Xin is Reader in International Communications with a special focus on China.

She was RCUK Research/Senior Research Fellow in 2006-2011 and UK/China Fellow for Excellence in 2008-2009, studying China’s soft power project, media and social transformations, and politics. Xin’s work has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Global Media and Communication, Javnost – The Public; Journalism Practice, Sport in Society; Journal of African Media Studies and a number of edited volumes.

Her first book How the Market Is Changing China’s News: The Case of Xinhua News Agency (Lanham: Lexington) came out in September 2012. Her forthcoming book is about China’s soft power. It will appear in the University of Illinois Press’s new book series “The Geopolitics of Information”, edited by Dan Schiller, Pradip Thomas, and Yuezhi Zhao.

Xin received external funding from the British Academy, the former DIUS, RCUK/RCUK China and UCCL.

Xin held visiting fellowships at leading research centres based in China and the US, including the National Centre for Radio & TV Studies of the Communication University of China (CUC) (2009), the Centre for Global Communication Studies of the Annenberg School for Communication and the Centre of East Asian Studies of the University of Pennsylvania (2008).

Before embarking on an academic career, Xin worked as a journalist at Xinhua’s Beijing headquarters for seven years and spent a year (1999-2000) as a visiting fellow in the State Pushkin Russian Language Institute, Moscow. She obtained her doctorate on Xinhua News Agency and globalisation in 2006 and her MA in Journalism (international) in 2003, both from Westminster. Xin received her BA in Russian Language and Literature in Beijing in 1994.

Teaching

Xin leads and teaches the following postgraduate modules:

• Global Media (Sem1)
• Researching Media and Communication (Sem2)
• Chinese Media (Sem2)

Xin also supervises and marks MA dissertations.

Xin is currently supervising the following PhD students as Director of Studies (DoS):

• Mr Robert Boughen, Sino-African journalism and journalistic fields.
• Miss Chen Yang, online construction and representation of cultural identity by young Chinese diaspora via YouTube.
• Mr Ruoyu Zhang, gender antagonism and social media in China

Xin also acts as second supervisor for a number of PhD students doing research on various issues relating to China, its media and the country’s changing relationship with the rest of the world.

Xin welcomes enquiries from prospective Ph.D. students with shared interests.