See Xiaoling Zhang's strategic plan for 2024-2027
Xiaoling Zhang has built up a research track record in the area of media, culture and society with a focus on China, especially in political communication, the advances of new information technologies and their political and social implications, and China’s image-building nationally and internationally. She has published widely on China’s creative industries, i.e., the film industry, the TV industry, and new media technologies/social media, more recently focusing on their role in the nation’s attempt to refresh its image and to build international soft power. She researches the evolving policies, the development of the industries as part of China’s economic development, the cultural market, and the broader social transformation as China develops towards a creative society. She has succeeded in winning research grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Chiang-chin Guo Foundation, the British Council and the Chinese National Soft Science Fund (CI). These projects not only enabled her to lead the international collaboration of multidisciplinary scholars but also to host international conferences and publish in internationally leading journals and book publishers. Before Xiaoling Zhang joined the Department of Media and Communication at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in China, she had worked for the University of Nottingham, UK, since 1999 and moved to its China campus in Ningbo as a Chair Professor in creative industries in the School of International Communications in 2018. She won a bid from the Ningbo municipal government to set up an incubator Research Base titled “Internationalizing Ningbo’s Screen Industries”.
She was also awarded the Pan 3315 Talent Scheme on “Policies and Strategies in Creative Industries in Ningbo’. From 2018 to 2020, Xiaoling Zhang led an interdisciplinary team to work on a project on China’s international communication and relationship building in the 21st century. Since joining Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool in Suzhou, Xiaoling Zhang has committed herself to the communication of cultural heritage. Co-leader for the research cluster “Heritage and Communication” at the university’s Research Centre for Culture, Communication and Society, she brings together a dozen multi-disciplinary scholars to explore diverse narratives, actors, platforms, interactions in the communication of cultural heritage, and the multi-dimensional implications for identity shaping, community building and image building, ranging from local to international. In 2022, she served as the chair of the organising committee for the five IAMCR pre-conferences in China and the co-chair of the organising committee for the IAMCR Conference 2022 Beijing.
Xiaoling Zhang is the co-editor (Zhang, X and Schultz Corey) for the Book Series Communicating China: past, present and future, https://www.routledge.com/Communicating-China/book-series/COMCHINA.