The Cultural Politics of Affect and Emotion E-Book

Wei Dong

• Herausgeber: transcript Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Critical Studies in Media and Communication
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Against the background of the media commercialization reform since the 1990s in China and drawing on the case of »X-Change« (2006–2019), Wei Dong investigates the affective meaning-making mechanism in the multimodal text of Chinese reality TV. The focus lies on the ways in which emotions are appropriated and disciplined by regimes of power and identity, and the ways in which affect – in this case primarily kuqing (bitter emotions) communicated by the material and the body – have the potential to challenge or exceed existing relations of power in the mediascape. Wei Dong shows how Chinese reality TV provides a historical and theoretical opportunity for understanding the affective structures of contemporary China in the dynamic process of fracture and integration.

Leseprobe

This open access publication was enabled by the support of a network of academic libraries for the promotion of the open-access-transformation in the Social Sciences and Humanities (transcript Open Library Community Medienwissenschaft 2022)

Vollsponsoren: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz | Technische Universität Berlin / Universitätsbibliothek | Universitätsbibliothek der Ruhr-Universität Bochum | Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Bonn | Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen | Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt | Sächsische Landesbibliothek, Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB Dresden) | Universitätsbibliothek Duisburg-Essen | Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg Frankfurt am Main | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg / Universitätsbibliothek | Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen | Universitätsbibliothek der FernUniversität in Hagen | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek – Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek | Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) – KIT-Bibliothek | Universitätsbibliothek Kassel | Universitätsbibliothek in Landau | Universität zu Köln, Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek | Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig | Universitätsbibliothek Mannheim | Universitätsbibliothek Marburg | Universitätsbibliothek der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München | Fachhochschule Münster | Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Münster | Bibliotheksund Informationssystem der Universität Oldenburg | Universitätsbibliothek Siegen | Universitätsbibliothek Vechta | Universitätsbibliothek der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar | Jade Hochschule Wilhelmshaven/Oldenburg/Elsfleth | Zürcher Hochschule der Künste | Zentralbibliothek ZürichSponsoring Light: Universität der Künste – Universitätsbibliothek | Freie Universität Berlin | Fachhochschule Bielefeld, Hochschulbibliothek | Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig | Fachhochschule Dortmund, Hochschulbibliothek | Technische Universität Dortmund / Universitätsbibliothek | Bibliothek der Pädagogischen Hochschule Freiburg | Hochschule Hannover – Bibliothek | Landesbibliothek Oldenburg | Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Universitätsbibliothek | ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, HochschulbibliothekMikrosponsoring: Filmmuseum Düsseldorf | Bibliothek der Theologischen Hochschule Friedensau | Bibliothek der Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg | Hochschule Hamm-Lippstadt | Bibliothek der Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover | ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe Bibliothek | Hochschule Fresenius | Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF – Universitätsbibliothek | Bibliothek der Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften Würzburg-Schweinfurt (FHWS)

Wei Dong, born in 1991, studies affect theories and Chinese media culture. She completed her doctorate at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.

Wei Dong

The Cultural Politics of Affect and Emotion

A Case Study of Chinese Reality TV

This publication was made available via Open Access within the framework of the funding project 16TOA002 with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

With support of CSC (China Scholarship Council).

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 (BY-NC) license, which means that the text may be may be remixed, build upon and be distributed, provided credit is given to the author, but may not be used for commercial purposes. For details go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Permission to use the text for commercial purposes can be obtained by contacting [email protected]

Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material.

First published in 2022 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Wei Dong

Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-6284-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-6284-3 EPUB-ISBN 978-3-7328-6284-9https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839462843 ISSN of series: 2512-4188 eISSN of series: 2747-3937

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1Locating affect and emotion in reality TV

1.2Overview of the chapters

Chapter 2: Mass Media and Reality TV Formats in Post-socialist China

2.1Chinese economic reform and social transformation

2.1.1Economic reform and the introduction of neoliberalism

2.1.2“Socialism from afar”

2.2The urban-rural dual structure

2.3Reform of the Chinese media system: between market and state

2.3.1Marketization and transformation of the Chinese television industry

2.3.2State control and ideological reconstruction

2.3.3The “disjunctive media order”

Chapter 3: The Turn to Affect and its Application to Reality TV

3.1A brief history of emotions in Western and Eastern thought

3.1.1Ideas of emotions in Western history

3.1.2Ideas of qing (情) in Chinese history

3.2The different “affective turns” in the humanities and social sciences

3.2.1Affect as bodily intensity

3.2.2Affect as elemental state

3.2.3Criticism and discussion

3.3The social-relational framework of affect and emotion

3.4Understanding reality TV: relational affect as a critical optic

Chapter 4: Reality TV Analysis: From Authenticity to Affect

4.1The politics of emotional performance on reality TV

4.2Negotiations of emotion display rules in (Chinese) reality TV

4.3Emotional labor and affective capitalism

4.3.1Affective economics as a new television marketing model

4.3.2Emotional labor in late capitalism

4.4The role of emotions in the audience experience

4.5The affective turn in reality TV analysis

Chapter 5: Researching Affect in Reality TV Text

5.1Rethinking affect and social structure

5.2Developing methods to analyze affects in reality TV

5.2.1Rethinking discourse analysis

5.2.2Toward a multimodal textual and filmic analysis

5.3Case selection and research design

Chapter 6: Telling Stories, Swapping Lives

6.1X-Change (2006-08): “The miracle of ordinary people”

6.2X-Change (2012-15): “Strength from distant mountains”

6.3X-Change (2017-19): “Find yourself in the world of others”

6.4Conclusion and discussion

Chapter 7: Emotional Excess and Therapeutic Governance

7.1Producing the money shot

7.2Reprogramming with neoliberal psychotherapy

7.3Moral pedagogy with Confucian family affection (qinqing)

7.4Discussion and conclusion

Chapter 8: The Politics of Suffering and Kuqing

8.1Mediate suffering through positive energy and dream narratives

8.1.1Articulating affect with the discourse of positive energy

8.1.2The dream narrative

8.2An invitation to empathy: visualizing kuqing

8.2.1Ruptures in meaning-making

8.2.2The affective scenes of kuqing

8.3Kuqing culture and the social pathos in a transitional China

8.4The vanishing of Kuqing?

Chapter 9: Conclusion and Discussion

9.1Rethinking the cultural politics of Chinese reality TV and affect

9.2From the Chinese experience to Chinese affective structure

9.3Limitations and perspectives for future research

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

This book, the outcome of reflections on Chinese reality TV, affective structure, class division, as well as my own identity, would not be possible without the help of many people. I would like to first express my sincere appreciation to Professor Margreth Lünenborg, my PhD supervisor at Freie Universität Berlin. Her enthusiastic, incisive, and meticulous guidance and support were indispensable for me to find my research direction, advance step by step, and finally complete the writing of my doctoral dissertation, which is the predecessor of this book. I am truly grateful.

I would also like to thank Professor Ji Li for encouraging me to pursue a doctoral degree in Germany and for always caring about my academic progress and life. I am also grateful to Professor Jens Eder for his careful reading and insightful feedback. I am thankful to my colleagues in the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, in particular Débora Medeiros, Claudia Töpper and Ana Makhashvili. I learned a lot from them in our colloquium.

I am greatly thankful to the China Scholarship Council for granting me a four-year scholarship. My research would not have been possible without this funding.

Finally, my thanks also go to those families, friends, and colleagues who have directly or indirectly helped me complete this book.

I dedicate this book to my husband Sheng Yao. Thank you for always encouraging and supporting me to pursue my dreams.

List of Abbreviations

CCTV China Central Television

CDA Critical Discourse Analysis

CPC the Communist Party of China

CRTV Chinese Reality Television

DHA Discourse-Historical Approach

HSTV Hunan Satellite Television Station

NRT Non-representational Theory

NRTA National Radio and Television Administration (2018-now)

PRC People’s Republic of China

SAPPRFT State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (2013-2018)

SARFT State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (1998-2013)

SOE State-owned Enterprise

U&G Uses and Gratifications

WTO World Trade Organization

List of Tables and Figures

Figure 7.1: A juxtaposition of the two exchange locations: Baxian, a small village surrounded by mountains; and Nanchang, a modern provincial capital city (Season 7, Volume 2, Episode 1 from 20.01.2014)

Figure 7.2: A juxtaposition of the leisure time of both parties: tea-picking with grandma vs. playing video games (Season 7, Volume 2, Episode 1 from 20.01.2014)

Figure 7.3: Shi is pestering his mother for money (Season 7, Volume 2, Episode 1 from 20.01.2014)

Figure 7.4: Most of the children in this village are left-behind children, they prefer to play together after school rather than going home alone (Season 7, Volume 2, Episode 1 from 20.01.2014)

Figure 7.5: Shi kicked over things on the table (Season 7, Volume 2, Episode 2 from 27.01.2014)

Figure 7.6: Shi took the hammer and prepared to stand on the small chair to destroy the radio microphone of the program group (Season 7, Volume 2, Episode 2 from 27.01.2014)

Figures 7.7 and 7.8: The close up shots of Wei Cheng in crying, after that, he confessed his feelings about dropping out of school (Season 1, Volume 1, Episode 4 from 07.09.2006)

Figure 7.9: Liu’s rural “father” is smashing the ice in a river (Season 4, Volume 3, Episode 2 from 15.04.2008)

Figure 7.10: He is dragging a whole cart of ice back with difficulty (Season 4, Volume 3, Episode 2 from 15.04.2008)

Figure 7.11: Grandfather asks the teacher to give the two urban youths some food, not to make them hungry (Season 8, Volume 4, Episode 2 from 30.06.2014)

Figure 7.12: Wang cries and hugs the old man tightly (Season 8, Volume 4, Episode 2 from 30.06.2014)

Figure 8.1: Huang Chuyi lives with his grandparents, the grandparents always put the meat in Chuyi’s bowl and let him eat more (Season 17, Volume 3, Episode 1 from 26.03.2019)

Figure 8.2: Huang Chuyi shouted out his dreams to the mountain (Season 17, Volume 3, Episode 1 from 26.03.2019)

Figure 8.3: A close-up shot of the ragged mosquito nets in Yuexiu’s bedroom (Season 3, Volume 1, Episode 2 from 09.06.2007)

Figure 8.4: A bust size shot of Yuexiu when she is weeping out the painful life (Season 3, Volume 1, Episode 2 from 09.06.2007)

Figure 8.5: Gao shed tears when he sit in a BMW car. He quickly turned his face away from the camera and the urban “parents” next to him (Season 1, Volume 1, Episode 1 from 04.09.2006)

Figure 8.6: Gao cried again when he was taken to the barbershop for a haircut (Season 1, Volume 1, Episode 2 from 05.09.2006)

Chapter 1: Introduction

What we now have is drama as habitual experience: more in a week, in many cases, than most human beings would previously have seen in a lifetime.– Raymond Williams, Drama in a Dramatised Society

We need to meet the universe halfway, to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential becoming. – Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

We won’t have any camera shooting positions at home, so that we can ensure that he is always in a real state.– Zhao Jia, director of X-Change

Our country’s poverty alleviation battle was a complete victory…the arduous task of eradicating absolute poverty has been fulfilled. We have created another miracle in the annals of history! This is the great glory of the Chinese people, the great glory of the Chinese Communist Party, and the great glory of the Chinese nation!– President Xi Jinping, speech at the National Poverty Alleviation Summary and Commendation Conference

1.1Locating affect and emotion in reality TV

This book focuses on reality TV, a hybrid television genre distinguished by appeal of the real, which observes ordinary people or celebrities by cameras in their everyday or out-of-the-ordinary environments. Since Big Brother (in Europe and the UK) and Survivor (in the US) began breaking rating records and causing wide debate in the early 2000s, reality TV has become a high-rating component of prime time programming in the past two decades, a sustainable global “phenomenon” generating considerable popular fervor. However, with the proliferation of digital, network, and mobile media technologies, we have inevitably entered the “post-broadcast era” (Turner & Tay, 2009). Television has retreated from the ranks of “new media” to “old media” and was predicted to be dying. But in recent years, an increasing consensus amongst academics is that television is not dying but has merely entered a new phase (e.g. Katz, 2009; Gray & Lotz, 2012). From the media practice of reality TV in the digital age, it can be seen that not only is the global proliferation of reality formats facilitated by the international distribution networks, but the new marketing model of “affective economics” (Jenkins, 2006a) also relies on convergence in media technology. Put differently, far from disintegrating, the TV industry has gained new vitality through innovative communication technologies and the accompanying new production and business models. What we see is that, while new media has fundamentally transformed the ways television affects viewers, television still occupies “a dominant layer of media experience” and has a profound impact on our understanding of the world (Straubhaar, 2007, p. 2). Therefore, rather than viewing the arrival of the “post-broadcast era” as a confirmation of the imminent demise of television, it is better to say that the new televisual practices spawned by digital technologies have posed new theoretical and empirical challenges to television studies.

Although many studies on changes in the media landscape are based on observations from the West, the reality genre has also attracted global media scholars’ attention to its practices in non-Western contexts (e.g. Fung 2004, 2009; Kraidy, 2010). Importantly, the key to its success is the adoption of the “format franchising” model, through which program concepts and ideas can be adapted to different cultures and regions around the world. The format acts as a recipe, a package, or a “cultural technology” (Keane, 2002, p. 85) that looks at production, content, and consumption from the point of view of an increasingly hybrid and porous global–local relationship. It is in this practical and academic context that my focus on Chinese reality TV began. Almost at the same time that Western reality shows became trendy, this new and flexible television genre has quickly attracted the interest of Chinese television producers, who urgently needed to increase viewership as a result of marketization and commercialization reforms. Since the broadcast of The Great Challenge for Survival (Shengcun datiaozhan生存大挑战) – the first localized version of Survivor – produced by Guangdong TV in 2000, various reality formats have been introduced and created. After two decades of market testing, exploration, and expansion, reality TV has moved a long way from its low-budget small-scale beginnings. Benefiting from high investment and large-scale production, it has become a staple of Chinese television, achieving consistently high ratings and continuing to attract impressive audiences in the domestic television market.

This book aims to unpack the cultural politics that operate on the affective and emotional dimensions of Chinese reality TV through a case study of the life-exchange show X-Change, which has a ten-year broadcasting history. Reality TV shows are infused with emotions. Even without any empirical analytic support, sophisticated viewers could perhaps realize that reality shows immerse them in a large repertoire of emotions. The semi-scripted nature of reality formats determines that some emotions are deliberately performed by the protagonists, while others seem to be “given off” as spontaneous and involuntary reactions. In order to create dramatic scenes that maximize audience appeal, producers often create extraordinary conditions intended to evoke intense emotional responses in the participants, which are often accompanied by overt bodily expressions such as tears, laughter, and screams. Scholarly research has also confirmed that, the typical reality TV show “provides its audience with a near-continuous series of emotional displays” (Krijnen & Tan, 2009, p. 467-68); and that reality TV formats are strategically deployed emotions in the stories so that the viewer can experience a simulated micro-social and “emotional journey” (Mast, 2016). It can be said that one of the keys to popularity for reality TV is its effective deployment of emotions, with the goal of inviting and ensuring the affective engagement of the audience.

Although the ubiquitous presence of emotions in reality shows has been well identified, still little systematic study has been performed to explore the position and function of emotions as an integral part of the show. In many cases academics and general audiences seem to pay more attention to (negative) social and moral impacts of reality TV. The public’s response to this is almost unanimously denouncing: the shows and producers are condemned as using tools like dramatization and exaggeration to exploit participants’ emotions in the unyielding pursuit of ever higher viewer ratings. Similarly, many media researchers also criticized reality TV as manipulating emotions to entertain the public, or representing the actual world in a distorted or illusionary way, constructing what Adorno (2001) calls “pseudorealism” and looping audiences into mechanisms of cultural power. Additionally, or rather because of this emotional excess, reality TV is considered to be “dumbed-down” television or a cheap form of “trash TV” that presents nothing of social value and is even responsible for the decline of social morality (cf. Weber, 2014). This debasing attitude towards reality TV is in congruent with the disapproval of popular culture as a whole; Bainbridge and Yates (2014) claimed that,

popular culture is often seen to lack psychological and emotional complexity: whereas ‘canonical’ works of literature, poetry and drama are seen to offer ‘timeless’ commentary on aspects of human nature, popular culture is conceived as little more than a form of psychological escape from uncertainties of the present. (p. 4).

As a result, concerns over the negative effects of (excessive) emotions dominate the field to a large extent, which inevitably leads to a dismissal of the complexity of emotions in reality TV. Fortunately, in recent decades other approaches began to emerge, focusing on the significance of affect and emotion in and by reality TV (e.g. Kavka, 2008, 2014; Skeggs, 2010; Lünenborg et al., 2021). Researchers have explored their melodramatic aesthetics, their roles in the entire communication circuit – in reality TV production, in audiovisual texts, and in the reception of the audience; as well as the relationship to broader questions of power, ideology, subjectivity in contemporary society.

The new interest in affect and emotion in reality TV, and more general, in media and communication studies (e.g. Döveling, von Scheve & Konijn, 2010; Dill, 2013; Lünenborg & Maier, 2018), has derived from the contemporary “affective turn” (Clough & Halley, 2007; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010) in challenging dominant Western rational thought and the structuralist and constructionist approaches that are obsessed with finding “deep structures of meaning”, absolute truths, and progress (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 164). However, these theoretical and empirical studies tend to focus on Western political, sociocultural, and historical contexts, ignoring differences in the working mechanisms of affect in other contexts and histories. This book attempts to fill this gap by offering a critical cultural analysis of the role of affect and emotion in the media practice of reality TV in contemporary China, a country that has experienced drastic neoliberal and capitalistic reforms but whose political system is still primarily defined by the top-down authoritarian Party-state. I am interested in how mediated affects and emotions are produced and performed under such unique socio-political contexts. Briefly, the critical cultural study in this book is primarily concerned with how CRTV (re-)produces the “structure of feeling” (Williams, 1961), and with how subjectivities and social forces are mutually constituted in the larger contexts of contemporary and modern Chinese history.

Traditionally, while most theories recognize that emotion involves both meaning and feeling, both mind and body, in empirical analysis emotion tends to be reduced to one side or the other of these dichotomies: it appertains either to universally identical biology or to a locally specific sociocultural tradition. What we often see in media and cultural studies is that emotions appear as objects of specific discourses and narratives, and as “merely the aura of ideological effects” (Grossberg, 1992a, p. 79). As a consequence, emotion is discussed in binaries: positive/negative, good/bad, for/against, and liberal/conservative, etc. For the affective turn, while the Spinozan term “affect” is reactivated to refer to a pre- or post-human force that subsumes emotion but cannot be reduced to specific feelings, such an approach also runs the risk of dualism – specifically, an inverted dualism with a focus on the socially and discursively irrelevant field of affect, which is inaccessible to empirical inquiry.

This is where the relational approach to affect comes in: instead of viewing emotion as residing “in” the individual or the social, this approach considers emotion as a cultural-material hybrid that constitutively enmeshed with the “mattering maps” (Grossberg, 1992a) of affects. Associated with the renewed understanding of emotion, affect is understood as “relational dynamics between evolving bodies in a setting” (Slaby & Mühlhoff, 2019, p. 27, italics in original). In this way, affect and emotion are inherently interconnected and in a circular relationship: affects can spark cyclical chains of feeling wherein affects transform into emotions, which spark affects, which move into emotions, and so on. It is based on this relational approach that emotion studies have the possibility to challenge conventional oppositions and to look at “how the biological and social continually charge each other” (Harding & Pribram, 2009, p. 16). In other words, relational affect rejects the privileging of any social structures, institutions or categories as deterministic explanations of social phenomena. By shifting the analytical focus to developmental processes, changes and transformations that are driven by the relational dynamics and intensities between bodies – human as well as non-human, such an approach enables us to foreground alternative ways of recognizing the complex and dynamic causal relationship between our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it.

On this basis, my analysis takes reality TV as a privileged media platform to investigate the reciprocal transformation between socio-culturally fixed emotions and relational dynamic affects in contextualized and historicized ways. To borrow from Shaviro’s (2010) perspective on film studies, I view reality TV as expressive – both symptomatic and productive. He writes,

[…] recent film and video works…are symptomatic, in that they provide indices of complex social processes, which they transduce, condense, and rearticulate in the form of what can be called, after Deleuze and Guattari, ‘blocs of affect’. But they are also productive, in the sense that they do not represent social processes, so much as they participate actively in these processes, and help to constitute them. (Shaviro, 2010, p. 2).

So understood, reality TV, like other media works, are technologies that have the capability of generating and transmitting affects, and as “repositories of feelings and emotions” (Cvetkovich, 2003, p. 7). Therefore, it is necessary to not just asking what emotions are and where they are located, but more significantly, what emotions “do” in reality TV (Ahmed, 2004). Specifically, asking what emotions are and where they are located may fix us in the spiral of dualism of questioning whether they are biological or psychological, universal or particular, individual or collective. But the question of what emotions do will orient our attention to how emotions create, fix and change the position of a subject and the identity in affective interactions in relational scenes. According to Ahmed (2004), emotions circulate in a social formation, and “attach” to ideas, people, objects, and events, saturating them with affective intentionality and emotional meanings. Significantly, at the level of cultural politics, the relational approach allows me not only to discover how emotions in reality TV represent “the structures of feeling”, but also how emotions (re-)constitute social relations and identities within the formative settings of the medium. Therefore, for this analysis of reality TV, emotions are not interpreted as the expressions of the inner feelings of individuals (either biological individuals or social individuals), but rather, as the products that rely on the construction and communication of the televisual medium – reality TV, to produce social difference and/or repetition in dynamic relations.

Both reality TV and emotions cannot be considered outside their specific social and historical contexts. For this study, the “specific” context refers to the media environment and social context in which CRTV is located. As mentioned earlier, the Chinese television industry has experienced a substantial commercialization since the late 1980s, facilitating increasingly market and audience-oriented programs to be produced, including diverse reality TV formats introduced from the West. As the approach of cultural hybridization (e.g. Kraidy & Murphy, 2008) suggests, when global cultural products enter new cultures and markets, they are often indigenized to fit local values, worldviews, and traditions in order to produce later versions that can be more applicable to the domestic media industry and acceptable for local audiences. The process of localization includes not only ideology and values but also the adaptation of emotions. As a product of the cultural industry, reality TV uses a variety of framing techniques in routine production to manage protagonists’ emotional performances and limit the possibilities for their interpretation in order to conform to local emotional repertoires and feeling rules. Thus understood, the mediated emotional performance is shaped by the interplay of global formats and local cultures (Wei, 2014).

For an in-depth exploration of the role of emotion in reality TV, I will conduct an empirical analysis of the Chinese reality show X-Change.X-Change is the first and most successful life-exchange reality show produced by Hunan satellite television station (HSTV) in 2006. Set against the urban-rural divide in post-reform China, it juxtaposes urban and rural youth by arranging for them to experience the life of their counterpart for a certain period. It was once praised as a new style documentary, as it applies documentary techniques and records youth participants’ activities for 24 hours during their stay in their counterpart’s home. According to the director Shuyuan Liang, in 2005, HSTV specially sent an elite team of about 50 people for a month’s intensive study of television program production in UK. The team then developed the format X-Change, which exploited and cloned the overall scheme of the global formats of Wife Swap and Trading Spouses while also undergoing elaborate localizing processes.1 An unusual fact is that X-Change has launched three times during the three periods of Chinese media adjustment: the first launch was from 4th September 2006 to 29th April 2008, through Season 1 to Season 4. After a three-year interval, it re-started with Season 5 on January 2012, continuing to Season 12 in 2015; the third launch was from Season 13 in 2017, up to Season 19 in 2019. The three broadcasting periods of X-Change from 2006-2008, 2012-2015, and 2017-2019 offers me an opportunity to not only analyze the affective production in specific medial and social contexts, but also tracing the shifting mediated “structure of feeling” along with the deepening of economic reform in China.

In specific, focusing on analyzing X-Change as both an audiovisual text and a sociocultural practice, my research first asks: how are the emotional performances arranged in the narrative and story of the reality show? I then track the circulation of emotion in detailed way, to observe how it articulates with subjects, things, ideas, values, and events, and works to (re-)produce social identities of the protagonists, as well as (unequal) power relations. Thirdly, I ask about what affective potentiality CRTV holds for audiences, either at the cognitive or experiential level? Finally, by articulating the deployment of affects in CRTV with the sociocultural and economic contexts, I want to investigate the ways in which CRTV is linked to the capacity to (re)present and constitute the public sentiments and perceptual realities of living in contemporary China in a time of transition.

1.2Overview of the chapters

This book has nine chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the general academic and empirical background of this research, as well as its significance, research objectives, and chapter outlines. Chapter 2 elaborates on the context of political economy in China and the Chinese television system in particular. Chapter 3 establishes the theoretical framework. Chapter 4 presents a literature review. The research methods and design are discussed in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 examines the narrative structures of the case X-Change in three periods. Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 explore the production of affects and emotions in the storylines for the urban and the rural respectively. Chapter 9 concludes the book with a preliminary discussion of Chinese affective structure in a transitional era.

Specifically, Chapter 1 introduces reality TV as a globally proliferated “phenomenon” and its key appeal of producing and transmitting emotions, followed by a discussion on the relational affect approach I applied and the contribution of this research, then an introduction of the reality show X-Change selected for case study, and concludes with an overview of the nine chapters. Chapter 2 depicts the socio-economic contexts and political ideology that have had impacts on the development of popular culture in China and reality TV in particular; it discusses the practices of neoliberalism in socialist China, the formation of the dual pattern of urban and rural areas, and media cultural market reform. Chinese media are constrained by both political and economic factors, which are empirically illustrated by the localizing processes of global reality formats in China’s television industry. I take these social contexts not simply as the “background” but the very conditions for the actualization of mediated affects and emotions that I analyze in the following chapters.

Chapter 3 builds the theoretical framework for the book. I begin with a review of traditional thoughts on emotion in both Chinese and Western theories, then an exploration of the two dominant trends in the “affective turn” since the mid-1990s. In the following, I elaborate on the social-relational understanding of affect and emotion as the theoretical basis of this thesis. Finally, I apply the theoretical framework to analyze reality TV, through which I view reality TV as a distinctive affective-discursive practice.

Chapter 4 reviews the understandings of reality TV in both Chinese and Western scholarship, and how previous studies approach affect and emotion in and by reality TV as primarily articulated with the themes of emotional realism, affective convergence, emotional labor, neoliberalism, and affective capitalism. By straightening out these relevant studies, this chapter also clarifies the position and contribution of my research in the academic context.

Chapter 5 is an introduction to the research methods and design. Taking arrangement thinking as the methodological approach, I produce two levels of analysis: a micro level and a macro level. The micro level focuses on the media text itself, narrative, textual and filmic analyses are conducted to track the production and circulation of emotions in the show X-Change over its three broadcast periods, respectively. Then the macro level analysis offers further interpretation by situating the reality TV text within the larger institutional, social, historical, and political contexts, which follows the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA).

Chapters 6–8 then empirically implement the theoretical framework and research methods. Chapter 6 is a structural-narrative analysis. Deconstructing the narrative structure of X-Change shows that different representational patterns of emotional performances are applied in the three periods. Chapter 7 explores the dominant narrative line of the redemption and transformation of urban youths. It turns out that the affective strategies of eliciting emotional outbursts is combined with both a Western psychological approach and Confucian family values. Affects produced are not oriented towards compassion between different social classes, but interpellated by the “ultrastable structure of Chinese society”. Chapter 8 explicates the narrative line that focuses on the adaptation and learning of rural youth. Positive discourses that promote self-improvement and dream-fulfillment are used to encourage positive emotional expressions, as well as to preempt the negative potential of narratives of suffering. But it turns out that while the affect of kuqing (bitter emotions) has frequently been subsumed by capital or disciplined by authorities, it is embedded in the public sentiments of Chinese history and revolution and cannot easily be oppressed or eliminated; the latter has retained impressions of the past and left them open to new articulations. While Chapter 6 provides with superficial ideological negotiations, Chapters 7 and 8 reveal how affects circulate in the complex network of relationships at once interlocking and in tension that is represented in the audiovisual media texts. These three chapters work in tandem to identify the sense and meaning-making mechanisms of X-Change.

Chapter 9 is the concluding chapter and invites future research. In this final chapter I review the previous chapters and reflect on the crucial role of affect and emotion in understanding the cultural politics of reality TV and our everyday affective encounters with it. Then I develop Williams’s (1961) term “structure of feeling” and Zhou’s (2013) term “Chinese feeling” to “Chinese affective structure” as a more explicit concept to capture the complex and dynamic ways in which affects mediate and transform power, ideology, and identity in the Chinese context. In this sense, I hope to insert this analysis into a larger project of thinking through the complex vibrations of social transformation. Finally, limitations and perspectives for future research are also reflected in the last chapter.

1 Like other local versions of reality shows at that time, HSTV did not purchase the copyrights of the above two formats, the producers prefer to simply exploit program ideas, enough to avoid charges of law violations and reduce costs at the same time (cf. Keane, 2002; Keane & Moran, 2008).

Chapter 2: Mass Media and Reality TV Formats in Post-socialist China

This chapter provides a study of what is happening in the contemporary Chinese media landscape. As media are “socially, economically and politically organized apparatuses” (Hall, 1977, p. 343), it is almost impossible to analyze Chinese reality TV without any consideration of the changing sociocultural context of China and the continuously shifting political ideology of the Communist Party of China (CPC), regardless of whether they exert influence directly or indirectly. Therefore, this chapter first discusses the general historical and social backgrounds of China’s reform and transformation, then examines two main themes that closely relate to the prevalence of reality TV in China and the creation of the show X-Change in particular: the urban-rural dichotomy and the propagandistic, market-driven Chinese media system. In this context, the production of X-Change and its adjustment of affective strategies can be seen as negotiating the tension between economic pressure, political regulation, and cultural values. But the negotiation between these forces is not always balanced, which also leads to ambiguity and unpredictability in emotional articulation. My purpose in this chapter is not to conduct a comprehensive review; rather, I intend to trace some of the most significant trends at play in the popular media fields, in order to set the analytical contexts for the case analysis of X-Change later in this book.

2.1Chinese economic reform and social transformation

2.1.1Economic reform and the introduction of neoliberalism

Since the late 1970s when the CPC carried out the market reforms of the so-called “reform and opening-up” policy, Chinese society has experienced unprecedented changes, which has transformed it from a socialist-planned economy to a largely authoritarian-capitalist society, and from state socialism to “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.1 Some Chinese studies scholars have applied a series of terms attached to the prefix “post”, such as “post-Mao”, “post-socialist”, “post-reform” and “post-broadcast” to emphasize the profound impacts of reform and opening-up on various fields of Chinese society, economy, politics, ideology and culture (e.g. Dirlik, 1989; Zhang, 2008). At the beginning, economic reform may well have been an independent decision by Chinese leadership – led by Deng Xiaoping – to face the dual difficulties of political uncertainty and years of stagnation under the socialist regime of planned economy. However, while the economy has experienced dramatic progression with the implementation of a set of practices of neoliberalism2, including the de-collectivization of agriculture, the opening up of the country to foreign investment, the privatization and contracting out of many state-owned enterprises (SOEs), Chinese society has also gradually transformed in the process of market economy formation. In place of families, communities, schools and other social groups, business enterprises and the corresponding productive organizations have become the main agents of reproduction mechanisms in China (Meisner, 1999). In a sense, China’s reform cannot be considered as merely an economic event, more importantly, it has profoundly subsumed entire socio-economic, political and cultural mechanisms into the market trajectory. David Harvey (2005) emphasizes that Chinese political economy in the era of reform “increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control”, and calls it “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” (p. 120).

It is barely possible for contemporary Chinese people not to feel the changes (and sometimes even sudden reversals of fortune) in their lives induced by this rapid economic reform. If in the Mao era the Party-state determined what proper life should be, leaving little room for individuals to make their own decisions, reform and opening-up have unlocked the realm of free development where people are now encouraged to pursue personal glory and grasp life with both hands (Zhang & Ong, 2008). Especially after the reform and restructuring of SOEs in the late 1980s, Chinese citizens are no longer identified as either a “workplace person” (danwei ren单位人) or “institutionalized person” (zhidu ren制度人) whose work and life is organized by the public sector, but as a “social person” (shehui ren社会人) who is forced to find new jobs in the competitive capitalist employment market (Sun, 2015, p. 17). As Deng Xiaoping’s famous “cat theory” – “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice, it’s a good cat” – has shown, as long as the market economy can develop productivity, it can be used in the practice of socialist countries. By appealing to “powers of freedom” (Rose, 1999), the CPC have actively transformed Chinese citizens from collective subjects into neoliberal subjects who are dedicated to self-responsibility, entrepreneurship, self-improvement, and self-governance.

To make these transformations effective in practice but controlled, the Party-state deliberately defined its ideological framework. During economic reform, de-politicized terms such as “market economy”, “modernization”, “reformation”, and “scientific development” are applied to replace terms like capitalism, privatization, and deregulation, etc. – terms like that might “cause immediate public backlash in a society that is still officially socialist and emotionally sympathetic to socialism” (Wu & Yun, 2016, p. 194). Indeed, as the communist party who publicly claims to represent Chinese workers and farmers, CPC is afraid of being charged with critiques of “capitalist restoration” (Petras, 1988).

However, despite the cautious rhetoric of political propaganda, it is difficult to neglect the rapid neoliberalism-oriented transformation of Chinese society, including the sweeping marketization of production, privatization of public institutions, and commercialization of everyday life. Moreover, as China actively sought to join the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the 1990s, its legal framework and institutional arrangements were drastically changed to adapt to the requirements of WTO in order to integrate into the global capitalist system. This move further indicates that the official has largely embraced neoliberalism and market fundamentalism. No wonder Alvin So (2007) purports that “up to the early 2000s, the Chinese state had been faithfully carrying out the policies of neoliberalism in its globalization drive” (p. 62).

2.1.2 “Socialism from afar”

Despite these developments, China has never officially and openly pronounced itself to be a neoliberal state; some may even find it counterintuitive to describe China as neoliberal. Politically, China has maintained a one-party socialist dictatorship. The neoliberal principles of private accumulation and self-interest are not allowed to touch key areas that are still firmly controlled by the Party-state (Ong & Zhang, 2008). The hallmark of neoliberal structure in terms of strong institutions, rule of law, and transparent markets are largely missing. Most importantly, despite decades of spectacular capitalist growth, Chinese market economy reform from its inception has been a top-down execution process – a national practice – during which state permission to pursue self-interest (mainly in retail and manufacturing sectors) is aligned with socialist controls over designated areas of collective or state interest. Thus, ostensibly, there exist developments in both China’s economic policies and its cultural landscape that parallel the Western neoliberal turn. Yet it would be a mistake to simply equate the Chinese state with neoliberal market authoritarian states elsewhere in the world (Zhao, 2008).

Thus when looked at carefully, China has taken a fairly idiosyncratic route in which state power is not disabled but reanimated with the infusion of neoliberal ideas. Specifically, as identified by Aihwa Ong (2006), the “Chinese model” or “Chinese state capitalism” actually deploys the twin modalities of neoliberal governmentality – “neoliberalism as exception” and “exceptions to neoliberalism” (p. 3). While “neoliberalism as exception” is deployed by the state to manage and subject certain populations, spaces, and socio-economic domains to neoliberal norms and market calculations; “exceptions to neoliberalism” are also invoked in policies, in order to exclude certain populations and regions from the benefits of capitalist development. Then what we have witnessed as a whole, is “China’s selective embrace of neoliberal logic as a strategic calculation for creating self-governing subjects who will enrich and strengthen Chinese authoritarian rule” (Ong & Zhang, 2008, p. 10). Zhao explains that this is, in essence, “a kind of State opportunism” (2015, p. 15) embedded in the deep structure of Chinese culture.

At the same time, the CPC has adopted a series of institutionalized measures, including the normalization of the replacement of high-rise authorities, allowances for controlling mass political participation, and the adjustment of ideological guidance, etc. While these changes, which are referred to as the “authoritarian resilience” by Nathan (2003), may be heavily restricted and even sometimes contradictory, it is through their implementation that the Party-state has successfully sustained political legitimacy and adapted to the ever-changing international and domestic environments. With institutional adjustment, the Party-state has voluntarily transformed itself from the past coercive “commander” to the current “guider” and a more or less efficient service provider (Chen, 2007), yet it should be noted that it is more a pragmatic strategy premised on market growth within the orbit of the state. Throughout the process of economic reform, state authorities continue to regulate from a distance, and the monopoly of political power held by the CPC remains intact (Lee, 2014). This pattern, which Zhang and Ong (2008) call “socialism from afar” (p. 3), is formed by the combination of neoliberal practices and the remote regulation by state authorities. Thus, unlike the assumption that market forces will cause substantial transformation of the political system, the CPC has tactically re-oriented the basis for its political legitimacy from ideological indoctrination in the tenets of Communism to practical purposes of “delivering the goods” and raising people’s living standards.

Admittedly, economic reform in the past 40 years has successfully increased the country’s material wealth and improved its international status. China has turned from a poor socialist country into the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese model of social transformation, coined the “Beijing Consensus” (Ramo, 2004), denotes a different development path from the Washington Consensus, which is dominated by free-trade neoliberal dogma. While some scholars highly praise China’s economic accomplishment under this model, the reform process is not entirely smooth and uninterrupted. Rather, accompanying the rapid progress of economic development, urbanization and technological innovation, significant signs of disruption in the social fabric, decline in civic virtue, and intensified social problems with regard to the deepening wealth gap, unequal resource distribution, and class stratification have emerged (Sun & Guo, 2013). The Chinese sociologist Sun Liping (2004) called contemporary China a “fractured society”. With the deepening of economic reform, pre-modern, modern and post-modern phenomena and their components coexist but are deeply differentiated and interdependent, and hence fail to form an organically integrated society.

Among these emerging social issues, some sociological and social psychological scholars have noticed the (negative) impacts of rapid market transformation on spiritual value, social relations, and social mentality. For example, Sun and Wang (2010) find that unlike the old generations who tend to follow traditional collective ideology, the young generations in China are more likely to regard self-development as the most important thing in life. Sun and Ryder (2016) also argue for the rising individualism accompanied by China’s rapid economic growth. As traditional social relations are dispersed, post-reform Chinese society has rapidly moved from a society of acquaintances to a society of strangers (Jiao, 2015), which may further elicit negative emotions such as anxiety, loneliness, depression, resentment, or other potential psychological problems, especially for migrant workers and the elderly (cf. Xiao, 2014; Cheng, 2009; Li & Li, 2007; Yan et al., 2014). Therefore, the impacts have happened not just on economic, political, and legal systems, but also indicate a confrontational but also cooperative process between new social forces and the original forces. Both are trying to sculpt the daily life of Chinese people, striving for positive cognitive evaluation, emotional investment and commitments to action. Informed by the above studies, my analysis pays particular attention to the entanglement and transformation between neoliberal practices, the construction of identity, and the emotional norms of Chinese society; these lay the framework for the actualization of affects in contemporary China.

2.2The urban-rural dual structure

One of the concentrated manifestations of social fracture is the urban-rural dichotomy formed as the result of the Chinese government’s eager pursuit of the transition from traditional agricultural economy to modern industrial economy after the foundation of the PRC in 1949. The issue of an urban-rural dichotomy is particularly presented here for it constitutes the direct social background for the creation of the reality show X-Change – the exchange of roles and lives between urban and rural youths. In general, the status quo of China’s urban-rural duality does not happen naturally, but is the result of structural inequality (cf. Yang, 1999; Yang & Cai, 2000; Wen, 2005; Cho, 2013). In the planned economy period (1950s to 60s), the urban-rural dual structure was established by the government through implementing a set of coercive “exploitative” policies and systems, primarily including the system of people’s communes, the dual urban-rural household registration system, and state monopoly on purchase and marketing. From 1953 onwards (until 1985), the state monopoly of the purchase and marketing system required farmers to sell surplus grain to the state in accordance with the state’s prescribed grain types, purchase prices, and planned purchase distribution figures. The state would then provide planned supply to urban workers; private traders were prohibited and food markets were cancelled.

In 1958, the household registration system (hukou户口), which is the basic institution for documenting population information and distributing public resources, was established in order to create a clear distinction between rural and urban areas. It gives urban citizens birthright to the benefits of the social welfare system, including not only basic necessities like food and clothes supply, but also employment, housing, education, labor insurance, medical care, pension, employment, etc. On the contrary, in rural hukou it is difficult to enjoy high levels of social security and public services. Correspondingly, the population flow between urban and rural areas is strictly restricted. The people’s commune system was introduced in the same year, requiring farmers to conduct collective production under the unified command and organization of production teams, production brigades, and people’s communes. So understood, the flourishing Chinese urban economy was achieved on the basis of the exploitation of agriculture, villages, and peasants. This structural inequality, as Wang Hui points out, “quickly transformed itself into disparities in income among different classes, social strata, and regions, leading rapidly to social polarization” (cited in Harvey, 2005, p. 142-143).

In the aftermath of economic reform, obstacles to population mobility were gradually eliminated, causing “the laborer tide” (mingong chao 民工潮) – an unprecedented growth in the number of migrant workers (nongmin gong 农民工) who originally registered in rural areas but now migrating out of the countryside in search of work in the cities (especially in the southeastern coastal cities). However, migration to the cities would not guarantee them stable employment, incomes, and welfare, and their residence in the city is still firmly controlled. As a consequence, the urban-rural dual structure has not been swayed but has broken through geographical restrictions to reproduce within the city. With low incomes and unstable employment, a large number of migrant workers have to live in “villages within cities” (chengzhong cun 城中村), and their children, whom they cannot afford to house and educate in cities, are left behind in villages. Therefore, while cities take advantage of national preferential reform policies and their own strength to get rich rapidly, the urban-rural gap keeps on expanding, and has undoubtedly hindered China from building a well-off society and achieving modernization.

The opportunity for a change in CPC’s attitude towards rural issues occurred in 2000, when an open letter to former Premier Zhu Rongji and the book I spoke the truth to the Premier were published by Li Changping, a former rural cadre from Hubei province, in which he claimed that “the peasants’ lot is really bitter, the countryside is really poor, and agriculture is in crisis”. Catalyzed by this event, public attention began to focus on the serious “three rural problems” (san nong wenti 三农问题) of “agriculture, rural society and the peasantry”, and heightened pressure from public opinion was placed on state leadership to find effective countermeasures. At the 16th National Congress of the CPC in 2002, the state put forward a new strategic mode of balancing urban and rural economic and social development. The next year, at the 16th Central Committee of the CPC, concrete reform policies were discussed intensively, and the single-minded pursuit of GDP growth was replaced by comprehensive development strategies that gave top priority to equal development in all regions. Later these thoughts were further clarified as the “scientific concept of development”. From 2004 to 2022, nineteen consecutive “No. 1 Central Documents” were issued by the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council, all of which have been designed to emphasize the “top priority” of solving “three rural problems” of Chinese modernization.

In 2006, the state abolished agriculture taxes and launched a major new program for the construction of a new socialist countryside (jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun 建设社会主义新农村