Authors

Discussion

China and Russia, two neighbouring major players in Eurasia and the world, have enjoyed an increasingly close relationship since the founding of the Russian Federation. This paper investigates how Russia is perceived by young Chinese public. A case study focusing on danmu comments posted to Russian videos reuploaded on a Chinese leading video platform Bilibili was devised. Because of the growing convergence of forms in the contemporary media sphere (Jenkins, 2004), Russian audiovisual strategic narratives (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin & Roselle 2014) are “incidentally” disseminated on China’s internet. Equipped with the danmu interface, Bilibili viewers can post comments which are superimposed directly on the screen and synchronised to the specific playback time at which the users sent them, moving horizontally from right to left. These fragmented comments were manually coded based on content analysis of the perceived characteristics of Russia and patterns of social and linguistic interactions observed in the dataset. The commentators have displayed a mixture of emotional proximity, light-heartedness, and critical distance to the videos, which have roots in their consumption habits and pre-existing knowledge of Russia. In the media ecology on Bilibili, such collective performance brings unforeseen benefits and drawbacks for Russian strategic narratives and soft power in China in a manner unanticipated by the video producers.