Postsocialist China Research Articles

Embodied Suzhi: Constituting Middle-Class Subjectivity in Post-Socialist China

Suzhi has grown into a key bio-policy that is crucial to governance and individual life in post-socialist China. Drawing upon Bourdieusian habitus, this article examines how millennial middle-class women live the class-based suzhi on a daily basis in the fields of education, marriage and real estate. Class divisions configure women’s habitual pursuit of cultural suzhi, and their embodied capital is reflected in practical situations. Women embody cultural suzhi and specific life experiences as middle-class daughters. They are inclined to have matched marriages to ensure personal happiness. But middle-class women demonstrate high neoliberal reflexivity in performing civil suzhi in the field of real estate. Neoliberal feminism is materialised through suzhi: Women exhibit reflexivity in their embodied experiences of suzhi while also internalising class structures and state power, thus reinforcing the insidious reproduction of social inequality.

A return of dominant paradigm in China: making Alibaba a development solution for rural China and the globe

ABSTRACT In 2011, Alibaba launched the Taobao Villages initiative, which enables rural e-commerce and connects rural sellers with urban buyers, highlighting the role of e-commerce platforms in reducing rural poverty. This approach was later integrated into national rural development policies. As the Digital Silk Road initiative progresses and Alibaba expands globally, Taobao Villages’ development experience is being promoted worldwide. Using Taobao Villages as a case study, this paper integrates the agrarian question in Marxian political economy with critical development communication studies. It explores why rural areas’ underdevelopment is perceived as a problem solvable by digital platforms, why this development approach emerged in post-socialist China, and its potential impacts. This paper argues that the Taobao Village exemplifies a dominant paradigm of development communication, produced by Alibaba, development experts, and government officials through shared knowledge practices. It examines the texts, intellectual frameworks, and diffusion processes involved in this knowledge production by employing critical discourse analysis. The study highlights how Taobao Villages reinforce the notion that informatization facilitates marketization, thus perpetuating and adapting three mainstream rural development ideas in post-socialist China. The underlying issue of rural China’s underdevelopment, the privatization and capitalization of rural social reproduction driven by China’s neoliberal globalization, sets the stage for another wave of digital labor exploitation. Furthermore, the widespread neoliberal ideology that advocates using e-commerce to foster social development creates internal challenges and generates external pressures within China.

Transforming Public Spaces in Post-Socialist China’s Danwei Neighbourhoods: The Third Dormitory of the Party Committee of Shandong Province

The urban residential pattern in China experienced two significant transitions during the second half of the 20th century. The first happened in the 1960s, based on the Soviet model, when a large-scale community model was built led by government enterprises and institutions under a planned economy; the second was in 1998 when the real estate market-led socialised community model emerged after the reform of commercial housing. The former is characterised by the integration of supervisory units, service units, and property owners: Residents enjoy the right to use the residences and supporting services provided by their affiliated institutions, while for the latter case, supervisory units, service units, and property owners are separate. New conflicts have been found in Danwei neighbourhoods with the housing commercialisation reform. This research focuses on the Third Dormitory of the Party Committee of Shandong Province as a case study to analyse the transformation of public space in the Danwei neighbourhood during the post-socialist era. Through archival research, interviews, and observation, this research has found that two forces that celebrate marketisation by the new residents and resist marketisation by the original residents coexist in the Third Dormitory. Unregulated spatial practices have resulted from the incomplete control of the owners of public space by the provincial government office. This research offers an example of public space transformations in Danwei neighbourhoods, which have undergone incomplete marketisation. The reflections on the Third Dormitory provide references for future neighbourhood management and policy-making.

The Cultural Consequences of Market Transition: An Empirical Examination of Rising Materialism in Twenty-First-Century China

This study examines how markets affect personal culture in the context of postsocialist China. Drawing on several bodies of literature, I argue that China’s transition to a market economy promotes materialist values via two causal pathways. First, market transition entails a process of economic liberalization, which accentuates economic incentives and exacerbates existential insecurity. Second, market transition also entails a process of commodification that, by immersing individuals in market relations, crowds out intrinsic motives and normalizes the pursuit of material self-interests. My empirical analysis uses repeated cross-sectional data from a large-scale national survey to demonstrate the effect of market transition through the lens of work values. Taking advantage of China’s regional variations in the pace of institutional change, I show that, between 2005 and 2015, provinces where market transition had made greater progress tended to experience a sharper rise in materialist work values. Additional analyses reveal significant differences in work values between state-sector employees and workers in the market sector, and that the relationship between market transition and materialist values extends beyond the work domain. These findings contribute to the theoretical literature on the cultural consequences of markets and the empirical knowledge on cultural change in contemporary China.

Representations of Christianity in Chinese Independent Cinema: Gan Xiao’er’s Postsocialist Religious Critique

Representations of Christianity in contemporary Chinese cinema are very limited, making the scholarship of this subject underexplored. Filmmaker Gan Xiao’er has made three feature-length independent films focusing on Christianity in China. These films, The Only Sons (2003), Raised from Dust (2007), and Waiting for God (2012), are used for case studies, with close analyses of their narratives and formal elements. They are also examined in the social and cultural contexts of postsocialist China. This article argues that Gan’s religious features are significant in the context of postsocialist Chinese cinema. They not only depict the religious experience of Chinese Christians, which has been under-represented cinematically, but also provide a religious critique rarely seen in Chinese films. On the one hand, these films critically engage with the experience of underprivileged people during the Reform period, when economic development and materialism became dominant, while the socialist political system remained. Gan’s religious features provide an alternative perspective that cares for people’s spiritual needs. On the other hand, Gan’s later films interrogate the local religious institution in China, questioning the arbitrary separation of the ‘holy’ and the ‘unholy’, proposing a more inclusive approach to the religious concept of love.

A critical analysis of volunteer tourism in post-socialist China

ABSTRACT This study delves into post-trip transformations among Chinese volunteer tourists, challenging the conventional Western-centric lens. Traditionally, research has focused on international examples in the Western context, but this study explores the less-investigated intra-country practices in China. It employs a simplified transformative learning framework, adopting a collective autoethnographic inquiry that involves the first author’s participation as a volunteer tourist in 2011, followed by an extended advisory role and authors’ cross-cultural reflexivity. The study scrutinizes psychological, convictional, and behavioural shifts while emphasizing the interconnection of transformations with pre-trip motivations, onsite host–guest interactions, post-trip actions, and the pivotal role of local organizations including long-neglected authorities. Significantly, it uncovers the mediating influence of China’s distinct socio-political landscape, contending that volunteer tourism in China serves as a top-down response to counter Western cultural dominance. This research underscores the need for a decolonized and context-specific approach to investigating volunteer tourism practices in non-Western contexts. It highlights the dynamic interplay between tourism experiences and the intricate socio-political environment in China, offering a fresh perspective on the transformative effects of local tourism practices in this unique context.

Performing Plasticity: On Recycling, Prosthetic Memories, and the Precarious Working-Class Renaissance

This paper examines the representation of post-industrial malaise in post-socialist China through a case study of the plastic characters of the 2019 hit song Disco Alaskan Wolves (野狼disco). Gem Dong, the singer/composer from Northeastern China, inflects Cantonese with accented Mandarin, utilizing a "disco" motif to express his generation's traumatic transition to the market economy in a laid-off worker's family. Taking a threefold connotation of “plasticity” as references to the materiality of media affordance, the kitschy aesthetic form, and a mode reflective of neoliberalist flexible corporeal politics, I claim that lyrics, singing, and derivative amateur dancing videos of the song all demonstrate “plasticity” as a performing tactic that undermines the glorification of post-socialist economic reform through a paradoxical self-exploitation of underclass bodies. I argue that the song’s parody of Cantonese and stunt performances manifests prosthetic memories formed with spectatorial experiences of "plastic media waste" — cut-out disco CDs and pirate Hong Kong films. They simultaneously unsettle the neoliberalist aesthetic of flexibility through plastic clumsiness. Controversies around the copyright of choreography, however, reveal an uneven distribution of cultural capital in the global capitalist structure that may continuously mutate and ironize the social undertone. Plasticity thus embodies and delivers sensory knowledge of desire, trauma, and precariousness for the post-socialist working class and asks for an ecological understanding of the working-class cultural renaissance.

‘Abstinence is panacea’: Reconstructing the ideal of Chinese masculinity through online community

This article discusses the experience of Chinese young men relating to sexual abstinence through the Abstinence Bar ( jiese ba 戒色吧) – an online community, with over six million members, dedicated to preaching the benefits of sexual abstinence – to identify how it represents a problematic strategy of ‘doing gender’ in post-socialist China. Based on a critical discourse analysis of the posts in the Abstinence Bar, we argue that the prosperity of the Abstinence Bar has re-stabilized the hegemony of dominant masculinities through cultural changes which intersect with individualism and nationalism. Consequently, it is essential to advocate evidence-based sexuality education among Chinese young people.

Fuwuyuan on Film: Cinema, Socialist Education, and Service Labor from the Great Leap Forward to Reform and Opening Up

As industrial and agricultural production kicked into overdrive during the Great Leap Forward, so too did cinematic production. Factories and agricultural collectives promoted labor models, and the film industry created new cinematic models of heroic production workers. At the same time, valorization of production labor heightened the alienation of workers in the “nonproductive” service sector. To address this situation, service sector work units nominated their own model workers, and the film industry brought tales of service workers to audiences nationwide. Through a close reading of three such films— Fuwuyuan 服务员 (1958), produced during the Great Leap Forward; Manyi bu manyi 满意不满意 (1963), produced just after the Great Leap Forward; and Duan panzi de guniang 端盘子的姑娘 (1981), produced shortly after the implementation of market reforms—this article charts the evolution of cinematic discourse on the value of service work in the economy and society of socialist and early post-socialist China.

Art as Surgery: Hygiene Politics in Zhang Peili’s Glove Art, 1985–91

This article analyzes Chinese video artist Zhang Peili’s latex-glove-themed paintings and conceptual art from the 1980s. It argues that they are an important intervention into post-socialist China’s politicized discussions on art’s role in society. Building on Mel Chen’s discussion of animacy hierarchies as sociopolitical constructs, the article reads Zhang’s latex gloves as animate—transgressing boundaries of “aliveness” between humans and objects. It locates Zhang and his art collective, “Pond” Society, amid mid-1980s discourses on art’s emotional contagiousness, highlighting that the Chinese art establishment’s insistence on Realism and on the Maoist art methodology of “immersion into life” (shenru shenghuo) reflected anxieties about “healthy” art making that could promote national progress. Zhang’s series of X? glove paintings from 1986 onward represent strategic promotions of his medical conceptualization of art. Zhang was infected during the 1988 Shanghai hepatitis A epidemic, and his subsequent glove-themed work called for an embrace of viral life. The figure of the glove was also central to Zhang’s first two video works, including Document on Hygiene No. 3, which signals a shift away from the insistence that art should reinforce the artist’s authority. Instead, Document uses the gloved hand to reflect on where, in a society obsessed with purity and in an art world obsessed with radicalism, we might fundamentally locate agency. This article shows that the history of contemporary Chinese art cannot be understood without considering artists’ responses to, and contributions in shaping, the deeply politicized notion of hygiene.

Heredity's Aesthetic Infrastructures

This essay traces a disjointed aesthetics of hereditary units in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) and Chinese filmmaker Wang Xiaoshuai's So Long, My Son (2019) and argues that shared social and economic conditions of Victorian Britain and postsocialist China prompt similar ruptures of social realism's totalizing aspirations. The novel and the film are mutually concerned with tragedies of biopolitical management and doomed lineages, but at the same time they both employ an aesthetics of leapings and projections—also featured in Hardy's 1917 poem “Heredity”—that argues for the value of an individual life based on a radical divestment from personhood itself, in favor of the gene's mindless jumps through unmapped space and time.

The Ideology is Blowing in the Wind: Managing Orthodoxy and Popularity in China’s Propaganda

ABSTRACT The concept of political propaganda includes a theoretical contradiction between orthodoxy and popularity of ideology, and by implication, a practical contradiction between repressing and mobilizing public discourse. Post-socialist China offers a curious case. The neo-traditionalist bureaucratic system stresses absolute ideological correctness, while the mouthpiece media’s need for adjusting to a marketized media industry demands popularity. How China confronts such contradiction is crucial for both understanding China’s resilience and conceptualizing propaganda and ideology. Through in-depth interviews with insiders of the propaganda system, this article argues that China’s mouthpiece media are compartmentalized into two separate branches. On one hand, the official print newspaper continues to define ideological orthodoxy. On the other, the newly developed online mouthpieces are granted greater autonomy to use various discursive strategies to popularize themselves. In the latter case, the subject of propaganda transforms from doctrine and dogma to discourse and culture, and ideology is integrated into everyday experience.

Translating the pet man: the “milky puppy” imaginary and neoliberal subjectivity

ABSTRACT The term “milky puppy” (xiao naigou) gained popularity as a slang term in Chinese cyberspace since 2017, symbolizing a young, endearing, and adorable male figure, much like the perception of a puppy. This phenomenon, influenced by Hallyu 4.0 and the toshishita romantic motif prevalent in Japanese and Korean popular cultures, has led to the emergence of an “older woman-younger man” relationship pattern as a new trend in Chinese digital entertainment, particularly TV dramas. In this context, the younger, “pet” boyfriend is commonly referred to as a “milky puppy.” This article investigates the transnational flow and cultural translation of the Pet Man imaginary in East Asia, arguing that the bodily rhetoric of “milky puppy” signifies a Chinese variant of moe culture and represents the commodification of the male body. The article presents critical analyses of two recent Chinese TV dramas within this romantic subgenre, Find Yourself and The Rational Life, and compares them to the South Korean drama Something in the Rain. Through this comparative study, the article aims to identify distinctive Chinese characteristics in the portrayal of pet man masculinity in these dramas. By engaging with feminist and governmentality theories, the study explores how gender dynamics in these dramas negotiate between neoliberal subjectivity and the resilience of patriarchal gender norms in postsocialist China.

Book review: Screen media and the construction of nostalgia in post-socialist china

Book review: Screen media and the construction of nostalgia in post-socialist china

The (de)-politicization of Internet memes in Chinese national youth propaganda campaign

ABSTRACT Visual political communication in the social media sphere is increasingly valuable for its ability to more effectively persuade viewers in this increasingly cluttered media landscape. Using multi-model discourse analysis and following the theoretical framework of Everyday Politics, this study focuses on a random sample (N = 200) of user-generated Internet memes from Chinese national youth propaganda campaign Youth Study. In addition, the author observed the sharing and dissemination of these memes in online public discussions. The findings reveal that young participants maintain a varying distance from politics. They employ strategies such as dark humor, hyperbole, contrast, and appropriation of pop culture to portray two key roles – the charming, brilliant followers and the abandoned, hunted breakers, and to construct four main scenarios-cute threat, humble beg, funny politics, and veiled resistance. This politicized propaganda campaign is being transformed from state aspirations to the creative daily cultural consumption of young netizens. This analysis contributes to the scholarly literature on youth subcultures, political mobilization, and visual propaganda in post-socialist China.

Keeping A Distance: Changing Everyday Lives of Married Migrant Gay Men in China’s State-owned Enterprises

ABSTRACT This study examines continuity and change in the lives of rural migrant gay men working in China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) from an everyday life perspective. By examining their sexuality, migration histories, and heterosexual marriage experiences, this study contributes to sexuality and migration literature by exploring how rural-to-urban migrant gay men maintain their everyday homosexual intimacies in post-socialist China. It adds to the perspective that gay men’s perceptions, interpretations, and reactions to marriage and sexuality vary, due to their personal migration experiences. These findings also contribute to scholarly discussions of everyday life by providing a nuanced analysis of how spatial tactics are employed as forms of everyday resistance by gay men for maintaining their sexualities.

The Power of Qing: The Guardian Web Series and Queer Worldmaking in Chinese Danmei

This article examines the web series Guardian (dir. Zhou Yuanzhou, 2018) as exemplary cultural texts of Chinese danmei, which portrays homoeroticism and male queerness in postsocialist China within the contexts of increasing institutional and political homophobia. The textual evidence shows that Guardian constructs queer subtexts and brings out the queer potentialities of the seemingly nonhomosexual media production via the following strategic negotiations: first, by creating a bricolage of science fiction, fantasy, and superhero genres to contest the homophobic social reality; second, by portraying qing, a powerful emotional bonding in queer relationships, and magnifying same sex intimacy as normal, natural, and moral; and last but not least, by interrogating queer stereotypes through deconstructing essentialized gender boundaries and further transcending stereotypical gong-shou aesthetics in danmei. Its commercial values notwithstanding, Guardian exemplifies a critical representational terrain that envisions alternative, imaginative ways to reconfigure gender and sexual identities, rearticulate queer desires, and disrupt insidious gender politics and homophobic discourse. Importantly, Guardian signifies the danmei genre’s disruptive potential to offer abundant space for queer worldmaking, thereby challenging censored representations of homosexuality.

The Impact of China’s Biopolitical Approach to COVID-19 on Pets

Using the frameworks of biopower and uses and gratification theory, this article examines the treatment of pets in China during the COVID-19 outbreak and the role of social media in fulfilling users’ social needs by facilitating discussions on associated animal welfare issues and mobilizing animal advocates to take action. The analysis focuses on how social media comments on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, have influenced public discourse surrounding the biopolitical governance of animals emphasized by the zero-COVID policy, which has helped maintain a strong sense of national consciousness in post-socialist China. The study centres on an isolated case of the killing of a corgi by a health worker in Shanghai and how it was perceived on social media. The findings suggest that much of the animosity demonstrated on Weibo towards the killing is centred around biopower, or the biopolitical governance of humans and animals that has more broadly prioritized human life over animal welfare in China’s approach to COVID-19. In this way, social media has played a crucial role in mobilizing animal advocates to take a more prominent role in the emergency management of pets. The study concludes that China should consider adopting a standard operating procedure for pet care and rescue that includes pets in its humans-first disaster response and relief measures to develop a better and healthier national consciousness, fulfil the social needs of its citizens who value animal welfare, and strengthen its sense of national consciousness.

Body Art in China: Yang Zhichao's Diary from a Psychiatric Ward

This study aims to trace how artists in postsocialist China have adopted the discourse of body art and reshaped its import of sociopolitical criticality. In this article, “body art” implies the use of the human body as the primary material of artistic creation and the performance of actions of cruelty, modification, and endangerment on the artist's body. Through an engagement with theories of embodiment, biopolitics, and postsocialism, this article argues that body art represents one way in which the corporeal assumes a new centrality in China's post‐1978 avant‐garde and popular culture, as both a reappropriated territory of self‐expression and an alienated object of consumption and surveillance. To do so, it discusses body art by Yang Zhichao 杨志超 (b. 1962), focusing in particular on a performance artwork titled Jiayuguan 嘉峪关 (Jiayu Pass, 1999 – 2000) and its documentation by the artist. As a result, this article shows how body art encapsulates the tension between dystopian negativity and regenerative potential at the heart of the postsocialist condition.

Running and Reading Remnant Danwei Walls in China's Postsocialist City

Built on visual and running/walking ethnography, this article analyzes visual traces left on remnant danwei walls in postsocialist China. The article considers danwei walls as yiji (remnant traces) that serve as loci of political memory and as a medium to host other visual traces by a variety of different actors. Drawing on a range of concepts from cultural studies and visual ethnography, the article provides a close reading of these traces, treating them as important historical documents and examples of how human actors interact with the built environment during China's postsocialist transformation. The article is built around three case studies, each of which captures different stages of the physical decay of the danwei as represented in the materiality of the walls in varying states of (dis)repair and the different nature of the visual traces local actors have left on them. The analysis of traces—understood as signs on the walls as well as the walls themselves—reveals a story of the ways in which humans interact with a very specific part of China's built environment at a moment of transition and of how relationships between these human actors change in the process. The article provides a reading of visual social phenomena, contributing to the understanding of signifying practices in postsocialist urban China.