Recent Publications (2024–2026)Facial AI: Cosmetic Surgery in China and the Death of Internets Everywhere (with M. Hillenbrand) — Grey Room 103, 2026.
Politically Speaking: LLMs on Changing International Affairs (with W.K. Chung, Y. Zhao, L.M. Zhou) — arXiv:2510.24582, 2025.
Advocate for Complete Benchmarks for Formal Reasoning with Formal/Informal Statements and Formal/Informal Proofs (with R. Yousefzadeh) — arXiv:2507.04719, 2025.
The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (book review) — The Journal of Asian Studies 84(2), 2025.
No Joke: Refusal Policies for Cross-Cultural Sensitivity (with M. Zhou), 2025.
How Large Language Models (LLMs) Extrapolate: From Guided Missiles to Guided Prompts — arXiv:2501.10361, 2024.
Anchoring Voices: The News Anchor’s Voice in China from Television to AI (with H. Levy-Landesberg) — Media, Culture & Society 47(2), 2025.
Controlled Carefully: How Consumer Care Legitimizes China’s AI Regulations (with L. Power) — Information, Communication & Society 28(15), 2025.
Monolingual LLMs in the Age of Multilingual Chatbots — boundary 2 52(2), 2025.
A Lean Dataset for International Math Olympiad: Small Steps Towards Writing Math Proofs for Hard Problems (with R. Yousefzadeh, A. Ospanov) — arXiv:2411.18872, 2024.
The Jargon Amplifier — PMLA 139(2), 2024.
Most-Cited PublicationsBullet Screens (Danmu): Texting, Online Streaming, and the Spectacle of Social Inequality on Chinese Social Networks — Theory, Culture & Society 38(3), 2021.
Extrapolation and AI Transparency: Why Machine Learning Models Should Reveal When They Make Decisions Beyond Their Training (with R. Yousefzadeh) — Big Data & Society 10(1), 2023.
Towards a Scalable Reference-Free Evaluation of Generative Models (with A. Ospanov et al.) — NeurIPS 2024.
Anchoring Voices: The News Anchor’s Voice in China from Television to AI (with H. Levy-Landesberg) — Media, Culture & Society 47(2), 2025.
The Multiple Bodies of The Three-Body Problem — Extrapolation 60(2), 2019.
Media AppearancesXuenan’s research and perspective have been featured in international media and public-facing conversations on AI and society.
The Straits Times — Is AI scary? China’s workers share their hopes and fears (May 30, 2026).
China Observers podcast — The Future of China’s Faces: AI Surveillance and Society. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Call for book reviews — WeChat announcement.
Associated Press — Chinese workers are adapting as AI job takeover worries grow (August 23, 2026).
CUHK Department of Cultural & Religious Studies — Public Humanities @ CUHK: Why We Need “Public Humanities” to Navigate AI, Art Tech, and Biomedicine?