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This study aims to map out the popular phenomenon of misogyny in the specific techno-social configuration buttressed by China's state-market nexus. With a case study of a controversy involving the standup comedian Yang Li and the luxury car brand Mercedes-Benz on the microblogging platform Weibo, I highlight the 'platformization of misogyny.' The conceptualization refers to the way that a platform is evoked as tools to manufacture and amplify misogyny. Weibo has this effect both through its design, features, and algorithmic shaping of sociality and through its users' appropriation of its affordances. On top of that, the platform also engenders a form of governance that is deeply enmeshed in the commercialization of internet opinion, suggesting a techno-nationalist mode of state control that is exercised from afar and deeply imbued with patriarchal and misogynistic characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study advances the understanding of consumer nationalism through an analysis of a Chinese boycott of South Korean goods. In early 2017, Chinese internet users expressed their strong aversion to the South Korean conglomerate Lotte and coordinated a folk boycott against it on the grounds that Lotte supported South Korea's deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile system, which China considered a threat. We explored the increasing convergence of consumer activities in the form of consumer nationalism with commercial entities' marketing strategies and also with the state's interests with respect to security and promoting national pride. The internet and new technologies have facilitated grassroots nationalist activities in terms of the ready circulation of information and mobilization of collective actions. We investigated a digital discursive space in the communicative interactions among stakeholders through which digital media not only amplify the scale and intensity of the mundane and everyday practice of nationalism but also blur the boundaries among the participating actors. Our research documented the multilateral relationships among stakeholders – individual consumers/media users, commercial entities, and the state – in practicing nationalism and reproducing the nation through (non)consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I discuss the affective dynamics in Hong Kong's anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement through examining the emotion and affect surrounding four Lennon Walls in various parts of the city. The Lennon Walls—public spaces decorated with numerous colorful sticky notes—became a hallmark of the 2019 protests. Most of the notes were hand-written spontaneously by passers-by, who used words, phrases, emojis, sketches, and cartoons to communicate information about the protest, frame issues, stir emotions, and charge the movement with affective intensities. I argue that the walls galvanize the population to sense, feel, experience, and act in ways that foster political feelings. Combining textual analysis and ethnographic observations, I show that the walls mediate discursive emotional expressions and non-discursive affective intensities, illustrating the affective dynamics of the movement in terms of its temporality, visibility, and operationality—the concentrated formations of emotion and affect. Together, these orient and move us in social movements by allowing us to feel through our bodily reactions and affective responses and act upon these felt experiences. The walls are able to marshal the resources of the minds and bodies of those who created and sustained them and give rise to political passions and movement actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For this study, we analyzed the changing images of women characters involved in extramarital affairs in three Chinese TV dramas— Come and Go (CG ; Hubei TV & Guangxi TV, 1998), Dwelling Narrowness (DN ; Beijing TV & Dragon TV, 2009), and Nothing but Thirty (NT ; Dongfang TV & Tencent Video, 2020). We argue here that shifting gender relationships, evolving political, economic, and technological conditions relating to the media industry, and a transition in the broader social environment have motivated a return to patriarchal moral discourse on Chinese TV. Specifically, in keeping with this discourse, extramarital affairs have come to be presented as immoral, primarily for the women involved—the "little third" of the title, this being the literal translation of the Mandarin term for "mistress." We documented this return to patriarchal moral doctrines that are intended to discipline women and limit the diversity and nuance of culturally accepted forms and expressions of sexual attraction and romance on Chinese TV in case studies of the three programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study critically examines post-feminism in Chinese fashion culture through the lens of Wang Hong, young online celebrities and entrepreneurs who sell fashion products. The extensive discussion of post-feminism in the literature has thus far focused primarily on Western contexts, specifically those where young, white, middle-class women embrace the contradictory identity of a freely-choosing, self-pleasing, and empowering, yet calculating, regulatory, and disciplinary subject. I argue that, in the absence of the charged legacy of successive waves of feminist movements that have been the Western experience, Chinese women, exemplified by Wang Hong, are able to embrace post-feminism through their fashion culture and indeed are eager to do so. Through various self-fashioning activities and business endeavors, Wang Hong embody a certain type of femininity that is not only aesthetic and entrepreneurial in the lexicon of freedom and empowerment, but also patriotic in its witting complicity in the market-state nexus that propagates nationalistic sentiments in the pursuit of social and economic advantages. Though unaware of the fragmented feminist moments in China, Wang Hong, nonetheless, demonstrate that post-feminism can take root in local culture through the transnationality of the consumerist, entrepreneurial, and neoliberal yearnings of women around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the hashtag activism through which Chinese social media users have countered censorship of homosexual content. Based on a close examination of 798 original posts on Weibo tagged #IAmGay#, I found that the personalized stories circulated with the posts served as the building blocks for discursive politics. Being linked through digital media, these isolated individual posts generated connective actions that together formed an alternative discourse about LGBTQ rights and free speech and challenged the government's hegemonic censorship. I argue here for a critical and reflexive recognition of the affective dimension of communication that problematizes the ways in which users make their voices heard through hashtag activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on precarious labor, in particular, the experiences of a group of internal migrant women working in a beauty shop in South China. The study aim is to elucidate the ways in which migrant Chinese women negotiate the demands of work and life that help to shape the imaginations and aspirations of modern city dwellers. Women factory workers, it is argued, leave other employment for work in the aspiring Chinese beauty industry, which promises significant facets of modern identity such as urban status, cosmopolitanism, and upward mobility. Their work, nevertheless, remains fundamentally precarious because of not only low wages and limited job security but also the construction and circulation of femininity and assumptions about gender normality in both work and family. The precarious work also indexes the ambivalent relationship between the national affect of hope and the fragility of individual potentiality under neoliberal ethos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to explore the popularization of Japanese console games in China in the past two decades, which reveals the tripartite relationship of the nation-state, transnational cultural power, and local agents.1 This study focuses on the formation and development of the console game industry in a non-Western context, where the society has undergone dramatic transformations and has been largely influenced by the globalization process. Encountering social anti-gaming discourse and cultural protectionism, the importation and distribution of Japanese console games did not get support from the state. However, it found its way to the audience and gained popularity through piracy, the black market, and the local agents’ appropriation, becoming an integrated part of many Chinese early gamers’ lives. This article draws upon the intersection of cultural globalization with game studies, calling for an investigation into the complexity of the game industry through its sociohistorical, political, and cultural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]