FRAMING CHINESE NATIONAL CULTURE IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN DIGITAL MEDIA

With the rapid expansion of short-video platforms, national culture is increasingly communicated, reinterpreted, and localized through algorithm-driven digital media environments. Platforms such as TikTok have transformed cultural communication from institutionally curated narratives into fragmented, visually mediated, and everyday encounters embedded in users routine media consumption. In this context, national culture is no longer primarily conveyed through authoritative explanation or comprehensive historical narration,but through repeated exposure to short, platform-adapted cultural moments that privilege immediacy, recognizability, and affective engagement.This study examines how Chinese national culture is framed in Southeast Asian digital media, with a particular focus on TikTok based short video narratives circulating in the Malaysian context. Drawing on qualitative content analysis and framing analysis, the study analyzes a corpus of TikTok videos produced by both Chinese and Southeast Asian content creators. Rather than treating cultural communication as a coordinated institutional project, the study adopts a national culture communication perspective that conceptualizes culture as a flexible and negotiated set of meanings shaped by platform affordances, creator practices, and cross-cultural interaction.The findings identify four dominant cultural frames through which Chinese national culture is represented: everyday cultural practices, symbolic heritage, experiential and tourism-oriented narratives, and simplified cultural identity. These frames demonstrate how national culture is localized through accessible practices such as food and lifestyle, condensed into visually recognizable symbols, mediated through creator-centered experiences, and stabilized through repetition and symbolic simplification.