Fangchen Wang

Fangchen Wang

November 28, 2025

Post-truth, Chinese international students in Australia, Social media, Trust crisis, Empathic communication, Information overload, Digital labor, Algorithmic opacity, WeChat, Weibo, Twitter, TikTok.

As an old saying goes," Far distance cannot separate us, and we all live in a united world. Empathic communication is a natural ability of human beings. In the " post-truth" era, transcultural empathic communication is beneficial to eliminating communication barriers and establishing trust between individuals of different cultures. Therefore, the realization of transcultural empathic communication is conducive to the development of multiculturalism and the Community of a Shared Future for Mankind. As a kind of emotion, empathy would be affected by the object and the situation. For Chinese students studying abroad in a different cultural space, social media platforms provide them with an open public sphere for transcultural communication. The understanding and trust established during the communication process create a foundation for further exploration in transcultural empathic communication. From the perspective of transcultural empathic communication, this paper takes a group of Chinese international students studying for their master's and doctoral degrees in Australia as the research object. Considering the social media platform as a social and cultural space for the group to build and maintain a virtual community, this paper observes, and interviews 20 Chinese international students born after the 90s from the University of Melbourne on their social media use of global social media (Twitter, TikTok) and Chinese social media (WeChat, Weibo, Doyin). It follows four aspects: difference, equality, communication, and cohesiveness, to discuss how Chinese international students form and maintain their virtual community on social media. On this basis, it will further explore the impact of social media use on the self-identity and multicultural identification of Chinese international students, as well as their integration into the local learning and living environment, within the complex context of the " post-truth” era and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is evident that the social media platform not only plays an essential role in forming and maintaining the community of Chinese international students in Australia but also increases the possibility of multicultural communication. This paper also finds that "environmental coexistence" enabled by social media platforms and digital technologies expands the media's availability and effectiveness of communication. Therefore, every Chinese international student who participates in transcultural communication actively would contribute to expanding transcultural communication methods and realizing multicultural identification. The study further explores the process of doubt and reflection on self-cultural identity experienced by Chinese international students living in a foreign cultural space. Specifically, they use global and Chinese social media platforms to interact online and offline with their relatives and friends in China, as well as teachers, friends, and classmates in Australia. Moreover, it discusses the new possibility and further development space of transcultural communication and the significance of overcoming and surpassing the trust crisis of transcultural communication in the "post-truth" era.

© 2025, the Authors. Published by ISCCAC

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license