Yuyang Ye completed her BA in Journalism at Wuhan University, China. She continued her Master’s degree in Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her master’s thesis is a research about the fact-checking system in news production in Germany and the US. Since September 2016 she is a PhD candidate at Free University Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Carola Richter. Her research interests include media usage in daily context, cultural identity and identity articulation in relation with media, migration and identity, as well as qualitative research methods.

Thesis: The media usage of Chinese migrants and its interconnection with their cultural identity

ABSTRACT

The number of Chinese migrants in Germany has been increasing remarkably in the past decade (Wang and Liu, 2015). Since Chinese culture is significantly different from the German one, and its own social media platform – WeChat – has a dominant market share among all of Chinese population, the contact with media of Chinese migrants in Germany could be very special.

The contemporary society we live in is a “Mediatization” one (Hepp, 2011). Various media has gained significance in individuals daily life so increasingly, that the daily life itself is shaped by media. For the diaspora life of the migrants, “the acquisition of media is constitutive for the existence of Migrants’ culture identity”(Hepp,2011). How do Chinese migrants in Germany use different media and in which way does the use of media interconnect with their cultural identity?

My dissertation is aimed to study the media usage of Chinese migrants in Germany in their everyday life with regard to their cultural identity. Moreover, it also intends to discover the role different media, especially the social media, play in their cultural identity articulation and negotiation. In order to achieve that goal, a set of qualitative research methods will be adopted.