Fan Yang

Drawing on her forthcoming book, Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements, Fan Yang mines 21st-century media artifacts such as Firefly and House of Cards to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. She demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state.

This piece situates keywords as sites of potential violence in the linguistic traffic between globalized China and the English-speaking world. Introducing the Chinese-English Keywords Project, which takes as its explicit goal to gather keywords that can serve as lenses onto Chinese conceptual and social lives, we center incommensurability, insisting that idiosyncratic usages be encountered on their own terms, sometimes even “detranslated.” Unpacking our methods - designed to eschew the epistemic violence that can accompany translational searches for equivalents that effectively privilege English - we then interrogate the concept of wenhua, conventionally glossed as “culture,” as it functions to instantiate social inequalities and zoom in on the entanglement of wenhua with the construct of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to examine contested meanings across local, national, and global scales. Throughout, we ask what a decolonizing stance toward translational politics would look like across the co-imbricated contexts of academic interchange, globalizing capital, and super-power antagonisms.

Shenzhen, the first Special Economic Zone established in 1979 in southern China, has transformed from a global electronics manufacturing hub and counterfeiting capital into a UNESCO City of Design within the span of four decades. This article examines three digital-imaging practices that emanate from the city to explore the city's multiple connections to globalization from above and globalization from below. The first is the 2004 narrative film The World, directed by Jia Zhang-ke (often known as a Sixth-Generation Chinese auteur) and based in part on lead actress Zhao Tao's experience working in Shenzhen's Window of the World theme park. The second is Shenzhen-based company Transsion's design of smart phones for the African market, which have roots in the city's Shanzhai (i.e. "knockoff") mobile phone sector. The third is large-scale light shows around the city in 2018-2019 that turn the facades of high-rises into electronic screens, featuring LED-light imageries generated by algorithms. Utilizing digital media to illuminate Shenzhen as a networked place in the world, these relational place-making practices simultaneously engage with and reveal the contradictions of transparency as a normative ideal upheld by global tech giants and Euro-American governments. Together, they provide a distinctive window to discern China's cultural and political dilemmas in the 21st century.

This essay examines two interconnected human-made nonhuman entities stemming from Shenzhen, China's first special economic zone, that have become dominant figures in mapping the city's-and by extension, China's-future: the robot and the drone. I bring an interdisciplinary, cultural studies approach to the multiple meaning-making practices that engage with these two objects; both participate in enacting the vision for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as an extension of the success of Shenzhen. These practices simultaneously normalise aspirations for a future fuelled by the power of nonhuman technological agents while offering glimpses into the uneven power relations between different humans that underpin such future making. At the same time, they also point to the emergent possibilities of meaningmaking that conjoin the human and the nonhuman.

The relationship between culture and policy has long been a major topic for media and cultural studies. With this issue, we hope to broaden the meaning of cultural policy, from policies that are explicitly regulating something we call the “cultural” (including media or traditional rituals or symbols) to include the practice of policy-making and the cultural legitimation of law and policy itself, regardless of the object or dimension of social life it regulates. The essays in this issue argue for (or at least accept) an understanding of policy as a cultural production representing certain ideological outlooks, and thus implicitly suggest that cultural policy studies should encompass a wide range of policies; at the same time, the essays are interested in the cultural mechanisms and means through which policies are promulgated and enforced from think tanks to social media flak, from the global circulation of ideologies to the local practices of appropriation/resistance. This work is l...

The Netflix popular reality series Too Hot to Handle (THTH), released during the coronavirus outbreak in 2019, requires all contestants to refrain from sexual activities of any kind in order to win a cash prize in the end. Mirroring the physical distancing mandate during the COVID-19 crisis, the show offers an opportunity to discern a set of interrelated human and nonhuman entanglements in contemporary technoculture that the outbreak has brought into sharper relief. This essay probes into the conditions of possibility for the popularity of THTH by placing an analytical focus on the role of Lana, a nonhuman sensor centrally featured in the show with a female voice typical of digital assistants. Lana, a cone-shaped device from ‘Factory, China’, is a surveillance robot embodying the operation of Netflix as part of the expanding regime of data colonialism, which extracts personal data for profit. Her nonhuman identity is evocative of China as at once a manufacturing locale for the material gadgets that make up the global digital economy and an authoritarian state that has deepened its censorship and surveillance practices during the COVID-19 outbreak. Instructing the contestants to care for their entrepreneurial selves while encroaching upon their autonomy, Lana invites us to rethink the common framing of China – a coveted market for Netflix – as the nonhuman Other of the liberal-democratic West. During a time when the nonhuman virus keeps humans apart while intensifying their reliance on nonhuman machines for communication, Lana promotes a kind of intimacy without proximity characteristic of the global infrastructures of connection. A symptomatic reading of THTH, which also conjures a vision of collectivity as a basis for surviving the pandemic, thus allows us to recognize the entanglement of the human and the nonhuman and to imagine new paths toward global social justice.

This chapter argues that critical screen studies in transnational contexts can benefit from a rethinking of media not just as textual artifacts but also material objects. The implications of this re-conception for writing about transnational screen cultures are three-fold. First, it involves approaching media as events rather than preformed artifacts. Second, it entails attending to the more explicit roles played by audiences today in shaping the configuration of transnational media objects. Third, it requires the recognition of ourselves not only as “writers” who study screen cultures from a distance but also as participant observers who take part in the production, circulation, and consumption of our objects of analysis. Drawing on my experience of writing about Under the Dome, a transnationally circulated documentary on smog in China, I suggest these ways of probing into the multifaceted processes of mediation can help us better engage the discourse and reality of “rising China.”

The relationship between culture and policy has long been a major topic for media and cultural studies. With this issue, we hope to broaden the meaning of cultural policy, from policies that are explicitly regulating something we call the " cultural " (including media or traditional rituals or symbols) to include the practice of policy-making and the cultural legitimation of law and policy itself, regardless of the object or dimension of social life it regulates. The essays in this issue argue for (or at least accept) an understanding of policy as a cultural production representing certain ideological outlooks, and thus implicitly suggest that cultural policy studies should encompass a wide range of policies; at the same time, the essays are interested in the cultural mechanisms and means through which policies are promulgated and enforced-from think tanks to social media flak, from the global circulation of ideologies to the local practices of appropriation/resistance. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

This essay brings a temporality-based approach to the study of urbanism in Shenzhen, known as China's first Special Economic Zone and as the birthplace for “Shenzhen Speed.” It examines multiple exhibitions and spatial practices in the city in 2014, when the state-propagated “China Dream” discourse was gaining momentum. If, historically, Shenzhen has figured in a nationalist narrative of development and progress, today it also offers a stage for carrying out new kinds of experiments. A rhythm analysis, which turns attention to the city and its dwellers' heterogeneous relations to time, not only allows for a more critical engagement with the urban experiences distinct to Shenzhen but also presents new possibilities to resituate Asian megacities in the Global South as a means to generate alternative global visions.

This essay critically examines the proliferating media artifacts and political discourses that dramatize China’s ownership of U.S. national debt in contemporary America. It argues that this new mode of representing China is best captured by the term fiscal orientalism. Complementing techno-orientalism, a configuration prompted by Japan’s (technological) rise in the 1980s, fiscal orientalism draws attention to the ideological work performed by a menacing “Chinese future.” Fiscal-orientalist narratives, by conjoining the time of the Other with the time of debt, racialize the effects of neoliberal financialization and perpetuate a historically specific form of indebted citizenship.

This article examines three significant moments of the shanzhai discourse in WTO-era China. Literally referring to a “mountain fortress” occupied by antiofficial bandits, shanzhai is a new term for wide-ranging knockoff products and copycat media forms. Often invoking Robin-Hood-like righteousness, it connotes a sense of defiance against the globalizing intellectual property rights regime. My account traces shanzhai's rise in the informal mobile phones sector in southern China to its proliferation on the Internet and its representation on state-run television. The discursive formation of shanzhai, I argue, makes visible an imaginary of collectivity, one that disrupts the state's continuous claim to “the nation” as a signifier for “the people.” To realign the national interest with that of “the people,” state media reshapes the shanzhai discourse by separating “shanzhai economy” from “shanzhai culture.” While the fixation of the former as “the illicit” and “the fake” allows the state to re-emerge as a protector of the people, the acknowledgment of the latter reinserts the state as a leader who can direct the energy of “the people” toward national progress. The meaning-making capacity of shanzhai is thus reworked to fit with a value-making notion of creativity so as to be channeled into a developmental force suitable for building the nation's own brands. The ideological struggles manifested in these shanzhai moments call for new perspectives in understanding the Chinese state's operation in globalization.

Under the Dome, a video about smog in China produced by author and former television anchor Chai Jing, garnered 200 million views within 48 hours before disappearing from major Chinese websites. This essay examines the video’s aesthetics, distribution and reception with a particular attention to its relation to time. I argue that a focus on temporality allows us to discern the ideological conditions that delimit how we talk about Under the Dome and indeed China’s pollution in the context of neoliberal globalization. The celebration of the video’s digitally enabled instantaneity not only privileges technological solutions and consumer agency but also obscures the unequal relation of power to which the Chinese state and the workers within the global electronics supply chain have long been subject. What these discourses eclipse is an opportunity to rethink the accidental event as opening an alternative dialogue about the geological deep time of media culture.

Faked in China is a critical account of the cultural challenge faced by China following its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. It traces the interactions between nation branding and counterfeit culture, two manifestations of the globalizing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime that give rise to competing visions for the nation. Nation branding is a state-sanctioned policy, captured by the slogan “From Made in China to Created in China,” which aims to transform China from a manufacturer of foreign goods into a nation that creates its own IPR-eligible brands. Counterfeit culture is the transnational making, selling, and buying of unauthorized products. This cultural dilemma of the postsocialist state demonstrates the unequal relations of power that persist in contemporary globalization.

This article proposes visibility as a new lens through which to examine the politics of Internet censorship in China. It focuses on the practice of recoding, that is, the use of code words and images to circulate information that is deemed “sensitive”
and therefore removed from the web. While commentators in the West have often described censorship-evading practices like this as a form of “resistance” against state domination, little academic attention has been paid to how and why recoding holds political and cultural significance. The prism of visibility, by conceptualizing recoding as a cultural response
to censorship, opens up a more critical perspective to comparatively analyze examples drawn from both China and the United States. It therefore invites a careful rethinking of China’s Internet censorship beyond the framework of the nation-
state, by calling attention to the social dimension of meaning making and the negotiation of power in a transnational context.

Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts—including films like The Martian and TV/streaming media shows such as Firefly and House of Cards—to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Describing these transpacific entanglements as “Chimerica”—coined by economic historians to reference the symbiosis of China and America—Yang examines how Chimerican media, originating in the US but traversing national boundaries in their production, circulation, and consumption, co-create the figure of rising China and extend a political imagination beyond the conventional ground of the nation.

Examining how Chimerican media is shaped by and perpetuates uneven power relations, Disorienting Politics argues that the pervasive tendency among wide-ranging cultural producers to depict the Chinese state as a racialized Other in American media life diminishes the possibility of engaging transpacific entanglements as a basis for envisioning new political horizons. Such othering of China not only results in overt racism against people of Asian descent, Yang argues, but also impacts the wellbeing of people of color more generally. This interdisciplinary book demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state. Bridging media and cultural studies, Asian and Asian American studies, geography, and globalization studies, Disorienting Politics calls for a relational politics that acknowledges the multifarious interconnectivity between people, places, media, and environment.