Rui (Ash) Feng

M.A. in Sociology (Mass Communication), highest grade in all graded coursework

Thesis (in Japanese): The Role of the People's Daily WeChat Account in Political Propaganda — With a Focus on Patriotic Propaganda

B.A. in English Language and Literature

Exchange Student

Independent research project, sole researcher and developer — lichtung.ashfeng.com · github.com/rfb4c/Lichtung · video walkthrough

• — Designed and built a platform-independent social feed simulator for research on perceived polarization, demonstrating the interventions as interactive feed- and interface-level modules and running without access to commercial-platform APIs, hence without dependence on platform cooperation.
• — Derived three intervention modules from documented mechanisms of out-group misperception and implemented each: reranking that surfaces counter-stereotypical out-party content, a distribution-overlay UI that surfaces the moderate majority obscured by extreme voices, drawing on authoritative poll distributions, and an identity layer that displays shared non-political attributes.
• — Extending it for online experiments, adding randomized condition assignment, behavioral telemetry (exposure sequence, dwell time, scroll depth, interactions), and pre/post survey linkage.

Prior independent research project, sole developer — ashfeng.com/research

• — Built and deployed a news aggregator that collected coverage of the same event from outlets across the political spectrum, premised on the assumption that breaking filter bubbles would reduce polarization.
• — Shut it down after a systematic literature review found the filter-bubble account weakly evidenced (Bruns, 2019; Arguedas et al., 2022) and cross-cutting exposure capable of backfiring (Bail et al., 2018), moving the research target from what users see to how they interpret it; led directly to Lichtung.

Developed from M.A. thesis (Kansai University, 2022).

• — Hand-coded every headline the People's Daily WeChat account published January–April 2020 (N = 2,318; 761 coded as patriotic propaganda) under an original two-level scheme separating narrative direction (inward vs. outward) from construction mechanism.
• — Construction stayed inward-facing across all four crisis periods (94.1% at peak), and in the outward remainder positive self-positioning and antagonistic othering barely co-occurred (2.5% of 162), splitting the two halves of the standard in-group/out-group script.
• — Horizontal affective solidarity was the largest of five construction mechanisms (48.9% of the patriotic sample) and ran on a reusable heroization template: three formulaic title patterns and three narrative paths, including 28 posts in 16 days sharing one provincial medical-team roster format, with represented figures converging on healthcare workers.

Journalist

Reported on government, science and technology, and general news.

• — Investigation into employment discrimination against people recovering from COVID-19. Prompted a policy response from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.
• — National infrastructure feature series. Member of the feature team; the series later received the China News Award.

Intern Journalist

Covered cultural affairs in writing, photography, and documentary video.

• — Documentary on Chinese students in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Independently reported, shot, and edited.
• — Photography desk and interactive VR dispatches. Profiles of documentary photographers and exhibition criticism; photo essays and VR reports on pandemic-era Shanghai and urban redevelopment.