Shuli Song, Shi Bin Tey

Shuli Song

31 October 2023

Chinese culture, Video-based international social media, Explicit dissemination, Implicit dissemination.

Cultural dissemination to the outside world is an international communication phenomenon in which a country constructs its national image through media, facilitating the flow of information, cultural exchange, values transmission, and power implementation across different time and space dimensions and virtual realms. In recent years, video-based social media has witnessed a strong rise and rapid growth, becoming a new platform for cultural dissemination globally that attracts considerable attention and active utilization. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the explicit and implicit dissemination of Chinese culture on YouTube, a popular international social media platform, focusing on content, form, and dissemination effects. Through analysis, this research suggests that users of international social media possess absolute freedom of choice in their reception, and implicit dissemination, which is more entertaining and empathetic, tends to be more readily accepted by the audience, while explicit dissemination, which is characterized by subjectivity and purposefulness, may be subject to influence. Certainly, showcasing a credible, endearing, and respectable image of China through the external dissemination of Chinese culture requires both the persuasive power of explicit dissemination and the emotional resonance of implicit dissemination. Promoting the implicit dissemination of Chinese culture does not negate explicit dissemination but rather serves as a beneficial complement to it.

© 2023, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license