Exploring the Role of Productive Audiences in Promoting Intercultural Understanding: A Study of Chinese YouTube Influencer Liziqi's Channel

Abstract

This exploratory study on YouTube videos investigates the role of Chinese YouTube channels created by influential individuals in facilitating intercultural communication and understanding. Specifically, it explores how YouTube viewers respond, interact, and express their views on Chinese culture. The nature of audience engagement with intercultural communication was explored through the lens of creative textual engagement using a qualitative research approach and textual analysis of five hundred video comments on one of the most subscribed Chinese YouTube channel (i.e., Liziqi). Audience's interpretation goes through a logic of consumption from cognition to emotion to attitudinal change and behavioural intention; the process by an audience promotes intercultural understanding and acquires an identity. Additionally, the interactive relationship between the text and the audience is reciprocal and democratic. Audiences can incorporate and form interpretive communities, regardless of their cultural composition, and cooperate to produce a common meaning regardless of varying interpretations. This study contributes to extending the concept of Fiske's productive audience to intercultural communication and broadens the path for an audience to negotiate and understand Chinese culture.