it marks the beginning of a new commitment to bring China and Switzerland (and Europe) closer in the eld of media and communication studies. Giuseppe Richeri Zhan Zhang China Media Observatory, Lugano, Switzerland Fei Jiang Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China Corresponding author. E-mail address: zhan.zhang@usi.ch (Z. Zhang)
1424-4896/$ see front matter 2013 Swiss Association of Communication and Media Research. Published by Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scoms.2013.11.003