This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Mig... more This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Migrant workers are being drawn back to their rural homes by the techno-entrepreneurial prospects of live e-commerce being used as part of the “new farmers” branding. We examine how livestreaming platforms transform the labor process of rural produce sellers, zooming in on the physical work and transactional labor involved in the process of platformization. Analysis of the “new farmer” online workflow reveals not only insights into the economic logics of platformized labor but also shows important continuities in terms of sustained economic inequality and the perpetuation of the urban–rural divide. Such analysis prompts questions regarding what political and economic interests scaffold the “new farmer” narrative in contemporary China. How does platform capitalism reinvent itself in rural China, more specifically, through the agentic practices of Chinese rural live e-commerce practitioners? We conclude that platformization reproduces, rather than subverts, the subjectivities of e-commerce sellers and the power structures in which they are cemented.
In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatformi... more In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatforming and platformization. It describes the phenomena of the systematic pushing back of controversial platforms and their communities to the edge of the platform ecosystem, dominated by mainstream platforms (such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). Deplatformization further demonstrates the hierarchical power relations within the global platform ecosystem and the complexity of platform governability. From the European perspective, van Dijck argues that public values and public institutions should play more active role in platform governance. The recent Russia–Ukraine war also indicates the vulnerability brought by such co- and inter-dependence on American platforms.
In this special issue, we explore the geopolitics, aesthetics and future potentiality surrounding... more In this special issue, we explore the geopolitics, aesthetics and future potentiality surrounding TikTok to assess the possibility and implications of a new phase of digital globalisation. A phase in which China-based innovative platform technologies, infused with state power, generate and potentially disrupt digital cultures in places outside China. We will further explore this in the next part of this introduction, showing how the global rise of TikTok is feeding into increasing geopolitical anxieties worldwide. At the same time, we argue for the need to diversify our approaches to TikTok and platform studies-the latter field is very much dominated by questions around production, monetisation, data and political economy. More approaches, focusing on aesthetics, visual culture and users, are needed. In the second part of this introduction, we mobilise the notion of repetitive creativities as a way to engage with the aesthetic affordances of TikTok. This brings us to our conclusion, in which we allude to the possibility that TikTok can be seen as a kind of silly archive, offering glimpses of a future that is not yet here, but that may well come.
Instead of viewing TikTok as a platform, in this article we borrow Dutch film theorist Patricia P... more Instead of viewing TikTok as a platform, in this article we borrow Dutch film theorist Patricia Pisters's concept of neuro-images to approach TikTok as a cultural form that is deeply participatory, platform contingent, and algorithmically engraved. In the coproduction between algorithms and users, TikTok becomes an enormous database and generates personalised narratives about individuals and the world onto and through its 'brain-screen' interfaces, which simulate our conscious and unconscious mind, and actualise the idea of creativity based on repetition. TikTok thus enables a quasiautomated cinema, whose non-stopping filming of everyday lives does not seek to reduce desires and tastes into a singular and coherent structure, but instead uncovers, releases and contains them in its vast database and interfaces, leading to a fluid and modulating categorisation of identities. It is within this quasi-automated, deeply participatory digital cinema that TikTok constitutes neuro-images, producing a distinctive experience of time, and unpredictable and unstable futures.
This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific len... more This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China. Kuaishou’s platform business fits into the Party State’s socio-economic agenda of “Internet+” and “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” and is also folded into the state’s demand for cultural censorship and social stability. As we will show, this state-commerce relationship largely shapes Kuaishou’s interface and its affordances as encoded in its algorithm. Nevertheless, Kuaishou enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become “unlikely” creative workers, who have become self-employed creative, digital entrepreneurs. For these “grassroots individuals,” creativity, life, and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated a...
Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this arti... more Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this article shows how the vibrant interaction between global cultural industries and the local Chinese economy propels transnational labour mobility and affects the subjectification of transnational creative workers. Having come to China to enhance their careers, these professionals have been incorporated into the Chinese creative workforce, contributing to the Party State's aspiration to use creativity as a growth engine for the economy and as a form of soft power. In terms of these workers' everyday experience, however, China's aspiration to 'foreign creativity' does not necessarily guarantee a privileged life. The State's restrictions on migration and the insecure working circumstances within the Chinese creative workplace discourage these transnationals from fully integrating in Chinese society and the Chinese labour market. At the same time, this research shows that the precarious lives led by transnational creative workers in Beijing are also productive and generate the conditions for a situated cosmopolitan subjectivity. Such a cosmopolitan subjectivity fosters respect for cultural difference and relations of mutual understanding and care among both international and local subjects.
This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based o... more This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based on the empirical analysis of fieldwork data, it analyses the governmentality of creative labour in Chinese SOCEs through an investigation of the condition of autonomy and the discourse of self-realization within selected Chinese media companies. The autonomy of creative work within the system is made contingent by the party state’s ideological concern, while since the commercialization reform of SOCEs, creative workers are also expected to ‘be creative for the state’ under the discourse of self-realization. In practice, as the case of loafing on the job illustrates, the system causes marked contradictions that furnish creative individuals with possibilities to distance themselves from the expected subjectivity of ‘being creative for the state’. This article offers an exemplary case study of how the governance of creativity and creative labour works in Chinese SOCEs, and of how it distingu...
This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Mig... more This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Migrant workers are being drawn back to their rural homes by the techno-entrepreneurial prospects of live e-commerce being used as part of the “new farmers” branding. We examine how livestreaming platforms transform the labor process of rural produce sellers, zooming in on the physical work and transactional labor involved in the process of platformization. Analysis of the “new farmer” online workflow reveals not only insights into the economic logics of platformized labor but also shows important continuities in terms of sustained economic inequality and the perpetuation of the urban–rural divide. Such analysis prompts questions regarding what political and economic interests scaffold the “new farmer” narrative in contemporary China. How does platform capitalism reinvent itself in rural China, more specifically, through the agentic practices of Chinese rural live e-commerce practitioners? We conclude that platformization reproduces, rather than subverts, the subjectivities of e-commerce sellers and the power structures in which they are cemented.
In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatformi... more In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatforming and platformization. It describes the phenomena of the systematic pushing back of controversial platforms and their communities to the edge of the platform ecosystem, dominated by mainstream platforms (such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). Deplatformization further demonstrates the hierarchical power relations within the global platform ecosystem and the complexity of platform governability. From the European perspective, van Dijck argues that public values and public institutions should play more active role in platform governance. The recent Russia-Ukraine war also indicates the vulnerability brought by such co-and interdependence on American platforms.
In this article, we analyse the most popular stories that circulated on WeChat public accounts co... more In this article, we analyse the most popular stories that circulated on WeChat public accounts concerning personalized experiences of COVID-19 in China during the first three months of 2020. Among these non-fictional online writings, we probe into ‘individual’ and mediated experiences with the coronavirus in China by questioning the visualizations and discourses of these stories and their producers, as well as the concomitant emotions they invoked. Parallel to the changing situation of the pandemic, we observe a diachronic evolution of emotions, from fear and doubt to (nationalist) pride. While articulating personalized experiences of the pandemic from disparate perspectives, the stories invariably built on, and were shaped by, the workings of the WeChat public account platform (公众平台) as evidenced by its content moderation logic and political economy. The analysis shows that emotions, rather than facts, propel the popularity of these stories. The measures taken by the state are most...
Topologies of Digital Work How Digitalisation and Virtualisation Shape Working Spaces and Places, 2022
This chapter introduces the specificities of the Chinese wanghong economy and its implications fo... more This chapter introduces the specificities of the Chinese wanghong economy and its implications for the existing spatial relationships in Chinese contemporary society. The wanghong industry first of all fits into the Party State’s agenda of restructuring the economy and boosting employment, while its mass participation and immense diversity also lead to the Party State’s mixed approach of both protection and censorship. At the local level, the well-established ICT infrastructure propels the booming platform economy and facilitates maximum incorporation of individual creativities and labour from disparate social and spatial contexts into the wanghong economy. This highly networked economy engenders social mobility that transcends geolocational limitations and transforms individuals including those from marginal social backgrounds into wanghong creators, providing them versatile spaces for creativity and employment that they are less likely to obtain in the pre-existing social settings. For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning, and emotional management. the booming platform economy and facilitates maximum incorporation of individual creativities and labour from disparate social and spatial contexts into the wanghong economy. This highly networked economy engenders social mobility that transcends geolocational limitations and transforms individuals including those from marginal social backgrounds into wanghong creators, providing them versatile spaces for creativity and employment that they are less likely to obtain in the pre-existing social settings. For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning and emotional management. monetisation on the side of individual creators. It is for this reason that the unlikely creativity of wanghong culture becomes desirable to creators and their online communities, serving as an imagined alternative to the tedious or normative everyday work as either cook, farmer, high-school teacher or college graduate waiting to be hired by companies. Taken out of the local context, these seemingly “bizarre” and “inadequate” creativities turn out to be highly entertaining and relevant and add flavour to the banal everyday life.
In this article, we analyse the most popular stories that circulated on WeChat public accounts co... more In this article, we analyse the most popular stories that circulated on WeChat public accounts concerning personalized experiences of COVID-19 in China during the first three months of 2020. Among these non-fictional online writings, we probe into 'individual' and mediated experiences with the coronavirus in China by questioning the visualizations and discourses of these stories and their producers, as well as the concomitant emotions they invoked. Parallel to the changing situation of the pandemic, we observe a diachronic evolution of emotions, from fear and doubt to (nationalist) pride. While articulating personalized experiences of the pandemic from disparate perspectives, the stories invariably built on, and were shaped by, the workings of the WeChat public account platform (公众平台) as evidenced by its content moderation logic and political economy. The analysis shows that emotions, rather than facts, propel the popularity of these stories. The measures taken by the state are mostly applauded, and only sometimes questioned; tragic memories are rewritten, and a political and economic order is consolidated.
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the boundaries between the human... more Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences to critically explore the cultural and social dimensions of contemporary globalization processes. This entails looking at the way globalization unfolds through and within cultural and social practices, and identifying and understanding how it effects cultural and social change across the world. The series asks what, in its different guises and unequal diffusion, globalization is taken to be and do in and across speci c locations, and what social, political and cultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders obsolete. A particular focus is the vital contribution made by different forms of the imagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception, experience and critique of contemporary globalization. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society is committed to addressing globalization across cultural contexts (western and non-western) through interdisciplinary, theoretically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded in detailed case studies and close analyses. Within the scope outlined above, we invite junior and senior scholars to submit proposals for monographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave Pivot format. Please contact the series editors for more information: [email protected]/[email protected] More information about this series at
In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the cr... more In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the creative industries discourse, and related debates around creative labour, continue to be haunted by a Eurocentric cum Anglocentric bias. The critical language of this discourse often directs all discussion of “inequality”, “precarity” and “self-exploitation” of creative labour towards a critique of “neoliberalism”, thus running the risk of overlooking different socio-political contexts. We point at the urgency to contextualize and globalize, if not decolonize, creative work studies, including the debates surrounding precarity. This special issue explores the nuanced situations of governance and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia.
In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the cr... more In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the creative industries discourse, and related debates around creative labour, continue to be haunted by a Eurocentric cum Anglocentric bias. The critical language of this discourse often directs all discussion of “inequality”, “precarity” and “self-exploitation” of creative labour towards a critique of “neoliberalism”, thus running the risk of overlooking different socio-political contexts. We point at the urgency to contextualize and globalize, if not decolonize, creative work studies, including the debates surrounding precarity. This special issue explores the nuanced situations of governance and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia.
The COVID-19 pandemic stirs up strong nationalist and localist sentiments; places pride themselve... more The COVID-19 pandemic stirs up strong nationalist and localist sentiments; places pride themselves on containing the virus more effectively: We are doing better. We call this 'biopolitical nationalism', understood by us as the dynamics between body, geopolitics and affect. When looking at mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, we analyse how the biopolitical efforts of these places are being compared, applauded and supported. Under a discourse of life and survival, this celebration of biopolitical control does not fall into the classic reproduction of capital, but speaks to geopolitical identification. Biopolitics has morphed into a field of competition, of rivalry, of nationalistic-or, perhaps more generally, localist-power games. What can we do as Cultural Studies scholars?
This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific len... more This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China. Kuaishou’s platform business fits into the Party State’s socio-economic agenda of “Internet+” and “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” and is also folded into the state’s demand for cultural censorship and social stability. As we will show, this state-commerce relationship largely shapes Kuaishou’s interface and its affordances as encoded in its algorithm. Nevertheless, Kuaishou enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become “unlikely” creative workers, who have become self-employed creative, digital entrepreneurs. For these “grassroots individuals,” creativity, life, and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated according to the workings of the platform. This grassroots entrepreneurship, in tandem with the institutional regulation and censorship of the Internet, contributes to the transformation of Chinese economy and the production of social stability and a digital culture permeated with contingency and negotiation.
Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this arti... more Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this article shows how the vibrant interaction between global cultural industries and the local Chinese economy propels transnational labour mobility and affects the subjectification of transnational creative workers. Having come to China to enhance their careers, these professionals have been incorporated into the Chinese creative workforce, contributing to the Party State’s aspiration to use creativity as a growth engine for the economy and as a form of soft power. In terms of these workers’ everyday experience, however, China’s aspiration to ‘foreign creativity’ does not necessarily guarantee a privileged life. The State’s restrictions on migration and the insecure working circumstances within the Chinese creative workplace discou- rage these transnationals from fully integrating in Chinese society and the Chinese labour market. At the same time, this research shows that the precarious lives led by transnational creative workers in Beijing are also productive and generate the conditions for a situated cosmopoli- tan subjectivity. Such a cosmopolitan subjectivity fosters respect for cultural difference and relations of mutual understanding and care among both international and local subjects.
This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based o... more This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based on the empirical analysis of fieldwork data, it analyses the governmentality of creative labour in Chinese SOCEs through an investigation of the condition of autonomy and the discourse of self-realization within selected Chinese media companies. The autonomy of creative work within the system is made contingent by the party state's ideological concern, while since the commercialization reform of SOCEs, creative workers are also expected to 'be creative for the state' under the discourse of self-realization. In practice, as the case of loafing on the job illustrates, the system causes marked contradictions that furnish creative individuals with possibilities to distance themselves from the expected subjectivity of 'being creative for the state'. This article offers an exemplary case study of how the governance of creativity and creative labour works in Chinese SOCEs, and of how it distinguishes itself from the creativity dispositif in the West. It suggests that the theorization of creative labour needs to go beyond the western neoliberal perspective and take into account the diversity of socio-political contexts across the world.
This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Mig... more This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Migrant workers are being drawn back to their rural homes by the techno-entrepreneurial prospects of live e-commerce being used as part of the “new farmers” branding. We examine how livestreaming platforms transform the labor process of rural produce sellers, zooming in on the physical work and transactional labor involved in the process of platformization. Analysis of the “new farmer” online workflow reveals not only insights into the economic logics of platformized labor but also shows important continuities in terms of sustained economic inequality and the perpetuation of the urban–rural divide. Such analysis prompts questions regarding what political and economic interests scaffold the “new farmer” narrative in contemporary China. How does platform capitalism reinvent itself in rural China, more specifically, through the agentic practices of Chinese rural live e-commerce practitioners? We conclude that platformization reproduces, rather than subverts, the subjectivities of e-commerce sellers and the power structures in which they are cemented.
In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatformi... more In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatforming and platformization. It describes the phenomena of the systematic pushing back of controversial platforms and their communities to the edge of the platform ecosystem, dominated by mainstream platforms (such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). Deplatformization further demonstrates the hierarchical power relations within the global platform ecosystem and the complexity of platform governability. From the European perspective, van Dijck argues that public values and public institutions should play more active role in platform governance. The recent Russia–Ukraine war also indicates the vulnerability brought by such co- and inter-dependence on American platforms.
In this special issue, we explore the geopolitics, aesthetics and future potentiality surrounding... more In this special issue, we explore the geopolitics, aesthetics and future potentiality surrounding TikTok to assess the possibility and implications of a new phase of digital globalisation. A phase in which China-based innovative platform technologies, infused with state power, generate and potentially disrupt digital cultures in places outside China. We will further explore this in the next part of this introduction, showing how the global rise of TikTok is feeding into increasing geopolitical anxieties worldwide. At the same time, we argue for the need to diversify our approaches to TikTok and platform studies-the latter field is very much dominated by questions around production, monetisation, data and political economy. More approaches, focusing on aesthetics, visual culture and users, are needed. In the second part of this introduction, we mobilise the notion of repetitive creativities as a way to engage with the aesthetic affordances of TikTok. This brings us to our conclusion, in which we allude to the possibility that TikTok can be seen as a kind of silly archive, offering glimpses of a future that is not yet here, but that may well come.
Instead of viewing TikTok as a platform, in this article we borrow Dutch film theorist Patricia P... more Instead of viewing TikTok as a platform, in this article we borrow Dutch film theorist Patricia Pisters's concept of neuro-images to approach TikTok as a cultural form that is deeply participatory, platform contingent, and algorithmically engraved. In the coproduction between algorithms and users, TikTok becomes an enormous database and generates personalised narratives about individuals and the world onto and through its 'brain-screen' interfaces, which simulate our conscious and unconscious mind, and actualise the idea of creativity based on repetition. TikTok thus enables a quasiautomated cinema, whose non-stopping filming of everyday lives does not seek to reduce desires and tastes into a singular and coherent structure, but instead uncovers, releases and contains them in its vast database and interfaces, leading to a fluid and modulating categorisation of identities. It is within this quasi-automated, deeply participatory digital cinema that TikTok constitutes neuro-images, producing a distinctive experience of time, and unpredictable and unstable futures.
This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific len... more This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China. Kuaishou’s platform business fits into the Party State’s socio-economic agenda of “Internet+” and “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” and is also folded into the state’s demand for cultural censorship and social stability. As we will show, this state-commerce relationship largely shapes Kuaishou’s interface and its affordances as encoded in its algorithm. Nevertheless, Kuaishou enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become “unlikely” creative workers, who have become self-employed creative, digital entrepreneurs. For these “grassroots individuals,” creativity, life, and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated a...
Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this arti... more Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this article shows how the vibrant interaction between global cultural industries and the local Chinese economy propels transnational labour mobility and affects the subjectification of transnational creative workers. Having come to China to enhance their careers, these professionals have been incorporated into the Chinese creative workforce, contributing to the Party State's aspiration to use creativity as a growth engine for the economy and as a form of soft power. In terms of these workers' everyday experience, however, China's aspiration to 'foreign creativity' does not necessarily guarantee a privileged life. The State's restrictions on migration and the insecure working circumstances within the Chinese creative workplace discourage these transnationals from fully integrating in Chinese society and the Chinese labour market. At the same time, this research shows that the precarious lives led by transnational creative workers in Beijing are also productive and generate the conditions for a situated cosmopolitan subjectivity. Such a cosmopolitan subjectivity fosters respect for cultural difference and relations of mutual understanding and care among both international and local subjects.
This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based o... more This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based on the empirical analysis of fieldwork data, it analyses the governmentality of creative labour in Chinese SOCEs through an investigation of the condition of autonomy and the discourse of self-realization within selected Chinese media companies. The autonomy of creative work within the system is made contingent by the party state’s ideological concern, while since the commercialization reform of SOCEs, creative workers are also expected to ‘be creative for the state’ under the discourse of self-realization. In practice, as the case of loafing on the job illustrates, the system causes marked contradictions that furnish creative individuals with possibilities to distance themselves from the expected subjectivity of ‘being creative for the state’. This article offers an exemplary case study of how the governance of creativity and creative labour works in Chinese SOCEs, and of how it distingu...
This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Mig... more This research examines the complex labor practices of live e-commerce sellers in rural China. Migrant workers are being drawn back to their rural homes by the techno-entrepreneurial prospects of live e-commerce being used as part of the “new farmers” branding. We examine how livestreaming platforms transform the labor process of rural produce sellers, zooming in on the physical work and transactional labor involved in the process of platformization. Analysis of the “new farmer” online workflow reveals not only insights into the economic logics of platformized labor but also shows important continuities in terms of sustained economic inequality and the perpetuation of the urban–rural divide. Such analysis prompts questions regarding what political and economic interests scaffold the “new farmer” narrative in contemporary China. How does platform capitalism reinvent itself in rural China, more specifically, through the agentic practices of Chinese rural live e-commerce practitioners? We conclude that platformization reproduces, rather than subverts, the subjectivities of e-commerce sellers and the power structures in which they are cemented.
In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatformi... more In this interview, José van Dijck distinguishes the concept of deplatformization from deplatforming and platformization. It describes the phenomena of the systematic pushing back of controversial platforms and their communities to the edge of the platform ecosystem, dominated by mainstream platforms (such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft). Deplatformization further demonstrates the hierarchical power relations within the global platform ecosystem and the complexity of platform governability. From the European perspective, van Dijck argues that public values and public institutions should play more active role in platform governance. The recent Russia-Ukraine war also indicates the vulnerability brought by such co-and interdependence on American platforms.
In this article, we analyse the most popular stories that circulated on WeChat public accounts co... more In this article, we analyse the most popular stories that circulated on WeChat public accounts concerning personalized experiences of COVID-19 in China during the first three months of 2020. Among these non-fictional online writings, we probe into ‘individual’ and mediated experiences with the coronavirus in China by questioning the visualizations and discourses of these stories and their producers, as well as the concomitant emotions they invoked. Parallel to the changing situation of the pandemic, we observe a diachronic evolution of emotions, from fear and doubt to (nationalist) pride. While articulating personalized experiences of the pandemic from disparate perspectives, the stories invariably built on, and were shaped by, the workings of the WeChat public account platform (公众平台) as evidenced by its content moderation logic and political economy. The analysis shows that emotions, rather than facts, propel the popularity of these stories. The measures taken by the state are most...
Topologies of Digital Work How Digitalisation and Virtualisation Shape Working Spaces and Places, 2022
This chapter introduces the specificities of the Chinese wanghong economy and its implications fo... more This chapter introduces the specificities of the Chinese wanghong economy and its implications for the existing spatial relationships in Chinese contemporary society. The wanghong industry first of all fits into the Party State’s agenda of restructuring the economy and boosting employment, while its mass participation and immense diversity also lead to the Party State’s mixed approach of both protection and censorship. At the local level, the well-established ICT infrastructure propels the booming platform economy and facilitates maximum incorporation of individual creativities and labour from disparate social and spatial contexts into the wanghong economy. This highly networked economy engenders social mobility that transcends geolocational limitations and transforms individuals including those from marginal social backgrounds into wanghong creators, providing them versatile spaces for creativity and employment that they are less likely to obtain in the pre-existing social settings. For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning, and emotional management. the booming platform economy and facilitates maximum incorporation of individual creativities and labour from disparate social and spatial contexts into the wanghong economy. This highly networked economy engenders social mobility that transcends geolocational limitations and transforms individuals including those from marginal social backgrounds into wanghong creators, providing them versatile spaces for creativity and employment that they are less likely to obtain in the pre-existing social settings. For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning and emotional management. monetisation on the side of individual creators. It is for this reason that the unlikely creativity of wanghong culture becomes desirable to creators and their online communities, serving as an imagined alternative to the tedious or normative everyday work as either cook, farmer, high-school teacher or college graduate waiting to be hired by companies. Taken out of the local context, these seemingly “bizarre” and “inadequate” creativities turn out to be highly entertaining and relevant and add flavour to the banal everyday life.
In this article, we analyse the most popular stories that circulated on WeChat public accounts co... more In this article, we analyse the most popular stories that circulated on WeChat public accounts concerning personalized experiences of COVID-19 in China during the first three months of 2020. Among these non-fictional online writings, we probe into 'individual' and mediated experiences with the coronavirus in China by questioning the visualizations and discourses of these stories and their producers, as well as the concomitant emotions they invoked. Parallel to the changing situation of the pandemic, we observe a diachronic evolution of emotions, from fear and doubt to (nationalist) pride. While articulating personalized experiences of the pandemic from disparate perspectives, the stories invariably built on, and were shaped by, the workings of the WeChat public account platform (公众平台) as evidenced by its content moderation logic and political economy. The analysis shows that emotions, rather than facts, propel the popularity of these stories. The measures taken by the state are mostly applauded, and only sometimes questioned; tragic memories are rewritten, and a political and economic order is consolidated.
Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the boundaries between the human... more Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences to critically explore the cultural and social dimensions of contemporary globalization processes. This entails looking at the way globalization unfolds through and within cultural and social practices, and identifying and understanding how it effects cultural and social change across the world. The series asks what, in its different guises and unequal diffusion, globalization is taken to be and do in and across speci c locations, and what social, political and cultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders obsolete. A particular focus is the vital contribution made by different forms of the imagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception, experience and critique of contemporary globalization. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society is committed to addressing globalization across cultural contexts (western and non-western) through interdisciplinary, theoretically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded in detailed case studies and close analyses. Within the scope outlined above, we invite junior and senior scholars to submit proposals for monographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave Pivot format. Please contact the series editors for more information: [email protected]/[email protected] More information about this series at
In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the cr... more In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the creative industries discourse, and related debates around creative labour, continue to be haunted by a Eurocentric cum Anglocentric bias. The critical language of this discourse often directs all discussion of “inequality”, “precarity” and “self-exploitation” of creative labour towards a critique of “neoliberalism”, thus running the risk of overlooking different socio-political contexts. We point at the urgency to contextualize and globalize, if not decolonize, creative work studies, including the debates surrounding precarity. This special issue explores the nuanced situations of governance and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia.
In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the cr... more In this introduction to this special issue on creative labour in East Asia, we explore how the creative industries discourse, and related debates around creative labour, continue to be haunted by a Eurocentric cum Anglocentric bias. The critical language of this discourse often directs all discussion of “inequality”, “precarity” and “self-exploitation” of creative labour towards a critique of “neoliberalism”, thus running the risk of overlooking different socio-political contexts. We point at the urgency to contextualize and globalize, if not decolonize, creative work studies, including the debates surrounding precarity. This special issue explores the nuanced situations of governance and labour experiences in the cultural economies of East Asia.
The COVID-19 pandemic stirs up strong nationalist and localist sentiments; places pride themselve... more The COVID-19 pandemic stirs up strong nationalist and localist sentiments; places pride themselves on containing the virus more effectively: We are doing better. We call this 'biopolitical nationalism', understood by us as the dynamics between body, geopolitics and affect. When looking at mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, we analyse how the biopolitical efforts of these places are being compared, applauded and supported. Under a discourse of life and survival, this celebration of biopolitical control does not fall into the classic reproduction of capital, but speaks to geopolitical identification. Biopolitics has morphed into a field of competition, of rivalry, of nationalistic-or, perhaps more generally, localist-power games. What can we do as Cultural Studies scholars?
This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific len... more This article studies the platformization of cultural production in China through the specific lens of Kuaishou, an algorithm-based video-sharing platform targeting second- and third-tier cities as well as the countryside. It enables the forming of an “unlikely” creative class in contemporary China. Kuaishou’s platform business fits into the Party State’s socio-economic agenda of “Internet+” and “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation,” and is also folded into the state’s demand for cultural censorship and social stability. As we will show, this state-commerce relationship largely shapes Kuaishou’s interface and its affordances as encoded in its algorithm. Nevertheless, Kuaishou enables the diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become “unlikely” creative workers, who have become self-employed creative, digital entrepreneurs. For these “grassroots individuals,” creativity, life, and individuality are constantly mobilized and calculated according to the workings of the platform. This grassroots entrepreneurship, in tandem with the institutional regulation and censorship of the Internet, contributes to the transformation of Chinese economy and the production of social stability and a digital culture permeated with contingency and negotiation.
Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this arti... more Drawing on qualitative research conducted on transnational creative workers in Beijing, this article shows how the vibrant interaction between global cultural industries and the local Chinese economy propels transnational labour mobility and affects the subjectification of transnational creative workers. Having come to China to enhance their careers, these professionals have been incorporated into the Chinese creative workforce, contributing to the Party State’s aspiration to use creativity as a growth engine for the economy and as a form of soft power. In terms of these workers’ everyday experience, however, China’s aspiration to ‘foreign creativity’ does not necessarily guarantee a privileged life. The State’s restrictions on migration and the insecure working circumstances within the Chinese creative workplace discou- rage these transnationals from fully integrating in Chinese society and the Chinese labour market. At the same time, this research shows that the precarious lives led by transnational creative workers in Beijing are also productive and generate the conditions for a situated cosmopoli- tan subjectivity. Such a cosmopolitan subjectivity fosters respect for cultural difference and relations of mutual understanding and care among both international and local subjects.
This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based o... more This article studies creative labour in Chinese state-owned cultural enterprises (SOCEs). Based on the empirical analysis of fieldwork data, it analyses the governmentality of creative labour in Chinese SOCEs through an investigation of the condition of autonomy and the discourse of self-realization within selected Chinese media companies. The autonomy of creative work within the system is made contingent by the party state's ideological concern, while since the commercialization reform of SOCEs, creative workers are also expected to 'be creative for the state' under the discourse of self-realization. In practice, as the case of loafing on the job illustrates, the system causes marked contradictions that furnish creative individuals with possibilities to distance themselves from the expected subjectivity of 'being creative for the state'. This article offers an exemplary case study of how the governance of creativity and creative labour works in Chinese SOCEs, and of how it distinguishes itself from the creativity dispositif in the West. It suggests that the theorization of creative labour needs to go beyond the western neoliberal perspective and take into account the diversity of socio-political contexts across the world.
The paradoxical relationship between Chinese creative workers and the state
Chinese Creator Econ... more The paradoxical relationship between Chinese creative workers and the state
Chinese Creator Economies dives into the paradoxical lives lived by creative professionals in emerging economies across China. Jian Lin contextualizes the socioeconomic conditions in which cultural production takes place and pushes back against the dominant understanding of Chinese media as a centralized, state-controlled apparatus by looking at how individual creative workers grapple with governance and precarity in the Chinese cultural industries and develop their bilateral subjectivities within the politico-economic system of Chinese media.
Drawing on intensive empirical research conducted on creative labor practices across television, journalism, design, and social media, Chinese Creative Economies looks at both Chinese and foreign-born content creators, exploring the tensions between Beijing’s limits on individual creativity, and its aspirations to become a global hub for cultural production. Lin maintains that it is the production of bilateral creatives that generates and maintains hope for the future of those who live and work within the cultural economies of China.
In Chinese, the term wanghong refers to creators, social media entrepreneurs alternatively known ... more In Chinese, the term wanghong refers to creators, social media entrepreneurs alternatively known as KOLs (key opinion leaders) and zhubo (showroom hosts), influencers and micro-celebrities. Wanghong also refers to an emerging media ecology in which these creators cultivate online communities for cultural and commercial value by harnessing Chinese social media platforms, like Weibo, WeChat, Douyu, Huya, Bilibili, Douyin, and Kuaishuo. Framed by the concepts of cultural, creative, and social industries, the book maps the development of wanghong policies and platforms, labor and management, content and culture, as they operate in contrast to its non-Chinese counterpart, social media entertainment, driven by platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch. As evidenced by the backlash to TikTok, the threat of competition from global wanghong signals advancing platform nationalism.
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For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning, and emotional management. the booming platform economy and facilitates maximum incorporation of individual creativities and labour from disparate social and spatial contexts into the wanghong economy. This highly networked economy engenders social mobility that transcends geolocational limitations and transforms individuals including those from marginal social backgrounds into wanghong creators, providing them versatile spaces for creativity and employment that they are less likely to obtain in the pre-existing social settings.
For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning and emotional management. monetisation on the side of individual creators. It is for this reason that the unlikely creativity of wanghong culture becomes desirable to creators and their online communities, serving as an imagined alternative to the tedious or normative everyday work as either cook, farmer, high-school teacher or college graduate waiting to be hired by companies. Taken out of the local context, these seemingly “bizarre” and “inadequate” creativities turn out to be highly entertaining and relevant and add flavour to the banal everyday life.
For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning, and emotional management. the booming platform economy and facilitates maximum incorporation of individual creativities and labour from disparate social and spatial contexts into the wanghong economy. This highly networked economy engenders social mobility that transcends geolocational limitations and transforms individuals including those from marginal social backgrounds into wanghong creators, providing them versatile spaces for creativity and employment that they are less likely to obtain in the pre-existing social settings.
For creator individuals, however, this empowering discourse of wanghong does not necessarily promise a secure career and life. Internet censorship and the rapidly evolving social media industry demand continuous self-governance that incorporates self-censorship, continuous learning and emotional management. monetisation on the side of individual creators. It is for this reason that the unlikely creativity of wanghong culture becomes desirable to creators and their online communities, serving as an imagined alternative to the tedious or normative everyday work as either cook, farmer, high-school teacher or college graduate waiting to be hired by companies. Taken out of the local context, these seemingly “bizarre” and “inadequate” creativities turn out to be highly entertaining and relevant and add flavour to the banal everyday life.
Chinese Creator Economies dives into the paradoxical lives lived by creative professionals in emerging economies across China. Jian Lin contextualizes the socioeconomic conditions in which cultural production takes place and pushes back against the dominant understanding of Chinese media as a centralized, state-controlled apparatus by looking at how individual creative workers grapple with governance and precarity in the Chinese cultural industries and develop their bilateral subjectivities within the politico-economic system of Chinese media.
Drawing on intensive empirical research conducted on creative labor practices across television, journalism, design, and social media, Chinese Creative Economies looks at both Chinese and foreign-born content creators, exploring the tensions between Beijing’s limits on individual creativity, and its aspirations to become a global hub for cultural production. Lin maintains that it is the production of bilateral creatives that generates and maintains hope for the future of those who live and work within the cultural economies of China.