The identity construction and representation of diasporic Chinese content creators on YouTube

A significant number of diasporic Chinese content creators have emerged on YouTube in recent years. Unlike their parents, these Chinese diasporas in Western world spend most of their time in the receiving countries and have been marginalized by the mainstream society during their growing up period. With the intention to represent their own diasporic identity, a series of videos were made to share various cultural related content ranging from ethnic food preparation. generational relationships, and heritage language practices. Many of these videos have already received hundreds of thousands of views, showing its potential to have a large social influence. Thus, this study decided to examine how Chinese diaspora construct and represent their cultural identity on this platform, with a specific focus on the Chinese in Western countries.

To understand the topic, this study will combine theories such as diaspora and transnationalism, cultural identity and semiotics, representation and power relations while also considering YouTube’s outstanding “participatory culture” and its commercial attributes. In terms of methodology, this study will treat YouTube’s environment as a whole and it has adopted a series of methods from online observation, semi-structured interview and textual analysis. The findings will be divided into three chapters with each chapter focusing on one cultural element (Chinese food, parents and heritage language) and the influence of these elements on Western Chinese identity construction and more importantly, how they represent these symbols online. During this process, power relations behind the representation process will be carefully investigated to understand how a hybrid identity was formulated through these online practices.