Fang Receives Young Scholar Award from China Times Cultural Foundation
The award includes a scholarship, which he will use for his dissertation research.
Doctoral Candidate Kecheng Fang was recently awarded the 2017 Young Scholar Award by the China Times Cultural Foundation in recognition of his dissertation research. He was one of nine recipients this year.
Established in 1986, the China Times Cultural Foundation is committed to supporting and promoting academic research that centers Chinese culture and related studies. The Young Scholar Award is granted annually to doctoral candidates in North America whose dissertation research focuses on humanities or social sciences within Chinese culture and society.
Fang’s dissertation research, titled “Mapping Media Bias in China,” was evaluated by a committee of six prominent China scholars including David Der-wei Wang of Harvard University and Wen-hsin Yeh of the University of California Berkeley.
Fang’s dissertation project offers a new theoretical framework for media bias, aiming to broaden the way we think about media bias in non-Western regimes. His dissertation committee, chaired by Walter H. Annenberg Dean Michael X. Delli Carpini, also includes Guobin Yang, Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology; Diana C. Mutz, Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication; and Sandra González-Bailón, Assistant Professor of Communication.
As a recipient of the Young Scholar Award, Fang will receive a scholarship of $6000. He will use the scholarship to fund travel to China and to hire research assistants for his continued dissertation research.
Fang’s dissertation project is a byproduct of his research interests in political communication and journalism, primarily in the Chinese context. He has worked on several projects that examine how China's propaganda machine adapts to social media and seeks to have influence on Chinese citizens living both at home and abroad, and he recently published a paper in New Media & Society on “Little Pink,” a female-led cyber-nationalism movement in China. Fang holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Journalism from Peking University in China.
