Personal Profile

Zengzhi Shi, Professor and PhD Supervisor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University; Director of the Center for Public Communication and Social Development, Peking University. She received her B.A. from the Department of Library Science at Peking University, her M.A. from the Department of Library and Information Science at Peking University, and her Ph.D. from the Department of Information Management at Peking University. She has undertaken visiting research at Victoria University of Wellington, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among other institutions.

Research Interests

Transmedia narration and communication; media and social change; media culture and public communication; new media empowerment and counter-empowerment; AI and being communication.

Courses Taught

Since joining Peking University, she has primarily taught undergraduate and graduate courses including Public Communication, Media and Social Change, and Transmedia Narration and Communication.

Academic Publications

Books:

· Being Communication: Self, Empowerment, and Wisdom, 2018.

· New Media Empowerment and the Rise of the Internet of Meanings, 2014.

· New Media Empowerment: The Co-evolution between State and Society in China, 2013.

Articles:

· Symbiotic Conversion of Metaphor——Cognitive Reconstruction of Mythological Narration and Empathic Ethics in the Digital-Intelligent Era, 2025.

· Media Transformation in the Digital-Intelligent Era: Cognitive Evolution from “Social Energy” and “Media of Mind” to “Global telepathy”, 2025.

· From Concealment to Emergence——A Foundational Exploration of Poetic Communication and Poetic Wisdom in Being Communication in the Digital-Intelligence Era, 2025.

· “Meditative Thinking” and “Calculative Thinking”——An Exploration of Metaphors in Social Media Language in the Digital-Intelligence Era, 2024.

· Being Narration in a Virtual–Real Symbiosis: In Search of “Authenticity” and “Creativity”, 2024.

· Mimicry, Authenticity and Creativity in the Coexistence of Virtuality and Reality in the Digital-Intelligence Era: From the Perspective of Being Communication, 2023.

· Re-emerging Empathic Communication in Everyday Life in the Digital-Intelligent Era: Proximity, Dialogue, and Power, 2023.

· Public Communication and Being Communication in the Internet Context: Another Possibility as Discursive Practice, 2022.

· Future-oriented Ignorance and Life Duration in Cognitive Acceleration in the Era of Digital Intelligence, 2022.

· The Cognitive Acceleration and Algorithm Game in the Age of Digital Intelligence——From the Perspectives of Being Communication, 2021.

· Everything Has Yet to Be Generated: The Internet Hypertext World as a Cross-media Narrative, Cognitive Acceleration and Algorithmic Games in the Digital-Intelligent Era, 2020.

Public Service:

She serves as Director of the Center for Humanitarian Mobilization and Communication at the Red Cross International Academy and as a board member of the Amity Foundation. For more than a decade, she has actively engaged in and advanced public welfare communication through initiatives such as chairing the Anping China · Peking University Public Welfare Communication Awards, organizing the Peking University New Media Training Program in Public Welfare Communication, and conducting volunteer service and academic field research in earthquake-affected areas of Nepal. Advocating a being-communication approach to social responsibility, she integrates reflection with action to promote public welfare, building constructive bridges toward “common welfare” among academia, media, and philanthropic organizations.

She has also served as an expert reviewer for numerous initiatives, including the “Responsible China · Public Welfare Gala,” the China Public Welfare and Philanthropy Project Competition, the 2020 “Four 100s” Advanced Models Promotion Campaign, the China Internet Public Welfare Summit, case studies on social organizations’ poverty alleviation commissioned by Office of the State Council Leading Group of Poverty Alleviation and Development, and the 2020 Cyberspace Administration of China campaign on online public welfare supporting poverty alleviation and pandemic response. She has been repeatedly honored as a “China Public Welfare Figure of the Year.”