Curating a Scopic Contact Zone: Short Video, Rural Performativity, and the Mediatization of Socio-Spatial Order in China

Abstract

With the promulgation of the “rural revitalization” initiative, China has been promoting the marriage between technology and rurality to chart a digital future for what is christened “a new countryside.” Rural revitalization is not simply a socio-economic project but a profoundly ideological one, which choreographs a socio-spatial order, fashions an aspirational rural subjectivity, and realigns imaginaries of rurality. This article examines the role of short video in fostering an emergent rural performativity in line with official ideology through idyll-icized displays of rural lifestyles and landscapes, which are loaded with affective and ideological connotations. A scopic contact zone is thus carved out between rural vloggers and urban viewers, one characterized by mutual appropriation and strategic differentiation. This article foregrounds the limitations of this urban-rural contact zone and its immanent “cruel optimism,” while advocating a kind of radical utopia to enable imaginations of the alternative futures of digital rurality.