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 Hui Faye Xiao
YOUTH ECONOMY, CRISIS, AND REINVENTION IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CHINA
Routledge Contemporary China Series

YOUTH ECONOMY, CRISIS,

AND REINVENTION IN
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY
CHINA
MORNING SUN IN THE TINY TIMES

Hui Faye Xiao

www.routledge.com

Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats

9780367345518.indd 1 15-11-2019 17:20:42

Youth Economy, Crisis,
and Reinvention in
Twenty-First-Century China

This book surveys the explosive youth culture in twenty-first-century China, an

active and powerful force catalyzing cultural innovations, social changes, and
collective efforts, re-inventing a pluralistic and multivalent youth (qingnian) in an
age of enormous change, division and uncertainty.
Providing a comprehensive analysis of literary, cinematic, musical, televisual,
and social media representations about, for and by disparate youth groups, this
book seeks to offer a systematic investigation of a transmedial and multi-locale
youth culture. In so doing, it examines contributions from high school dropouts,
industrial workers, migrant laborers and “leftover women,” as well as best-selling
writers and filmmakers, cultural entrepreneurs, queer idols and fans, and young
feminist activists. Observing the Chinese youths’ deployment of “small” genres,
such as light novels and short videos, in addition to digital media, this book
ultimately demonstrates the renewal of cultural forms and the transformative
power of networked “small” atomized individuals in reinventing a youthful
coalition of silenced, belittled, and marginalized groups.
A thoroughly interdisciplinary study, Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention
in Twenty-First-Century China will be useful to students and scholars of Chinese
culture and society, as well as literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and
media studies.

Hui Faye Xiao is Associate Professor and Chair of East Asian Languages and
Cultures at the University of Kansas, USA. Her publications include Family
Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual
Culture (2014).
Routledge Contemporary China Series

Non-Governmental Orphan Relief in China

Law, Policy and Practice
Anna High

Living in the Shadows of China's HIV/AIDS Epidemics

Sex, Drugs and Bad Blood
Shelley Torcetti

China's Quest for Innovation

Institutions and Ecosystems
Shuanping Dai and Markus Taube

Ecology and Chinese-Language Ecocinema

Reimagining a Field
Edited by Sheldon H. Lu and Haomin Gong

Civilian Participants in the Cultural Revolution

Being Vulnerable and Being Responsible
Francis K.T. Mok

Hong Kong’s New Identity Politics

Longing for the Local in the Shadow of China
Iam-chong Ip

Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China

Morning Sun in the Tiny Times
Hui Faye Xiao

The Chinese Economy and its Challenges

Transformation of a Rising Economic Power
Charles C.L. Kwong
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Contemporary-China-Series/book-series/SE0768
Youth Economy, Crisis,
and Reinvention in
Twenty-First-Century China
Morning Sun in the Tiny Times

Hui Faye Xiao

First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Hui Faye Xiao
The right of Hui Faye Xiao to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Xiao, Hui Faye, author.
Title: Youth economy, crisis, and reinvention in twenty-first-century China:
morning sun in the tiny times/Hui Faye Xiao. Other titles: Youth
economy, crisis, and reinvention in 21st-century China
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Routledge contemporary china series | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019043306 (print) | LCCN 2019043307 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367345518 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429326905 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781000765106 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781000765229 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Youth—China—Social conditions—21st century. |
Youth—China—Economic conditions—21st century. | Youth—China—
Attitudes—21st century.
Classification: LCC HQ799.C6 X53 2020 (print) | LCC HQ799.C6 (ebook) |
DDC 305.2350951/0905—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043306
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043307

ISBN: 978-0-367-34551-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-32690-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Gang, Ethan, and all those who have lit up the dark
moments in my life with their youthful sparks
Contents

List of figuresviii
Acknowledgementsix

1 Introduction: youth culture in three keys 1

2 Youth economy in the “China Dream”: rise of the

Me-generation creative class 30

3 Against the proletarian modernity: retrotopic journey and

precariat subject in alternative youth literature 57

4 Back to youth on the wings of music: prosthetic memories

and sonic nostalgia for an unlived past 93

5 “We are creating a spokesperson for ourselves”: queering

and un-queering young idols on networked small screens 129

6 Political economy of small: cross-cultural and transmedial

shojo manga (girls’ comics) aesthetics 164

Conclusion: reinventing the discourse of hope in an age of crisis 211

Index 217
Figures

4.1 “1997 C. E.” 97

4.2 Statue of the Great Guitar 101
4.3 Collective Singing of Beyond’s “No More Hesitation” 103
4.4 The New Dreams Trio at the Center of a Packed Stadium  108
4.5 Yang Zirong Enters the Stage 113
4.6 The Ghostly 203 Squad Watching the Model Opera 119
6.1 Belittled Xiong Dun as a Small Pink Dot in the Urban Scene 177
6.2 The Cult of Cuteness 178
6.3 Xiong Dun in a “Sexy” Pose 179
6.4 The Post-Human Gang 184
6.5 Small Screen within Big Screen 186
6.6 Post-Human Virtual Dancer 187
6.7 Virtual “Song of the Phoenix” 188
6.8 Sailor Moon Action, courtesy of Lü Pin 190
6.9 Screen Shot of the “Mei shaonü zhanshi lala” Account on
Weibo (May 12, 2019) 193
6.10 The First Version, courtesy of Zhang Leilei 196
6.11 The Second Version, courtesy of Zhang Leilei 197
6.12 The Third Version, courtesy of Zhang Leilei 197
6.13 The Cutified Version, courtesy of Zhang Leilei 197
6.14 Anti-Harassment Poster vs. Real Estate Ad, courtesy of Zhang Leilei 199
6.15 Anti-Harassment Poster vs. Chinese Airbnb Ad, courtesy of
Zhang Leilei 200
6.16 Zhang Leilei Carrying the Manga Poster in front of the
Guangzhou TV Tower, courtesy of Zhang Leilei 201
6.17 A Small Step Forward, photo taken by Hui Faye Xiao in June
2017 on Shanghai Subway Line 10 204
Acknowledgements

I was first attracted to the explosive youth culture in the summer of 2005 thanks
to my chance encounter with the 2005 season of the Super Girl reality show.
I watched every single episode of the show and even joined the massive voting
army for one of the contestants! Since then, I have been following closely the
latest fads of a fast-changing youth-oriented cultural scene, reading journalistic
reports and scholarly studies on today’s youth in China and across the world, and
publishing comments, op-eds, and full-length essays on youth culture at print and
social media platforms in both Chinese and English languages. This longtime
accumulation of data, material, intellectual curiosity, and scholarly interest as a
mesmerized audience member, a participatory fan, a feminist cultural critic, as
well as a teacher and researcher at the same time has led to the slow growth and
fruition of this book-length project. Along the winding long road, I have also
accumulated enormous emotional and intellectual debts to the following institu-
tions, colleagues, and friends who have helped me to carry through this research
project.
I am deeply grateful for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Center
of East Asian Studies of the University of Kansas that has provided me with enor-
mous support in the various forms of research funds, travel grants, sabbatical
leave, and course release. American Philosophical Society offered a Franklin
Research Grant in 2019 that enabled me to conduct the last-stage field research
to collect the latest data and research materials to be incorporated into the book
manuscript.
I would also thank Ban Wang for reading some earliest drafts of my book (not
really in any kind of book form back then) and suggesting the current book title
to me. Thanks also go to Liang Luo, Geng Song, Ying Xiao, Jim Yu, Noah Smith,
John Kennedy, and Akiko Takeyama for inviting me to give talks at various points
of this long-term project for audiences at KFLC: The Languages, Literatures,
and Cultures Conference, the University of Hong Kong, Fudan University, the
4th Miami International Symposium on Chinese Cinema and Culture, Tufts Uni-
versity, the Center of East Asian Studies and the Hall Center of the University
of Kansas. In addition, I have also presented different parts and versions of this
book at many conferences, symposia and seminars and would like to thank all
the panel organizers, participants, discussants and audiences for their invaluable
x Acknowledgements
comments, questions, suggestions, and criticisms. In particular, I would like to
thank Arif Dirlik, who served as our panel chair and discussant when I joined
Nichole Huang and Xuelin Zhou to present an earlier version of Chapter 4 at the
international conference “The Cultural Revolution Today: Literature, Film, and
Cultural Debates,” which was organized by Gina Marchetti and Sebastian Veg
and held at the University of Hong Kong in 2016. Later Arif exchanged ideas
with me via emails, providing me with helpful comments and suggestions from a
historian’s perspective. His passing away in 2017 was a huge loss to many who
would remember him dearly for his great scholarship and friendship.
I have been guided, cared for, and cheered by numerous colleagues and friends
who offered me help, advice, and moral support along the way and would like to
take this opportunity to express my heart-felt gratitude to them with the following
incomplete list: Tani Barlow, Michael Berry, Yomi Braester, Angie Chau, Liana
Chen, Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, Jin Feng, Elaine Gerbert, Eleanor Goodman,
Geraldine Fiss, Stacilee Ford, Haomin Gong, Li Guo, Han Li, Xiang He, Heidi
Huang, Rania Huntington, Shuyu Kong, Rui Kunze, Alexa Alice Joubin, Tonglu
Li, Lin Wei, Liu Xi, Chris Lupke, Peijie Mao, Gina Marchetti, Bingchun Meng,
Evan McCormick, Jason McGrath, Keith McMahon, Aili Mu, Li Li Peters, Kun
Qian, Andrew Stuckey, Michael Tsang, Robin Visser, Nicolai Volland, Chuanfa
Wan, Yanjie Wang, Xueshan Wu, Cuncun Wu, Jiwei Xiao, Xin Yang, Hongmei
Yu, Ling Zhang, Jamie Zhao, Xueping Zhong, and Ping Zhu. In addition, I would
like to say thank you to Vickie Doll for helping me acquire all the needed research
materials, to Kris Ercums who collaborated with me to bring Above Ground –
40 Moments of Transformation, a photographic exhibition documenting recent
demonstrations by Young Feminist Activists in China to KU in 2018, and to
feminist scholars and activists including Ai Xiaoming, Ke Qianting, Li Maizi,
Lü Pin, Song Sufeng, Xiao Meili, Zeng Jinyan, Zhang Leilei, and Zhu Xixi for
sharing their photos, thoughts and insights. Their creativity, courage, resilience,
and camaraderie are particularly inspiring and empowering in an age marked by
division, bigotry, and disillusionment!
I have been working closely with Stephanie Rogers and Georgina Bishop at
Routledge. Their efficient work and professionalism make the publication of this
book a smooth and pleasant process. I am also indebted to anonymous exter-
nal reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions that have helped
strengthen and sharpen the central argument of the book. Of course, I am solely
responsible for all the errors that might remain in this book.
An earlier and shorter version of Chapter 2 was published under the title: “From
New Concept to Youth Economy: The Rise and Crisis of the Me Generation” in
Transforming Book Culture in China, 1600–2016 (eds. Daria Berg and Giorgio
Strafella, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Publishing House, 2016). Portions of Chapter
5 were published under the title “Androgynous Beauty, Virtual Community: Star-
dom, Fandom and Chinese Reality Shows under Globalization” in Super Girls,
Gangstas, Freeters, and Xenomaniacs: Gender and Modernity in Youth Cultures
(eds. Karen Brison and Susan Dewey, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,
2012). I have made substantial revisions and added plentiful updated materials to
 Acknowledgements xi
both chapters. Thanks to both publishers for allowing me to include them in the
current book.
Last, I would like to thank my husband Gang Hu and our son Ethan Yiyan Hu
for bringing me so many joyful, magical, memorable and youthful moments, for
always standing by my side to provide the best companionship that one could
dream for, for sustaining me through the dark days in my life with their constant
love, trust, understanding, patience, and care. To them I dedicate this book with
boundless love and gratitude.
1 Introduction
Youth culture in three keys

On October 18, 2017, toward the end of his long speech delivered at the 19th
National Congress of the Communist Party of China, president Xi Jinping specifi-
cally addressed the Chinese youth (qingnian):

A nation will prosper only when its young people thrive; a country will be full
of hope and have a great tomorrow only when its younger generations have
ideals, ability, and a strong sense of responsibility. The Chinese Dream is a
dream about history, the present, and the future. It is a dream of our generation,
but even more so, a dream of the younger generations. The Chinese Dream
of national rejuvenation will be realized ultimately through the endeavors of
young people, generation by generation. All of us in the Party should care about
young people and set the stage for them to excel. To all our young people, you
should have firm ideals and convictions, aim high, and have your feet firmly on
the ground. You should ride the waves of your day; and in the course of real-
izing the Chinese Dream, fulfill your youthful dreams, and write a vivid chapter
in your tireless endeavors to serve the interests of the people.1

The opening statement, “A nation will prosper only when its young people thrive,”
is a direct allusion to Liang Qichao’s novel Ode to Youth (Shaonian zhongguo shuo)
written in 1900, that compares a progressive new China to its youthful generation
of new citizens.
Overturning the patriarchal generational politics of Confucianism, Liang “iden-
tified conservatism . . . as symbolizing the old [laonian], while associating the
future, hope, progressiveness, constant change, adventurousness, and creative-
ness with the young.”2 Following the publication of Liang Qichao’s Ode to Youth,
the dominant intellectual discourses of modernization and evolution conjured the
image of New Youth as the national symbol of political activism, cultural innova-
tion, and historical progression. Youth – qingnian or qingchun – is not so much
bound by biological age limits as it is defined by a new evolutionary vision of
human history and a new consciousness of time. Under the influence of evolution-
ary Darwinism, “‘modernity’ in China was loosely defined as a mode of conscious-
ness of time and history as unilinear progress, moving in a continuous ‘stream’ or
‘tide’ from the past to the present.”3 As an illustration of this logic of modernity,
2 Introduction
the sublime figure of youth has been valorized to embody the reform-minded elite
intellectuals’ ideal of “the ego’s active fusion with the forward tide of history.”4
This “Young China” consciousness has been constantly invoked by manifold
waves of social movements and intellectual discourses in modern Chinese his-
tory. The 1919 May Fourth Movement – the first student movement in Chinese
history – highlighted the political agency of an educated younger generation.
The flagship journal of the May Fourth generation was named New Youth (Xin
qingnian). In its 1915 inaugural issue, Chen Duxiu published “Call to Youth”
(“Jinggao qingnian”), comparing youth to fresh, vital cells of the human body.
This allusion to modern medical science and anatomical knowledge is meant to
emphasize the transformative power of youth for the individual and for national
new life in an organic and naturalistic manner.
In changing the youths’ inferior position in the old ritualistic patrilineage, the
modern biopolitical science makes explicit the link between youths’ bodily stamina
and their political momentum as an essential means to create a new and empowered
modern subject. Naturally, the bildungsroman was introduced as a staple literary
genre to depict the development of a “young China” as a journey and a rite of pas-
sage, the end destination of which is the maturation of the youthful body of China’s
future citizens and the rise of a modern nation-state in place of a crumbling old
empire. In other words, youth or qingnian in modern China has never simply been a
category of biological age or a transitional stage of human development, but rather
a politically and aesthetically sublimated figure “that embodies an array of lofty ide-
als: newness, progress, and above all, the vision of national rejuvenation.”5
During the Maoist era of 1949 to 1976, political campaigns about creating the
socialist “New Man,” “Iron Girl,” and “Red Guard” continued this biopolitical
tradition of producing a forward-looking youth endowed with revolutionary ide-
alism, heroic collectivism, and labor aesthetics inscribed on a politically charged
and energized young body. In 1957, Mao Zedong declared: “You young people,
full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in
the morning. Our hope is placed on you. . . . The world belongs to you. China’s
future belongs to you.”6 With this comparison to the brightness of the morning
sun, youths are entrusted with the great task of building China’s future with their
explosive energy and refreshing vitality of new life. The quick and wide mobi-
lization of Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution appears to
manifest this vision of youth’s earth-shattering momentum and burning revolu-
tionary passion. In his study of socialist literature and art, Cai Xiang contends that
revolution is not only disruptive, but also productive. It subverts the Confucian-
ist inter-generational hierarchy and produces the historical figure of youth as the
socialist “new man,” who simultaneously embodies both a futuristic telos of the
revolution and a rebellious anti-establishment force.7 Countless socialist literary
and cinematic works continue to employ the form and logic of bildungsroman to
construct a politicized subjectivity that “denotes youth as a sociological group but
at the same time also symbolizes the revolution and the state.”8
The latest Party-prescribed bildungsroman, as quoted at the beginning of
this chapter, similarly predicates national rejuvenation on the revival of such a
 Introduction 3
future-oriented discourse of youth while, more significantly, dismissing the politi-
cal agency and subversive potential of that same social group. Youth have been
regarded not only as a unified driving force behind the development of the national
economy and the China Dream (Zhongguo meng) discourse, but also an important
historical agent and ideological link between the past and the future, and between
nationalist and collectivist discourse and the construction of an individual subject
in the market logic of competition and self-betterment. While displaying an acute
awareness of youth’s ever more important role as human capital that plays a key
role in pushing forward sustainable economic development and the steady growth of
national power, Xi’s speech, however, fails to recognize the ongoing social differen-
tiation and segmentation that drive today’s youths into another historical maelstrom
of unprecedented changes, escalating risks, contingencies, jeopardies, and struggles.
Four decades after China’s economic reform and reintegration within the global
capitalist system, it has become clear that the lives of the youth – their aspirations
and apprehensions, socio-economic statuses, signifying systems, and cultural
imaginaries – have been conditioned by age, class, ethnicity, and gender-specific
socio-economic variables. The “morning sun” metaphor associating youth with
revolutionary change and futurity has disappeared from the latest diverging trends
of Chinese youth culture. A unified historical and politicized understanding of
youth embedded in the national and the collective ethos, as indicated by a com-
mon denominator like qingnian, is a hollow concept in the twenty-first century.
Rather, the phrase “Tiny Times,” the title of a young writer’s best-selling novel
and film series, is frequently cited to illustrate the disintegration of that grand
narrative and the new predominance of the “small” – ephemeral pleasures, trivial
motives, micro-narratives on the smaller screen and portable media, and atomic
individualization – in contemporary China.
The historical process of social fragmentation and dispersion has led to the
coinage of plenty of neologisms to name different groups of Chinese youth along
age, gender, region, and class divisions: 80 hou (“post-’80s generation”), 90
hou (“post-’90s generation”), shengnü (“leftover women”), xiaozhen qingnian
(“small-town youth”), fo xi qingnian (“Zen-style youth”), fu erdai (“second-gen-
eration descendents of the rich”), yizu (“ant tribe”), diaosi (“losers, underdogs”),
and many more. The proliferation of neologisms for various youth groups speaks
volumes about the ongoing social stratification and identity fragmentation in a
post-socialist China. A careful study of several vignettes will reveal the changing

Vignette I: The new millennium has seen China rise to the status of
“Huallywood” with its numerous indigenous blockbusters churned out for
the world’s second largest film market (after the United States). In the
past few years, the Chinese film industry has seen a series of record-
breaking box office miracles. According to the statistics published by the
State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television
4 Introduction

(SAPPRFT), the total box office revenue in 2017 reached 55.91 billion
yuan, a 13.45 percent increase over 2016. Domestic film productions
generated over 30 billion yuan, taking 53.84 percent of the total box
office revenue.9

trends and wide spectrum of today’s pluralistic and multi-faceted youth culture,
movements, and life politics.
What is particularly worth noting is that summer blockbusters with young
students as target audiences have played an important role in the ongoing box
office boom. Instead of Hollywood-style big-budget blockbusters (dapian), the
phenomenal success of Love Is Not Blind (Shilian 33 tian, 2011), the Tiny Times
series (Xiao shidai, 2013–2015), and various other small-budget youth-oriented
productions (qingchun pian) testifies to a radically changing film market in con-
temporary China. Catering to an increasingly younger Chinese audience whose
average age was twenty-one in 2012, many of these summer blockbusters have
been adapted from bestselling youth novels, online publications, and imported
and indigenous comic books. Thanks to a changing Chinese film market, produc-
tion model, and audience demographics, the youth film has replaced the “Happy
New Year film” (hesui pian) to become the most lucrative genre that drives up
the Chinese box office revenue to historic highs.10 In 2015, multiple youth films,
including the last installment of Tiny Times, were released during summer break.
As a result, the monthly box office revenue of July surpassed the annual total of
2014.
Film critics attribute these phenomenal box office takes to the accelerated
expansion of chain cinemas from big cities to small towns. Hence, “small-town
youth” (xiaozhen qingnian), a term that is often interchangeable with “provincial
youth” (waisheng qingnian), are reported to have become the driving force behind
the explosive growth of the Chinese film industry in particular and media cul-
ture in general.11 Both terms refer to those between eighteen and thirty-five years
old who have grown up outside of the megacities like Beijing or Shanghai but
yearn to experience a more cosmopolitan lifestyle either by relocating to the more
developed regions or through taking in audio-visual experiences of various media
products. Their rising purchase power and growing demand for cultural products
are targeted by an increasingly diversifying and comprehensive market that is
posed to expand and penetrate into every remote corner of contemporary Chinese
society. Embodying an unprecedented mobility with their geographic movement
and cultural fluidity brought about by the speed of new public transportation and
digital media, this group of provincial youths is touted as the most influential
group of consumers of 2018, feeding the next growth point of China’s new crea-
tive economy.12
It is not only young consumers of film, but also younger generations of film-
makers who have played increasingly important roles in the Chinese film industry.
 Introduction 5
A cohort of directors including Guo Jingming, Han Han, Chen Sicheng, Wang
Ran, Han Yan, Guo Fan, MTJJ (Zhang Ping), Jiaozi (Yang Yu) and Dong Cheng-
peng were born and raised after China’s economic liberalization and marketi-
zation. Eschewing the Fifth Generation’s self-ethnographic style or the Sixth
Generation’s gritty realism, these younger filmmakers blend together formalistic
innovation with unabashed commercial pursuit in an age dominated by digital
technology. In following the predominant model of Hollywood genre films, they
have produced one Chinese blockbuster after another for younger audiences since
2010. Meanwhile, their familiarity with small media (TV shows, manga, Internet
literature and video streaming, mobile apps, and social media) also translates into
a defining characteristic of a new cinematic aesthetics on the rise: the proliferating
and networking of hypermediated cultural texts, signs, and spectacles on the sil-
ver screen. This is a result of tech-savvy young filmmakers’ tireless experiments
with remediation, or in representing and appropriating other media – traditional
or digital – in the filmic medium, which, in turn, also shapes their sensory experi-
ence and perception of the real.13 Put differently, what is real is not determined by
a faithful mimesis of the physical world or the social reality. Rather, the real now

Vignette II: Since the mid-1990s, China has witnessed a revolution in

Internet culture. In July 2008, the number of cyber citizens in China was
over 253 million, and China surpassed the United States to become the
largest Internet-using population in the world.15 As of December 2017,
the population of Chinese Internet users was over 772 million, and the
number of mobile Internet users in China reached 753 million, account-
ing for 97.5 percent of the total netizen population.16 Among Chinese
Internet users, 73.0 percent were aged 10 to 39 years old in 2017, with
the male-to-female ratio at 52.6:47.4.17

is generated by multiplying mediation and remediation that “create a feeling of

fullness, a satiety of experience” as a different viewing pleasure for the audience.14
With such a colossal number of users, the Internet has become the most
important platform for youth to access information, read literature, commu-
nicate, socialize, shop, entertain, and express themselves. According to The
Development Report of China’s Internet Intellectual Property Industries 2018
(Zhongguo wangluo banquan chanye fazhan baogao 2018), issued by the
National Copyright Administration, the total market value of China’s Internet-
based cultural industries (including online news, gaming, reading, music listen-
ing, video sharing and viewing, livestreaming, and so on) reached 636.5 billion
yuan in 2017, a 27.2% increase in comparison to that of 2016.18 In 2017, readers
of online literature totaled 378 million. “Users of cell phone literature reached
344 million, constituting 45.6% of the total mobile netizens.”19 According to the
6 Introduction
government statistics released in 2017, “China’s online literature industry is the
largest in the world, with a combined value of 10 billion yuan [around $1.47
billion USD] in 2016.”20 Many of the recent bestselling TV shows have been
adapted from online literature, including Suspense at Every Step (Bu bu jing
xin), The Tale of Zhen Huan (Zhen huan zhuan), Day and Night (Bai ye zhui
xiong, 2017), The Tale of Ruyi (Ruyi zhuan, 2018) and Novoland: Eagle Flag
(Jiu zhou: Piaomiao lu, 2019).
One title that has traveled across different mediums in a reverse direction is the
serialized period drama The Story of Yanxi Palace (Yanxi gonglüe, 2018). It was
first streamed on July 19, 2018, by iQiyi, one of the biggest video streaming and
production websites in China, and was watched more than 15 billion times by
August 30, 2018.21 Google Trends finds this drama has taken the top spot on the
global list of the most-searched TV shows of 2018.22 As one of the most-watched
TV series in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and among
diasporic Chinese communities, The Story of Yanxi Palace has gained a reputation
as a shuangju, or a show that makes viewers feel so good and addicted that they
have to binge-watch it to achieve the pleasure of total immersion and, finally, full
satiety. The term shuangju is a spinoff of shuangwen, “a binge read.” “Shuang-
wen are common in China’s massive internet fiction industry, in which binge-
ability is a key element of the business model.”23 Due to its phenomenal success,
this shuangju was then adapted into a serialized shuangwen published at wenxue.
iqiyi.com, the e-reading platform of the iQiyi multimedia conglomerate that as of
2018 leads the latest fad of transmedial storytelling, which includes everything
from online fiction serialization, audio book-listening and video-streaming, TV
show and film production, and sometimes to video game creation, comic book
adaptation, and fan fiction publication.
Meanwhile, China had 534 million online game players, creating revenue
of 165.57 billion yuan in 2016, a quarter of the world’s games market.24
Domestic products not only dominated the Chinese market, but also achieved
commercial success overseas. “On the PC side, Player Unknown’s Battle
Grounds, a typical sandbox shooting game, was sold in 27 million copies,
becoming the best-selling game in history. On the mobile side, four of top five
games downloaded by the Appstore in November belonged to such games.”25
In addition to these male-oriented shooting games, a video game called Love
and the Producer (Lian yu zhizuoren) gained unparalleled popularity among
young female gamers. The interactive game follows the model of serialized
storytelling to lead the player, the only female persona in the game, to assume
the titular role of the producer to accomplish a series of tasks to save a media
company from bankruptcy while engaging in multiple romantic relationships
with different types of male characters. Fulfilling the younger generation’s
desires for career development and pleasurable romance at the same time, the
game has achieved phenomenal success among female game players. Having
spearheaded a new trend of creating female-oriented games for the expand-
ing unmarried young women (otome) market, the game has also been adapted
into various fan fiction and fan comics serialized online. In another recent
transmedial movement between online literature, gaming, comics, and visual
 Introduction 7
media, young boys in the new profession of Esports, or multiplayer video
game competitions, have been featured and celebrated as the new love inter-
ests and national idols in televisual and Internet-based shows such as Go Go
Squid! (Qin’ai de, re’ai de, 2019) and The King’s Avatar (Quanzhi gaoshou,
2019).

Vignette III: In addition to bringing day-to-day communication, entertain-

ment, online shopping platforms, and media consumption to China’s mil-
lennials, the widespread use of the Internet and digital technologies also
provides new venues for speedy information flow and social engage-
ment, the combined forces of which have sought to penetrate state cen-
sorship and bureaucratic obstacles to push a wave of the “#MeToo in
China” movement.

On January 1, 2018, Luo Xixi, then residing in the United States, published
an open letter online accusing Chen Xiaowu, her former PhD advisor at Bei-
hang University in Beijing, China, of sexual assault. This open letter was dis-
seminated quickly and widely among Chinese netizens and ultimately caused
Chen’s layoff. Following this initial victory, the Shen Yang case would prove to
be another milestone of the #MeToo in China movement. On April 5, 2018, Li
Youyou, an alumna of Beijing University, published a statement online accusing
Shen Yang, a prominent linguistics professor who used to work at Beijing Uni-
versity, of sexual abuse and rape that led to his young victim Gao Yan’s suicide
in 1998.26 April 5 happens to be Qingming jie, or the Tomb-Sweeping Festival,
a traditional Chinese festival for people commemorating deceased family mem-
bers. Moreover, it was also only weeks before Beijing University’s grandiose
celebration of the prestigious college’s one hundred twentieth anniversary on
May 4, 2018, also officially set as Youth Day (Qingnian jie) to honor the legacy
of the May Fourth Movement of 1919.
At such a sensitive moment, Li’s statement spread at a phenomenal speed and
volume, stirring waves of discussion and debate about sexual harassment on- and
offline. Even China Youth Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Youth
League of China, reported this case, which then was reprinted by the Xinhua
news agency, the official state press agency of China.27 The raging public anger
ultimately resulted in the removal of Shen Yang from his current teaching post
at Nanjing University. On April 9, 2018, a group of students at Beijing Univer-
sity made a request, urging the college to publicize more of the school’s records
of how Shen Yang’s case had been handled two decades ago. Their demand for
greater transparency was legitimate according to the official regulations of Bei-
jing University; however, they were repeatedly grilled and intimidated by the col-
lege authorities, and then placed under the strict surveillance of their teachers and
parents.
8 Introduction
On April 23 and 30, 2018, one of the students, Yue Xin, a senior in the School
of Foreign Languages, published online two long open letters to the public record-
ing every stage of the whole event and advocating for more freedom of infor-
mation. The letters were immediately viewed and re-posted countless times at
WeChat, Weibo (literally “Microblog,” the Chinese version of a combined Twitter
and MySpace), various blogs, Zhihu (a Chinese counterpart of Quora), the Bulle-
tin Board System (BBS), and Facebook in and out of China. Yue’s public WeChat
account, “M. Mu Tian’s Pickaxe” (that was already blocked), had received mul-
tiple small-dollar donations from her supporters. Yue Xin then donated all the
money to gongyou, or “worker friends,” who had been diagnosed with pneumo-
coniosis. Inspired by Yue’s protest, Li Yiming, another female student at Beijing
University, started a petition demanding greater institutional protection for stu-
dents’ interests and legal rights.28
Yue’s open letters were quickly censored by the authorities and eliminated from
the digital public territory within the Great Firewall of China. However, anony-
mous supporters of Yue then republished Yue’s open letters on GitHub, a plat-
form for software developers; and also inscribed it on the Ethereum Blockchain,
the decentralized ledger normally used in recording transactions in bitcoin for
e-commerce. Because the record of blockchain cannot be deleted or tampered
with, Yue’s essay will remain on the Internet permanently.29 By making use of the
decentralizing power of new media and digital technology, the #MeToo in China
movement has gained wide traction among younger generations, particularly
among young women, who are encouraged to step forward from the margins of
the male-dominant structures of power and speak up against sexist discrimination
and sexual assault encountered in their everyday lives. Lü Pin, a longtime advo-
cate for feminist activism, has observed, “Those who are fighting are not famous
people. It is countless grassroots people echoing each other.”30 Transgressing the
ideological, bureaucratic, and digital boundaries of the establishment, the grass-
roots movement has left an indelible mark in Chinese feminist history, pushing
for a sisterly solidarity forged on the foundation of “a greater understanding of
and support for reforms to systems of power as a means of combating sexual har-
assment.”31 Thus, a networked grassroots feminism is taking shape thanks to the
social, cultural, communicational, intellectual, and affective links built up through
the use of popular culture and transmedial venues – print, Internet, and mobile and
other visual media.

Vignette IV: Small town youth, in addition to being viewed as indiscrimi-

nating happy consumers of the recent explosion of new media and new
technologies, are also called by different, often discriminatory, names by
those from big cities. On March 4, 2017, a two-minute video clip of a verbal
confrontation that later escalated into physical abuse on a Beijing subway
went viral on Chinese social media.32 In this video, two young girls are seen
asking their fellow subway passengers to scan a QR code with their cell
 Introduction 9

phones for product marketing. A seventeen-year-old boy refused to do so

and verbally attacked the girls. When one girl tried to call the police, he
grabbed her cell phone and pushed her out of the subway car at the next
stop. The most humiliating term used in this young man’s profane verbiage
is “waidi bi” (roughly, “provincial pussy”), referring to those women from less
developed parts of the country who migrate to Beijing for jobs.

What is most striking in this scenario is how a misogynistic rhetoric penetrates

the younger generations’ everyday vocabulary with terms that position the female
gender as the undesirable Other. Through the process of creating a gendered
hieararchy, the young man asserts male dominance in its various guises, such as
physical aggressiveness, heterosexual desires, and urban residency. Despite their
tireless effort of riding the new wave of a rising mobile economy, the two anony-
mous young women on the subway are placed in a marginal position as minorities
within various formations of power structures: as young girls, they are physically
smaller and have less strength; as internal migrants they are culturally and linguis-
tically marginal in China’s most expensive and exclusionary mega-cities such as
Beijing or Shanghai; and as females their sexuality is subject to the voyeuristic
male gaze.
Scholar Lian Si has coined a more neutral term to describe the massive group of
“small town youth” in the major cities: yizu, literally meaning “ant tribe,” refers to
the vast labor army that mainly consists of college graduates who drift within big
cities working at low-wage jobs and enduring intolerable working and living con-
ditions. Long working hours and overtime have become so common that reports
of guo lao si – “dying of too much work” – have been on the rise among white-
collar employees. It has been stated that over “80 percent of company employees
say they frequently work overtime.”33 In the face of rising job insecurity, height-
ened competition, work pressure, and a sense of rootlessness in strange cities, a
new fo xi qingnian, or “Zen-style youth,” culture has been gaining traction among
Chinese youth to provide an illusory utopia where they can escape from their
anxiety-ridden everyday lives. By going Zen-style, they reject mainstream social
values and shake off the burden of weighty expectations, aspirations, and any
desire for material wealth or career success.
In contrast to the more yuppie-oriented “going Zen” trend, another group of
migrant workers, those from rural China who are often engaged in backbreaking
manual labor, have uttered more fiery voices of anger and protest. At the sudden
death of Liu Huangqi, a young migrant worker who died of extreme exhaustion
after working multiple extra shifts in a textile factory in Guangdong Province, Luo
Deyuan, a migrant worker-turned poet, wrote the poem entitled “Liu Huangqi, My
Dagong Brother” (Liu Huangqi, wo de dagong xiongdi):

Your digestive system is bleeding your respiratory system is failing

Your life is about to end
10 Introduction
Yet the first thing you uttered after recovering consciousness is
“Don’t stop me. Let me punch my card.
I’ll be fined if I’m late . . .”

Lamenting the wasted youth (qingchun) full of miseries, tragedies and sighs of
many dagong brothers and sisters who are constantly overworking at the assem-
bly line like Liu, the worker-poet issues an urgent call to arms in the last stanza
of the poem:

Let’s all stand up

lift up our spines
in the cold wind of South China
Let me wield my small but unyielding pen
to deliver a powerful outcry from the bottom of my heart
to all the brothers and sisters like Liu Huangqi34

Ranging from young billionaire entrepreneurs and happy middle-class consumers

plunging into the currents of the latest new media culture to millions of trivial-
ized and alienated youths as exhausted migrant workers laboring to their death,
younger generations in today’s China overwhelm the world not simply by the
sheer size of their demographic numbers, but more for their highly divergent and
differentiated life experiences and their nearly undefinable fluidity in an unset-
tling age of social, economic, and cultural transformation. How shall we under-
stand such a diverse spectrum of the newest icons, images, signs, and memes of a
multi-faceted and decentralizing youth culture in a fast-changing China? How are
their new subject positions, life politics, and self-imaginations reconfigured at the
intersection of shifting state ideologies, a restructuring global capitalist economy,
and ever-newer technologies of mass media and cultural industry? How do they
understand and catalyze possible socio-political changes that will shape not only
their individual identities but also the social dynamics and the national and even
the global future? Is it still possible or meaningful to contemplate the totality of
the lifeworld, representational politics, sociopolitical agency, and historical sub-
jectivity of youth in the face of escalating social segmentation and fragmentation
in China and beyond?
This book seeks to address these important questions by investigating contem-
porary Chinese youth culture and the unmaking and remaking of youth subjectiv-
ity in the new millennium. In reviewing and expanding the genealogy of youth
discourse within twenty-first-century China, this book will focus on literary,
cinematic, musical, pictorial, and social media representations about, for, and,
most importantly, by youth. It investigates the latest trends and significations of
a fast-changing youth culture that takes shape under new political and economic
conditions and cannot bloom without the younger generations’ agency, initiative,
and creativity, as well as an insuppressible desire for self-expression and critical
engagement with social intervention and organized activism augmented by the
 Introduction 11
ongoing digital revolution. In short, youth economy, youth crisis, and youth rein-
vention are the three main themes that thread through this book.

Youth economy
The new millennium has witnessed manifold changes in Chinese youth culture:
the rise of a youthful creative class consisting of young bestselling writers, film-
makers, digital technology and media workers, and cultural entrepreneurs; the
constant cross-media movement from the world’s largest online literature indus-
try (which had a combined value of 10 billion yuan in 2016) to youth-oriented
films, television shows, comic books, video games, and other media products;
the proliferation of mobile reading, audio book apps, video streaming, and live-
casting websites; the widespread use of digital technologies and portable screens
in various sizes (including laptops, tablets, smartphones, e-readers, iPods, and
so on); the explosive output and speedy, nearly instantaneous, turnover of new
memes, apps, images, idols, and fashions to cater to a quickly expanding multi-
layered youth market; and the decreasing average age and increasing purchase
power of young culture producers, transmitters, and consumers. All of these
have dramatically changed the platforms, patterns, forms, and sensory experi-
ences of a multivalent and polyvocal youth culture that rides the latest wave of
digital technology and media convergence. As a result, a new postmodernist
aesthetics “that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the
commodification of cultural forms” has become a fundamental trademark of the
younger generations’ everyday cultural experiences in millennial China.35
To capture the new impulses of a fast-changing China and its people in the
twenty-first century, this book seeks to critically engage with multiple genres,
forms, mediums, and phenomena of youth culture that converge to weave a net-
worked youth economy created for, about, and oftentimes by youth. I use this
term to refer to the new post-Fordist economic mode that is capitalizing on young
consumers’ increasing purchase power and their desires for self-expression and
pleasure, as well as on the transmedial creative labor of young writers, filmmak-
ers, media workers, cultural entrepreneurs, and even their zealous fans. Moreover,
it also repackages youth (qingchun) itself as its most profitable commodity for
sale through networked technologies and media to meet the increasing demands
of the fastest-growing segment of the cultural market both in China and across
the world. In other words, market segmentation and product proliferation and dif-
ferentiation are essential new strategies of the unprecedented commercial success
of a youth-oriented cultural industry. Produced, disseminated, and consumed in a
roaring market economy under globalization, a highly commercialized youth cul-
ture serves as an ongoing pedagogic project of neoliberalizing subjectivification.
It seeks to instill the neoliberal rationale of economic efficiency, developmentalist
mentality, and market sensibility in individual youths who invest time, money,
affective labor, and creative energy in different links of the networked cultural
industry that is touted as the next front of economic advancement.
12 Introduction
The thriving of such a youth economy at an unprecedented pace and scale
not only indicates the coming of age of youth culture producers and consum-
ers in contemporary Chinese society, but also corresponds to the global trend of
post-industrial revolution and neoliberal economic restructuring at the turn of the
twenty-first century. In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs has con-
tended: “It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that
constitutes the decisive different between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the
point of view of totality.”36 In order to achieve this “point of view of totality,” it is
essential to situate an investigation of contemporary youth culture at the nexus of
a restructuring national economy and global capitalist regime as well as to recon-
figure labor-capital and human-media relationships across the world.
One such economic system undergoing reconfiguration is Fordism, which
derives its name from the production model Henry Ford established at his first
automotive factory in Michigan. Fordism is based on “the standardized, large-
scale production” by a labor force mainly staying within national boundaries and
consuming what they produce.37 In contrast, the post-Fordist model is “geared
to quick turnover and a constantly changing market in which companies down-
sized their core workers, diversified their holdings and product lines, and relied
on subcontractors, peripheral workers, and outsourcing.”38 As David Harvey
has observed, flexible accumulation, characterized by “flexibility with respect
to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption,” is
essential to post-Fordism to counter “the rigidities of Fordism.”39
Since the late twentieth century, industrialized economies have gradually
switched to the post-Fordist model in order to meet the increasingly sophisti-
cated and diversified consumer demands on the global market. As the traditional
manufacturing section of advanced capitalist countries has been subcontracted
and outsourced abroad to low-wage regions of the Third World, a new mode of
“knowledge economy” is on the rise in the post-Fordist and post-industrial First
World. In addition to technical know-how, the new mode of flexible accumulation
also demands a constantly upgraded information flow concerning the ever-chang-
ing and quickly diversifying needs and tastes of consumers. Walter W. Powell and
Kaisa Snellman use the automobile, the very icon of Fordism, to illustrate such an
epochal transition: “A new car today is less and less the product of metal fabrica-
tion and more a smart machine that uses computer technology to integrate safety,
emissions, entertainment and performance.”40
In general, the ongoing knowledge or information-based economy refers to an
innovation-led growth model predicated on a cluster of “production and services
based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of
technological and scientific advance as well as equally rapid obsolescence.”41 The
development of this new economic mode demands a greater research and develop-
ment (R&D) investment, information and communication technologies, technical
and cultural innovations, faster turnover time, and more diversified and flexible
marketing orientations to develop knowledge-intensive and service-enhanced
industries. As a result, a “highly privileged, and to some degree empowered, stra-
tum within the labour force emerges as capitalism depends more and more on
 Introduction 13
mobilizing the powers of intellectual labour as a vehicle for further accumula-
tion.”42 Richard Florida identifies this rising new stratum of creative class “whose
economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative
content.”43
China began reintegrating itself into the global capitalist system with the launch
of Dengist reform in 1978 and has become a sort of “workshop of the world” (shi-
jie gongchang). With its seemingly unlimited reserves of cheap labor, the popu-
lous country has historically earned itself a reputation for churning out massive
quantities of low-cost goods. However, following China’s accession to the World
Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China sought to move up the global value
chain by aligning itself with the post-industrial turn to the model of a “knowl-
edge economy.” The Tenth Five-Year Plan (for 2001 to 2005) put great emphasis
on the development of information technology and cultural industries to boost
China’s competitive advantage and soft power on the global stage. The upgraded
economic model seeks to forge a new path of innovation-led growth by turning to
the production of knowledge-intensive, technology-based, and consumer-oriented
value-adding goods with high design concept and cultural content. Increasing
investment has been made in the educational and tech sectors to produce well-
trained human capital due to high demand by the emerging knowledge economy.
A cluster of technology-oriented industry and business zones have been estab-
lished in urban centers including the 230 km2 Zhongguancun Science Park, the
world’s largest science park, which is often called China’s Silicon Valley. Located
in the Haidian District of northwestern Beijing where research institutes affiliated
with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and China’s top universities are concen-
trated, the Science Park was later complemented by the addition of the Zhonguan-
cun Creative Industries Pioneer Base in 2005.44 On the southern edge of China
lies Shenzhen, one of the first special economic zones, that is another center of
mushrooming startup enterprises and vibrant tech companies including Huawei,
China’s biggest telecommunication equipment and consumer electronics corpo-
rations. Dajiang Innovations (DJI) is another fast-growing technology company
based in Shenzhen that manufactures and sells unmanned aerial vehicles, nor-
mally known as consumer drones, all over the world. In order to cultivate young
engineers and entrench its brand, DJI collaborated with the municipal govern-
ment of Shenzhen to organize the RoboMaster Robotics Competition (Quanguo
daxuesheng jijia dashi sai) among college students beginning in 2015, and also
co-produced Robomaster, a serialized anime with Japan.45
On the wings of the rapid rise of information and telecommunication technol-
ogy industries, the development of a wide range of creativity-centered cultural
industries is an essential constituent of the late-capitalist “knowledge economy”
and its latest variation of a “creative economy” predicated on a new global trend
of shifting from manufacturing tangible industrial goods to the production, dis-
semination, promotion, and consumption of intangible services, entertainments,
fashions, leisure activities, cultural icons, images, spectacles, and signs.46 Based
on his intimate observation of China’s current economic and cultural circum-
stances, Michael Keane contends that China is seeking to make a paradigmatic
14 Introduction
shift from a “made in China” manufacturing powerhouse to a “created in China”
commerce developer, “a serious contender for the spoils of the global cultural and
service economies, spheres of exchange largely bound by forms of ephemeral
property.”47 In a 2016 study that also takes this new phrase, “created in China,” as
its title, Georges Haour and Max von Zedwitz focus on the infrastructure develop-
ment required for China’s turn to a post-industrial creative economy.48
In order to rise beyond the initial development stages of low-cost off-shore
outsourcing and imitation, China has made a series of institutional and struc-
tural changes to develop its knowledge-based and consumer-oriented technol-
ogy and cultural industries. Technical knowledge and cultural creativity have
become much-demanded commodities churned out through highly organized
and commercialized production centers in order to boost China’s economic
growth and to meet the fast-growing demand of young domestic consumers
who have been raised in the post-reform era with elevated living standards and
educational levels as well as the widespread use of personal computers with
Internet access. Following the post-Fordist neoliberal model of flexible produc-
tion and accumulation, new technology and cultural industries seek to “[diver-
sify] their market scope, targeting niche markets rather than mass consumption,
and finding ways to respond to their most valued demographic, the urban youth
market.”49 In other words, changes in the circulation and consumption of new
technological and cultural products are not only a result of the restructuring of
the capitalist economy but also affect the new patterns of organizing capitalist
production and marketing.
This worldwide turn to a post-industrial revolution, or the “culturalisation of
the economy,” has generated a fast-changing pattern of workforce structure and
regional distribution, social organization, and economic dynamics that impact
today’s youths and their everyday engagement of the latest technological prod-
ucts, services, and cultural texts on a global scale.50 Digital technologies, video
games, e-commerce and social media apps, web fiction, comics, animations, and
video streaming and live-casting websites have become not only the latest techno-
logical and cultural commodities vying for a segmented market in the new wave
of the creative economy, but also the new cognitive lens through which young
consumers perceive their media-saturated world and the theatrical stage on which
they perform their reconfiguring selves.
China is poised in a vertiginous transitional moment in the shift from a collaps-
ing old socio-economic order to a post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism that empha-
sizes instantaneous turnover and the rapid obsolescence of commodity production,
dissemination, and consumption. This embryonic post-Fordist creative economy
generates enormous new opportunities for younger generations and promises
them a dream of joining a global creative class that obtains financial gains and
upward mobility with their marketable intellectual and creative labor. Meanwhile,
its neoliberal model is invested exclusively in optimizing market coverage, profit
margins, and individual competitiveness, which also accelerates the division, dif-
ferentiation, and fragmentation of youth demographics along class, gender, eth-
nicity, educational, and regional lines. Hence, I use dual keywords – youth crisis
 Introduction 15
and youth reinvention – to characterize this dialectic paradigm shift and its impact
on younger generations’ existential conditions, cultural imaginations, and subject
positions in the making.

Youth crisis
China’s economic boom is embedded in a transforming global capitalism that
has gradually converted to a neoliberal post-Fordist model since the 1970s. As a
major consequence of the speeding up of the turnover of capital to meet the need
of infinite accumulation and development, the “volatility and ephemerality of
fashions, products, production techniques, labour processes, idea and ideologies,
values and established practices” are accentuated in post-Fordism.51 Citing the
example of the transnational Coca-Cola empire, Anne Allison characterizes the
dominant cultural logic of the post-Fordist system of production and consumption
as “fragmentation, flexibility, customization (just-in-time demand).”52 In com-
parison to the Fordist mode, the post-Fordist mode appears to be less focused
on mechanical, homogeneous, and standardized mass production to satisfy the
demand of mass consumption. Rather, it is based more on the customized, indi-
vidualized, and fragmented labor of a more mobile and fluid workforce scattered
all around the world and distanced, both geographically and structurally, from the
source of the hegemonic corporate capital.
The internationalization of labor and the market in a post-Fordist world has
led to “rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both between sec-
tors and between geographical regions.”53 The de-terrorization of transnational
capital and corporate operations has accelerated the disruption of traditionally
place-bound social fabrics and class alliances with an epochal shift “in the con-
stitutive relationship of production to consumption.”54 As a result, “a more radi-
cally individuated sense of personhood” constructed through the workings of
neoliberal market individualism and consumer cosmopolitanism has emerged
all over the world.55
China’s hukou (“household registration”) system and the One Child Policy, in
effect from 1980 to 2015, have further enhanced the individualizing effect of a new
consumer-oriented economy and of reconfiguring labor-capital power dynam-
ics. Because of the global outsourcing practices of advanced capitalist nations,
China’s entry into neoliberal capitalism “requires a large, easily exploited and
relatively powerless labour force.”56 The majority of such a flexible labor army
consists of a vast number of rural youths who flood into factories and enterprises
to work in the manufacturing sectors. However, without the urban residency per-
mit, or hukou, they are labeled as rootless migrant workers, or nongmin gong, who
are not only deprived of any hukou-related benefits, but, more importantly, of an
organic sense of local community, equal access to socio-cultural resources, and
a coherent class consciousness developed in the course of organized action and
culture-making. This is why the young worker-poet Zheng Xiaoqiong refuses to
categorize “migrant workers” as part of the proletarian class, which in the Chi-
nese context normally refers to industrial workers with an urban hukou.57 Without
16 Introduction
the official grant of the urban residence and all its associated benefits and rights,
migrant workers are only rootless sojourners living in a city of others (bieren de
chengshi in Zheng’s words), or even “outsiders in their own country.”58 Wanning
Sun defines their paradoxical relationships with the city and the country as an
existential state of liminality: “being neither here nor there, and finding it hard to
negotiate the past and future – [this] creates among migrant workers a widely and
deeply felt existential angst.”59
Combining the terms “precarious” and “proletariat,” Guy Standing coined the
term “the precariat” as a class-in-the-making, referring to those who lives are
“dominated by insecurity, uncertainty, debt and humiliation” as a result of the
runaway neoliberal capitalism around the world that transfers risks and precari-
ties to workers, often those who are in informal and temporary employment sta-
tus.60 They are different from the classical Marxist working class or the proletariat
embedded in the traditional model of national industrial capitalism. According
to Standing, “The latter terms suggest a society consisting mostly of workers in
long-term, stable, fixed-hour jobs with established routes of advancement, subject
to unionization and collective agreements, with job titles their fathers and moth-
ers would have understood, facing local employers whose names and features
they were familiar with.”61 Rather, precariats are dis-embedded from such a local
social organization. As children of the neoliberal globalization that creates a flexi-
ble labor market and fragments national class structures, they are “denizens rather
than citizens, losing cultural, civil, social, political and economic rights built up
over generations.”62
It is a global trend for youths to form the core constituent of today’s precariats,
according to Standing.63 In the Chinese context the most famous – or infamous –
group of the young rootless precariats suffering from severe deprivations in
every aspect of their lives might be the Sanhe da shen (literally, “the great god of
Sanhe”). Coined in 2015, this uncanny neologism refers to the low-income float-
ing population, mainly consisting of young migrant laborers, who concentrate in
the Sanhe district of Shenzhen, the first incubator of China’s free-market capital-
ism and innovation-driven startup companies and the production place of most of
the world’s digital devices.64 With no urban hukou or job security, these migrant
workers see no future or hope for upward mobility. Instead of squandering their
youth at the assembly line like their parents’ generation, these younger migrants
choose to take temporary jobs for quick cash and then spend it surfing online and
playing video games in cheap 24/7 Internet cafés. Their motto is “work an odd job
for one day, play for three days” (ri jie zuo yi tian, keyi wan san tian). In some of
the most extreme cases, desperate youths even sell their official photo ID (shenfen
zheng) for a meager amount – usually 40 to 80 yuan for those born between 1980
and 1990, or 80 to 100 yuan for those born after 1990 – to pay for the Internet fees.
Deprived of stability, basic human dignity, and even a legal identity, the “great
god of Sanhe” renders the bleakest illustration of those who play the double role
of menial workers at the very bottom of the post-Fordist neoliberal capitalism and
hard-squeezed end-users in a rapidly expanding gaming industry, a core constitu-
ent of the transmedial youth economy.
 Introduction 17
Meanwhile, the implementation of the One Child policy between 1980 and
2015 has created the first generation of youths who are their family’s only child,
often dubbed China’s “Me Generation.” As a result, the increasing concentra-
tion of family financial investment and parental affection on the Me Generation
promises them higher living standards and better educational opportunities and
life prospects. Members of the Me Generation are not only deprived of siblings
but also the urge and capacity to connect with the life experiences and value
systems of their parents’ generation, who grew up with the teachings of the Mao-
ist revolutionary ideology and a working-class collective ethos. The radically
shifting political, economic, and ideological climates have disrupted China’s
intergenerational continuity. For the younger generations, the discourse of com-
petitive individualism, which emphasizes an enhanced awareness of self-interest
as well as individualized identity (its imagination and expression being increas-
ingly dependent on expanding image-production creative industries) and a life
path of self-realization in an entrepreneurial market economy, has become a pre-
dominant new religion.
In her book The Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy,
Vanessa Fong presents an ethnography of the Me-generation teenagers who have
enjoyed better living standards but also shouldered a heavier pressure of parental
expectation for their academic success. The recent restructuring of the Chinese
economy demands a steady supply of service-oriented and knowledge-based
young workers, which has further boosted the Me Generation’s hope in follow-
ing a path of self-betterment and individual development so as to join the ranks
of a global middle class consisting of well-paid urban professionals, white-collar
workers, technocrats, and management personnel in a cluster of newly developed
high-technology and creative industries.
Jean and John Comaroff identify the explosion of the neoliberal discourse as a
prominent feature of the hegemony of millennial capitalism, which also applies to
millennial China. The prevailing neoliberal discourse encouraging self-sufficiency
and free competition has further accelerated this historic process of individualiza-
tion that propels atomized youths to learn to navigate through uncertain routes and
mounting risks because of restructuring institutions (such as the changing state
welfare and job market), the diminution of organic communities, and the disrup-
tion of traditional social fabrics. The tightening control on social activism and
political organization has further contributed to the process of individualization,
which is nearly synonymous with the depoliticization of Chinese youths, trans-
forming them from revolutionary subjects into diligent workers and happy con-
sumers to propel the further development of the national economy as the China
Dream discourse predicates.
However, as a result of the global economic recession and rapid expansion of
college enrollment numbers, the rate of unemployment and underemployment has
increased sharply even among college graduates. In the meantime, the marketiza-
tion of social services, decreasing insitutional support, rampant corruption, cut-
throat competition starting from kindergarten, and escalating social inequalities
in a radically stratifying society have combined to crush the younger generations’
18 Introduction
dream of embourgeoisation. Rather than joining the global creative class with
their intellectual power developed via meritocratic education, more and more
young college graduates have been driven into the urban “ant tribe” ( yizu), or
the massive labor army that mainly consists of college graduates who drift on
the peripheries of big cities with low-wage and often temporary jobs and dismal
working and living conditions. It is reported that by 2012 “the average entry-
level wage for university graduates in China had fallen below that of migrant
laborers.”65
Often found languishing in the same basement in the cheapest rental units,
younger generations of equally disenfranchised knowledge workers and migrant
workers tend to share a similar sense of the vulnerability of socially disadvan-
taged groups. Sinking into the ranks of precariats in the millennial capitalist econ-
omy has shaken the confidence of younger generations and profoundly changed
their vision of the future. The rhetoric of modernization and its linear temporality
of historical progression are called into question. In the place of the politically
charged subject of forward-looking New Youth who strive to bring the futuristic
utopia into the present, themes of alienation, loss, and disillusionment have pre-
vailed in an (ironically) thriving youth culture in the new millennium. Facing up
to the challenges of economic polarization, diminishing job security, dispersing
institutional support networks, social stratification and fragmentation, intensified
competition for opportunities and resources, and rising risks of downward mobil-
ity, the youth become the bearer of national anxiety as well as the vanguard of
socio-cultural change.
The proliferation of networked media appears to exacerbate the fragmented and
uneven social conditions of the contemporary youth lifeworld rather than reduc-
ing it. Han Han, an iconic youth writer who will be discussed fully in Chapter 2,
registers a feeling of disorientation in an increasingly fragmenting and technolo-
gized world in his essay “Fragment”:

We have more and more fragments in our everyday lives. The news is more
and more diversified. Conversation topics are more and more sensational.
Everything comes and goes so fast. We feel disintegrated with the world if
we sleep a few hours longer. We feel abandoned by the humanity if we turn
off our cell phones for one day.66

At such a historical moment of socio-economic crisis, a crisis in cultural repre-

sentation also seems to be lurking on the horizon. Shao Yanjun, a literary critic
at Beijing University, laments the proliferation of youth-oriented Internet culture
characterized by a retrogressive vision and an escapist mood as being the “dead
end of Enlightenment” (qimeng de juejing), or the demise of the May Fourth New
Youth and New Literature.67 Hence, the questions I seek to address include: is it
still possible to represent a progressive and coherent subject of New Youth in the
face of the mounting risks and anxieties among the younger generation? How
does a fast-changing youth culture cope with the prevailing sense of crisis and
rupture, since political participation and social activism are difficult to accomplish
 Introduction 19
under an authoritarian regime? Does a crisis in representation merely lead to a
proliferation of representations of crisis? Or does it also propel a new wave of
reconfiguring and reinventing the signifying system and political economy of cul-
tural forms, texts, and products for, about, and by the youth?

Youth reinvention
Given the current economic recession and social stratification, younger gen-
erations’ loud expressions of their confusion, insecurity, and antagonism could
be heard all over the world.68 Commenting on millennial youth, Jean and John
Comaroff have contended that it is a global phenomenon that a “sense of physical,
social, and moral crisis congeals, perhaps more than anywhere else, in the con-
temporary predicament of youth.”69 Living with an increasing sense of anxiety,
discontent, and crisis, however, youths are not simply passive victims of structur-
ally generated inequalities, oppressions, and despair. Rather, the new millennium
has also witnessed “the recent rise of assertive, global youth cultures of desire,
self-expression, and representation; in some places, too, of potent, if unconven-
tional, forms of politicization.”70 While the traditional sense of rootedness has
been disrupted in an age of globalization, the unprecedented “flow of information,
styles, and currencies across old sovereign boundaries” has facilitated bold exper-
iments with budding new forms of youth narratives, youth culture, and youth
activism in different venues and platforms.71 Going with the global flow, Chinese
youth culture is not only a result and reflection of the ongoing paradigmatic social
transformation, but also works with a networked agency to change the current
economic restructuring and social politics.
Weaving together the duet of youth crisis and innovation, this book examines
the ways in which an increasingly vociferous and disquieting population of Chi-
nese youths push various boundaries to reinvent their class and gender identities,
cultural expressions, generational memories, and disparate forms of social resist-
ance, real or imaginary, as possible strategies for tackling crisis and reconstructing
a pluralistic and multivalent subject of youth in an age of enormous change, risk,
and uncertainty. With the fast and seemingly endless proliferation of evolving
new trends, genres, and products of youth culture in today’s China, this book does
not claim to accomplish the mission impossible – to paint an exhaustive picture
of Chinese youth culture in the new millennium. Rather, the following chapters
seek to offer a series of in-depth investigations of manifold representative trends
of innovating and reinventing youth-oriented cultures, collective identities, and
political economy in the new millennium. In order to highlight the networked
nature of contemporary youth culture and to offset the urban-centric tendency of
the field, my book will offer an investigation of a transmedial and multi-locale
youth culture, with a thorough analysis of literary, cinematic, musical, operatic,
pictorial, televisual, and social media representations about, for, and, most impor-
tantly, by disparate youth groups: high school dropouts, best-selling writers and
diasporic filmmakers, industrial and migrant workers, queer idols and fans, “lefto-
ver women,” and young feminist activists.
20 Introduction
Chapter 2, “Youth economy in the ‘China Dream’: rise of the Me-generation
creative class,” studies the rise of a younger generation creative class consist-
ing of young writers, filmmakers, and cultural entrepreneurs, represented by Guo
Jingming (1983–) and Han Han (1982–), who were born after China’s economic
reform and celebrated as practitioners of the “China Dream.” Both Guo and Han
hail from small towns and belong to the Me Generation, or the post-’80s genera-
tion (baling hou) that refers to approximately two hundred million Chinese born
between 1980 and 1989, corresponding roughly to the social group referred to in
the West by a range of different names including Generation Y, Millennials, or the
iPod generation (born since the early 1980s).72
These Me-generation writers are the best examples of Chinese “small town
youths” reinventing their cultural identities and social positionality in the new
model of youth economy. In addition to being frequently ranked at the top of
the bestseller list, superseding many senior Chinese writers including the recent
Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, they also direct high-grossing summer blockbuster mov-
ies and run commercially successful literary journals and multi-media compa-
nies. Both Guo and Han have boosted the spearheaded development of the new
genre of youth literature and transformed the landscape of the Chinese publication
industry and media culture with their literary and entrepreneurial practices. While
Guo Jingming experiments with new forms, genres, and technologies to market
his transmedial storytelling and image-making among tech-savvy young consum-
ers, Han Han appropriates the May Fourth literary genre of zawen essays73 as a
new narrative device in a digital age to register and comment on an increasingly
fragmented world in which a coherent subject of New Youth is dispersed and
disintegrated. With their reinvention of traditionally marginalized cultural forms,
genres, and media, they push forward the new model of a transmedial and net-
worked youth economy catering to an increasingly diversifying and fragmenting
youth market.
Moving beyond Guo’s and Han’s literary works and entrepreneurial prac-
tices that simultaneously reinforce and contest mainstream ideology, Chapter 3,
“Against the proletarian modernity: retrotopic journey and precariat subject in
alternative youth literature,” zooms in on the other end of the youth spectrum,
namely young precariats. In the Chinese context, this social stratum-in-the-making
mainly consists of migrant workers and “ant tribes” (floating populations of unem-
ployed or underemployed college graduates) whose lives are dominated by depri-
vations, risks, and precarities.
From the leftist realism of the 1930s to Mao-era socialist realism, the logic of
bildungsroman has coalesced with the telos of revolutionary modernity to pro-
duce the proletarian subject of young workers or the “socialist new man” who is
imagined as the outward-looking and future-oriented historical agent entrusted
with the twofold task of self-reformation and national rejuvenation. However,
such a bildungsroman of youth and hope has evaporated in a series of post-social-
ist youth narratives that construe a radically different historical vision, time con-
sciousness, and life politics inscribed on individualized young bodies.
 Introduction 21
Chapter 3 focuses on a close analysis of a set of alternative youth literary works
at the interface of a larger socio-economic restructuring and a shifting literary
genealogy of the working-class subject. Lu Nei’s novel Young Babylon deals with
a young industrial worker, a rare subject in the genre of contemporary Chinese
youth literature, whose only emotional outlet in an oppressive post-Fordist manu-
facturing system is through inflicting violence, genuine or imagined, on himself
and others. Fang Fang’s novella “The Individual Sadness of Tu Ziqiang” follows
a rural youth’s dream of joining the urban creative class with self-betterment and
self-exploitation of his youthful body vis-à-vis his everyday reality of living as an
abject member of the “ant tribe” on the peripheries of urban modernity. The last
section of this chapter then examines how the widespread use of “small” media
(decentralized social media in contrast to state-controlled mass media) allows
the creative writings of belittled young migrant workers to be disseminated far
and wide, highlighting subaltern youth experiences to reveal the hidden crisis
and inherent contradiction of the state-celebrated “China Dream” predicated on
mobilizing and exploiting youthful productivity.
All these alternative writings about and/or by young precariats tell the coming-
of-age stories of young workers facing a series of risks, setbacks, structural ine-
qualities, and violent deprivations, which indicates a new trend in contemporary
Chinese literature: the transformation of a proletarian hero into a liminal and dan-
gerous precariat subject struggling on the peripheries of the global capitalist sys-
tem. In the place of a utopian vision of a progressive and expansive modernity, the
central trope for the rite of passage has been rewritten as a retrotopic journey to turn
back in time and inward to a geographic and psychological interior. Following the
flow of retrogressive temporality, the youthful body of the precariat subject is also
deprived of the sublime aesthetics of heroic industrial workers of a socialist realism.
Rather, it devolves into a site of double violence: while structural violence produces
deformed, sickened, and wasted youthful bodies, individual violence becomes
young workers’ only means of self-expression, the only way of moving backward
in time to a retrotopia to escape from a dystopic future.
If the historical subject of youth has been deconstructed to different degrees
in the first two chapters, then the following three chapters explore possibilities
of remaking the subject of youth, or youths in the plural, understood from dif-
ferent perspectives and reconstituted in different narratives, genres, and media.
Chapter 4, “Back to youth on the wings of music: prosthetic memories and sonic
nostalgia for an unlived past,” turns to study the transmedial cross-fertilization
of music, small-screen video culture, and youth cinema. Often hybridized with
other genres such as time travel, romance, the biopic, war epics, and so on, the
youth-oriented films examined in this chapter all manifest a profound sense of
sonic nostalgia. While a slew of high-grossing Chinese summer blockbusters suf-
fuse their soundtracks with Cantopop numbers from the 1980s and 1990s, Hong
Kong filmmakers have been recycling Mandarin Chinese revolutionary songs
and traditional and model operas in their recent works. Of course, this cross-
referencing and transmedial intertextuality could be understood as post-Fordist
22 Introduction
marketing gimmicks. However, I also argue that, through remixing pop, rock, and
operas from different ages and spaces, filmmakers of different generations and
localities resort to mediated memories; this has often materialized in the circuit
of small-screen culture (pirated DVDs played on a computer, video parlor screen-
ings, online video-streaming, and so on) to construct a border-crossing and time-
traveling network of revolutionary youths embedded in diverse linguistic, musi-
cal, and political milieus.
The last two chapters scrutinize the unsettling gender politics, imaginaries, rep-
resentations, and social movements that channel the explosive energy of a boom-
ing youth culture and creative economy to new sociopolitical fronts for potential
transformation. Chapter 5, “‘We are creating a spokesperson for ourselves’:
queering and un-queering young idols on networked small screens,” studies two
tremendously popular reality shows: Super Girl, which aired noncontinuously
from 2004 to 2016, and Produce 101, which has aired during 2018 and 2019.
Localizing the popular Euro-American singing contest reality show format in the
Chinese context, the 2005 season of the Super Girl show by the Hunan TV station
produces what is arguably the first made-in-China young idol, Li Yuchun. Her
striking star image of an androgynous appearance not only reinvents the con-
ventional model of femininity, but also constructs an affective nexus of Chinese
young women who have formed a virtual sisterhood in a new participatory popu-
lar culture to voice their queer desires. However, their queer expressions mainly
remain at the level of fantasy to avoid direct confrontation with mainstream heter-
osexual ideology. Such a queering trend has been continued and escalated in Pro-
duce 101, an Internet-based reality show. Its young fans have gathered in online
communities, appropriating queer idol images to openly support the local LGBTQ
movement despite state intervention. This chapter will examine the ways in which
Chinese youths negotiate and reinvent their cultural and gender identities through
watching and discussing the reality shows in online communities.
The last chapter, “Political economy of small: cross-cultural and transmedial
shojo manga (girls’ comics) aesthetics,” then turns to another popular youth cul-
tural form: manga (“comics”), or shojo manga (“girls’ comics”) in particular.
Similarly standing at the intersection of old and new, global and local, the aes-
thetics of shojo manga has crossed national and media boundaries to be localized
and reinvented in the Chinese context. On the one hand, this manga subgenre has
shaped the new subject matter, form and style of Chinese youth literature, graphic
novels, and youth films, particularly those targeting young female audiences. On
the other hand, its aesthetics also pierces the everyday social reality, propelling a
reinvented form of social activism that relies on the combined strength of popu-
lar culture, manga visuality, street performance, young women’s creative labor,
and new media fluidity to weave a network of gendered resistance and grassroots
feminist movements, including “#MeToo in China.”
On the basis of a series of case studies within this chapter, I contend that the
transmedial and transcultural visuality of shojo manga is central to the explod-
ing youth culture of twenty-first-century China, which is characterized by an
 Introduction 23
aesthetics and politics of youthful smallness that can be understood on dual lev-
els: the sense of smallness is often associated with the marginal positionality of
youth culture in a male-dominated adult world and cultural sphere, yet smallness
can also be transformed into a cultural expression of youthful fantasy, freedom,
and pleasures, or a new cultural sensibility and gendered effect growing and thriv-
ing from the margins of the mainstream aesthetic hierarchy and cultural estab-
lishment, thus providing alternative means of youth empowerment and resistance
strategies. In the face of tightening regulations for social activism, various cultural
forms of “smallness” have been mobilized as a means of networked youth resist-
ance action and civil engagement, essentially employing the strategy of guerilla
warfare to initiate social resistance from the margins.
To sustain “a constant erosive force” of youth culture that weakens the central-
ized system, solidarity in the form of growing numbers and converging efforts
across different locales, classes, and media is key to making this micro-politics
of oppositionality possible. As I will demonstrate throughout the book, it can
be observed that Chinese youths’ insistent deployment of “small” genres (light
novels, short videos, shojo manga, and other youth-oriented subcultural forms)
and “small” media (digital media in contrast to state-controlled and centralized
mass media) lead to a reinvention of cultural forms and release the enormous
transformative power of “small” atomized individuals in reinventing a youthful
coalition of silenced, belittled, and marginalized social groups. In the place of top-
down ideological indoctrination, a bottom-up and multivalent network is built up
to break open youth spaces for civic engagement, alternative identities, and social
activism in the cracks of the web of power.
Therefore, while the rise of transmedial youth economy becomes a new pro-
pulsion engine of millennial capitalism in China and across the world, the latest
experiments in networked youth cultures and youth activism give birth to possible
new subjects as historical agents pushing forward social and cultural changes.
All these reinvented forms of cultural innovation, anti-establishment politics, and
social transformation converge together to generate a new networked sociality of
youth and a reinvented discourse of hope in a time of global crisis and division
through the younger generations’ persistent agency, initiative, and creativity.

Notes
1 Xinhua News Agency, “Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosper-
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Characteristics for a New Era: Xi Jinping’s Speech Delivered at the 19th National Con-
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2 Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural
Imaginaries, 1949–1966, ed. and trans. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 146.
3 Oufan Leo Lee, “Modernity and Its Discontents: The Cultural Agenda of the May
Fourth Movement,” in Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries, ed.
24 Introduction
Kenneth Lieberthal, Joyce Kallgren, Roderik MacFarquhar, and Frederic Wakeman Jr.
(New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1991), 164.
4 Ibid.
5 Mingwei Song, Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman, 1900–
1959 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), 3.
6 “Mao Zedong Meets with Chinese Students in Moscow,” China.org.cn, accessed July 30,
2019, www.china.org.cn/china/18th_cpc_congress/2012-11/17/content_27086164.htm.
7 Cai Xiang, Geming/Xushu: Zhongguo shehuizhuyi wenxue – wenhua xiangxiang
(1949–1966) (Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural
Imaginaries, 1949–1966) (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2010), 18.
8 Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural
Imaginaries, 1949–1966, ed. and trans. Rebecca E. Karl and Xueping Zhong (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 146.
9 Bai Ying and Shi Jingnan, “2017 nian Zhongguo piaofang 559 yi yuan,” (“China’s
Box Office Revenue Reached 55.9 Billion Yuan in 2017”) Xinhua News Agency,
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12/31/c_1122192404.htm.
10 Ying Zhu and Frances Hisgen, “A Rite of Passage to Nowhere: ‘Tiny Times,’ Chinese
Cinema, and Chinese Women,” China File, July 15, 2013, accessed January 6, 2016,
www.chinafile.com/rite-passage-nowhere.
11 Sun Jiashan, “‘Xiaozhen qingnian’ yu Zhongguo dianying de weilai,” (“‘Small-Town’
Youth and the Future of the Chinese Film Industry”) Qianxian (Front) no. 1 (2017): 65–70.
12 Li Yang, “Xiaozhen qingnian: 2018 Zhongguo zui ju yingxiangli xiaofei qunti,”
(“Small-Town Youth: The Most Influential Group of Consumers of 2018”) Xin yingx-
iao (New Marketing), no. 3 (2018): 24–25.
13 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cam-
bridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1999), 45.
14 Ibid., 53.
15 Zhao Jin, “Woguo wangmin shu jiejin 3 yi” (“Chinese Internet-Using Population Is
Nearly 300 Million”) Jingji ribao (Economic Daily), January 14, 2009.
16 CNNIC, “The 41st Statistical Report on Internet Development in China,” CNNIC.com.
cn, accessed March 19, 2019, https://cnnic.com.cn/IDR/ReportDownloads/201807/
P020180711391069195909.pdf, 7.
17 Ibid., 34.
18 Jiang Tianjiao, “Wo guo wangluo banquan chanzhi tupo 6000 yi yuan” (“The Mar-
ket Value of China’s Internet-Based Cultural Industries Surpassed 600 Billion Yuan”)
Jingji ribao (Economic Daily), April 24, 2018.
19 CNNIC, “The 41st Statistical Report,” 58.
20 Lai Mingfang, “‘2017 Zhongguo wangluo banquan chanye fazhan baogao’ fabu,”
(“‘The Development Report of China’s Internet-Based Cultural Industries’ Was
Released”) National Copyright Administration, April 25, 2017, accessed October 13,
2018, www.ncac.gov.cn/chinacopyright/contents/10336/329960.html.
21 China Daily, “Aiqiyi Yanxi gonglüe chao 150 yi shouguan,” (“The Story of Yanxi Pal-
ace by iQiyi Was Watched 15 Billion Times at Its Closure”) ChinaDaily.com, August
31, 2018, accessed July 31, 2019, http://tech.chinadaily.com.cn/2018-08/31/con-
tent_36853185.htm.
22 “Year in Search 2018,” Google.com, accessed July 31, 2019, https://trends.google.
com/trends/yis/2018/GLOBAL/.
23 Zeng Yuli, “Binge-Watching, China Style,” Sixth Tone, September 28, 2018, accessed
October 4, 2018, www.sixthtone.com/news/1002981/Binge-watching,%20China%20
Style/.
24 Sun Jiashan, “Cong wangluo youxi dao wangluo wenyi,” (“From Online Gaming to
Online Literature and Art”), Hongqi wengao (Red Flag Papers), no. 18 (2017): 10–12.
 Introduction 25
25 CNNIC, “The 41st Statistical Report,” 61.
26 Javier C. Hernández, “China’s #MeToo: How a 20-Year-Old Rape Case Became a Ral-
lying Cry,” New York Times, April 9, 2018, accessed September 25, 2018, www.nytimes.
com/2018/04/09/world/asia/china-metoo-gao-yan.html?_ga=2.53403624.
1516763042.1537893545-1963832022.1537893545.
27 Lu Yijie, Yang Huicai, and Jia Tianrong, “20 nian qian de Gao Yan zisha shijian chi-
dao de xiaoyuan fan xing saorao zhidu,” (“Gao Yan’s Suicide Twenty Years Ago and
the Delayed Anti-Sexual Harassment Mechanism on College Campus”) Zhongguo
qingnian bao (China Youth Daily), April 9, 2018, 5.
28 Yue Xin, “Zhi Beijing daxue shi sheng he Beida waiguoyu xueyuan de yi feng
gongkai xin” (“An Open Letter to Teachers and Students of Beijing University
and the Foreign Languages College”), trans. CDT, China Digital Times, April
23, 2018, accessed September 25, 2018, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2018/05/
translation-yue-xin-on-the-week-since-my-open-letter/.
29 Keith Zhai and Lulu Yilun Chen, “Chinese #MeToo Student Activists Use Block-
chain to Fight Censors,” Bloomberg, April 24, 2018, accessed September 25, 2018,
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-24/chinese-metoo-student-activists-use-
blockchain-to-fight-censors.
30 Suyin Haynes and Aria Hangyu Chen, “How #MeToo Is Taking on a Life of Its Own
in Asia,” Time, October 9, 2018, accessed July 31, 2019, http://time.com/longform/
me-too-asia-china-south-korea/.
31 Lü Pin, “‘MeToo’ he lai: Cong hudie dao jufeng – yi ge chuanbo de shijiao,” (“The Origins
of ‘MeToo’: From Butterflies to Hurricanes – A Point of View’s Dissemination”) China
Digital Times, July 26, 2018, accessed September 25, 2018, https://chinadigitaltimes.
net/chinese/2018/07/%E5%89%8A%E7%BE%8E%E4%B8%BD-metoo%E4%BD%
95%E6%9D%A5%EF%BC%9A%E4%BB%8E%E8%9D%B4%E8%9D%B6%E5%
88%B0%E9%A3%93%E9%A3%8E-%E4%B8%80%E4%B8%AA%E4%BC%A0%
E6%92%AD%E7%9A%84/. The English translation, by Emile Dirks, of this article was
published at Free Chinese Feminists, an overseas Chinese feminist public account on
Facebook, accessed September 25, 2018, https://b-m.facebook.com/notes/free-chinese-
feminists/the-origins-of-metoo-from-butterflies-to-hurricanes-a-point-of-views-disse
minati/1109858635837549/.
32 The short video clip was first posted on Sina weibo, March 4, 2017, http://weibo.com/
tv/v/EDpjBzVG5?fid=1034:839e0eb6859a8fbb37f0f22822df0b0c (accessed August
13, 2017).
33 Eric Fish, China’s Millennials: The Want Generation (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2015), 88.
34 Luo Deyuan, “Liu Huangqi, wode dagong xiongdi,” (Liu Huangqi, my dagong brother)
in Selection of Dagong Poems in China: 1985–2005 (Zhongguo dagong shige jingx-
uan: 1985–2005), ed. Xu Qiang, Luo Deyuan, and Chen Zhongcun (Zhuhai: Zhuhai
Publishing House, 2007), 61–88. Translation is mine, unless otherwise noted.
35 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cul-
tural Change (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1989), 156.
36 Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans.
Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 27.
37 Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 100.
38 Ibid., 97.
39 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 147.
40 Walter W. Powell and Kaisa Snellman, “The Knowledge Economy,” Annual Review of
Sociology 30 (2004): 201.
41 Ibid.
42 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 186.
26 Introduction
43 Richard Florida, Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure,
Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 8.
44 Michael Keane, “The Capital Complex: Beijing’s New Creative Clusters,” in Creative
Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives, ed. Lily Kong and Justin
O’Connor (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 86.
45 The official website for the RoboMaster Robotics Competition is www.robomaster.
com.
46 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 287.
47 Ephemeral property includes “bundles of rights, licensing and syndication agreements,
human and social capital, brand names and customer databases.” See Michael Keane,
Created in China: The Great New Leap Forward (London and New York: Routledge,
2007), 11.
48 Georges Haour and Max von Zedwitz, Created in China: How China Is Becoming a
Global Innovator (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
49 Keane, Created in China, 5.
50 Ibid., 83.
51 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 285.
52 Allison, Millennial Monsters, 160.
53 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 147.
54 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of
Neoliberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 3.
55 Ibid., 15.
56 Wanning Sun, “Inequality and Culture: A New Pathway to Understanding Social Ine-
quality,” in Unequal China: The Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Inequality,
ed. Wanning Sun and Yingjie Guo (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 33.
57 Qin Xiaoyu and Jiang Tao, “Lishi yu xianzhuang: Zhongguo gongren shige chuangzuo
yantaohui” (“History and Status Quo: A Seminar on Chinese Workers’ Poetry Writ-
ing”) in Wo de shipian (The Verse of Us), ed. Qin Xiaoyu (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe,
2015), 393–474, 419.
58 Qin Xiaoyu, “Introduction: Remembering the Anonymous,” in Iron Moon: An Anthol-
ogy of Chinese Worker Poetry, trans. Eleanor Goodman (Buffalo, NY: White Pine
Press, 2017), 15.
59 Sun, Subaltern China, 12.
60 Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury,
2011), x. For a full-length discussion about how the creation of a flexible labor market
to maximize productivity and competitiveness under neoliberal capitalism transfers
risks and precarities to workers, see Chapter 1.
61 Ibid., 7.
62 Ibid., x.
63 Ibid., 77.
64 Yang Zhongyi, “Zai Sanhe wan youxi de renmen” (“Those Who Play Video Games in
Sanhe”) Chule (Chuapp), May 3, 2017, accessed December 17, 2018, www.chuapp.
com/?c=Article&a=index&id=282974.
NHK made a documentary about this social group in 2018: Sanhe Talent Market: Chinese
Young Men Who Took Temporary Daily Job for 1,500 Yen, directed by Kenichi Endou,
accessed December 17, 2018, www.nhk.or.jp/docudocu/program/92409/2409304/.
65 Fish, China’s Millennials, 84.
66 Han Han, “Suipian” (“Fragment”), accessed October 11, 2018, http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/
blog_4701280b0102eb8d.html The English translation is quoted, with minor modifica-
tions, from Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Cul-
ture, ed. Haomin Gong and Xin Yang (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 61.
67 Shao Yanjun, “Zai ‘yituobang’ li goujian ‘geren linglei xuanze’ huanxiang kongjian:
wangluo wenxue de yishi xingtai gongneng zhi yizhong” (“Constructing a Fantasy
Space of ‘Individual Alternative Choice’ in a Heterotopia: One of the Ideological
 Introduction 27
Functions of Internet Literature”), Wenyi yanjiu (Literature and Art Studies), no. 4
(2012): 16–25.
68 Mark Cieslik and Donald Simpson, Key Concepts in Youth Studies (London: Sage,
2013); Ann Anagnost, Andrea Arai, and Hai Ren, eds., Global Futures in East Asia:
Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2013).
69 Comaroff and Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism, 16.
70 Ibid., 17.
71 Ibid.
72 Standing, The Precariat, 86.
73 Zawen, literally “miscellaneous essays,” refers to a short and often satirical prose form.
This literary genre was made famous by Lu Xun (1881–1936), who authored hundreds
of zawen essays to make biting commentaries on social ills and cultural issues. In
her call for zawen writings in 1942, Ding Ling characterized Lu Xun’s zawen essays
as “China’s greatest ideological weapon, works so splendid they are intimidating.”
Ding Ling, “Women xuyao zawen,” (“We Need the Zawen Essay”), first published in
Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), October 23, 1942. The English translation, by Ruth
Nybakken, of the article appears in Modern Chinese Literary Thought, ed. Kirk A.
Denton (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 456.

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University of California Press, 2006.
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2 Youth economy in the
“China Dream”
Rise of the Me-generation
creative class

While the mainstream study of Chinese literature continues to be a history of

canonical works and writers, today’s young readers enthusiastically embrace a
group of new writers about their age such as Guo Jingming (1983–) and Han Han
(1982–), who are prolific and often controversial. Both Han and Guo have been
ranked at the top of the bestseller list of Chinese publication industry, superseding
many senior Chinese writers including the Nobel Laureates Gao Xingjian and Mo
Yan. Actually, the number of young writers born after the 1980s has been increas-
ing so fast that their creative writings constitute over 10% of the whole Chinese
publication industry, which is about the same market share of all the works pub-
lished by established modern and contemporary Chinese writers.1
In addition, both Han Han and Guo Jingming have also directed high-grossing
summer blockbusters and run commercially successful literary journals and multi-
media companies. As leading figures of a fast-growing group of young writers and
cultural entrepreneurs, they have boosted the spearheaded development of the new
genre of youth literature and transformed the landscape of Chinese publication
industry and media culture with their literary and entrepreneurial practices. These
writer-filmmaker-entrepreneurs represent the rise of a new creative class, “whose
economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative con-
tent” in a transmedial youth culture that brings about an ongoing cultural revolution
on the wings of media convergence and a thriving creative economy.2 Their creative
and entrepreneurial practices across a wide range of forms and media have played
essential roles in shaping youth identities and transforming social politics and the
ongoing economic restructuring in an increasingly neoliberalizing China.
However, the aesthetic and sociological significance of these versatile young
writers and their works have been underappreciated by literary critics and schol-
ars. Despite, or because of, the high profits of his literary and media works, Guo
has constantly received critics’ disparaging1 and trivialization. The fact that the
main body of his fans are teenage girls intensifies such biased views similar to the
elitist critique of Twilight fans in America: “It sucked because it was written for
teenage girls.”3 In comparison to Guo, Han has enjoyed more critical acclaim, but
more for his newly-earned “public intellectual” persona and the political ramifica-
tions of his blogging (Chau 2015, Strafella and Berg 2015, Yang 2013). In order to
redress this situation and call for a critical re-examination of these young writers’
 Youth economy in the “China Dream” 31
creative works, this chapter aims to study the rise of a generation growing up dur-
ing China’s reform era, focusing on the above-mentioned duo’s stylistic and trans-
medial innovations as well as their pivotal roles in a rapidly changing publication
industry and networked media culture in contemporary China.
Born in the 1980s, Guo and Han both belong to the Me Generation. In the
Chinese context, the term has been used to name those who “were born in the
1980s and afterwards,”4 corresponding roughly the social group referred to by a
range of different names including Generation Y, the Millennials, or the iPod gen-
eration (born since the mid-1970s) in the West.5 For this new generation of writ-
ers-filmmakers-entrepreneurs and their loyal young fans, the 1980s marked the
starting point of two critical transitions in Chinese history: a paradigmatic shift
from high socialism to high capitalism and the implementation of the “One Child”
policy. While the former has brought about the radical marketization of publica-
tion industry and mass media since the 1980s, the latter ensures the growth of a
younger generation with more familial investment and greater purchase power for
youth-oriented cultural products.
In the following sections of this chapter, I will start with an investigation of the
economic and cultural conditions conducive to the rise of this young generation.
Specifically, the self-transformation of a youth-oriented literary magazine Budding
(Mengya) will be used as a case study of the marketization of China’s publication
industry and the incubation of the Me-generation cultural entrepreneurs. Then I will
turn to a close analysis of the new literary style and youth subjectivity created by
the two trendsetting Me-generation writers and will argue that their creative writ-
ings can be viewed, contrary to mainstream literary critique of their “shallow” and
“vulgar” works, as a youth-oriented re-invention of the legacy of the May Fourth
literary revolution as the latest trend in a fast-growing creative economy.
The last two sections will revolve around the ideas of youth economy and crisis
through examining Han’s and Guo’s career paths that have benefited from the
blossoming of a transnational and transmedial youth-oriented media culture in an
age of neoliberal globalization. I argue that Guo and Han represent China’s Me
Generation with their creative labor and entrepreneurial practices that reinforce
and at the same time contest the mainstream ideology, particularly the most recent
state-sanctioned discourse of China Dream that aims to conjure up the glamor-
ous image of a rising China keen on developing its own creating economy. The
rapidly changing political economic and socio-cultural conditions contribute to
these Me-generation writers-filmmakers-entrepreneurs’ unprecedented creative
endeavor and phenomenal market success that are unconceivable for their senior
peers, but also generate a profound sense of youth crisis and nostalgia in an age of
vertiginous changes and social differentiation and fragmentation.

Creating the first brand of a youth-oriented

literary incubator
Any discussion about the rise of the Me-generation creative class should start with
not only the transformation of the media culture in China’s reform era, but also
32 Youth economy in the “China Dream”
more importantly, the extreme make-over of one literary magazine Budding that
successfully branded itself as the first-ever youth-oriented literary incubator and
had nearly single-handedly produced the group of the young bestseller writers and
cultural entrepreneurs to be examined in this chapter.
As a result of Deng Xiaoping’s inspection tour to South China (nanxun) in
1992, further marketization has been pushed forward in every aspect of China’s
economic and social sectors. Even culture is no exception. Since 1990s, the “cul-
tural system reform” (wenhua tizhi gaige) has instilled the market logic to cultural
production and distribution. For the first time in the PRC history, “the ‘value’ of
a Chinese literary work had been linked directly to its market appeal.”6 Litera-
ture, and culture in general, is not considered to be a part of the non-productive
superstructure anymore, as the classical Marxism prescribes. Rather than tools
of sheer political propaganda and ideological indoctrination, cultural products
are redefined as commodities for sale on a “free market” powered by domestic
and transnational capital, but also closely monitored and regulated by the state.
As a result of the increasing capitalization and state-sanctioned marketization,
literary production in today’s China has become a part of the cultural industry.
It encounters double censorship: the profit-oriented commercial censor, and the
governmental political censorship that has received far more attention from the
mainstream media in the West. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, Chinese
publishers, particularly those of literary magazines, have struggled hard to survive
in the face of the double censorship.
One literary magazine turns out to be the most successful in following the
post-Fordist logic of market diversifying to change its publishing preferences and
business strategies and adapt to this new reality of cultural industrialization and
commercialization of publication: Budding. Published by the Shanghai Writer’s
Association, Budding has a long history and wide influence in the literary field.
In 1930, Lu Xun, with the assistance of Feng Xuefeng, Rou Shi, Wei Jinzhi, and
other Left-League (Zuolian) writers, founded a journal called Mengya yuekan
(Budding Monthly) in Shanghai. Due to its publication of socialist-themed liter-
ary works and translated Soviet Union novels for the youth, Budding Monthly
was shut down by the Nationalist government after publishing five issues. Though
short-lived, the literary legacy of the youth-oriented journal went a long way. At
the end of Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the beginning of the Civil
War (1946–1949), a literary magazine sharing a similar title, Mengya (Budding),
was published in Chongqing by a group of leftist intellectuals, to commemorate
the tenth anniversary of Lu Xun’s death and to continue instilling ideas of socialist
revolution and literature into Chinese youth. This journal was also quickly termi-
nated after publishing merely four issues.
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (P. R. C.), the literary
magazine gained yet another rebirth in 1956. Continuing the May Fourth legacy
of politicizing youth as the national subject, the young government called for Chi-
nese youth’s participation in the socialist revolution and construction. During this
period, Budding was published as the first youth-oriented journal in the P. R. C.
history. The state-funded literary journal celebrated the Left-League legacy, with
Another random document with
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 Rectangular Opening to Use over Camera View
Finder

The Rectangular Opening Allows Only That Portion of the View to be Seen
Which will Show on the Picture

Ordinary view finders on cameras, having the cut-out in the shape

of a Maltese cross, are quite confusing to some camera users. To
overcome this difficulty, I cut a piece of celluloid to the shape shown,
and in taking a picture, the proper opening is held over the view
finder so that only the view that will appear in the picture can be
seen.—Contributed by E. Everett Buchanan, Elmira, N. Y.
 Clipping File Made of Envelopes

The Flaps Hold All the Envelopes Together, Producing a File of Several
Compartments

Handy pockets for holding notes, or small articles, may be made

by anyone from ordinary envelopes. The gummed flaps of the
envelopes are stuck together after spacing the envelopes to allow a
small margin at the end on which the contents of each separate
pocket may be written.—Contributed by H. Goodacre, Wolcott, Ind.
 Handle for a Drinking Glass
Measure the bottom part of the glass and make a band of copper
that will neatly fit it. The ends of the copper can be riveted, but if a
neat job is desired, flatten or file the copper ends on a slant, and
braze or solder them together.

Attach to the band an upright copper piece a little longer than the
glass is high. To this upright piece a bent piece of copper to form a
handle is riveted or soldered. The glass is set in the band and the
upper end of the vertical piece is bent over the glass edge.—
Contributed by William King, Monessen, Pa.

¶A simple and handy pincushion can be made of a large cork

fastened to any support or base with a nail or screw.
 Combination Camp-Kitchen Cabinet
and Table
By J. D. BOYLAN

Thebeing
combination camp-kitchen cabinet and table is the result of not
able to take the members of my family on an outing unless
they could have some home conveniences on the trip, and perhaps
the sketch and description may help solve the same problem for
others. The table will accommodate four persons comfortably, and
extra compartments may be added if desired. The cabinet, when
closed, is strong and compact, and if well made with a snug-fitting
cover, is bug-proof, and the contents will not be injured greatly, even
though drenched by rain or a mishap in a craft.
 This Outfit Provides Accommodations for Four Persons, and Folds
Compactly

For coffee, tea, sugar, salt, etc., I used small screw-top glass jars.
They are set in pocket shelves at both ends. When closed, one can
sit on the box or even walk on it if necessary when in the boat, and if
an armful or two of coarse marsh grass is spread over it, the
contents will keep quite cool, even when out in the hot sun. When
open for use, the metal table top F is supported on metal straps, E,
which also act as braces and supports for the table leaf, G, on each
side of the box. This affords plenty of table surface and one can
easily get at the contents of the cabinet while cooking or eating. The
legs, D, are stored inside of the box when closed for traveling. They
are held in place under metal straps when in use, and held at their
upper ends by the metal plate and blocks, B and C. The bent metal
pieces, A, on the ends of the top, spring over the blocks at B and C,
and form the handles.
 A Homemade Life Buoy
A serviceable circular life buoy may be made by sewing together
rings of canvas, filling the resulting form with ground cork, and
waterproofing the covering. Cut two disks of canvas about 30 in. in
diameter, and cut out a circular portion from the center of each,
about 12 in. in diameter. Sew the pieces together at their edges,
leaving a small opening at a point on the outer edge. Fill the cover
with cork used in packing grapes, and sew up the opening. Paint the
buoy thoroughly, with white lead, and attach hand grips of rope.
 Locking Device for Latch Hook on Gate or Door

The troublesome opening of a latch hook on a gate or door,

permitting intruders to enter or possibly injuring the door in the wind,
can be easily overcome by fitting a small catch over the hook, as
indicated in the sketch. The U-shaped locking device is cut from a
piece of tin, and fastened on the screw over which the hook is set.
When locked, it is pushed back over the head of the hook, and
cannot be easily jarred out of place.
 A Vanishing-Cuff Parlor Trick
A trick which is interesting and amusing for the entertainment of
the home audience, is performed with a derby hat and a gentleman’s
cuff. The effect is produced as follows: The performer takes the
derby from his head and shows that it is empty. He removes one of
his cuffs and drops it into the hat. He tips the hat over so that the
spectators can see the inside, and the hat appears empty. He then
shakes his arm, and the white cuff reappears, whereupon he places
the hat back on his head. The explanation is simple: The white cuff,
dropped into the hat, contains a false cuff link, and the inside of the
cuff is painted black. A thread holds the cuff in shape until the latter
is dropped into the hat, when the thread is broken without the
spectators being aware of it. The cuff just fits into the hat, and its
ends are deftly snapped beneath the hatband, the hat thus
appearing empty. The duplicate cuff is kept on the forearm of the
performer, and with a shake, slides into place.—Merritt Hale,
Hartford, Conn.

¶A little fresh developer added occasionally to old developing

solutions will bring them up in speed and intensity.
Inexpensive Table Lamp Made of Electrical-
Fixture Parts
 A small table lamp that is light and easily portable, can be made at
a cost of less than $1 from electrical-fixture parts, either old or
purchased at a supply store for the job. The base is a bracket, with
its brass canopy inverted, as shown. The upright is a ¹⁄₈-in. brass
pipe, and it is fitted to a standard socket. The shade holder can be
made complete from a strip of tin and two wires; or adapted from a
commercial shade holder used for candlesticks. Various types of
shades, homemade if desired, can be used.
 Wire Holders Keep Cabinet Doors Open

Doors of cabinets often have an annoying tendency to swing shut

when articles are being removed from the shelves. To overcome this
trouble with a kitchen cabinet, I fitted brackets of No. 9 gauge wire
into the sides of the cabinet, the wire being bent to the shape shown
in the sketch. When the doors are to be held open, the wires are slid
forward from their original position, as indicated by the dotted lines,
and set in front of the doors. Before the doors are closed, the wires
are quickly snapped back into place.—A. S. Thomas, Amherstburg,
Ont., Canada.
 “Switchboard” Protects Milker from Cow’s Tail

The Legend Put On the “Switchboard” by the Boys Shows How They Value It
 A simple and effective device for guarding a person milking a cow
from being hit in the face by the cow’s tail is made of a board, about
10 in. wide and 5 ft. long. This is hung by two wire hooks from a long
wire running lengthwise of the stable just over the front edge of the
gutter. It is moved along with the milker and effectually protects his
face while milking. The device was made by a Wisconsin farmer
after nearly losing the sight of an eye in being hit by a cow’s tail. He
tried tying the tails of the cows while milking them, but found by
actual test that some cows dropped down as much as 25 per cent in
milk production when their tails were tied. The “switchboard” gives
the cows the necessary freedom.—D. S. B., Wisconsin Live Stock
Breeders’ Association.
 Reflected-Light Illumination with Homemade
Arrangement
“Friend wife” does not complain any longer because of poor light
over the kitchen stove. The windows in the kitchen were so disposed
that the light was partly shut off from the stove by the person
standing before it. I solved the difficulty in this way: A small window
was cut directly back of the stove, in a partition between the kitchen
and an adjoining storeroom, locating it just a few inches above the
top of the stove. A mirror was placed, after some experimenting, so
that the light from an outside window in the storeroom was reflected
through the small window in the partition and onto the top of the
stove. Plenty of light was thus afforded. Various adaptations of this
arrangement may be worked out.—F. E. Brimmer, Dalton, N. Y.
 Bedroom Shade and Curtains Arranged for
Thorough Ventilation

This Arrangement of Curtains and Shade Permits Through Ventilation in the

Sleeping Room

Curtains, shades, and similar fixtures, often interfere with the

proper ventilation of sleeping rooms. By arranging these features as
shown in the sketch, the ventilation is not interfered with, and the
shades and curtains give the same service as with the usual
arrangement. The curtains are hung singly on hinged bars, which
may be homemade or those used as towel bars. Details of the
supports, at A and B, are shown in the sketch. Two pairs of fixtures
are provided for the shade, permitting it to be lowered at night, with
free circulation of the air at the top and bottom. The shade is quickly
raised, and the curtains swung into their closed position.—J. E.
McCoy, Philadelphia, Pa.