From Memes to Habitus: The Mechanisms of Cross-Cultural Transmission and Bodily Internalisation in Becoming Chinese

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_93How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Remote Habitus; Internet Memes; Cross-Cultural Identity

Abstract

In early 2026, the Internet meme Becoming Chinese spread widely across global social media. The scale of this phenomenon was not merely a chance occurrence of meme propagation, but was further fuelled by participants’ transformation of cross-cultural behaviour—cultivated through remote habitus—into a sustainable practice. Therefore, this study wants to investigate how those actual online memes slowly turn from a fragmented and brief trend into a lasting cultural habit. This article puts forward the core concept of the development of remote habitus, and builds a theoretical explanation chain of meme → habitus → identity with the help of meme theory, Bourdieu’s habitus theory and cross-cultural academic theory. The so-called remote habit development means that people in the digital age can internalize cross-cultural practice into physical memory without really moving their bodies, which mainly relies on three mechanisms: algorithm recommendation, physical demonstration and community support. By revealing the underlying logic of the transformation of digital memes into lasting cultural practice, this concept effectively expands the connotation of Bourdieu’s habit theory in the digital age. This study reveals the basic process of how digital memes are precipitated into long-term cultural practice, and also broadens the boundaries of the application of Bourdieu’s habitus theory in the digital age. At the same time, it also provides a new perspective for understanding the cross-cultural identity construction in the context of digital globalization.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yiwei Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - From Memes to Habitus: The Mechanisms of Cross-Cultural Transmission and Bodily Internalisation in Becoming Chinese
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 861
EP  - 869
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_93
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_93
ID  - Zhang2026
ER  -