Date: Sep 8 (Tue), 10:00 – 12:00

Venue: CJT. 9.29 + Online Via Zoom

Registration Link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=109371

Guest speakers

YANG Yi杨一

Podcast entrepreneur, media professional, and host of 杨一的花园. Former COO and current shareholder of JustPod, one of China’s leading podcast production companies. He is currently based in London and continues to work actively across the podcasting industry, including podcast education and industry events.

QUAN Xiaoxing 权小星

Media professional and host of 东亚观察局. He has worked across journalism, artist management, and think-tank research, and currently maintains an affiliation with a university research centre focusing on the Korean Peninsula. His podcast focuses on contemporary East Asian politics, society, culture, and regional affairs.

Moderator

Ms Yinjia He

PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong

Event description

Chinese podcasting has developed from a relatively niche media practice into an increasingly professionalized cultural and media industry. Yet podcasting continues to occupy an unusual position: it sits between journalism and personal expression, professional expertise and everyday conversation, commercial media and community-based cultural production.

This event brings together two practitioners with markedly different professional trajectories to examine what podcasting makes possible for people who already possess established forms of media, professional, and intellectual capital.

For a former podcast-industry executive and entrepreneur such as Yang Yi, podcasting provides a space to experiment with new forms of media production and audience relationships beyond conventional institutional media. For Quan Xiaoxing, whose professional experience spans journalism, artist management, and research, podcasting provides a distinctive way of bringing specialized knowledge, professional networks, and long-form analysis into public conversation.

Rather than asking simply whether Chinese podcasting is “maturing” as an industry, the discussion will examine a more fundamental question:

When people already possess professional expertise, media experience, and established networks, what does podcasting offer that traditional media institutions cannot?

The conversation will explore how podcasting reorganizes expertise, credibility, creativity, audience relationships, and labor, and what these changes tell us about the current development and possible limits of the Chinese podcasting industry.

Key Questions

• What brings experienced media professionals, researchers, and industry practitioners to podcasting? What can podcasting do that journalism, publishing, academia, or conventional media cannot?

• How does professional or intellectual expertise change when it enters podcasting? How does podcasting reshape the ways expertise is communicated and made public?

• How do podcast creators negotiate the boundaries between professional identity, personal life, and public persona? What forms of creative and invisible labor sustain this apparent intimacy and informality?

• Has the Chinese podcast industry actually matured? What does “maturity” mean beyond professionalization, commercialization, and audience growth?

• Podcasting in the age of AI

• What is Chinese podcasting still failing to become? What possibilities remain unrealized, and what assumptions about “industry development” might need to be reconsidered?

Event Rundown

10:00–10:10 | Opening Remarks

Introduction to the event and framing of the discussion.

10:10–10:30 | Two Podcasting Trajectories

Each guest will briefly introduce their professional trajectory and discuss why podcasting has become an important part of their current work.

10:30–11:35 | Moderated Conversation

A focused discussion around:

• Podcasting beyond traditional media institutions

• Expertise, credibility, and public voice

• Audience relationships and intimacy

• Creative and invisible labor

• The professionalization of Chinese podcasting

• AI and the future value of human-produced audio

11:35–12:00 | Audience Q&A and Closing Discussion

The event will conclude by returning to the broader question of what the Chinese podcasting ecosystem has and has not become.

This talk is part of our ongoing GRF project, Chinese Podcasting Cultures: Communities, Apps and Economies (GRF Project Number: 17613325), combining public-facing discussion with broader sociological reflections on media, culture, labor, and digital society.