In the house this week: Jesse, Emily, Tianyu, Yan, Yi-Ling, and Krish.

Krish: Hello. Chinese videogames are having a global moment, and we’ve written two episodes trying to figure out where their quirky sensibilities might come from.

Our answers: Flash games, emulation, console meal replacements, and the liminal space offered by Steam, are all key pieces, but it’s the subject of this episode that really completes the picture.

In the 90s and 2000s, English language learning was a huge fengkou, the site of an insane commercial and VC scramble. At the heart of it were electronic dictionaries (电子词典), singularly Chinese computing devices ostensibly meant for language acquisition. In reality, they became so much more: the repository for a whole generation’s private world of notes, virtual pets, sprawling RPGs and coding experiments. Somewhere between a Nintendo DS, Chromebook, Ti-83 Calculator, and a Tamagotchi, electronic dictionaries were wildly popular, extremely customizable, and gleefully modded to support dizzying possibilities.

Their interlaced worlds were foundational to many strands of gaming and game development in China, prefiguring the global rise of smartphones.

Emily: Also, games on electronic dictionaries, which were sold to parents as purely educational devices, represented a really important lure to kids beyond the promise of private worlds: that of  transgression, trespass, secrets and provocations.

Krish: Our guide through these nested menus is Jesse Young, a writer and translator in Beijing who has been obsessed with the devices for years. With his sprawling collection assembled through second hand resellers on Taobao, he takes us on a deep-dive through dither-punk RPGs for a look at the legacy and influence of the electronic dictionary in China.

As always, we want to show that the history of games in China is not “partial, belated, or emerging,” but rather a specific result of complex technological trajectories. These trajectories, as Jesse shows below, aren’t just nostalgia fodder but signposts to what a better, more open, and punk af tech future might look like.

The Decade of the Electronic Dictionary

Words and Illustration by Jesse Young

Jesse: Recent pieces in Polygon and Chaoyang Trap both explicated what I’d long intuited: the quiet soft power victory of Chinese video games. This got me into some speculative anthropology around the framing of gaming here—the console ban (2000-2015), games as “spiritual opium,” the current crackdown and video game licensing woes.

Wind back now to the 1980s and the homegrown NES-clone Little Tyrant (小霸王). China’s only big console success story had to position itself as educational hardware. It was a design choice with implications, arguably the start of a new, distinctly Chinese technological idiom. I’d seen a variant of this in Tom Mullaney’s work on The Chinese Typewriter (newly published in Chinese) and early personal computing, and there is a direct line here about how culture informs technology which informs design which informs aesthetics.

In China’s case I think this interplay of technology and aesthetics, responsive to culture, is best exemplified in what I am calling “The Decade of the Electronic Dictionary: 1995-2005.” During these ten years, for a tech savvy cohort of high school and college students, “electronic dictionaries” (电子词典) were the ascendant hardware. Instead of PCs, PDAs or the like, which took off belatedly in a still-developing China, electronic dictionaries were de-facto mini-notebook computers.

Here, electronic dictionaries developed into impressive multifunction devices, sporting their own striking design sensibility and serving as a bridge to smartphones much as PDAs did in the West.

The two leading brands Bubugao (步步高, BBK) and Wenquxing (文曲星) generate the same nostalgic fondness as Palm Pilots and Apple Newtons do (just check Bilibili or second hand platforms like Xianyu 闲鱼). Returning to video games, the most interesting facet may be the largely unexplored legacy of Chinese electronic dictionaries as gaming devices, and their influence on a whole generation of programmers and developers in China.

Electronic dictionaries reigned supreme especially after the millenium, as network capabilities were added and technological convergence elevated the devices into capable MP3 players, e-book readers, handheld gaming machines, graphic calculators, notebooks, programming tools, virtual pets, personal organisers and more, complete with SD card support, USB connectivity and infrared data transfer. To echo educational industry analysis firm Blackboard Insight's (黑板洞察) conclusion on their significance:

“It belonged to a wave. That wave has retreated but its ripples still reverberate...it carries the special complex memories of a whole generation of students.”

Yan: I’d like to add a bit of context here: one of the biggest anxieties over learning English in China in the late 90s and early 2000s was “Mute English,” or at least that’s what my parents projected on me. This was before pirated and subtitled American TV shows like Friends were widely available for people to watch, and you rarely had access to audio materials of conversations between native English speakers other than textbook recordings. So an electronic device that could read out all the English words for students to check their pronunciation was essential for people who wanted to be able to converse in English rather than just pass English exams, most of which didn’t have a speaking component.

That’s how revolutionary the device wanted to be for English pedagogy in China during that specific period. I had a Wenquxing but I sadly don’t have any memory of learning English with it. All I remember is a cat I raised in the Tamagotchi game that came with the device. In the game, in order to “make money” to buy cat food there’s a simple word game, where you fill in the blanks to complete words. The twist: they were Chinese 成语 (idioms), not English words!

Emily: One of my most prized possessions growing up was this - The 2006 Barbie B-Book. It was marketed as a “learning laptop” for kids to learn 1st/2nd grade English vocabulary through a series of educational games.

A few things to pick apart here: first, the pinkness overload. The target audience was obviously little girls who were already in the Barbie craze phase. I wonder, then, the possibly gendered nature of electronic dictionaries and these B-Book type devices. I, for one, never had any of the aforementioned devices back then. I knew of their existence but I never wanted one, nor have my parents offered to purchase one for me. I’m throwing an idea out there: since our society is inherently gendered, educational hardware is no exception.

Other notable features include the fact that the B-Book is not internet-enabled, even though it is marketed and aesthetically designed to resemble a laptop. It is much less user-driven since the “vocabulary learning” aspect is not actualized through a dictionary function where the user looks up words, but through program-led games. As far as I remember, the B-Book did not have a calculator function, but it does have math-related games. I’m hesitant to definitively argue that these features are sexist and am well aware that previous examples of hardware might be innately different to B-Book (the latter is completely in English). But, it's worth raising here and opening it up for debate. :)

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Jesse: Okay, back to the beginning. Electronic versions of text dictionaries have existed since the early 1960s, but the proximate ancestor to the electronic dictionary, a dedicated pocket computer with word search functions, is the “enhanced” electronic calculator. Their invention is often credited to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, who made his early fortune by selling designs for an electronic translation device to Sharp (dictionary and translation functions being porous from the outset). This was in 1978, the same year top US calculator maker Texas Instruments’ Speak&Spell signaled an embryonic step into more lexicographic as opposed to numeric territory. Their ‘Language Translator/Tutor’ followed in 1979. Japan would prove the true template for subsequent Chinese forays though, sharing the same computational challenge of handling a character-based writing system and sizable segment of (mostly English) language learners. Sharp’s IQ-3000 debuted in 1979 and was soon met by Casio’s TR-2000 in 1981, coming in at a lightweight 53 grams.

1989 is the watershed year for the Chinese electronic dictionary. Quanzhi International launches the first Chinese electronic dictionary, the EC-1000, under the name Kuaiyitong (快译通), positioning it as a Chinese-English translation tool. They began in Taiwan but by 1990 had started production in Shenzhen for the mainland market. At roughly the same time, a Taiwanese and Hong Kong technology firm joined forces to establish BESTA (好易通) and launched their own electronic dictionary.

These were bougie gadgets costing several thousand kuai, generally out of reach of the laobaixing. An entrepreneur from Taiwan, Zhou Zhiyuan, would be instrumental in changing this. He founded Golden Vision in 1993 with a view to making an affordable, truly mass-market product.

1995’s Wenquxing (文曲星) CC-100, named for a star in the big dipper constellation associated with literary success, debuted at 330 RMB cutting the price of an electronic dictionary by 80% overnight.

The first multi-function electronic dictionary would arrive shortly after in 1997 with Wenquxing’s PC-220. By 2000 Wenquxing dictionaries had accumulated sales of 20 million units and occupied a 70% market share.

It was around this time Duan Yongping, who had invented the educational hardware market with Subor Electronics and the Little Tyrant (小霸王) left to found Bubugao/BBK (步步高) and a second era was born. Network features were added. Backgammon, Snake and Tetris gave way to sprawling RPG games. Programming and game development tools were made available. Intense competition led to a war over games, price and features. Online forums like WQXNET sprang up. Wenquxing fans began calling themselves 星迷 (star fans). And electronic dictionaries became a ubiquitous fact of campus life. By the early 2000s Noah (诺亚舟) had also entered the fray and soon found themselves second only to Wenquxing, with BBK settling into third place. Industry sales peaked at 10 million a year in 2004.

In 2005, an abrupt industry-wide restructure shrank the sector by half. Nokia phones were IN,  and the writing was on the wall. Innovation stagnated and a prolonged period of decline had begun. Companies pivoted to hardware based around replicating the classroom experience, like point readers (点读机, basically interactive textbooks) incorporating new video and online capabilities. Bubugao was successful in navigating these winds and remained a market leader, while Wenquxing and Noah floundered and ceded their dominance to new players like Shulang (读书郎) and Best Under Heaven Studying (优学天下), which along with BBK currently control 60% of the educational hardware market.

Electronic dictionaries shed their distinctive character and increasingly came to mimic smartphones and tablets. This culminated in the study tablet (学生平板), a learning-focused ‘distraction-free’ (no games, no browsing the internet) alternative to iPads. Unable to compete with modern multifunction devices, the “superfluous” was pared away.  The electronic dictionary became an actual electronic dictionary,  exemplified by the no-frills dictionary pen (词典笔). In a complete inversion, classic-style electronic dictionaries are still marketed, but this time the selling point is the lack of games.

Much of what made the electronic dictionary special has been lost, so let’s take a moment to celebrate their manifold delights.

The design of these devices deserves appreciation. They are beautiful, and as the old heuristic goes, what is beautiful is usable. You can witness the evolution of form-factor in the image below. From a flat credit-card shape with a calculator-like display to a more rounded clamshell flip-design not dissimilar to a Nintendo DS. Other models and brands experimented with a diversity of novel features including touch-screens, a second-screen on the case with music controls, handwriting input, insertable cartridge support and more.

Their beauty lies in a delicate dance. To be easy to carry, access quickly, to hold and to use all at once.  It's fascinating how, at a UX level, these devices pull off these little clues or 'signifiers' that guide user experience. Even in 2022, cycling through nested menus and functions was immediately legible to me, articularly with my BBK Dictionary King A5—considered the pinnacle of e-dictionary design.

Electronic dictionary keypads are informational dense sites and smart design choices around user input often pay aesthetic dividends. Below you can see the elegant combination of mathematical symbols, Korean, Chinese, English and Japanese on the same keypad. All while avoiding clutter. The menu options are also simple enough to be directly understood without reference to a manual.

These compact machines flip open and present an air of discovery. A learning device should invite possibilities. It should feel personal, and be personalisable. A textbook isn't a dairy, but this is something you can build a connection with. There is no internet browser—the world it affords you is a private one. Navigation is enhanced by small, often cute graphic touches. Like the chinese-knot style bordering above. Then there's the quirks—separate password controls for games/personal/music / just about every function (a level of granular parental oversight that screams China).

The dictionaries are riddled with archaic and bizzare turns of phrase, rarely marked as obsolete—for example “sucking the monkey” (Oxford: “the illicit act of using a straw to siphon off rum from its container”). More than one good chuckle was had by making the dictionaries say dirty things in an admirably passable voice. All this adds to the charm factor. There is a thriving second-hand market. The online listings show the kawaii aspects played up, and the fun people have had customising their dictionaries with stickers.

'Electronic dictionaries swept the nation's campuses. Although ostensibly for education, these palm-sized devices also held a hidden gaming function that parents rarely knew.'

Gaming Research Society  ( 游戏研究社), in a 2020 retrospective

The untold gaming dimension to Chinese electronic dictionaries is particularly ripe for excavation now. What is old is most definitely new with 1bit graphics. The same binary black-and-white LCD screen pixel art of electronic dictionaries is in the midst of a revival. There is even a new handheld gaming device, The Playdate, built entirely around this aesthetic. It’s enough of a trend to even have a label, ‘dither-punk,’ named for the computer graphics term of patterning pixels to give the illusion of shading or colour depth. Using emulators, I have captured footage and compiled my own top 8 list of classic Chinese electronic dictionary games below.

In many ways gaming was the real draw of these devices, as the same Gaming Research Society article put it, “Chinese children saw electronic dictionaries as gaming consoles, downloading learning software in front of their parents and lining up with classmates at stores near their schools to download the latest games.”

Gaming helped foster committed and dedicated fanbases. One that was locked in, much like the walled gardens of today. Numerous forums sprang up offering homebrew apps and games. The official sites gave a lot of support too, actively encouraging  the community through sponsorship of development contests or else hiring talented programmers from the community pool. I was still able to effortlessly download the relevant firmware and lessons for my 17+ year old BBK dictionary on the official site, fully compatible with my Windows 10 PC. Proof of an acknowledgement of the ongoing value of these dictionaries to a subset of people. Further borne out by the fact that most of the 8 games I describe below have seen endless remakes, sequels, spin-offs and fan tributes, and new versions continue to be made. There are Wenquxing and BBK emulators for PCs, 3DSes, Androids and iPhones, among other systems.

Hobbyist programmers of electronic dictionary games have found lasting professional careers in game development. While many of the OG forums have been lost to link rot, new communities such as Edic.Club have surfaced in recent years to preserve the files and development tools for these systems.

Top 8 Classic Chinese Electronic Dictionary Games

1/  英雄坛说 Altar of Heroes

System: Wenquxing

Description: Wenquxing's killer app, an open-world RPG first playable on the NC1020 (2003) and preloaded on Wenquxing dictionaries thereafter. Early iterations lifted sprites from Pokémon. Presenting a complex world centred on various schools of martial arts, NPCs were based on a rogue's gallery of figures from history, comics and Wuxia novels.

2/ 伏魔记 Record of Exorcism

System: BBK

Description: Bubugao's answer to Altar of Heroes. Released in 2004, there were over 100,000 downloads on BBK's official forum and people lining up at download spots at offline stores to get the game. A free development kit, BBKRPG, was released afterwards. One of the creators continues to work in game development to this day.

3/ 魔塔 Magic Tower

System: BBK

Description: Puzzle-action game originating in 1994 in Japan about ascending a tower with a typical ‘save the princess’ plot. A local 21-story variant took off in China and was later ported to BBK. Reaching the top requires memorisation of enemy and item positions to chart an optimal path. Countless versions exist including a 2016 remake titled Magic Tower - Never Again.

4/  三国霸业 Three Kingdoms Supremacy

System: BBK

Description: Three Kingdoms’ based strategy games are a mainstay of Chinese gaming (right back to the Huarong Pass wooden sliding puzzle). This adopts elements from several popular Three Kingdoms turn-based titles which makes for surprising depth in such an unassuming package.

5/  十字这门Cross Entry

System: BBK

Description:  Accessible development tools came later to BBK (with BBKRPG) and it seems less major titles were developed than for Wequxing. Most were simple student games or ports of existing games like Pokémon or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. This RPG seems to be one of more significant undertakings post-Record of Exorcism.

6/ 神州 Shenzhou

System: Wenquxing

Description: Large-scale fantasy RPG with multiple endings and hidden easter eggs. Shenzhou was the first winner of Golden Vision’s own GVmaker programming contest, netting 5000 yuan. And the Shenzhou ‘space-time’ engine went on to become the standard development tool for later RPGs on the system.

7/  蛙蛙大富翁 Frog Monopoly

System: Wenquxing

Description: China has seen various digital adaptations and ‘sequels’ to the classic boardgame Monopoly.  Taking on local flavour with mechanics around the God of Luck, God of Fortune and such. This version by 'Lee', a prominent member in the original Wenquxing development scene, is apparently based on Monopoly 4? Great diversion that supports a map editor and decent opponent AI.

8/ 宇星外传翼剑天殇 Extraterrestrial Wing Sword Tianshang

System: Wenquxing

Description: One of the late post-Shenzhou RPGs for the Wenquxing and part of the same group of developers. Out of a myriad of community-developed RPGs this one stands out for its high production-values. Although it never became as popular as its bigger cousins.

Jesse: Wrapping up, electronic dictionaries are unique to China’s timeline of consumer hardware, with no exact parallel anywhere else. They are beautiful to admire and still hold several lifetimes worth of linguistic knowledge. They remain usable. They are central to the birth of China's game development scene, though none of their original titles are much known outside the country.

Now the stars seem to be aligning. The government's recent “two-reductions” 双减 policy that has gutted the private education sector has also driven serious tech-titan investment into the educational hardware space, seeing new translation devices from the likes of Baidu, iFlytek and Netease. 2020 saw the Youdao Super Dictionary, a return to a more traditional clamshell form-factor and the feature-set of a classic electronic dictionary, updated for today.

More processing power, cloud services, shinier screens, computer vision and AI technology presents a vision of an electronic dictionary still at the cutting edge. The use case is still there—a portable, personal device with efficient learning tools.

The private gardens and parallax worlds of learning on an electronic dictionary are far too evocative to be reduced to another iPad app. 27 years on, China is still dreaming of electric words.

Yi-Ling: Curious to see whether or not any of the EdTech giants who got gutted after “Double Reduction” will pivot to the educational hardware space. Does it count as an afterschool tutor…if you get a hand-held, automated bot that teaches you logic 101 through a gamified lesson, instead of a New Oriental teacher who teaches you middle-school algebra?

Tianyu: The popularization of electronic dictionaries enabled the success of Chinese consumer hardware brands. Jesse mentions that Duan Yongping left Subor in 1995 to found BBK Electronics, selling gaming handsets to Chinese children by convincing the parents that these gadgets were, in fact, for learning English.

The Dongguan-based BBK was restructured in 1999 into three subsidiaries: BBK Education continued to make educational gadgets like electronic dictionaries and “reading machines” (点读机); BBK Audiovisual turned to making consumer-grade VCD and DVD players; BBK Communications focused on making telephones and later smartphones. Under Tony Chen (陈明永), BBK Audiovisual later became OPPO in the early 2000s, first manufacturing MP3 players before making cell phones. Shen Wei’s (沈炜) BBK Communications made BBK “music phones” (音乐手机), later rebranded as vivo.

In 2013, former executive Peter Lau (刘作虎) left OPPO to start OnePlus as a subsidiary; in 2018 OPPO’s former VP Sky Li (李炳忠) founded realme, another smartphone brand. Both spinoffs target overseas markets and remain part of BBK’s supply chain. When added all up BBK (which claims that all these brands operate independently, despite sharing the same investors) controls a major share of the global smartphone market.

Emily: An intriguing phenomenon in the Chinese entertainment industry that speaks to this piece is the U-turn of reality shows from being purely recreational to being both fun and didactic, due to government crackdown on vices and immorality rampant in M&E industry. Entertainment has to borrow its legitimacy from some added element of public lecturing or the dissemination of correct values. The once beloved celebrity crime-solving variety program Who’s The Murderer (明星大侦探) had to recently transition to become a “law popularization” (普法) show, educating the masses on law and ethics while celebrities tackle a staged murder mystery. In some ways, the pretending-to-be-on-Wenquxing-but-actually-gaming era is never really over.

Krish: Outro music this week is this wonderful playlist (Spotify) of early Chinese punk rock.

It’s assembled by Chaoyang Trap contributor and newsletter favourite Nathanel Amar for his new (French language) book Scream for Life, which takes an ethnographic approach to tell the story of Wuhan and Beijing’s early punk rock scenes.

Here’s a personal favourite rescued from Douban limbo: Eat Truck, a short-lived, combustible, wildly creative “drunk punk” band in Beijing.

Tianyu: Bye!

Jesse Young is fool enough to sell tea in China. He’ll take writer/translator since poet doesn’t pay.

Yan can’t remember the name of her beloved tamagotchi cat =(

Krish’s first computing device was a Sharp YO-100CP, on which he wrote (bad) flash fiction.

Tianyu was too young to have owned an electronic dictionary.

Emily used to carry her B-Book around as a fashion accessory.

In the house this week: Chong, Runze, Jen, Simon, Yi-Ling, Krish, Tianyu, Jaime, and 咸湿佬.

Krish: Hello. Just a heads up before we um get into it: 🔞 everything that follows is NSFW.

In this episode, we’re talking about pornography and desire in China. We discuss why porn matters, how sexualities are constructed, and where these conversations unfold. We try to delineate between porn culture and actual porn, to look at what that tells us about everyday life on the Chinese web.

Tianyu: As Jiang Zemin told Mike Wallace in his famous 60 Minutes interview, the Chinese government’s initial justification of internet censorship was that they needed to ban pornography (“sometimes there is also unhealthy material [on the internet]—especially pornography on the Internet—which does great harm to our youngsters," he said).

But ironically I’ve heard many anecdotes of people having learned about censorship circumvention tools not because they were interested in dissident politics, but that they had to use a VPN to watch porn.

Yi-Ling: The cute cat theory, except the cute cat is porn.

Tianyu: This had the adverse effect of, well, people curiously tiptoeing around political boundaries after being introduced to the uncensored internet originally for the purpose of porn consumption.

Krish: Porn is, to quote Richard Dyer, “too important to be ignored, or to be left to the pornographers.”

The heart of this episode is a conversation between two incredible researchers—Chong and Runze—swapping field notes, thoughts, and theories with the rest of the group. We cover everything from powerful yearning to whatever stage of horny this tweet represents:

We’re so excited that Chong and Runze agreed to talk about their work here. Chong Liu is a sociologist who researches youth experiences with sexuality education and social stratification in China, and is also a teacher and consultant on sexuality education. She's done fieldwork among high school students around Tianjin. Runze Ding is a post-doctoral researcher whose work spans porn studies, new media, and online queer experience in China. He has done fieldwork with local gay communities in Beijing and Guangzhou, interviewing over 80 demographically diverse gay men about their lives and sexuality.

Over to you both and, again, a reminder:

This episode is 100% NSFW.

[DOC/36K] 【CYT0207】ChaoyangTrap.avi

Chong: Let’s start with some fundamental premises.

1: Porn is a cultural product in China.

We can see it as the output of overlapping social, cultural, and political contexts, a means to help unpack the youth experience.

Runze: This is so true. Porn matters as a cultural phenomenon, and it especially matters to gay men. Richard Dyer defines gay porn as “a form of representation that can be the site and occasion for the production of bodily knowledge of the body.”

There is high demand for locally-produced (both amateur or semi-professional) porn videos within the Chinese gay community, which suggests that the reason for this “popularity” is not just novelty but also the big gap they fill in the market. The visibility of sexualized Chinese gay male bodies, per se, has cultural and political significance. A means of showing gay men’s “ability to do sex.”

Chong: This leads to our next premise.

2: Porn has a long history in China, and that history informs the present.

It’s notable that the oppressed social and political circumstances of the last half century did not reduce, well, horniness, even if porn could lead to arrests and punishment. The popularity of so-called hand-copied literature (手抄本) during and after the Cultural Revolution is revealing about how youth at the time experienced their sexuality. They would reinterpret the literature they were exposed to while copying,  adding descriptions about lesbian sex, exotic places and so on. These risky reinterpretations show how the youth, subjectively, wanted to access sexuality-related information and challenge the mainstream discourse about sexuality even during peak Maoism.

About half a century later, when I conduct my fieldwork and interview my student participants, almost every single one of them can talk about porn. Some of them even share the names and features of their favorite porn stars with me without feeling timid. These include Chinese stars (from unlicensed porn-centric apps and websites), some Japanese ones (e.g. Sola Aoi, Yui Hatano, and Erika Momotani), and some white actors (they did not remember their names but did remember their faces).

Runze: Yes, Chinese gay men are also certainly not shy or reticent in talking about their porn consumption. Some of them are even willing to share their experiences of producing pornographic content. In a recent co-authored study, which explores Chinese gay men's self-made sex videos on Twitter, I also found that many Chinese gay men are more open about this subject than I would have expected. Reflecting upon my experience, I believe pornography is not a taboo topic for many young Chinese (gay) individuals who were willing and happy to share their stories about this.

Chong: That said, there is a paradox here: this “openness” is set against a reluctance, a suspicion, a kind of moral judgment, whenever porn is mentioned. This is our third premise.

3: Porn is illegal in China, and this illegality colors the manner and texture of its consumption.

This dynamic within the porn ecology in China is quite note-worthy. Referring to the policies and laws, such as the Criminal Law of The People’s Republic of China (1997) and the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Penalties for Administration of Public Security (2006), nobody can access porn legally as it is against the law to manufacture and disseminate porn. Watching porn, although not technically illegal, still could carry risks since “producing, transporting, duplicating, selling, and renting out” porn could be seen as breaking the law. Moreover, the definition of each is not usually clear.

Hand-in-hand with this “transgressive” reality is porn’s connection with aspiration. One of my fieldwork participants, a boy, told me he thought watching porn was like a habit to him, and it maybe even had nothing to do with his sexual desire. He had two elder sisters, and he was the little son in his family. His parents, therefore, had set a “high standard” for him and wished for him to go to one of China’s top universities. Referring to a study focusing on youth porn watching in Taiwan, the motivation behind habitual porn watching is linked to high expectations from parents and society. Porn thus becomes a shelter to youth to help them escape the pressure, frustration and boredom in the competitive circumstances brought on by the implementation of the One-Child Policy and neo-liberal demands.

A short Arrow Factory documentary about the market for high-end sex doll manufacturing in China.

Runze: The anthropologist Lisa Rofel writes in her book Desiring China that “the specificity of neoliberalism in China lies in the production of desire”. I am in total agreement—the idea of “desire” is the key to understanding China's social transformation over the past several decades. What is more related to the idea of “desire” than porn? By understanding how porn is produced and consumed in China, the complexity of the construction of sexualities in China can be unpacked.

Chong: In the late 80s, and especially after the student movement in 1989, porn was assumed to be the result of bourgeois liberalization, a symbol of a “decadent capitalist way of life.” It was common to link porn watching to criminal activities, and to link “deviancy” in sexuality to crime. The specter of hooliganism (流氓罪), raised in the 1970s, and although retired in 1997, still has a deterrent impact on society. The word “hooligan (流氓)” is still frequently used in a school setting, and in my research amongst youth, the ones who talked about sexuality-related topics, even if just to express their confusion, told me that they would be gossiped about or publicly shamed.

That reminds me of a very interesting thing that happened recently. I went to the pub near my university in the UK with a group of Chinese PhD students. After I introduced myself, a female PhD student slut-shamed me and asked, “how many men have you ever touched?” I was (and still am) not even close to her!

Runze: I think there are also political and technological dimensions in reading, watching (or producing) porn. We need to stress that the making and distribution of sexually explicit materials (homosexual or heterosexual) is illegal in China, and the government has increasingly tightened its control and censorship of pornography on the internet. Despite these efforts, it is not difficult for the public to access porn, particularly for those who live in more economically developed areas.

Results from the 2006 Sexuality Survey of China showed that 51.1% of participants had seen sexually explicit media content (such as images and videos) in the year before the survey was conducted. By 2010, this percentage had risen to 65.8%, of which 25.9% had actively searched for sexually explicit content, including texts, pictures and videos. VPN use is common since the Great Firewall actively blocks most porn sites or platforms where porn might be hosted.

Tianyu: The most popular board on Caoliu (草榴社区), China’s most famous porn BBS, is a current affairs forum known as “technical discussion area” (技术讨论区). In between NSFW posts are, in fact, uncensored discussions about international politics and domestic policy, as well as reposts of censored WeChat articles.

But I think this porn-to-politics, nudes-to-news pipeline has also shifted to Twitter, where a lot of Chinese people came for the porn and stayed for the minyun keyboard warriors (mostly men) of Sinophone Twitter.

In most of these circles misinformation is rampant, and most are bad takes; still, I’d love to read a paper on this if anyone is interested in an investigation.

Chong: Despite the hard censorship, Chinese people can and always find ways to access pornography. I remember during the first day at the vocational school which was my research site, a few boys approached me during their lunch break in the playground with my research information sheets in their hands. They asked me the reason why I wanted to carry out this research. ‘You research sexuality, right? Is it not about porn and all that mature stuff?’ they giggled, and then one of the boys continued to ask, 'would you not feel shame when you talk about them?' I soon identified it as an opportunity to build rapport with them by saying that there was nothing right or wrong in talking about sexuality, and it was all about personal choice to watch and read porn. After hearing my response, these boys were no longer confrontational and showed their strong interest in my research, then asked me how they could participate in my project.

Runze: I also experienced a similar thing in my fieldwork. When I asked my participants how they “realised” their same-sex desires, many of them answered “porn”. Some individuals found that when they were watching straight porn with their mates, they were less attracted by the female actor, but rather stimulated by the male ones. Some participants also told me that it was watching gay porn that let them “confirm” their sexuality.

Chaoyang TrapS02 Episode 2: Press F to Review BombIn the house this week: Aaron, Yuxin, Jason, Christina, Simon, Krish, Tianyu, and Henry. Krish: Welcome to Episode 2. This is the first in a two-part series about video games in China…Read more5 months ago · 8 likes · Tianyu M. Fang

Yi-Ling: I wonder how porn is defined and categorized, and how that definition has perhaps shifted over the last three decades (especially, when it comes to defining legality of content.) Is content that contains same-sex desire more likely to be labelled as “porn” than heterosexual content that is not? (i.e. Danmei literature?) I also wonder how porn fits in the discourse of the “vulgar,” as labeled by various state censorship organs. Is there an overlap between pornography and the “vulgar?” Or are they now kind of siloed into two wholly separate categories, in the eyes of content consumers and content regulators?

Krish: Just from my specific niche as a former social media manager for Chinese brands, most platforms just use crude, sometimes hilariously excessive, filtering for “黄” content that they see as pornographic. Images I've had to delete after being labeled porn have included, over the years, photos of crowd surfers, an illustration of a baby in a onesie, a punk band singer screaming into a mic, and a beer poster that was vaguely flesh colored.

咸湿佬: We talk about this a little later on, but I think it’s worth emphasizing that (although I guess maybe Chong or Runze would have some actual data on this) the heavy regulation of porn in China seems like it has actually resulted in a lot more amateur porn in China than other markets. That heavy reliance on amateur porn to fill the ‘gap’ has also created huge online communities that I don’t feel like exist at the same scale elsewhere—I don’t know if there are really any sites in other places that have the level of activity or influence that Caoliu or 91porn seem to in China, especially given their specific cultural localization as compared to global sites like Pornhub.

Taiwanese porn studios are also another interesting aspect of this - I don't know anything about the history of cross-straits porn relations, but it seems like the popularity of professional Taiwanese porn producers like Madou Studios (麻豆) in recent years is an example of companies filling the gap left from censorship cutting off the supply of local, professional porn content.

Chong: During my fieldwork, many student participants told me that Japanese porn was their “enlightener.” It is worth mentioning that Japanese porn is the most common type mentioned among all my student participants. Japanese porn first entered China in the 1990s, and its popularization in China is a fascinating cultural phenomenon alongside China’s social transformation.

In the famous online community Caoliu, there are different categories available for people to download—Asian porn censored, uncensored, European and American porn, animated porn, Chinese porn, porn with Chinese subtitles and so forth.

The popularization of Japanese porn can be seen as a kind of decentralization of Western-country-dominated discourse about globalization in East Asia. Moreover, the imagination of 'being modern,' based on China and Japan's cultural similarities, could hardly be negotiated solely by American culture.  In one of my interviews, a high school kid could not wait to tell me about his “taste” for porn. He told me he liked Japanese porn more than European and American porn. He explained that “we look more similar and it can help me imagine that I am having sex with my girlfriend”. This similarity in East Asian Countries, to some extent, also rationalizes the popularization and acceptance of Japanese porn amongst youth.

Runze: yes, Japanese porn was also very popular among Chinese gay communities. But there are also many gay indiviudals that fancy western “studio” gay porn. Facilated by the internet, some young Chinese gay men have already developed a specific taste towards western gay porn production from a very young age—a kind of transnational sexualization of culture. Within this context, a few participants reported a strong preference for Western (white) men. They jokingly use the term “western food girl” [potato queen/西餐妹] to describe themselves. Arguably, a Chinese modernity has bought into Western gay attitudes towards sex and gay (porn) aesthetics, seemingly supporting filmmaker and researcher Katrien Jacobs’ claim about ‘erotic-cultural imperialism’ in China. She points out that sexual imagination here has been hijacked by a peculiar kind of “euramerican” style and suggests “a reclaiming of Chinese sexual bodies through “home-made pornography content [that] would be important to even out dominant scripting of eroticism and perversity by overseas producers.”

Chong: Compared to boys, girls were more likely to deliberately search for (or admit that they had searched for) gay porn and Boys Love (BL) comics and literature. ​​BL and gay porn filled in an important gap in China’s inadequate sexuality education. A girl participant told me that, to a certain extent, she obtained knowledge about the existence of sexual minorities and understood civil society according to her active exploration of BL and gay porn. Due to governmental suppression of sexual minorities’ rights, knowledge about LGBT issues is often deliberately obscured and hidden. Even though, taking a long view, the situation is much better than in previous years—at least homosexuality is no longer identified as a mental health disease since the mid-2000s.

Some girls also told me that compared to heterosexual porn, they prefer to watch gay porn more than other types.

The reason: in heterosexual porn, women are usually exploited, degraded and objectified and it made the girls feel uncomfortable. Gay porn, then, provides girls opportunities to get away from widely existing binary gender stereotypes and opt out from the manipulation and unequal power relationships (at least in personal media choices). From Japan to China, from the submissive to the grass-roots, in the trend of social transformation, porn is a double-edged sword—a battleground. It has given multiple possibilities to different people to deal with gender (in)equalities in society.

Runze: Interestingly, and more recently, there is a rise in the locally produced gay porn market that is challenging this “erotic-cultural imperialism.” Around 2010, a series of locally produced gay porn films under the brand name “Chitu” (赤兔) has gained popularity among gay men in China. Arguably Chitu can be seen as the first gay porn series in China. Following the success of Chitu, there are more and more individuals and groups take part in the local gay porn production in China.

Although the production of Chitu has stopped, similar forms of homo-erotic media and gay porn productions are actively continuing in corners of the Chinese web. For instance, another series of locally produced gay porn films under the brand name ‘A Big Cock Man’ gained popularity in the Chinese gay community beginning in late 2016. With the popularity of Tumblr and later Twitter, more and more ordinary Chinese gay men also become DIY porn producers.

These DIY porn creators are often referred to as wanghuang (网黄), a term derived from wanghong (网红, “internet famous”) swapping the “red” for “yellow.” A recent paper by Lin Song offers a really fascinating insight into the phenomenon, arguing that wanghuangs represent both a willing submission to, and an active negation of, commodification and state censorship.

Chong: Wrapping up, we should talk about porn’s affects in China, and how it functions as education in the absence of comprehensive sex-ed.

One of my student participants, a 17 year-old boy,  told me that he usually felt guilty when watching porn and swore not to watch it anymore. Part of his guilt was about morality - he felt he was breaking the law every time he watched porn. Having been identified as 'spiritual opium', 'yellow pollution' and 'spiritual poison' by the public and even the authorities, porn is usually being sold as an entirely negative thing to youth. While on the other hand, these nicknames explain why youth cannot resist porn as a transgressive pleasure.

It is actually a very tricky situation. I have multiple roles in the field of sexuality education—I research, teach, and consult. As a sociologist, I can confidently say that the youth benefit when they watch porn. To be specific, it can help them release pressures and at least have some fun and explore their identities. However, as a teacher and a consultant, when I cooperate with the authorities and schools, it becomes unrealistic to mention the positive part of watching porn to youth, because practically, it is still vital to follow the rules and the law.

Runze: Interestingly, not many of my gay participants felt guilty when watching porn. For the majority of (young) participants, when they first started to explore their sexual identity online, they would naturally encounter pornographic content. Specifically, for many participants from post-1980s and post-1990s generations [80 后和 90 后], the Internet has become Chinese gay men’s major (if not only) information source for sexually explicit materials. In fact, when many of my younger participants accessed information on homosexuality online, they found that sexually explicit material was the first thing that turned up, which suggests that homoeroticism is inseparable in the construction of gay identity. However, this access is not free from censorship or state control. Many participants noticed the government’s tightening-up censorship on Internet (gay) pornography. They often expressed that getting access to gay porn online was much easier when they were younger.

Chong: Porn stars are often called 'teachers' by youth in China, including by many of my student participants. Simultaneously, some of my student participants looked to porn for answers when there was no one to ask for help. For example, some of the girls I interviewed told me they did not know where to ask sex-related questions. Compared to boys, they found talking about sexuality to peers was a difficult task.

▲ A series of hand-drawn sex-ed videos, now deleted from the Chinese web, that went viral in 2014.

Another participant of mine told me that he learned a lot about sexuality through porn. He specifically highlighted knowledge about contraception—through porn watching, he learned that ejaculating on his sex partners’ bellies could be an efficient way to avoid making girls pregnant.  Ignoring the accuracy and leap of logic in this particular instance, porn had some educational benefits to almost all of my participants, caused in part by the conservative attitude towards sexuality. “The underground circulation of pornography” functions, in a sense, as an informal educational network. In this case, calling porn stars 'teachers' and using porn as a critical learning material shows the everyday encounter with sexuality in youth’s lives.. It also expresses an attitude of resistance against 'the dominant belief that "pornography is poison"' widely advocated by China's legal system and mass media.

▲ “Why Most Women Hate Oral Sex,” from popular sex-focused video channel ChaoZhiBai (超直白)

Runze: This is so true. Like I mentioned earlier, the internet has become the major source for Chinese gay men to explore their sexualities. Digital technologies provide sorely needed alternative spaces for LGBTQ folks to acquire and practice sexual knowledge. The internet creates a relatively safe space where gay men are empowered to satisfy their curiosity, learn about sex, and talk about topics they would unlikely discuss otherwise.

Tianyu: On the subject of online communities, a few other random things about Caoliu:

• The website never got banned banned. Their main domain has long been on the GFW blacklist, but they’ve managed to mirror the site on different servers and temporary domains. You can always find a list of their most recent mirror URLs in one way or another, somewhere on the Chinese internet.
• Caoliu had a reputation for the civility of its users. Quarrels were very rare because community rules are strictly enforced; since the site is invitation-based, and they stopped handing out new invitation codes long ago, I imagine no one is willing to get their handle permanently banned so that they could win an argument. (You need an account to add or reply to posts, but anyone can browse/download.)
• New users on Caoliu needed to wait at least 1024 seconds between two replies. For whatever reason, people on Caoliu started writing “1024” in the comments to thank the OP. But this practice was later introduced to non-porn BBS forums, so it wasn’t uncommon to see entire threads of “1024” on SFW messaging boards.

Simon: I feel slightly awkward commenting on this as a straight white man  but in any case, porn seems like another interesting example of a cultural space in China defined by absence. I remember once hearing that sex shops used to be so ubiqituous in Beijing in part because porn was illegal, and thus “sex” had to be sold another way.

What do people think the future of porn in China will look like? Runze mentions that it has gradually become more difficult to access gay porn online; I wonder if changing heterosexual mores might bring straight porn more into the open? If high birthrates are being encouraged these days, does that make (heteronormative) desire good in the eyes of the state? As noted above, porn is often an escape from reality rather than oriented towards real life (reproductive) sex, so perhaps the connection here is tenuous, but I wonder how attitudes and laws might change.

Krish: More a comment than an answer, but it’s fascinating to see how erotica and nudity have become such signficant presences at any art book fair in China, or at illustration fairs like Singularity Plan (奇点计划). There’s an overlap there with slash culture, which will be the subject of a future Chaoyang Trap episode [doge].

Jaime: Lin Song put it well when he describes “illiberal homonormativity" as “a situation where consumer culture functions as one of the very few, if not only public channel for queer expressions and negotiations under illiberal rule" and “the marriage between queerness and commerciality may be at once enabling and restricting, liberating and normalizing, and apparently assimilationist and tactically oppositional."

He speaks explicitly to the production of DIY gay porn and the consumption of homosexual culture but I think this can apply to other kinds of imported subcultures (sexual, underground, or otherwise) that are seen as threatening to the heterorthodoxy of the state. this is how we get publications like MISSIONARY—issue 3 is dedicated to porn—which, while a necessary corrective to the invisibility of gay media, aestheticizes queer and sexual culture in a way that lacks self-consciousness about the way class—and capitalist relations, and capitalist relations with Chinese feudal/hukou characteristics—functions to enable or disable sexual power.

Mainstream society co-opts or accepts deviant sexuality in so far as it also upholds values that are in service of maintaining other categories of social hegemony—think about how MISSIONARY is bilingual, pro-VPN, and quotes no less than three European philosophers in each issue. This is, by the way, connected to the thesis of Christopher Chitty's Sexual Hegemony, which crucially (and mindbendingly) proposes a Marxist framework to account for the policing of homosexuality at various urban junctures throughout the rise of capitalism. Chitty stops at American bourgeois hegemony in the 20th century (RIP) but what I would give to read the unwritten chapter on how Chinese sexual history fits into the development of China's demented form of capitalism, common prosperity/xiaokang society policy goal, and its unique population (control) struggles outside of Western liberal order.

咸湿佬: Personally, I look forward to the evolution of porn advertising, where China is already on the bleeding edge of innovation. This randomly selected video is a great case in point:

• the actors are playing a mobile poker game being advertised in the video
• this clip is immediately followed by an actual embedded ad clip for the game
• there are printed signs in the room advertising the game
• there are digital overlays on the video repeating the same ad!

And this one isn’t even pushing the boundaries - there are also examples of native ads like the porn site being displayed in a billboard in a passing shot, context-aware bouncing ads, temporary tattoos on actors’ bodies, and more…who knows what the future holds.

(If you are the person who makes these ads and you happen to see this newsletter, please contact @ChaoyangTrap, because we have…questions.)

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Krish: Outro music this week is the lead single from the new Absolute Purity album. “Baroque sludge post-punk” is my attempt at describing the sound.

It’s a great direction for this band. Singer Wen Jun used to front beloved short-lived noise rock outfit Guai Li, and this takes just the right amount of nostalgic inspiration from the 2010s Beijing scene and pushes it into fun, noisy, gothy, poppy territory.

Tianyu: Bye!

Chong Liu is completely safe for work. She is also interested in the sexual abstinence culture in China.

Runze Ding is a post-doc researcher in Shenzhen where he cannot say he is studying porn out loud. He hopes to find a job position in which he can do more “sexy” research projects.

Jen Rao aka drift & dune is an illustrator and artist based in Beijing, and the co-founder and creative director of nugget records, a DIY cassette label and venue.

Krish Raghav is a comic-book artist now based in Amsterdam. His attempts at drawing erotica always turn into body horror :(

咸湿佬 works 996 hours but is NSFW.

Yi-Ling Liu learned earlier this month that the first sex shop in China was called Adam & Eve.

Simon Frank wanted to write that he lives in Beijing’s sexiest district, but then realized if he looked up “Beijing’s sexiest district” online he’d be very disturbed by the results.

Tianyu Fang is visiting Amsterdam in two weeks. He drunk-tweeted on August 19, 2021: “chaoyang trap season 2 on onlyfans.“

Jaime (bot) is still trapped in Chaoyang.

This dispatch appeared in S02 Episode 6, along with Putting the Hack in Hakka Noodles by Yan. Cover illustration by Jason Li.

Tianyu: Let's talk about Shaxian, the restaurant chain that’s everywhere in Chinese cities…no one really knows who owns it or how many of them are knock-offs. I don’t remember the exact details of my first (helplessly intoxicated) visit to Shaxian in Fuzhou. I recall that the beef noodle soup that I had ordered was extraordinarily cheap, and while I struggled to actually find beef in it, I was too drunk to complain.

There is a collective diaspora craving for Shaxian Delicacies: the idea of affordable, pan-Chinese dining that opens until late night. The food doesn’t have to be good, but it would be nice to know there is one around the neighborhood. I recently encountered (with fellow Chaoyang Trap resident Henry Zhang) a Shaxian Delicacies in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We didn’t go in because we had just had lunch, and we weren’t sure if it was shanzhai. In any case, it was soothing to reunite with the red-and-green Pac-Man logo.

For our second story this week, Zoe pays tribute to the Shaxian cult with her trademark combination of gonzo, immersive, investigative and method journalism:

Zoe: It’s 3 AM and you just came out of a live music show, craving late night comfort food to wrap up your epic night out. Chances are, you’ll see a Pac-Man like logo on the street corner and chomp your way to it. Instead of an action maze chase video game adventure, you will experience the slightly surreal essence of Han Chinese cuisine.

沙县小吃 (“Shaxian Delicacies”) is the most culturally invasive Chinese restaurant brand in the whole world, truly the Shen Yun of snack joints. I’m telling you- there are at least three Shaxians in Brooklyn, including a knock-off. It’s not as flamboyant as Laoganma, the Chinese chili oil that has stormed American dining tables, but Shaxian Delicacies has quietly taken over countless shopping streets and urban walking routes, pervading your life by opening right next to your apartment compounds.

1873 results for Shaxian locations on Dianping, and this is just Beijing.

Shaxian Delicacies started out in Shaxian, aka Sha County, a district of Sanming in Fujian province. While a mostly typical southern cuisine, Shaxian food features surprising fusion with northern flavors. This is part of the reason why Shaxian Delicacies have become so popular all over the country, unintentionally creating a pan-Chinese palate. The food culture of Shaxian and other places in Fujian benefited from the two waves of migrations from the Zhongyuan region (roughly Henan, Shaanxi, and Hebei) down south, during which a large number of northern Han Chinese poured into Fujian, bringing the food culture of the north to Shaxian and other places in the South.To a lot of Chinese, it tracks as vaguely “representative”—capturing a kind of essence, the profundity of Chinese food culture (but not entirely).

Shaxian is my favorite drunk food—very much like dollar pizza on 6th Ave, mostly because they both open after midnight and serve tasty carbs to drunk people. Another virtue of Shaxian (and dollar pizzas) that I highly appreciate is that they are truly hospitable dining spaces where everyone is welcomed - Shaxian is probably the most affordable restaurant food that you can buy. A warm bowl of wontons at Shaxian after work is the best treat for an Ele.me delivery driver. A broke college student struggling to support themselves can always get a sumptuous dinner at Shaxian Delicacies. And you can also spot well-dressed salarymen sitting at a dining table in Shaxian slurping their piaoxiang noodles.

I remember reading a Douban post in which the OP only had three kuai left in their pocket. Cold and starving, not knowing where to go, they decided to go to a Shaxian. The owner of that Shaxian near their university generously offered to serve them more steamed dumplings for free and asked if they had enough money to make their trip back to campus. Shaxian to me is a hodgepodge that mixes social classes.

In front of a bowl of Shaxian dumplings, everyone is equal. Alright, I might have gone too far…

Shaxian Delicacies is key among the many things Mr. Xi has looked at, often during his tenure in Fujian. According to a Xinhua report, “Mr. Xi Jinping's care and support during his tenure in Fujian was the key to Shaxian Delicacies evolving into a worldwide industry coming from a tiny backwater town.” Apparently the then-vice party secretary of Fujian noticed the potential of the local food industry when he was visiting in 1999 and suggested the major attraction of Shaxian was cheap and cheerful, spotting the “lower consumption market.”

In the early 1990s, thousands of people left their hometowns to make a living in the catering industry. This coincided with the wave of ‘Xiahai’ 下海, which led to a surge in the urban migrant population and its demand for food, accommodation and travel. The affordable price of Shaxian Delicacies grasped the hearts and tummies of the low consumption residents.

This is on-point. Apart from this apt analysis, I also want to share this hot take from Shaxian locals:

In the eyes of Shaxian people, Bianrou 扁肉 (a type of Fujianese dumplings) are ‘bricks’, and Ban Mian 拌面 (Fujian-style stirred noodles) are ‘steels.’ The local street food has been built into the skyscrapers of Shaxian.

This description of Shaxian food somehow sounds very earthy and “industrialized,” but I assure you the food served at Shaxian Delicacies is generally quite excellent. My favorite is “Fragrant Stirred Noodles 飘香拌面.” It comes coated with soy sauce and peanut butter (unsweetened), sprinkled with a bit of salt and sugar, and garnished with a pinch of chopped spring onions. Give it a solid stir to evenly mix the seasonings with the boiled noodles, and our taste buds will be completely captured by this simple carb bomb.

As a curious human being, I assume that people must be very curious about the ownership of this restaurant brand. Owning thousands of branches in China and abroad, Shaxian’s owner must be a millionaire. I tried to do some research about this mysterious brand, not expecting to hit the wall at the first step—even the official website of Shaxian Delicacies doesn’t work. Typical Shaxian style. But deep diving into all public records about the brand, finally something much clearer has emerged.

Shaxian was initially a collective run by locals from Shaxian. During the early 90s, Shaxian locals flocked to southern coastal cities to sell street food. Seeing their peers raking in money in the big cities, fellow villagers smelled the profits from the burgeoning catering industry and followed the army of Shaxian street food vendors, starting to open more restaurants selling Shaxian food in the cities. Everyone just unconsciously adopted the name Shaxian Delicacies. As its reputation grew, non-Shaxian locals also began to emulate their recipes and further expanded the brand's influence all over China and even abroad. This also explains why originally Shaxian Delicacies were only managed by Shaxian locals, but nowadays we do see quite a lot of non-locals running them.

Please don’t ask me how they came up with the Pac-Man like logo. I have not yet gotten to the end of that investigation.

Simon: I had heard previously that there were a lot of Henanese migrants in Fujian, but I hadn’t really thought about that in terms of it creating a kind of north-south fusion cuisine in Shaxian, which is super interesting. Zoe, recently you mentioned to me that you’re starting to notice less Shaxian Delicacies, which makes me wonder if it’s a sign of China growing out of the “lower consumption market” that creates the need for it. I remember reading an article a few years ago about how growing prosperity (as well as delivery services) were killing off instant noodle sales in China. What might replace Shaxian’s supremacy at home? Maybe the much discussed luosifen fad of the past few years might demonstrate more cosmopolitan palettes, a search for the exotic and new (within national borders) rather than the comforting?

Also, as a *闽 Appreciator* I’d be remiss to not mention my minor beef with Shaxian Delicacies: by completely cornering the lower end market, it makes it very hard to find Fujianese food around China that isn’t either dirt cheap or in a super expensive seafood restaurant. In Beijing at least, it’s only been in the past few years that mid-range restaurants offering (excellent) food from Xiamen and Quanzhou have opened up.

Krish: Outro music this week is the double bill of:

1/ Simon’s ‘What’s the Point?’ show on BAIHUI, followed by;

2/ This hour-long “GO GO ROUND THE FISHMANS” mix by friend of the newsletter Hayley, featuring everyone’s favorite Japanese psych rocksteady trio.

Tianyu: Thank you for reading! Please share, subscribe, and tell us about your ingredient substitution ideas via email (hello AT chaoya.ng) or Twitter @ChaoyangTrap.

In the house this week: Yan, Zoe, Jason, Krish, Tianyu, Lisha, Aaron, Caiwei, Jaime, and Simon.

This dispatch appeared in S02 Episode 6, along with Shaxian Can't be Fucked With by Zoe. Cover illustration by Krish Raghav.

Tianyu: Happy Year of the Tiger! Let’s talk about food.

Krish: Our two stories this week are about the everyday life of Chinese food, and how malleable, inclusive and wonderfully creative local adaptations of national food cultures can be. Too much of writing about Chinese food in English gets tangled up in issues of “authenticity,” and the subjects of both our stories resist definitions of the authentic so fiercely that the word might as well be useless.

Jaime: Authenticity is for nerds.

Krish: First, Yan goes into an internet rabbit hole to find Tahini-Linguine Hot Dry Noodles.

Meanwhile Zoe writes an ode to Shaxian Delicacies—China’s best drunk food staple.

Neither would feature in any traditional depiction of Chinese food, but I always think of this perfect parody of A Bite of China where the making of instant noodles is an epic adventure:  

Food cultures are sustained by everyday adaptation and sharing, what the writer A.K. Ramanujan calls “an infinite use of finite means.” On the social platform Xiaohongshu (小红书, also known as Red), Yan discovers sharing that resembles a form of homesickness mutual aid:

Yan: It all started with pizza dough.

I was scrolling through my feed on Xiaohongshu, my go-to Chinese social platform for life hacks, or more specifically, recipes for Chinese dishes created by and for overseas Chinese. A photo of youtiao popped up. Beneath it the headline read, “Newbie friendly! Make delicious youtiao with pizza dough.”

I was shook. I’ve never associated pizza dough with youtiao. I’ve never associated pizza dough with anything other than pizza.

Since I moved to Amsterdam last September, I’ve been consuming Xiaohongshu as a sort-of productivity/home decor/inspiration blog. Although it is known as a platform full of fashion influencers who help sell clothes and cosmetics to a predominantly female user base, small niches have emerged in its culture that encourage all kinds of sharing: from “10 IKEA products every home should have” to “5 tricks that help you to write a literature review in an hour.” A news story pointed out that parts of Xiaohongshu resemble TripAdvisor or Wirecutter. A podcast even called Xiaohongshu the Zhihu (a male-dominated Chinese equivalent of Quora) for women.

Using Xiaohongshu feels a bit like playing with the bastard child of Instagram and TikTok: photos and videos show up on my “Explore” feed in an endless scroll. From my experience, it seems like the Xiaohongshu algorithm is a bit smooth-brained: it just doubles down on content you’ve shown any interaction with. So my pizza dough encounter opened up an entire genre of cooking among overseas users on Xiaohongshu that had been unknown to me: Ingredient Substitution (食材平替).

My feed was never the same again. I'm now obsessed with the genre.

Imagine you’re a Chinese student living abroad. You’re on a limited budget, and your access to ingredients is limited. Pandemic and supply-chain restrictions mean care packages and trips home are impossible. The food you’re craving isn’t “restaurant food” but rather regional specialties or niche, home-cooked dishes.

Enter 食材平替, “Ingredient Substitution.” The classics of the genre represent people’s diverse daily cravings that a regular Chinese restaurant can’t fulfill, existing at the venn diagram intersection of “cheap”, “possible” and “satisfying.”

Before we dive into its three sub-genres, follow the flowchart and see which category you fall into:

Lazy/busy cook’s compromise - Pizza dough for youtiao/baozi/xianbing

Pizza dough embodies the first school of thought behind ingredient substitution: maximizing taste with a minimum amount of time and effort. A purist may frown upon this style of cooking, but it’s the perfect solution for people who don’t want to, or don’t have the time to, get their hands dirty. Pizza dough saves you the trouble of measuring flour and water, getting all the wet bits off of your hands when mixing the dough, and hours of waiting for a dough to rise. You speedrun the process by getting it ready-made in a grocery store.

Cooking with pizza dough also takes speedrun’s underlying logic: it requires imagination and an understanding of the object at hand in order to take advantage of it. Like speedrunners exploiting common bugs in game design, Xiaohongshu users take advantage of pizza dough as a premade mixture of flour, water and yeast, and repurpose it for making any flour-based dish.

I’ve made Beef pancakes and Shengjian Bao with pizza dough following recipes I found, and both attempts were successful. The outside was crunchy and golden, and the stuffing juicy. They weren’t perfect—I wished the dough had risen a bit more to give it a fluffy texture on top of the crunchiness, but they did the job. 8/10 would dough again.

Caiwei: This is the same “decompose rearrange” shit Chinese cooking (especially baking) enthusiasts have been seeing for a few years—I think essentially a result of China's yet undeveloped food industry, and also caused by a disparity in shared knowledge on food, especially when it comes to pastries. A good example is using ready-to-eat shou zhua bing (手抓饼, often translated as “pancakes” but come on it’s a paratha and even Jay Chou knows) dough to make Palmiers or egg tart crust. You cannot buy puff pastry at Chinese grocery stores, but you would have better luck finding frozen shou zhua bing even at the store in the smallest Chinese town. The substitution is amazing and uniquely diasporic because it takes knowledge from both food culture and a good amount of reverse-engineering/code-cracking, and reveals this deep resonance between cultures remote to each other, which I find beautiful.

Radical substitution - Sauerkraut vs. Suancai; Tahini vs. Hot Dry Noodles

Yan: Radical substitution has the most “fusion” potential. I call it radical not because it dramatically changes the cooking process, but because it’s the most adventurous and creative sub-genre in breaking boundaries between ingredients and national borders, challenging people’s preconceived idea of cuisine-specific ingredients.

Sauerkraut can be remixed as suancai (酸菜) in dishes from northeastern China. Tahini can be appropriated as the main component for the sauce in Hot Dry Noodles (热干面), a Wuhan signature. Can’t find alkali noodles for authentic Hot Dry Noodles? Use Linguine for similar taste and texture. Miss midnight snack 烤冷面? Use Lasagna to recreate the infamous street food.

Here’s a hilarious example of the same principle applied to cooking equipment: when you have friends over to make dumplings together but have only one rolling pin, use wine bottles or bowls!

Reverse engineering - Making tudoufen from scratch

This last subgenre of cooking is the opposite of the first one: instead of taking a shortcut, it takes a detour. When ingredients hard to come by are not easily substitutable, or when a purist is craving for an authentic bite of their favorite dish, it’s possible to make some ingredients from scratch.

This accidental crossover with “slow food” does require more awareness of the ingredients themselves. It’s important to note that this kind of “first principles” thinking can be quite radical for casual cooks. Before I read the tudoufen (土豆粉, potato noodles) recipe from Xiaohongshu, it’s just a product I buy from dried food shelves in Asian groceries. I never thought about what it is made of, and how it is made: Mix potato starch with water and hit it up. Stir the mixture until it turns into a dough. The rest of the process is the same as making noodles.

Another advantage with this style of cooking is that it can be super cheap! As this recipe brags in the headline, “enjoy tudoufen at home for 75 cents!” With the global supply chain crisis, food products shipped from China are getting expensive—if you can even find them at all. If you’re a broke student who wants to save money, this is for you.

I can’t stop thinking of what Xuandi wrote in his senior fashion story in Season 1 last year. Influencers on Xiaohongshu usually want to sell you something, turning everything they touch into “derivative and banal” facsimiles. It is the opposite with Ingredient Substitution recipes: when specific products are mentioned, I never feel I was being sold something. I feel reassured that someone has tested it and successfully made a dish that I will one day make myself. Like senior fashion, they are creative yet unassuming: they aren’t monetizing their visibility or preaching shallow multiculturalism or in-your-face globalism. They’re not weaponizing nostalgia, but rather using it as an act of care, a way to feel more grounded wherever they may be.

At the end of the day, Ingredient Substitution is about living in a foreign country—adapting and getting by. Surviving and coping with the impossibility of going home. When I see a recipe being replicated, modded, or speedrun, I don’t see them as copycats trying to capture traffic and boost follower counts on Xiaohongshu. I see them as people who, in search of the old and familiar, have created something new.

Aaron: The exact same thing that happened to Yan has happened to me since I moved back to the US from Beijing late last year. Xiaohongshu is convinced that I’m a Chinese student living abroad instead of the 30-something white American that I actually am, and has delivered me a steady stream of Ingredient Substitution recipes since I demonstrated my interest by clicking on one of them.

Instead of Tesco tahini though, Xiaohongshu users in the US are particularly obsessed with Costco and Trader Joe’s, plus the occasional posts about Whole Foods. It’s been interesting for me to see, and has led to me using the app way more here than I ever did in China. In China, I’d find myself hate-browsing Xiaohongshu only if I was bored, but in the US I actively look forward to seeing the creative ways in which people can recreate the taste of home. It really does feel like a better, more creative version of Xiaohongshu. Now I just need to decide which one of these ten recipes for using Trader Joe’s uncured Black Forest Bacon as a Hunan la rou substitute I should actually cook…

Simon: In one sense Xiaoshongshu substitution cooking might just be the latest iteration of a longer process of the adaptation of food (foodways?) through immigration, itself speaking to the specificities of current patterns of migration. Subbing sauerkraut for suancai sounds fairly similar to the types of improvisation that created Chinese-American food. What might be different now is the class of the people doing this cooking, and, for some of them, the temporary nature of their sojourns outside of China. Will this become part of global Chinese cooking, but stay as a subculture for students, or is someone going to open a beef pancake place in Amsterdam that takes surprising cues from pizza and pide?

As a foreigner that’s spent a significant chunk of my life in China, I can relate to Aaron’s feeling of missing the flavors of a home that is not your home. One of my favorite foreigner-oriented media outlets in China is actually the YouTube channel “Chinese Cooking Demystified,” which I admit to binge watching and cooking from when I want to do something engaged with my surroundings, but also switch off the second-language part of my brain. Yet this is also strange, because part of the channel’s allure is about teaching you how to make inaccessible regional speciality/restaurant dishes while out of China—perhaps I am mentally preparing myself for departure… Anyway, I think they do a good job breaking down some of the differences between restaurant and home cooking, and actually have a video on making Shaxian Delicacies’ iconic peanut noodles. I have crisped green onions in lard to make it, which is pretty funny considering there is a Shaxian Delicacies 50 meters from my house. Imagining cooking it outside of China speaks to the power of nostalgia and distance, where something absolutely ubiquitous and mundane becomes alluring…

In the house this week: Yi-Ling, Tianyu, Simon, Krish, and Yan.

Yi-Ling: Rewilding is an exploration into the language of the Chinese internet.

In each issue, I pick a word from the labyrinthine swamp of online life in China, lay it on the table, scrutinize it and take it apart in the form of a mini-essay, then replant the pieces, sowing seeds for further conversation.

This week: the waves.

In May 2020, to celebrate China’s Youth Day, Bilibili released a video called “Rear Waves, Speech for a New Generation.” Opening with a dramatic montage—an astronaut landing and a glorious sunrise over a snow-flecked mountaintop—the video unfolds into a three-minute reel of Chinese twenty-somethings doing exciting things. It is a visual orgy of Positive Energy. They are hot, young and confident. They dance in hanfu, play Chinese instruments, try out VR glasses, practice calligraphy, skydive, scuba-dive, lift weights, and pose in front of the Eiffel Tower. “I look at you filled with envy,” says celebrity actor He Bing, who narrates the video in a paternalistic, sonorous tenor, filled with what netizens called diewei or “daddy vibes.” “A nation’s most beautiful scenery is its youth. Kind, brave, selfless, fearless…Surge ahead, rear waves!”

The video went viral—amassing more than 6 million views, airing on CCTV—thrust into the national limelight, alongside the phrase “rear waves.” To those who loved it, both the video and the term “rear waves" (后浪), which comes from the proverb “as the rear waves of the Yangtze River drive on the waves in front, so the new replaces the old,” captured the sense of pride and confidence that many Chinese youth feel, or at least some imagine that many feel, living in today’s China. Reaping the riches sowed by their predecessors, they are wealthier, more powerful and more patriotic than ever before.

But many more responded to the video with cynicism, riffing on the image of the wave. “Young people have to change their lyrics to sing on a program. Young people want to create and discuss but are silenced. Flow swiftly? More like drift along in a canal that you’ve carved,” one netizen commented. “How about cutting housing prices and raising salaries for the rear waves? The rear waves are drying out,” another comment read. “Only those with financial means can have dreams,” a user posted on Weibo. “We are more of a “chive wave” jiulang, than a rear wave.”

Chive wave, jiulang, is a compound of rear wave and another viral phrase—cut chives, or gejiucai 割韭菜. Once a stock market metaphor, to describe how inexperienced investors reinvest in the stock market after loss, then a corruption metaphor, to capture how corrupt officials spring back in spite of regulation, “cut chives” is now mostly deployed in reference to young people, who stubbornly grow upwards, only to be cut down, again and again, from burnout, competition and disillusionment with the system. Unlike the rolling waves of the Yangtze, a symbol of continuous progress, cut chives embody the opposite, a symbol of despair and futile growth.

The disparity is jarring. Where is the divide? Down the lines of socio-economic class, geographic location, or political positioning? Who sincerely perceives the next generation as powerful rear waves, surging forward to assert itself? Who, in contrast, believes that growth is cyclical and futile, like frail weeds sprouting on barren land? Where does the true source of energy lie—in the aggressive power of the nation state, or in the hard-headed resilience of the people themselves? To what extent are they at odds, and to what extent do they fuel each other, entangled in mutual embrace?

Yan: “Rear Waves” was Bilibili’s clumsy attempt to define their user base as a “young generation full of positive energy.” The company successfully got several official media houses on board to circulate the video, including a 2-minute version aired at the primetime slot just before the 7pm news (新闻联播) on CCTV-1. It backfired partly because it completely turned a blind eye to the bleak reality young people actually live in. But such a video with high production quality and self-righteousness was destined to face pushback, because it just wouldn’t vibe with the user base on Bilibili, the platform that popularized playful 鬼畜 and danmu bantering. Ultimately, it’s more of a feel-good video for Bilibili Corporate to present itself as a platform that’s cultivating a new generation that is creative, driven and full of ambition.

Kuaishou does this too—despite constantly being made fun of as a 土 (“low”) platform, it tries very hard to brand itself as a short video app that “gives voice” to people who live in rural areas and offers economic opportunities previously inaccessible to farmers and migrant workers. So I wonder, what was the target audience Bilibili had in mind when they produced it? Regulators? Investors? Parents??

GenZ didn’t need to be told by a boomer who they really are.

Krish: Rear Waves is a good example of how so much of what we find interesting on the Chinese web happens at the level of the 'reply.' A meme culture sustained, somehow, by both paranoid and reparative readings. Which I guess is why concepts like positive energy (正能量) encompass not just what is created, but also responses to them.

Simon: It does definitely feel like today’s “rear waves” are having some trouble pushing to the front. Despite younger generations growing up with more opportunities than their predecessors, chances to jump a social class or reinvent yourself completely by hook or crook seem to be  scarce. There’s more of a script to follow to be a white-collar, middle class professional (which in a way is good), but it seems nearly impossible to somersault out of that cycle, which might have been doable in the heady days of the 80s or 90s.

To use contemporary art as a slightly abstracted example, most major Chinese artists are pushing 50. While there are a handful of artists in their early 40s that have just about reached the same status, below that there’s a gap—an artist in their mid-30s might still be considered “up and coming” even though their predecessors were participating in major international shows at the same age. The “secret sauce” that made established stars—participation in quasi-dissident activities in the 90s and a more open attitude towards China in the West leading to cosigns from foreign tastemakers with a knock-effect at home; enough time having passed for these dalliances to not be a liability now; and strong relationships with major art academies in China—seems hard to replicate in this day and age.

While people today are growing up in a time of unprecedented prosperity, the ladder that leads to the heights of that prosperity seems to have been kicked out of the way.

Perhaps this explains in part the obsession with 风口 (fengkou) which Yi-Ling explored in an earlier Rewilding: it takes a freak accident of the zeitgeist to bust out of the status quo.

Krish: Outro music this week is an overlooked album from last summer that I’ve taken to describing as “lo-fi math rock to chill out to.” This is Chengdu band FAYZZ with the appropriately titled “Freedom is Worthless:”

自由无用, by Fayzz

from the album CONNECTION

FayzzBandcamp New & Notable May 27, 2021

Tianyu: Happy Spring Festival, and see you in the Year of the Tiger!

Krish: Bye!

Yi-Ling is an aspiring gardener trying to re-grow her own glass jar chives.

Simon is (not) “hot, young and confident.”

Krish is a comic book artist in Chaoyang. He prefers No Wave to Rear Waves.

Yan dreams of chive pockets 韭菜盒子, not chive waves.

In the house this week: Henry, Light, Yi-Ling, Zoe, Simon, Krish, Aaron, Jaime, Yan, and Tianyu, but which one of us is the killer?

Krish: Hello, we’d like to report some murders.

Welcome to Episode 5. You might be surprised to see us covering Jubensha now.

China’s murder mystery escape room werewolf LARPs were top of the trend charts in 2021. They’re already the third biggest form of offline entertainment behind films and sport. Pandemic prevention notices mention them specifically whenever there’s an outbreak. The New York Times has written about them.

But now that they’ve moved from the peak of inflated expectations (i.e. a fengkou) to the plateau of managing Dianping ratings, it’s time to look at the medium’s formal properties.

For one, intertextuality of kaleidoscopic dimensions is the lifeblood of the Jubensha scene. Scripts and scenarios in the scene are wild with citation, pastiche, imitation and “heavy” “inspiration,” drawing from video games, c-dramas, horror, sci-fi, revolutionary history, internet novels, and fan-fiction. These crash into a decade of obsession with escape rooms and immersive theater (Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More is still sold out every night in Shanghai), making the medium both thematically and mechanically worth examining.

In 2022’s first Chaoyang Trap, Henry threads the pins on the cork board to solve the Jubensha mystery. How did a curious mix of subgenres morph into a privileged Chinese medium “on par with bar-hopping or moviegoing?”

On Jubensha

By Henry Zhang

Henry: “No hookups; yes Jubensha”: this strange sentence abounds on China’s Tinder profiles—and unlike dubious declarations of penta-lingualism or offensive sub-saharan selfies, the enthusiasm that the country’s millennials and zoomers express for the medium seems genuine.

What is Jubensha? It’s the Sinicization of an early-20th-century American game, the Murder Mystery Party, which consists of an impromptu and imperfect homicide trial for which players act as both jury and accused. Impromptu, since the actual institutional powers that be are often too distant or incompetent to reach the crime scene, giving deliberations an element of vigilante justice—and imperfect because each player harbors their own motives for wanting the victim dead. If there were a Jubensha made about Chaoyang Trap, for example, and I were the deceased, I might’ve tried to sell the platform to a venture capitalist or plagiarized from another member’s piece—enough to get you all fantasizing about my convenient exit from the scene.

This might sound like interesting but hopelessly dorky marginalia (which I’d still love!)—just think about the pejorative English word LARP—but in China, Jubensha has quickly become the “third most popular form of offline entertainment, behind movies and sports.”

In our 2nd episode, Ting noted the phenomenon by which a Western medium shrinks into a Chinese genre, as the monopoly of HBO or Netflix falters, in its transnational journey, to become one more Euro-American import, on par with jazz dance or pilates. With Jubensha, we are witnessing the reverse: an expansion of a largely-forgotten American subgenre into a privileged Chinese medium for social interaction, on par with barhopping or moviegoing.

Jubensha entered the popular consciousness through a 2016 show, Who’s the Murderer (明星大侦探), was was intended capture part of the market share for previous crazes like Escape Room and Werewolf Game（狼人杀). It had to wait until the post-Covid world to find true popularity, going from about 7000 brick-and-mortar venues across the country last year to over 30,000 this summer. The variety of settings in which Jubensha happens, and the differences in players’ social backgrounds, attest to its penetration into Chinese life: there’s a live-action version, popular with a growing class of young professionals willing to pay premiums for set design and drinks; a couch-friendly board game version, which budget-conscious creatives can buy used, then resell on Xianyu; and finally, mobile apps, like I’m A Mystery (我是谜), which cater to the compulsorily transient and or the internationally mobile—out-of-province youths in first-tier cities or affluent students studying abroad.

Yi-Ling: One thing I was struck by was cost and how much it seemed like yuppies were willing to shell out for a Jubensha session, way outside of their typical spending capacity. (And a good portion on drinks–one Jubensha I participated in was insanely boozed-up.) I'm wondering what people feel like they are paying for–the novelty of the experience? The creativity of the script?

Henry: My first round of Jubensha took place in one of Beijing’s air-raid shelters, of which there are thousands, built in case of nuclear war (not just with the US, but the USSR). In stark contrast to the dingy staircase and dark corridor we passed through, the actual store—announced by a metal sign of Sherlock Holmes in profile—was newly-furnished and brightly-lit. On the ground, yellow tape delineated the crime scene: a set of rooms in medieval European style, in which we got on our knees to fish for murder implements beneath beds, or stepped on chairs to reach for suspicious letters above tall drawers. Afterwards, we retreated to a conference area, to reconstruct the crime, pin clues to people, and think up alibis—even if you aren’t the murderer, remember, you probably wanted the dead person dead.

The title of our scenario was “The Valentine Estate,” whose duke is the victim in question. (I haven’t been able to find the description online, because brick-and-mortar joints often buy up the exclusive rights to certain scripts, or write proprietary ones). I played the duke’s son, the heir presumptive; after getting into my frilly, epauletted costume, I read the script and discovered that, though I hadn’t killed my father, I had found his body, and, in a fit of despair and selfishness, stolen his seal ring to authorize a large transfer of money to my creditors. The young scion was a gambling addict, and if the others discovered his secret, I would lose my chance of victory.

Ultimately, the script’s lack of historical texture—Valentine feels vaguely Roman, but where, and when, were we, exactly?—detracted from the experience, but it was enough to get me hooked. I pleaded with my friends to play more Jubensha. Wanting to save money, we sprung for several of the board-game scenarios. You might be tempted to compare my journey from live-action to couch-co-op Jubensha with an addict’s transition from bordeaux to franzia, but in fact, couch co-op must compensate for its immateriality—a lack of set and stage—with great worldbuilding.

Henry: My favorite was Pagoda of Madness (疯人塔), a historical melodrama involving a sinister secret society, formed in the Zhou Dynasty, that is bent on infiltrating royal families across the ages, and the counter-society formed to hunt it down. Agents from both have appeared at the pagoda—a kind of ancient sanitarium—whose monk-physician has been killed, mysteriously, in a room that was locked from inside. Disfigured beauties, blind scholar-students, knights errant gather in the tower to dispense rough justice. I loved the lore: real, traditional Chinese potions, like mafeisan, act as poisons; victims are pronounced dead by checking their nostrils for breath; and a script written in quasi-classical Chinese.

The expansive, nearly operatic scale and tone deepened our desires to intrigue and plot. I watched, transfixed, as my friends, a couple both IRL and in-game, began to bicker over whether one was really the woman she claimed to be: after all, her face was unrecognizable after an accident involving acid—could he really trust her? Nostrils flared, she berated him for his conjugal skepticism—only to laugh, after he refrained from accusing her during the finale, at how stupid he’d been: she’d been an imposter after all.

Quality, of course, comes at a price. Jubensha’s rapid expansion is causing growing pains: involution, as increased competition and readerly demand have sunk many operations; censorship, as the government denounces the game’s “bloody and gruesome” content; and finally, the risk of a vigorous, but short lifespan—that this is the hottest thing around doesn’t mean it’s not liable to cool down faster than you can say, China speed (cf. Simon Frank, episode six, on accelerationism’s discontents). Gone are Jubensha’s early, DIY days when shops were opened and scripts written by loving amateurs, for whom turning profits was an afterthought. The industry now draws underemployed movie and TV writers (who oftentimes have far more autonomy writing murder scripts than they would in their real jobs); and studios are Taylorizing game production: one writer develops the structure, another fills in the details, and yet another polishes the style.

Zoe: I should have seen this coming, but there are already patriotism-themed Jubensha. It’s interesting how Jubensha’s “live” and “improvised” nature resists the usual modes of censorship that the authorities might employ on film and broadcast media. If anything, what’s been most successful in tempering enthusiasm for Jubensha is pointing out that it’s pandemic-unfriendly. Big Brother might find it harder to stay on track with what’s happening in this medium.

Jaime: As someone who thinks going to her office job everyday is Jubensha enough already and thus remains an indifferent but open convert, Jubensha’s popularity seems theoretically most obvious as an event that embraces “the live” without fetishizing it and resists censorship through spontaneity like Zoe said (although I’m not sure if people consciously write or go into these games thinking, hehe they can’t stop me from what I’m about to say or do). Immersive theater like Sleep No More has been around for Chinese yuppies for a while and Jubensha also seems like a logical democratization of that—which makes me wonder if there are evil tech ways to monetize this aka what kind of data can be harvested and exploited from these activities? Or is Jubensha radical because it completely resists that?

Henry: How long will Jubensha’s career be? It all depends on how well it exceeds its generic conventions—a dead person and a hung jury—and on how many smart writers are drawn to it as a real art form. Maybe this is asking too much. As for Jubensha’s diaspora, I’ve participated first-hand—the friends who got me into Jubensha routinely schedule late-night video calls with peers in pajamas, in California, New York, Melbourne. After leaving Chaoyang, and the country, I downloaded a Jubensha mobile app, I Am A Mystery (我是迷). Technological ineptitude led me to accidentally click into a Kuaishou-style chatroom, where users belted the lyrics, Karaoke style, to corny Mainland rock songs, in between complaining about their lousy service jobs. Lying on a friend’s couch, in New York City, I wondered what it was they got from this app, from Jubensha in general.

Might it have to do with the medium’s allowance for bad endings? Frederic Jameson, contra Adorno, has defended Hollywood films for giving play to—though ultimately neutralizing—the public’s utopian impulses. The kernel of truth is there, couched in false directives. But so many big budget Chinese crime films—from Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake to Zeng Guoxiang’s Better Days—fail even this kind of ideological management. Call this a piggy ex machina: it’s hardly a thriller when the cops always win.

In both the Valentine estate and the pagoda of madness, the real murderer got away—and it was our fault. But there was something exciting in shouting that we’d known it all along, in portioning out the blame and responsibility for this miscarriage of justice. Much more satisfying to study from your failures than to claim a bogus victory.

Tianyu: After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, I've seen quite a few local WeChat articles recommending Jubensha game rooms, few of which had a proper Google Maps or Yelp listing beyond an address and a GPS pin. Intuitively, this was reasonable—if the targeted customers are all Chinese, why bother explaining it in another language? I’ve also seen friends visiting escape rooms in major U.S. cities that cater to Chinese audiences (they are also everywhere on Xiaohongshu); it’s fascinating to see how Chinese games that recently became popular now find themselves in diaspora communities.

While the history of Chinese jubensha ultimately traces back to murder mystery games in the U.S. (see the Savannah murder mystery in The Office), and that there are murder mystery party rooms in America, I don’t think many of my friends that are into jubensha in China notice the connection! Maybe there aren’t a lot of similarities between the two versions. I have yet to play either, but please email me (tianyu AT chaoya.ng) if you’re in the Bay Area and want to try it out.

Simon: My main thought after discussing Jubensha in-depth for the first time with some friends was really that it filled a gap provided by the shortcomings of other media in China. If a horror film that actually gave you some psychological shocks could make its way to big screens, or if a more piquant video game could spread outside of Steam, would there really be such a need for this new format? Also, I think the activity says something about how the way people socialize and participate in leisure activities in China may be more “organized” than elsewhere. With a full awareness that what I think is “normal” is shaped by my class/cultural background, and perhaps personality, I feel like one is more likely to just casually hang out with North American friends, whereas in China, except perhaps with your closest friends, there needs to a plan: at least a dinner, or a KTV session, a tour, a class... To me, Henry stumbling upon users complaining about their jobs within I’m A Mystery encapsulates how people use these activities as a “frame” in which to create moments of vulnerability and bonding. Of course, people’s hobbies function like this anywhere in the world, but it is interesting that Jubensha harks back to party games from a time of relative scarcity in America, when you had to make your own entertainment, and someone had to sing or play an instrument if you wanted to hear music. After all, today we just need to touch a screen to be amused.

Curious if anyone knows of any anthropological or sociological work that touches upon these different ways of “hanging out.” Or am I just bad at making friends and plans? 😊

Krish: With the caveats that this research is a) from the early 2010s and b) primarily about an earlier stage of Chinese social media, I think Tricia Wang’s conception of the “elastic self” hints at some answers:

“Under semi-anonymous, [informal] conditions, Chinese youth are able to overcome the low levels of trust that characterize authoritarian societies and adopt broader forms of social trust that characterize more participatory societies…[they] are primarily seeking to discover their own social world and to create emotional connections—not grand political change.”

Again, recognizing that sometimes a LARP murder mystery is just a LARP murder mystery, maybe Jubensha (and its attendant apps) provide a frame for these exploratory “semi-anonymous” spaces today, allowing what Tricia calls the “trying on of heterodox identities” without shame or anxiety.

Yan: Maybe this also explains what I always think of as the unthinkable: people playing Jubensha with strangers. I’ve seen on Dianping where Jubensha studios sell individual tickets, and I always wonder if someone would just drop in and spontaneously start playing with whoever happens to be available. Maybe not knowing the people you play with makes it easier for you to immerse yourself in your role and in the story. It’s another layer of anonymity on top of the “semi-anonymous” space provided by Jubensha’s worldbuilding.

Krish: Yes! Tricia’s work, too, talks specifically about socializing with strangers as the hallmark of the elastic self.

Aaron: To me, it seems like Jubensha are filling a Dungeons & Dragons-sized hole in Chinese social life. Working in video games in China, it was interesting for me how few of my Chinese coworkers played D&D, even as they were often on top of the latest American or European video games and TV shows. But Jubensha provide a platform for a lot of the same aspects that have helped D&D keep rising in popularity in the US, allowing people to try on new identities and play collaboratively without needing any mediating devices.

Krish: Outro music this week is newish Beijing duo Naja Naja. They make warm, Moon Duo-adjacent minimal post punk, and just toured with newsletter faves Howie Lee and Hualun.

Here’s ‘Dong Dong’ from their debut EP, released on Bie Music on 24 December 2021. This has been 代购ed from the Chinese web with permission. An international release is scheduled for April 2022 via Wharf Cat Records.

Tianyu: That’s it for this episode! Next up: Rewilding.

Krish: Bye!

Henry Zhang doesn’t fall in love; he just plays Jubensha.

Light is a multimedia illustrator and designer based in Los Angeles.

Tianyu Fang is an intern.

Zoe has moved to Guizhou.

Yi-Ling Liu is a writer in Beijing.

Jaime Chu plays office Jubensha for rent in Chaoyang.

Krish Raghav is a comic artist in Beijing who would kill for some good dosa.

Yan Cong was born in Xicheng, grew up in Haidian, and is now based in Amsterdam, via New York and Chaoyang. She writes for another Substack Far & Near on visual storytelling in China. You should subscribe!

Simon Frank lives in Beijing and wonders if “the music scene” is live-action roleplay.

Aaron Fox-Lerner is a writer in New York.

This dispatch appeared in S02 Episode 4, along with The Zine and the Unseen by Denni. Cover illustration by Krish Raghav.

Jaime: When it comes to lack of creative agency, respect, and fair treatment, the one profession in the creative class that might universally have it even worse than media workers might be translators. It took someone like millennial literary phenomenon Sally Rooney to remind the reading world of the inherent political value in literary translation when she turned down a recent Hebrew translation offer from an Israeli publishing house as a gesture in support of the Palestinian struggle. The wildly successful Irish novelist was once compared to Uniqlo for “the era of normcore fashion has been matched with an era of normcore literature”. But are the post-90s and post-2000s kids who line up for the opening of the new Sanlitun Uniqlo global flagship concept store with “in-store curated LifeWear experience” the same millennials who wear “cheap Uniqlo cashmere sweaters to his semi-leftist politics job” or past season Uniqlo U by Christophe Lemaire to gallery openings and dinners their mentors pay for from selling out before it was normalized?

Is Sally Rooney the undeniably universal millennial experience as the rest of the world claims? I caught up with Na Zhong, the Simplified Chinese translator of Sally Rooney’s three novels to date, to get some perspective on how Irish are her novels for a Chinese audience, how does her prose hold up in translation, and who might be the Sally Rooney of contemporary Chinese literature (click bait!) Na was born in Sichuan and now lives in New York. Her writing and translations have appeared in AAWW, Lithub, and LARB and she hosts a podcast in Chinese about literature and translation. She has just finished the translation of Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You.

The Cloud in Sally Rooney's Room

By Jaime Chu

Jaime
How did you get involved with translation and translating Sally Rooney’s novels? Are you proud of it? What was the process like?

Na
I have very complicated feelings about being a translator. I majored in translation in college, so it was natural for me to pick up some projects to hone my skills. A friend I met through one of the projects introduced me to an editor, who was looking for a translator for a short story collection by an Irish writer named Billy O’Callaghan. I translated an excerpt from the collection and was hired. At the same time, I was never content being just a translator, because back then I didn’t feel respected being a translator and came to perceive translation as a sort of derivative. So I started writing for newspapers until a publisher who just bought Sally Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, reached out through a friend to ask if I would be interested in translating “this novel by a young Irish writer.” I finished the novel in two days and was completely hooked. I took on the project without realizing how big this will be in three years.

I basically witnessed how Rooney became the celebrity writer. It's a privilege and a pleasure—her first two books are extremely enjoyable to read and translate. Readability has always been one of her strongest suits, which also helps me as a translator to work with a rhythm. I’ve just handed in the translation of her third novel and I have some mixed feelings about it—I don't know if you have read this one or any of her other books.

Jaime
What were the mixed feelings?

Na
I love how she continues to experiment, using emails as a vessel to carry the characters’ interiority and playing with the Woolfian stream of consciousness technique. But when she goes into step-by-step stage instructions in the sex scenes, I found myself bored with having to come up with six ways to say “he smiled” in Chinese. That said, as I reviewed my translation last week, I couldn’t help but marvel at how she succeeded, once again, in capturing the power dynamics of relationships, the sharp edges and dark shadows that refuse to be tamed by overused words like “love” or “friendship”.

Jaime
Maybe I should experiment with reading the third book in Chinese first before English. I remember having different reactions when I read Conversation with Friends at different times a couple years ago. Recently, I read your translation in Chinese, and it hit me in a different way, because the language of her sentences are so direct, but in a way that you wouldn’t read the same phrasings and thoughts in contemporary novels by Chinese writers—for example, quite early in the novel, Bobbi says, “我是同性恋，而弗朗西丝是个共产主义者。” (“I’m gay, and Frances is a communist.”) So that felt very special, to hear these thoughts on the page in a different language.

Na
When I was translating that part, I was worried that it would get cut out in the final version. I was glad that it didn't. After the book came out, I joined another writer on a podcast about Sally Rooney and the host asked a question about Marxism, and it suddenly hit me that actually, what Sally Rooney meant by Marxism is quite different from what it means in China. Of course, they stem from the same origin, but the history of how it was received and taught is completely different, but I agree there's a connection there, a more subtle and complicated one.

Jaime
Building on that, I remember reading Sally Rooney reviews that comment on how despite their wide relatability as “millennial novels,” her books are in fact very Irish in the ways that they depict things like geography and class consciousness. How much of this “Irishness” did you feel when you were translating these novels? How deep did you have to go researching Irish culture?

Na
There are many moments when I had to do research because her characters are always talking about local politics. They are always dropping names that are unfamiliar to me, and her characters have extremely Irish names—Siobhan, Connell, Felix—a lott of them are impossible to find in my dictionary (《世界人名大词典》 is the official Xinhua dictionary for Chinese translation of foreign names).

But for me, these Irish elements feel like decorative icing on a cake, because the way her characters think and relate to the world feel extremely American to me, which is probably why the books are so well-received by U.S. readers, because they share so much more in common: They are hyper-conscious of themselves. Very outspoken about their political stances. They like to flaunt their intellectual superiority at each other. Rooney’s Irish characters are constantly talking about what’s happening in London, New York, and the U.S. in general.

I think in a sense, Twitter and social media platforms have created this shared space for English-speaking netizens, while because of various reasons, Chinese readers don’t have that easy access to the communal space and public conversation.

That’s an important factor in deciding how Sally Rooney has been accepted in China, versus in the U.S.

Jaime
Do you know anything about how her books have been received or accepted in China?

Na
Normal People has been received very, very warmly, not only because the life depicted in this book is so much closer to Chinese readers, but also because of the TV adaptation. For Conversation with Friends, with its love triangles and bisexual relationships and extramarital affairs, these themes make some of the morally righteous Chinese readers very confused or offended. I feel like people are having more mixed feelings about Conversation with Friends.

Jaime
Do you track the Douban pages for reviews?

Na
I try to avoid Douban reviews for my own sanity. Like Goodreads, Douban readers are extremely picky. One interesting thing about Douban readers is that they would equate the poor quality of the work with the translator’s quality of work—basically, if something doesn't translate, say, culturally, usually they would say it's the translator’s fault. If the story is weird, or if it doesn't resonate with them that much, they would say, maybe it's the translation. The translator is a very easy scapegoat for the mediocrity of the work.

Jaime
Have you observed any similarities between Rooney’s sensibilities and the work of any contemporary Chinese writers?

Na
In terms of the kind of concerns shared by the millennial writers in the West, I haven't found anyone who is super similar to Sally Rooney. I have an impression that Chinese literature in general does not approve of individualism—young writers are encouraged to write about the society, the past, anything but themselves. On the other hand, Rooney’s work is deeply rooted in individualism, especially in her third novel, where the loneliness of the characters are examined to an almost painful degree. They are like atoms drifting in the world, disconnected from their families. They maintain superficial relationships with coworkers and only choose a select few to bare their hearts. For Chinese, I feel like we have a much closer relationship with families, which is both bondage and a sort of shelter, a place to seek refuge when you are defeated.

When I was translating Conversation with Friends, I was also working on my own novel, and there was a time when I would try to write more like her. But I struggled and failed, because it was impossible to impose her glamorous style on my unglamorous characters—how can they talk like that? My characters either rarely show the cerebral side of them or simply don't have this side to them. They care about different stuff, and they are definitely not good-looking.

The level of interest in themselves shown by Sally Rooney’s characters would risk being criticized as self-absorption in Chinese literature, which is why I haven't seen any young writer who writes in a similar vein. But a new generation of Chinese writers are emerging, and many of them are dealing with feminism and their relationships with the world in a very original way.

Jaime
It's interesting to think about the idea of the “millennial” even, because the way that generations are delineated in China is actually very different from how the millennial covers an age range. It’s not entirely fair to draw a direct analogy, so it's interesting to see how these experiences get reflected in literature. What would you consider to be representative of post-90 novels for Chinese readers?

Na
There are a couple of works by young Chinese female writers that I find very relatable. One of them is Wang Zhanhei (王占黑). In her first two short story collections, she pays tribute to her parents’ generation, elders from her community, but with her latest short story collection, she's focusing more on people around our age.

Another Chinese female writer called Lu Yinyin (陆茵茵) depicts young Chinese women's experiences in a very subtle and lyrical way, which I quite like.

Jaime
What you said about the atomized experience of being a young person today, I thought of a 2020 film called The Cloud in Her Room, which is a frank, compact, and “self-absorbed” story of a recent college graduate returning home in Hangzhou. She presents a disaffected front in reaction to almost everything that's happening around her, while inside, she is actually questioning and seeking release from the familial or emotional ties that get formed simply by being human around other people.

Na
When I was translating Conversations with Friends,I was remembering what I was doing as a 21-year-old. It was such a boring life. A lot of reading and finishing assignments and trying to be a good student, even though I was already in college. To my regret, a lot of us have a very long puberty period where we don't make decisions on our own. We just follow the mainstream and what our parents have told us to do. It’s definitely an interesting thing to think about.

Krish: Outro music this week is amazing new Beijing band KyoYoKo. They write nervy, jittery, doomed songs for tangping youth. “Untitled #27” wouldn’t be out of place in a Sally Rooney book:

Jaime is an editor who lives and works in Chaoyang.

Na is a bilingual writer, literary translator, and cultural podcaster based in New York. She prefers clothes with pockets.

Krish is a comic artist in Beijing. He’s really into jan sober but otherwise makes very poor fashion choices. Ask him about artisanal bowties.

Simon Frank is a writer, translator, and musician in Beijing. He hopes that Christopher Lemaire might one day hear his music.

In the house this week: Denni, Jaime, Lisha, Na, Yan, Krish, and Simon.

This dispatch appeared in S02 Episode 4, along with The Cloud in Sally Rooney's Room by Jaime. Cover illustration by Lisha Jiang.

Jaime: Hello friends. Our two stories this week are about creative agency (or the lack thereof), translation, and why people get mad about Ideas without looking at the structures in which they’re produced.

Last month, at the Art'n’Dior exhibition unveiled during Shanghai Art Week, photographer Chen Man's magazine work from nine years ago dredged up controversy and an onslaught of hate posts on Chinese social media.

Netizens and state media accused her of perpetuating Western stereotypes of the “Asian small eye” look in the “gloomy” portraits of Chinese women of minority ethnic groups, for which both she and the luxury brand apologized a week later. The photo was removed from the exhibition. The anti-intellectualism of this strain of nationalistic cancel culture aside, to what extent are fashion editors and artists responsible for decisions that are the results of more fundamentally problematic ways modern fashion media has been set up in China, especially in relation to the luxury and fashion industry?

Legacy print publications everywhere in the world are haunted by the failure of the advertising business model to adapt to the compromises between capital and editorial integrity, resulting in the common scenario where if the brand asks for certain editorial content from a title and the editorial team fails to comply, the sales team would apologize to the brand and offer to compensate with even more editorial content. Coupled with the burden of representation and struggle to shape and assert some form of “Chinese” identity through beauty and style on this misappropriated stage, no wonder everyone is mad, someone is always apologizing, and no one is having fun.

Who are fashion magazines even for anymore? What gets lost when media serves brands and advertisers rather than readers? Who will decolonize fashion magazines? (Not a 27-year-old Australian-Chinese fashion blogger.)

From one media industry worker and insider’s perspective, there are more frustrations and questions than solutions in what might be the first op-ed in Chaoyang Trap. We hope that this open letter of sorts will provide some context to how we think about the conflicting interests of globalized capital, beauty’s potential, representation, and creative agency. What if more money does not translate to more power for the individual?

What if capitalism sucks for everyone?

The Beautiful, Glossy Lies of China’s Fashion Magazines

Denni: China’s fashion magazines are not thriving.

They’ve ceded their power to brands and celebrities, and their sense of style is increasingly disconnected from reality.

Fashion and power are, of course, eternal topics in this industry defined by beauty and creative forces. Yet the rise of Chinese consumer power didn't help propel established Chinese fashion media forward—their insignificance only accelerated by the increasing demands of the brands that support them and an over-reliance on the advertisement business model after the internet’s disruption. Chinese fashion magazines have peddled a narrative of a westernized ideal of womanhood—the “fiction” of an independent woman who can become a western ideal through her purchasing power.

Only until the rise of China as a global power did magazines seek to catch up, stressing a need to express Chinese femininity and modernity. Yet, most portrayals, as in Chen Man’s case, tended to look at the Chinese woman as a symbol instead of a real person—a warrior-like figure, a guardian of Chinese heritage and culture. Coupled with blatant branded content, they created an easy target for online criticism. At the root of such misunderstandings was the clash between the westernization of the Chinese woman and real Chinese women.

Jaime: #weareallmulan

For fashion magazines, creative freedom is often not free but handicapped by the bottom line. Before the recent crackdown on celebrity culture, fashion publications had seemingly found a way to balance monetization and localization: the “ageless cuteness” of Chinese celebrities like Angelababy, Yang Mi, Xiao Zhan, and Jing Boran drove traffic and created immediate hype, which easily converted to magazine sales. An issue of Harper’s Bazaar e-magazine featuring Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo sold over 1.26 million copies at 6 RMB per copy. You can see why magazines became so keen on chasing after celebrity culture, right up until the party came to an abrupt end.

But this is only one of the many paradoxes in the contemporary fashion media landscape.

Short Colonial History of Chinese Fashion Magazines

The first modern day fashion magazine was《时装》(Fashion), founded in 1980 and coinciding with the era of Reform and Opening Up. Almost a decade later, Elle China became the first syndicated fashion title in China. In 1992, Louis Vuitton opened its first shop at Beijing’s Imperial Palace Hotel, followed by Hermès in 1997 and Chanel in 1999. Brands entering the market further propelled the growth of magazines, since they needed a local voice to spread their savoir-faire gospel. Harper's Bazaar, Elle China, and Vogue China soon became the holy trinity of fashion magazines in China in the aughts, whilst establishing the three Devils that Wear Prada—Angelica Cheung, Xiao Xue, and Su Mang—who almost collectively came from business, rather than editorial, backgrounds.

In theory, magazines could pick their own editor-in-chief, but technically they never had true editorial power since all magazines and their ISSN numbers were owned by the Chinese government. Local fashion glossies existed as syndications, with censors having final say on all editorial content. Homegrown publications such as iLOOK, launched in 1998 by culture personality Huang Hung and dubbed “a magazine for women with brains,” also garnered attention, but major fashion advertisers still favored Western glossies in general. 《明日风尚》(Ming), launched in 2007 by Hong Kong’s Ming Pao Weekly’s EIC Jessica Wong (黄宝玉), provided “a window, a mirror” to the global cosmopolitan class, but folded in 2015.

Magazines became a fashion education for many and saving up for the latest issue of Vogue was my monthly ritual. Before the internet, magazines could afford insane ideas with overflowing budgets. Often shot by globally renowned photographers like Mario Testino, Tim Walker, with international top models on the cover, these glossies provided joyous beauty and surprise: fashion was a key source of entertainment, fashion was “literature”, fashion was digestible art. It made 10-year-old me feel alive, and for a while, I was certain that becoming a magazine editor was my true calling. I still remember marveling at a 2008 Maggie Cheung cover, where she was covered in a badminton ball dress designed by Martin Margiela, to celebrate the Beijing Olympics. Other fashion magazines fought for prime spots on the newsstand, Modern Weekly's Fashion section introduced the avant-garde to the mass, Men's Uno emerged with its ratchet sexual energy, every other cover with Zhang Ziyi or Fan Bingbing would be an event in itself.

Yan: Denni’s personal story with fashion magazines resonates with me so much. When I was a 6th grader, I’d save up pocket money to buy 瑞丽 The Ray, a Japanese syndication, which had three different magazines (服饰美容，伊人风尚，可爱先锋) targeting young women of all age groups, from office white collars to teenagers. It sounds funny to say this now, but at the time it gave me the idea that my sense of self can be constructed by how I look—even though I could not afford any fashion items recommended by the magazines (and I had to wear school uniforms everyday).

The very act of reading them helped construct my identity, in a weird way.

There were also other Japanese syndicates such as 昕薇 (Vivi) and 米娜 (Mina) that were well-received in 2000s China. These catered more towards a so-called “East Asian aesthetic,” making them popular among Chinese readers. Maybe this was why I was drawn to them in the first place—being able to see someone who looked like me on the cover when I passed by newsstands. The Ray also cultivated a group of models who went on to become full-blown celebrities in China, like Yang Mi and Gao Yuanyuan.

Denni: Fast forward to 2020: The old guard that had crafted the fashion magazine landscape left the scene almost simultaneously. These ambitious women more or less found traditional media limiting and left at a time when ad sales numbers in the reds made exiting seem like a natural decision. (According to Statistica, annual magazine ad revenue is expected to drop almost 18% from 2020 to 2023.) They found their second life scattered across industries, be it investing, e-commerce (微商), or sustainability marketing. They also left behind a legacy and a mess.

Short Neo-colonial History of Chinese Fashion Magazines

Quickly, new syndicated titles burst onto the scene. If the established fashion publications showed us what it's like to be rich and famous, the new media company Xuxu Huasheng (栩栩华生) saw a business opportunity to fill “niche” needs of both brands and audiences, built on the nuances of local cultures instead of in-your-face glitz and glamour. Backed by CMC Capital Group, the new Devil Wears Prada is Chuxuan Feng. He knew the market wanted something new, but Western brands were hard pressed to accept anything too new, so by buying up Chinese licensing rights to maturing niche publications like T Magazine, The New York Times Travel Magazine, Wallpaper, Nylon, and WSJ Magazine, he quickly gained acceptance (and ad money) from Western brands.

The Xuxu Huasheng business model was not that different from traditional fashion publications, but being new is certainly a virtue. T Magazine created a Chinese identity for the middle-class intellectual, whose thirst for sophistication and taste may be quenched by minimalist, moody editorials of celebrities like Li Jiaqi talking about their philosophy on life; niche young creatives, artists, and DJs belonging to the sorority of ya-subculture (the phenomenon of the lifestyle and consumption of subculture as subculture) also made their way into the magazine, signifying free spirit and alternative sass; models like Liu Wen and Ju Xiaowen often came aglazed by neo-Oriental filters, wearing Balenciaga or niche avant-garde fashion, performing Shang Chi-like feminist ideals as an otherworldly heroine.

While it might sound like a good thing that makes room for creativity (and jobs) when smart brands actually want their paid content to look editorial, the illusion of freedom just complicates the power struggle between capital and creativity. The progressiveness of Chinese fashion magazines might have appeared like a gesture of zeitgeisty know-how, but even with a more humanistic take on the message, it still fundamentally operates from a capitalistic point of view. They still cater to the same advertisers, producing what the brands deem high-brow and artsy. It doesn’t help that the same strategy also caters to monied local brands looking for an identity revamp, propelling a certain brand of westernization. Chineseness became a “style” and a moodboard.

The Paradox of Fashion Journalism in China

Markets and aesthetics may evolve, but the inherent issues that have overshadowed the industry from its very start remain unresolved. There's no true diversity, not enough real estate for editorial integrity, let alone freedom to create beauty that reflects how we live or what we aspire to—real culture creation. As a photographer friend once put it, the industry is so colonized that the only viable ideas are what sells to advertisers rather than how fashion reflects our reality, and so without being able to create fresh feelings and showing contemporary China through a fashion lens, all participants become complicit fashion victims of sorts.

A colonized industry to begin with, efforts to explore a version of Chineseness for Chinese readers seems lacking from the media. In turn, this void has been filled by fashion boutiques, most notably Dongliang in Beijing and Labelhood in Shanghai. During Shanghai Fashion Week every six months, Labelhood showcases the best in class of emerging Chinese designers, and crowds from their constellation, fashion hipsters, and, most importantly, the ya sorority members all gather to cheer for them as they feel seen. A new class of internationally recognized brands such as Shushu/Tong, Samuel Guì Yang, and Rui all found their footing in fashion at Labelhood. What started as a small boutique has come to function as both a showcase and an incubator—some might even call it a community.

Dongliang focused more on promoting Chineseness on the sales side such as by opening stores for established Chinese brands like Uma Wang and partnering with Shenzhen Fashion Week to cultivate fashion in Shenzhen, which then elevates the city’s established commercial brands.

Can Millennials Save Fashion Magazines

More Seventeen than Vogue, the social media platform Xiaohongshu has filled the creativity gap for the younger generation by acting as a kind of magazine with endlessly diversifying content on endless scroll. Still, for some reason, an appetite for print culture has persisted. So it was not surprising that hope was pinned on the millennial Australian-Chinese blogger/stylist/general digital new generation person Margaret Zhang when, at age 27, she was announced to be the new (and youngest) editor-in-chief of Vogue China in early 2021.

All eyes were on her to create a fresh new look for a rusting empire, but the business side of things has proven to be too monstrous to let her roam free. Creative agency is now fully in the hands of the brand. When Chanel wants a Vogue cover story with a "total look" of the brand, there is little room for argument. And since the internet has broken down hierarchies and redistributed our attention span and focus even more—in short, became print’s mortal enemy—for fashion publications, that means short-term compromises became the norm. The bread and butter of legacy titles became branded content and paid events, and creativity became more hounded by annual revenue.

The most important storyline of who Chinese women are today gets buried when short-term market needs triumphs all. If the most vital and established medium for visual representation of the Chinese woman has been normalized to privilege Chineseness for capital and westernized needs, where can we find representation of Chinese women?

Since media and culture are already so decentralized and fractured to dust-sized niches, maybe it could be worth looking to local historical entities for salvation.

Let’s look to 《玲珑》(Ling Long) or 《新女性》(New Woman) in the early 1930s for a plausible outlook, both hyper-local publications aimed at documenting the lifestyle and livelihood of professional women during the ​​Republic of China era—women with petit bourgeois tastes, who are smart and homely at the same time. They were not dissimilar to Elle magazine around the same era, when Barthes’ quip that their readers are entitled “only to fiction”, except the fiction in this reality could mean so much more than grooming omnipotent heroines who are perfect to a fault.

Hope in a Hopeless Place

These uncertain times are also hard on creatives working in fashion media and publications, when self-censorship is the norm. Those of us in the system see no way out. In the early and late 2000s, working at a fashion publication was like getting a masters degree at an Ivy League, and striking it out on your own afterwards means affluence and influence, but the powers have since shifted to social media and KOLs.

Many editors now see the influencer economy as a more promising career trajectory, but algorithms are a fickle thing, especially in China.

In these times, pandering to the needs of luxury brands can only result in symbiotic downfall, having to apologize like Chen Man when the party comes to an abrupt halt at any time. But some of us haven’t given up hope that an extreme form of creative collaboration with brands could bear fruit to something creatively substantial, even if it just takes time. Others seek creative agency in other mediums, perhaps even paying for their own shoots with their fashion media salary and celebrity styling gigs. Some started their own online publication like The Ballroom by Lucia Liu (T Magazine’s first executive deputy editor). But the new crop of fashion magazines are more like scattered words than a statement; they still lack the gravitas of a full-blown magazine, and substance that can provide footnotes to the history of fashion in China.

Ideally it will be the next generation of perhaps non-fashion elites to reestablish a system, who can also broaden the scope of advertisers and change the business model, and at the same time, make fashion editorial sharp, fun, dynamic, and in touch with the world again.

Yan: There’s this connection between men’s fashion magazines and nonfiction longform journalism that exists in both the U.S. and in China. I’m thinking of 60-70s “new journalism,” exemplified by Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra has a Cold” in Esquire, and the strong work produced by reporters at Esquire China and GQ China in the past few years—the most successful piece being Du Qiang’s 太平洋大逃杀亲历者自述 (“Massacre in the Pacific”), about a Chinese fishing expedition that devolves into a mutinous bloodbath.

What’s behind this connection seems to be a rationale that male readers are more sophisticated and care to read literary journalism, while women are simply treated as consumers. Am I wrong here? Maybe I’m not giving Teen Vogue enough credit for their dedication to quality journalism? But then, is there a Teen Vogue of China, and does China need one at all?

Jaime: What Yan said reminds me of this borderline misogynist spon-con风 short story by sci-fi wunderkind Chen Qiufan recently published in Vogue China (the same issue that features cyborg Gongli on the cover), which struck me as out of touch and cringe—it would’ve been more to the point if they published a story authored by AI. I refuse to believe that the commission is a real idea from a real magazine editor, but readers can be their own judge.

My medium-to-hot-take is I do think there is a case to be made where in a media environment as stifled as it is now, fashion and beauty should’ve remained as one of the more open channels for creativity. Maybe you can’t do nudity or make underwear out of flags and fashion is ultimately a material industry but in some ways superfluous frivolity makes the barrier of entry lower in terms of expression. Some Soviet fashion magazines seemed fine! But of course, keeping in mind that state capitalism has made things awkward when the instinct to defend one leaves the other compromised.

Simon: Having encountered the fashion industry/fashion media in China more peripherally than head-on—in terms of crossover collaborations with the art world, or fashion personalities that turn up at music scene events—it has always struck me as a curious mix of highly developed and rootless. On the one hand, it can produce designers, photographers (though not purely a fashion figure, Ren Hang comes to mind), and models that have found great international success. And yet, the mechanisms connecting high fashion to the fashions of daily life (even in a coastal, urban, middle-upper class milieu), seem totally opaque to me. Are the trends espoused by the media actually trends? Denni’s comment above about “ya-subculture” as something that would be explored by T-Magazine actually got me thinking that it’s slightly different from a received, literati-like aesthetic. Dressing “ya,” like a combination between a club kid, a nu-metal fan circa 1999, and a Shibuya-kei star actually appears to have a grassroots precedent from the shamate subculture of the early 2000s. Though I’m pretty far from this world, it seems to me that it might organically seem cool to Beijing high schooler in 2021?

All that being said, I’m kind of jealous that the fashion world has a media ecosystem left to critique, which can barely be said about other creative fields in China these days.

Also, I’d like to sum up my thoughts on fashion in China with a meme:

Denni is a fashion editor and aspiring podcaster based in Shanghai.

Jaime is an editor who lives and works in Chaoyang.

Lisha Jiang is an illustrator and comic artist in Hangzhou. She collects comic books, plastic toys, and anything glittery. She is generally considered a fashion disaster.

Yan Cong was born in Xicheng, grew up in Haidian, and is now based in Amsterdam, via New York and Chaoyang. She writes for another Substack Far & Near on visual storytelling in China. You should subscribe!

Simon Frank is a writer, translator, and musician in Beijing. He hopes that Christopher Lemaire might one day hear his music.

In the house this week: Yi-Ling, Even, Yan, ████, Krish, Yuyang, and Simon.

Yi-Ling: Rewilding is an exploration into the language of the Chinese internet.

In each issue, I pick a word from the labyrinthine swamp of online life in China, lay it on the table, scrutinize it and take it apart in the form of a mini-essay, then replant the pieces, sowing seeds for further conversation.

This week: 风口-pop philosophy.

Six years ago, Lei Jun, the founder of smartphone giant Xiaomi, shared a few secrets to his success with The Wall Street Journal—words of wisdom that would become forever immortalized in the lexicon of overeager Chinese techies and investors.

“Even a pig can fly,” he said. “If it stands in the middle of a whirlwind (fengkou.)”
“站在风口上，猪都能飞起来.”

Literally, fengkou translates into “wind vent,” an opening through which the gust can blow. To step on a wind vent is to stumble upon a path to profit, to open sesame your way to the pot of gold. In other words, any clueless entrepreneur can succeed, as long as they seize the right opportunity. After all, Lei Jun did it. Swept up in the zephyr of his generation—the rise of the mobile internet economy in the late 2000s—he built Xiaomi, a company named “Little Millet” for its ethos of hard work and humility, into one of the largest smartphone companies in the world. If he could do it—if Jack Pony Robin Yiming could all do it—then you could do it too.

People devoured Lei’s words. Suddenly, everyone was on their pudgy haunches, hungrily sniffing out the next wind vent. Everyone wanted to be a flying pig. Professional investors zealously debated where they could find the next wind vent. EdTech! Social e-commerce! Rural e-commerce! Virtual Reality! Bitcoin! Amateur bloggers shared extensive wind vent breakdowns, developing Lei Jun’s words into “Flying Pig Theory,” and comparing its philosophy to Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Ofo! Mo-fo! P2P! B2B! NFT! “Everyone’s dream is to catch a wind vent,” wrote a Zhihu blogger, in a post titled ‘How Do Ordinary Folks Catch Wind Vent Industries. “You just need to be ready.”

Readiness is the core idea behind fengkou. That in order to succeed in an environment as fast and capricious as China’s, where the weather changes and the winds shift to forces completely outside of your control, you have to be ready. In contrast to their Silicon Valley counterparts, Zhongguancun veterans know that the key to a start-up’s survival is not “mission-driven” but “opportunity-driven.”

Yi-Ling: Don’t go against the grain to fight for your values; go with the flow. Ditch software; go hardware. Dump the edtech stocks; buy the electric vehicle shares. Move from first-tier city to second tier to the countryside. Urbanite slump; rural revitalization. When the window opens, pivot to livestreaming; when it shuts, pivot to healthcare. Pivot, pivot, pivot like a Daoist piggie, caught in a tornado, praying that you’ll end up somewhere good.

But today, given the sweeping Crackdown on Everything that we’ve seen in the last few months, we are living in profoundly different times. Fengkou entered our lexicon in 2015—the glory days of tech entrepreneurship, back in the days when 996 working hours were worn as a badge of honour and CEOs were worshipped like rock stars (throwback when one such CEO belting “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” in a white wig and tight-fitting red jacket in front of roaring crowds.) Ever since Jack Icarus Ma flew too close to the sun and disappeared from the public eye, all around us, little piglets have been raining down from the skies.

If the 2010s were the decade of the Flying Pigs, then do the 2020s mark the beginning of the Falling Pig? In today’s China, will there still be wind vents? Where will we still find them, what will they look like, and most importantly, who will still have the balls to seize them?

Even: So for work related reasons I’ve sought out agriculture-related expressions for years. I was struck, reading this, that when I first learned this one (back in like 2007 or 8) it was rendered “台风来了，连猪都会飞”—when a typhoon comes, even pigs can fly. But a typhoon is a natural disaster without redeeming qualities, which makes me think that Lei took this phrase that referred to a destructive and chaotic thing, and neutered it by revising the expression to 风口. This draws focus to the funny, hopeful image of the pig flying, but not on the mess it will face when it inevitably falls back to earth.

I can’t figure out exactly where or why I first heard this typhoon version, but apparently Zhang Ruimin, the founder of appliance company Haier, popularized it back in the mid 2000s.

████: I think there’s a very fine line between just “trends” and a true 风口—the real vents come on the back of venture capital. The wind that pigs are flying on is money: investors don’t just find wind vents, they make them, and that’s not going away any time soon, even if the industries change. F&B has been a huge one lately, with trends like the themed restaurants linked in the video above prefiguring today. The wind picked up this year with stories of people taking investment to open restaurant chains directly into their personal accounts before they even registered a business. But the flip side of the saying is true: wind vents can even make pigs fly. I went to one of the VC-backed noodle chains and they made me order with an app for a bowl that tasted like slop.

Krish: “Fengkou = trend + VC scramble” is pretty accurate, but it’s also a very particular kind of scramble that seems to result in identical, destructive consequences regardless of industry. Be it dockless shared bikes or EDM music festivals, there is first ridiculous oversupply, then a ridiculous overcorrection.

Yan: I’d add government policy to the fengkou equation, something like:

Fengkou = (Trend + VC Scramble)*Government Policy

Like Yi-Ling said in the piece, with the crackdown right now, there are trends, but no fengkou. Trends can be set by some wanghong, but it takes capital blindly chasing trends to have fengkou, which we don’t see nowadays. And I think the important factor here is government policy. Back in 2015, the government was campaigning for “Internet+” and anyone who could come up with a PPT that combines a traditional industry with the internet (O2O, a.k.a “offline-to-online”) could get some investment from VCs in Zhongguancun, which was the genesis of this photo story Yuyang Liu and I did at the time:

████: If you have any good PPT-based grift ideas, please do get in touch with Chaoyang Analytica LLC.

Krish: Building on ████’s example, there is definitely a fengkou emerging in dive bar chains. The founder of Starbucks-for-vodka-shots chain Helen’s recently became the country’s latest billionaire, and here is Shenzhen’s Helens-but-craft-beer chain RichKat (猫员外) just openly boasting about how much money they have.

Simon: I think the fengkou paradigm is emblematic of how many businesses are oriented not towards specific products or services, but precisely as businesses. To follow this F&B line of approach, I believe I heard that due to the new regulations on tutoring, one teaching company has started selling food. Or when 螺蛳粉 (luosifen), Guangxi’s pungent river snail rice noodles, peaked in popularity during quasi-lockdown last year, unexpected parties got involved, from back-to-nature influencer Li Ziqi (李子柒) launching her own luosifen brand (despite not being from Guangxi), to McDonalds and KFC adding pickled bamboo (a key ingredient in the dish) to burgers.

The connections to CEO antics that come up here also remind me of a point that I think isn’t talked about enough—outside of China, it’s easy to fall into the “dissident” narrative that if Pony Ma and Jack Ma somehow fall foul of government guidelines, it means they’re doing something good, some kind of resistance. But things are more complicated. I feel like they guide the direction of mainstream values and trends—and also occasionally, temporarily, fall out-of-step with the (official) direction of society, resulting in a slap on the wrist. These guys do seem pretty kooky, and their framing can seem strange at a time when hardly anyone looks to Zuckerberg or Bezos for moral guidance.

Yan: I completely agree, because these companies, in a way, are always trying to align their business with the priorities of government policies, either to directly get funding from local governments, or at least to get support and preferential treatment. For e.g., all the “rural e-commerce” startups, or even short-video app Kuaishou, frame themselves as poverty alleviation efforts.

Yi-Ling: New Oriental—China’s largest tutoring company—has pivoted to selling vegetables. TOEFL to tomatoes. New fengkou? Eat your greens, folks.

Yi-Ling Liu is a writer in Beijing, but would like to exist somewhere warmer.

████ is a ███████ and ██████████ at ███████ in ███ , and prefers his noodles without the taint of venture capital.

Yan Cong is a Beijing photographer now based in Amsterdam. She believes that Substack should start paying more writers instead of charging fees with their $65 million venture capital money.

Yuyang Liu is a Chengdu-based photographer. He needs hair and sleep.

Krish is a comic book artist in Beijing.

Simon Frank is a writer, editor, and musician in Beijing. He misses all Chaoyang exiles.

Even analyzes pig policy and can authoritatively confirm that swine wings are not yet eligible for local or national subsidies.

This dispatch appeared in S02 Episode 3, along with Flashing for Fun and Profit by Zoe Mou. The cover illustration is by Bo.

Krish: This is a story about wildly ambitious creativity in hardware.

China banned foreign videogame consoles in 2000, but the ban didn’t stop console gaming. Not even a bit. It just redirected the energies of the industry to a madcap array of modified shanzhai devices, locally produced alternatives and mod-chipped knockoffs:

The sublime ideal of this era of hardware creativity appeared in 2003. This was the 神游机 or iQue Player (pronounced “I.Q”), a slightly insane officially-sanctioned Chinese variant of the Nintendo N64 console created to dodge the console ban, and allow Nintendo a path into the mainland market.

The iQue Player had big ideas. It had downloadable games and plans for a digital storefront before Steam even existed. Nintendo games at the time were consumed almost exclusively by proxy, through knock-off machines like the Subor “Famiclone” (小霸王), and the iQue promised a radical solution to the quirks of Chinese regulations, and China piracy.

Spoiler: it was a failure.

But its failure was consequential. There is a through line, in part, from iQue’s sunset and the eclipse of console gaming by PCs to the boom (and bust) in wangba internet cafes (网吧), the moral panics framing gaming as spiritual pollution, all the way to today’s curbs on game time and game licensing.

The iQue is worth remembering not just as a failed experiment but a big “what if” moment in China’s gaming history. To learn more, I interviewed @ChineseNintendo, a games archivist dedicated to building an online resource for iQue.

The story of Nintendo in China that we discuss isn’t just a nostalgic evocation of an already-known history. Parts of it prefigure what is happening in the Chinese games industry today.

Maybe it might even predict an unmapped future.

Krish: So, how would you like to be introduced?

ChineseNintendo: “He was not the first person to research iQue. He merely shared it with the western world, got over the language barrier, and helped build a worldwide community interested in a forgotten piece of gaming history in China.”

Krish: Perfect. So let’s start by setting that history in context. Because of China’s...unique experience with videogames, gamers here have a very different "timeline" of what games or systems are canonical. In a way, it upends traditional games history.

So, in the early 2000s, what was Nintendo’s position in the country? What games did gamers know, and were there any surprising differences between Nintendo's image in China and elsewhere?

CN: China’s gaming timeline is indeed different compared to that of developed nations, most notably for its fragmentation.

In terms of Nintendo, a large number of gamers moved from the GameBoy Advance to the PlayStation Portable, which surprisingly overshadowed the Nintendo DS in China in terms of popularity, and the abbreviation “PSP” was a synonym for handheld gaming devices until smartphones gained popularity in China. Many people didn’t know Super Mario Bros. (1986) was more than just the first Famicom title until they heard about Super Mario Odyssey (2017), missing out three decades of evolution in this world-famous franchise.

Krish: Can you talk about how iQue ended up becoming the representative of Nintendo in China? The central figure here is the founder Dr. Wei Yen (顏維群) who, before founding iQue, was an influential figure in the development of computer graphics.

CN: It may be loosely related to the 2000 console ban itself. The ban of all import videogames created a vacuum for a (legal) console gaming market in China, which could be easily circumvented by branding original designs as “domestic” consoles. Plus, most of the fear of videogames from Chinese parents and educators in the 1990s was probably targeted towards more “violent” or “explicit” arcade titles, which Dr. Yen saw as a path Nintendo games could avoid (at that time) for a more family-friendly experience.

Many articles written by Dr. Yen in the early years of iQue show his dream of educating children with the power of Nintendo games, specifically slogans like “Rouse potential and surpass the limits of intelligence” (激荡潜能 超越智慧), but it’s up to the reader’s jurisdiction how much that was a true wish and how much that was just marketing bluff.

However, the console ban affected more than legal import of gaming hardware, as it extended to the scrutiny of all gaming software and hardware being imported into China. Games took months to approve, which hampered iQue’s plan of releasing iQue Player games swiftly. Seminal titles like The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask were said to have been rejected for having “too dark” a theme.

Krish: The iQue Player fwiw is a bit of a hardware miracle. It’s basically the entire console compressed into a controller that just plugs into a TV. I’m exaggerating slightly here, but we wouldn’t see that kind of design in the mainstream until the Wii U decades later.

So could you talk about what made the iQue Player stand out, and what grand plans they had for it? In your mind, was it just a weird curiosity or did it leave any lasting impact on the gaming industry in China?

CN: In short, it was iQue’s redesign of the Nintendo 64, a brand new design to sell as domestic gaming hardware, and an all-digital distribution method to reduce costs of shipping and prevent piracy. It was later discovered by iQueBrew, a community of iQue Player homebrewers, that the iQue Player also possesses superior processing power compared to the N64.

iQue had great plans for the console’s digital storefront—iQue@Home, or 神游在线 (Literally: iQue Online) in Chinese. There were plans for online multiplayer, and an official forum for gaming fans, among others.

One could say Dr. Yen envisioned systems equivalent to, and predating, the Nintendo eShop, Nintendo Network, and Miiverse, or even Steam’s combination of storefront, community and  multiplayer services. But it would be a bit of an exaggeration to say it kickstarted future digital distribution in China. iQue was a pioneer, but its grand ambition fell short due to both lack of player interest and technical limitations, so it did not make much of an impact. It was a forgotten grand plan.

Krish: You’ve archived a lot of their ads and promotional campaigns from that time, and there’s something refreshing about how…localized their marketing was.

CN: Much as I love iQue’s content under Dr. Yen with their autonomous and unique takes on advertising Nintendo IP in China (compared to Tencent’s more conservative approach today), I have to sadly admit that iQue in itself was a huge commercial failure. As such, it served as a warning to the executives of Nintendo how not to approach the Chinese market.

Krish: That sense only deepened with the failure of the iQue, and then, the failure of the Nintendo Wii in China. Can you talk about iQue’s “darkest year” of 2008?

CN: The failure to release the iQue Wii was probably the worst blow iQue had in the 2000s. With the Beijing Olympics on the horizon, it was a no-brainer to release the Wii into China. There was soaring interest in sports, not to mention the chance to put out a Beijing Olympics themed videogame featuring Mario.

If the iQue Wii had successfully made its entry into China alongside the Olympics, more people in the country would have learnt about the company, and through Mario & Sonic they would have gained a fresh new perspective on the red plumber they had previously only thought of as a pixelated character on the Famiclone.

But the Wii failed to get government approval. It was heavily believed that reforms within the government that year caused import game consoles to be scrutinized more strictly, and iQue wasn’t really able to pass off the iQue Wii as an “Interactive Multimedia System” like its handhelds. If the Wii played DVDs, would that have changed the course of history?

Krish: This led to iQue, and by extension Nintendo, pretty much retreating from China for a half-decade.

CN: iQue in the early 2000s worked closely with gaming magazines, communities and websites—doing events, giveaways, and other types of activities. But it was largely ignored in the Chinese gaming community as a whole.

I started reading Chinese gaming media in 2010, and boy, Nintendo did not have the most positive image. With iQue falling out of the spotlight and official Chinese support gradually dying out, it was obvious that fewer gamers and gaming media thought highly of the company.

Nintendo was often accused of sinophobia by disappointed gamers in the early to mid 2010s, and some infamous made-up articles mocking Nintendo were published during that time, one of which claimed Shigeru Miyamoto’s wife left home due to domestic violence.

I believe the abundance of Onion-level articles and focus on the negative side of Nintendo was something of a supply and demand relationship: The lack of Nintendo fans meant publishing articles against the company would not hamper their viewership.

Gaming media now paint Nintendo in a much more positive light, thanks to the popularity of the Nintendo Switch at home and the abundance of same-day Chinese language support. It was unimaginable for a Nintendo fan in 2015 that most future Nintendo games would have official Chinese translations, let alone available at launch. We have iQue to thank for that.

Yan: I found out recently that the iQue remains a really popular piece of hardware among speedrunners, because an unintentional consequence of the shortcuts and enhancements the device had to make in China is that it runs certain games (like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) without lag, making speedrun tricks easier to execute.

CN: You’re correct that iQue has a special relation to speedrunning since Chinese is a relatively concise language, which means faster text scrolling compared to other languages. Thus, many Ocarina of Time speedrunners tried their hands on the iQue Player version, and the world record for Super Mario Odyssey ran the game in Chinese text, translated by iQue.

Krish: Can you tell us more about games archiving in China, and how you got into it? I know of certain prominent general-purpose “retro gaming” Weibo accounts like Retro冷饭王, and there’s Chengdu’s 环球电子游戏文化博览馆 (Global Videogame Cultural Museum)—but where does iQue archiving reside online?

CN: My first iQue product was an iQue DS Lite purchased in 2009, but the iQue brand did not mean anything unique to me yet. Three years later, among the messy arguments on Baidu Tieba r/3DS over buying vs. pirating 3DS games and blaming Nintendo for neglecting Chinese speakers, I met OldBag and other iQue/Nintendo fans who gradually educated me on the history of Nintendo’s struggle in China, and that Nintendo’s current neglect was due to its past failures. These people later became the founding members of the QQ server “iQue Research Group.” Don’t try to ask for an invitation to the QQ chat or bother befriending OldBag though: iQue Research Group is more of a shitpost server today, and OldBag has retired from the frontlines of iQue Research and only dips his toes once in a while in the matter.

I don’t know much about the field of archiving in general. However, my datamining and research (if you can call my time crawling the Wayback Machine “research”) has contributed to the knowledgebase of gaming historians in China like @RetroDpad. There are many aspects of retro gaming in China (such as emulation, upscaling retro consoles, technical breakdowns etc.) which I am not well versed in, so I won’t say I’m part of the core of ‘game history’ yet, although I do consider myself something of a game historian on a specific subject.

I also have to thank my American friend and internet archivist DKL3 and my Canadian friend Bman, who reached out to me in 2017 in the interest of pursuing and archiving iQue content, and it was then that I realized a lot of the ideas we considered common knowledge were entirely unknown in the anglosphere.

The largest project in my plan is to make some kind of informal “documentary” on iQue and Nintendo, one not only showcasing hardware and software related to the company’s history, but also giving an in-depth discussion of the sociopolitical background at the time of release, as well as the technical caveats that make iQue products unique. I’ve had this idea for quite some time but had to put it on hold due...well, life.

Krish: Looking forward to that. Thanks so much, CN!

Krish is a comic book artist in Beijing who once made Flash games that no one will ever play.

Bo is a Shenzhen-based illustrator and animator. He believes in making life fun.

ChineseNintendo is on Twitter.

Yan Cong was born in Xicheng, grew up in Haidian, and is now based in Amsterdam, via New York and Chaoyang. She’s currently obsessed with the game Unpacking, which you cannot play on flash, but can play on Nintendo (Switch... and Steam).

This dispatch appeared in S02 Episode 3, along with The Any% History of Nintendo in China by Krish Raghav.

Krish: The first online phenomenon I ever obsessed over was a series of animated shorts called Xiao Xiao, each episode of which featured gorgeously choreographed stick-figure fights.

This was the mid-2000s, and every Xiao Xiao drop, provenance unknown, came with immense anticipation. It was the kind of mysterious oddity the web seemed built for, a proto-meme distributed like xeroxed zines via downloadable Adobe Flash files. I didn’t know it then, but Xiao Xiao was a breakthrough hit of China’s so-called “Flasher Generation,” a rag-tag assemblage of young designers, illustrators and animators in the early 2000s who were using the then-new Flash platform to create games and craft weird experiments.

It’s hard to overstate how magical this aspect of the early web was. It enabled people like me, a 10-year old on screeching dial-up connections in India, to follow a Beijing-based animator’s work through email-chain forwards and dodgy links.

Flash and browser games are often seen as marginal to videogame histories, but the Flashers in China created shared memories for an entire generation. The experimental playground they pioneered was a gateway into gaming for thousands of designers, coders and illustrators.

Their wild creativity (and rapacious piracy) was also a glimmer of what an open Chinese web might have looked like.

In this episode, Zoe unpacks the legacy of Flash games in China, and speaks to the historians and vloggers preserving them—as heritage, as memory, and as signposts to a different kind of internet. To paraphrase the writer David Stubbs, maybe the games of the past carry not just a glow of nostalgia, but “possible dormant futures that have merely been deferred.”

Zoe: Web games are Chinese millennials’ shared memories. In elementary school in the early 2000s, our weekly “computer class” was the highlight—all kids wore their shoe covers to attend it. Before my family bought our first home PC in 2005, this 45-minute class was my sole access to computers and the internet. Clearly, in this scenario, I had to get as much as possible out of this rare encounter with the web. Enter browser games. The secret sauce that amped up my weekly 45-minute dose of happiness.

Before the rise of the mobile game, browser and PC games were everything. With our generation’s then-limited access to electronic devices, we were either on QZone (QQ空间) planting and stealing vegetables, or mining gold through a browser window.

Krish: Many of these browser games were built on Adobe’s Flash, a programming language and platform that, from 2000 onwards, created this explosion of DIY developers and small studios globally. The influence of Flash on modern games history is inescapable. Entire genres—endless runners, escape rooms—were popularized by Flash developers, and its designer-centric user interface meant animators, illustrators and writers, not just coders, could now self-publish games easily and go viral overnight.

Zoe: Back then, teachers and chicken parents were the only obstacles that stopped kids from playing video games.

Few even understood the medium, and these browser games spread quietly without any government scrutiny or moral panics (I should feel grateful for being raised in the 2000s). They didn’t need any “gamer” skill sets. The satisfaction of leveling up, the smooth animations, and the sound effect combination were appealing to every 10-year-old. It felt like watching an animation, but I could also interact with it. Isn't that what all video games are?

Krish: ...no.

Yan: Noooooo.

Zoe: Okay fine, but what I meant was that the learning curves for these web games were quite gentle. In some makeover games, players just have to click on virtual clothes, makeup, and accessories on the screen to put them on a cartoon character. That’s it. The hardware requirements were also not high. You didn’t need fancy high-performance video cards or high-core-count central processing units. In the era of slow ADSL connections, the games were able to load successfully (most of the time).

Zoe: Let’s talk about “Chinese-localized” Flash games first, the “汉化”的Flash游戏. Very much the 字幕组 or subtitle groups of games culture, these were fast, loose, and wild in their diversity. Really representative of their time.

I reached out to GM, a Bilibili vlogger and archivist of flash games in China to help explore the topic. His channel introduces both popular and rare games from the era, and interviews the original creators.

During our chat, we agreed on what a more proper title for him might be: a web game historian.

GM: Hi.

Zoe: So Flash became the main language for creating browser games in China beginning in the late 90s, and the first generation of Flash game designers called themselves “Flashers” (闪客). In 1999, 1st gen Flasher Gao Dayong (边城浪子) created “Flash Empire” (闪客帝国), China’s first Flash games platform. It hosted many of the OG Chinese browser games including Crazy Flasher (闪客快打) and the aforementioned Xiao Xiao series (小小作品). Flash’s ease of use made it quickly popular among Chinese netizens. It wasn’t just games—this famous animated music video for Cui Jian’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll on the New Long March” (新长征路上的摇滚) was created in this era by Flasher Lao Jiang (老蒋). After it appeared on Flash Empire in 2000, Cui Jian himself approached Jiang and asked him to help produce some live visuals for his shows.

GM: People found these things magical because it was unimaginable at that time: images moving, sounds playing on your browser. Now the whole world is filled with GIFs and streaming video, but back then such things were not popular, and videos were not common. Hence Flash found its first opportunity to thrive.

Zoe: By the time I was tip-toeing into computer labs in the early 2000s, the most popular browser game pages were on 4399.com and 7k7k.com. 4399.com was established by Li Xingping (李兴平), who also founded the online listings portal hao123.com. Like hao123, 4399’s goal was to be a “hub” for anything you might need. Behold this magnificent piece of 2000s Chinese web design:

Gold Miner (黄金矿工) was widely acknowledged as the top flash game of this time. Gold Miner’s rules were quite simple: get the gold, avoid the rest. In the game, an old man (netizens nowadays call him “old Lionel Messi”) stands at the top of the screen, fishing for gold embedded in the ground below him. At the start, his grappling hook oscillates back and forth in an arc until the player pushes a button, which sends the hook shooting downward in a straight line to grab whatever is in its path. The goal of the game is to collect as much gold as possible before time runs out while avoiding undesirable items like rocks and underground critters.

The game was made by developer Dan Glover in 2003, but its spread through the Chinese web was marked by cracked versions and copycat hackjobs. Most websites just pirated the game in its entirety from its original version on the Game Rival site without the creator’s authorization, and all attempts at encryption and copy-protection failed. GM reached out to Dan Glover in 2020, and Dan didn't even know his game was wildly popular in China until...2021.

GM: None of the Flash game designers I interviewed for my own vlog channel were aware of the fact that their games became viral in China. There is no exception. None of them.

Zoe: Gold Miner’s experience was the norm. Most web games on 4399 and 7k7k were pirated. Regardless of my sympathies as an avid childhood fan, I have to say browser game sites are a bunch of shameless copyright thieves. According to multiple Zhihu and Douban users, more than 98% of web games on 4399.com are reproduced without the original game creators’ authorization.

Even Chinese independent game developers usually couldn’t prove that they owned their own game’s copyright and typically resorted to creating a special version for 4399 to replace pirated versions on the site. Meanwhile, foreign developers didn’t even know their games had been pirated. In a nutshell, 4399 blatantly robbed these games from their creators.

GM: These platforms infringed game copyright for sure, and often even their stolen versions were stolen from foreign pirate groups and crackers.

In sharp contrast, and the dominant global source of Flash-era creativity, was Newgrounds, a kind of Steam for Flash games. The site was like a community/BBS where everyone could share their own designs and exchange ideas. Newgrounds accepted all types of Flash designs with no discrimination against designers’ skill levels or techniques. So games like Dad n’ME (狂扁小朋友) could get discovered and spread globally. In my opinion, Newgrounds was why Flash games flourished and developed so fast.

Zoe: In a way, 4399 and its peers in China were just vultures scavenging the left-overs from the master predators.

GM: It’s hard to tell whether these pages at least did some good to promote Flash games, since without these websites, some games might never have been known and played by so many people.

Zoe: I consider the golden age of Flash games as the Warring States period of internet history. During the Warring States period philosophies and schools flourished in an era fraught with chaos and bloody battles. Chaotic, but it was also known as the Golden Age of Chinese philosophy since thoughts and ideas were developed and discussed freely.

Krish: It’s fascinating that a similar flourishing (of both avant-garde experiments and softcore sleaze) was happening in China in another medium at the same time: comics. The indie underground comics anthology SC (Special Comix, 特别漫画) was, like Flash, an equalizer of sorts—curating but not gatekeeping the work of many young Chinese comic artists. The contents page of any SC compilation reads today like a dream team of some of the biggest names in the field, and I wonder if Flash was similarly a riotous proving ground for China’s future coders and designers.

Simon: I missed out on this era in China, yet the scene of a few stolen minutes in the computer lab playing Flash games does really bring me back to middle school. Maybe part of the reason we feel so much nostalgia for this era of gaming and computer games is because there was a more clearly defined divide between online/offline.

Tianyu: I was born too late to witness the early days of indie games developers, but in the early 2010s a lot of the young programmers I knew of had started their career writing ActionScript 3. For me, I grew up with Seer (赛尔号) and Mole’s World (摩尔庄园), both online adventure games (for kids) designed by the Shanghai-based studio TaoMee. Happy Farm (开心农场) and its clones were also very popular once, during the heydays of SNS platforms Renren, Qzone, and Kaixin (better known as 偷菜, the game allows you to grow and steal crops from neighbors). As web payment remained inconvenient, I had to go to convenience stores for top-up cards (Tencent’s QQ卡 and TaoMee’s 米米卡). It was much more difficult for independent developers to monetize.

Even: This is an open question, but I wonder how Flash games interacted with/fed into the small gaming companies that started building “social games” in this period. There were a lot of acquisitions as well as outright theft BY foreign companies of Chinese-designed games (Happy Farm to Farmville being the most well-known example), driven by this fascination with monetization that Tianyu mentions.

GM: Flash, and Flash games, made the social game scene possible. It was a symbiotic relationship—the entire Facebook games genre that emerged around 2009 with companies like Zynga would not have existed without the “non-profit” Flash scene that came before.

Aaron: I really think the Chinese game world’s origins in flash and other casual forms of the medium led to Chinese mobile game companies becoming the international juggernauts they are today. While major talent in other countries was consumed by console wars and next-gen specs, Chinese game-makers had little problem moving from flash and browser games into mobile games that anyone with a phone could pick up and play, no matter where they were in the world. Much like what happened with broader internet culture, it’s ironic that games often made with zero expectation of profit helped establish one of the most aggressively monetized and lucrative types of games.

GM: Definitely. A big part of this energy came from the fact that most designers got into Flash purely out of interest and passion. No one thought that they could make money from it. Although the commercialization of Flash animation was relatively early, around the beginning of 2000, Flash games did not generate any profits for anyone until 2007 or 2008, when sophisticated advertising code could be embedded into games, or web ads in general began to take off.

Before the social games era, there was no money to make. It just attracted this wide group of people with diverse interests to join the community and make games. It was pure enjoyment, a “抱着玩的心态.”

Zoe: I believe this is the grassroots and proletarian nature of Flash games.

GM:  China’s Flash community was also fairly isolated. Apart from the rampant piracy, there was no substantial exchange between China and other Flash scenes except for Xiao Xiao.

Xiao Xiao is probably the only Chinese-made Flash creation that spread beyond the country. First of all, with no doubt, the quality and the creativity are phenomenal. In addition, the stick figure aesthetic traveled easily, and capitalized on the global popularity of kungfu films and franchises like The Matrix.

Krish: It’s tragic that Xiao Xiao was just an anomaly—the sole breakthrough hit of the scene. It’s important to clarify here that it was the community that made Flash what it was. Part of the tragedy of Flash is that it belonged to a company (Adobe) that didn’t know what to do with it, and consistently failed to make it more robust and open.

Zoe: Yes, Flash faded from relevance by the late-2000s, and was retired completely in 2020. Security concerns and irrelevance meant Flash was no longer bundled with Windows or modern browsers, making many of these older games unplayable. Fortunately, Flash game archival projects like BlueMaxima (and GM’s own work) have saved many classics, and underscored the importance of Flash-based web games and animations to contemporary web culture at large.

GM: After Flash’s gradual exit from history, the major coding language to create web games was HTML 5. However, the popularity of HTML 5 is nowhere close to Flash’s. The key reason being H5 is not as easy to learn, and so the golden age of Flash games just can’t be recreated anymore. Despite Adobe’s missteps, Flash opened the gate to everyone who wanted to try creating animations or video games as long as you had the heart to learn. The software was available to download (or pirate). The creation process was simple and straightforward—frame by frame by frame. And that was it.

Zoe: There was an “irreducible individuality” to the Flash scene that seems lost in today’s web. It was vibrant, bringing to life so many fun animations and games. In my opinion, it was the most creatively liberating web technology of the 90s and 2000s—both a generational marker and the inspiration for  those who would later shape Chinese animation. It was more than just a mere web technology. It created habits of mind, ways of knowing. It introduced a whole universe of new aesthetics.

I miss the Flash era.  It was a time when “censorship” wasn’t the primary frame around which creativity on the Chinese web was measured. When talent, ideas and creativity could flourish just because people came together for fun. And to mine more gold than anyone else.

Zoe is a Dongbei migrant worker based near Chaoyang.

Krish is a comic book artist in Beijing who once made Flash games that no one will ever play.

Slowork is a Beijing observer and an oddity illustrator.

GM is on Bilibili.

Tianyu Fang is a writer in California. He dreams of moving to a farm, where he will be growing real crops—and stealing his neighbors’.

Yan Cong was born in Xicheng, grew up in Haidian, and is now based in Amsterdam, via New York and Chaoyang. She’s currently obsessed with the game Unpacking, which you cannot play on flash, but can play on Nintendo (Switch... and Steam).

Even is an ag analyst who has been known to play farming games out of nostalgia for an agrarian way of life.

Henry Zhang is a writer who lives in New Haven and dreams of Chaoyang.

Simon Frank lives in Chaoyang and has roots in New Haven.

Aaron Fox-Lerner is a New York-based writer. Somehow he had no idea the stick figure animations named “Xiao Xiao” he watched as a middle schooler were from China.

In the house this week: Yi-Ling, Krish, Yan, Jaime, Caiwei, Simon, and Tianyu.

Yi-Ling: Rewilding is an exploration into the language of the Chinese internet.

In each issue, I pick a word from the labyrinthine swamp of online life in China, lay it on the table, scrutinize it and take it apart in the form of a mini-essay, then replant the pieces, sowing seeds for further conversation.

The inspiration? Two years ago, I co-wrote a newsletter which sought to make sense of the ever-evolving language of the Anglo-speaking tech world: Bandwidth. Disruption. Ecosystem. Called Fossil Poetry, it was inspired by Emerson’s claim that “language is fossil poetry,” that words are always shedding old associations, evolving in new meaning and ossifying into new forms.

Over the last four years living and writing in China, I’ve found that the slippery and malleable nature of language could not be more true, than for the words that have proliferated on the Chinese internet. Involution (neijuan, 内卷). Wanghong (网红).Versailles Literature (凡尔赛文学). YYDS. Wind Vent (风口). Suspension (悬浮). New words sprout and grow (and rot from overuse) at an accelerated pace. Amidst what writer Yu Hua calls the “endless chatter,” or rather, the incessant tweets commenting on China, how can words serve as a “pair of eyes” or a lens into online life here?

What exactly is the disillusioned college graduate referring to when she calls herself “involuted?” Where does the word wanghong come from, and how has its use transformed in exciting and troubling ways? How can I make sense of this online landscape through the useful but flawed metaphors of the flying pig, the struggling hummingbird, or the anaconda coiled inside a chandelier?

These essays, like the process of rewilding, are meant to be messy, organic, open-ended. I end each issue with a question. The hope is that by scrutinizing these words, taking them apart, playing with them, and then bringing them back into the conversation, we might open up newer ways of seeing.

The first issue goes back in history to a phrase that’s been around for a while now: Boundary Ball (擦边球).

Yi-Ling: Playing boundary ball is a precarious game. In table tennis, when a player serves up a “boundary ball” (打擦边球), they hit the edge of the opponent’s table, but the ball is still safe within bounds. It’s a tricky move, one that demands good skill, good luck, a good feel for your opponent, and a good appetite for risk.

Three decades ago, Chinese journalists, allowed to report more liberally about their country for the first time, began to borrow the diction of table tennis to describe their own work—like a game of “boundary ball.” Like a good hit, a good article should skirt the line and test the limits of the permissible, all the while staying within bounds. Like a skillful table tennis player, an agile news editor aspired to push for change without violating the rules, circumventing control without invoking the wrath of the censor.

Soon, boundary ball became a ubiquitous sport, a useful metaphor deployed not only by journalists but anybody who wanted to change the status quo. Artists and educators, activists and government officials, factory workers and farmers, entrepreneurs and software engineers. Across the country, people skirted the line, pushing the bounds of the permissible. The rules would relax, people believed. The game would become more plural, more inclusive, more open. We would all become players one day, trying our hand at ping pong, figuring out the rules together.

But not quite. The problem with the boundary ball metaphor is that the bounds are blurry and ambiguous. In this particular game of ping pong, you’re never quite sure who calls the shots. The rules change constantly; what you get away with depends on who you are, where you are, and which direction the fickle geopolitical winds are blowing. Chengdu rappers soar to mainstream popularity one month; hip-hop culture is banned from TV the next. A lockdown diary is praised in March, its English translation viciously condemned by May. Nike is roasted; Li-Ning is hot. Little Fresh Meats in; sissy boys are not.

Over time, you try to make sense of the rules and patterns, compiling perhaps a scrappy Boundary Ball Handbook that you inherit from mentors and pass onto your friends. You learn that tactics matter, for example. Sharing your grievances—about misogyny, long work hours, algorithmic exploitation—remains ok, but organizing others to do the same is out of bounds. You learn that seasons matter. The warmer months of May through October are dangerous times to play, low season for boundary ball (note: all those political anniversaries,) whereas by November, as the weather cools down, risk-takers poke their heads out and try their luck again.

You try to make sense of the rules all the while knowing you have no idea where the line lies. After you’ve played Boundary Ball for a while, you start to get the sense that perhaps, it’s not a skill you can hone with time, but a fundamentally Sisyphean pursuit. What does it do to your psyche as a player after expending all your energy evading a line that you cannot see? Is it fucking exhausting, as I often feel these days? Or is it also twistedly fun? Does uncertainty empower the referee or embolden its players? Is anybody out there still trying to play a dignified game of table tennis? Is anybody out there, still? Or have the rules been so distorted and rigged from the very beginning that nobody wants to play anymore?

Yan: As someone who studied journalism at a Chinese university in the late 2000s and early 2010s, this brings back so many memories. It also makes me reflect on how normalized this kind of game was at the time. It’s something professors and professionals talk about in lectures and panel discussions, often matter-of-factly. And it’s a game that journalists and editors play quite aggressively, sometimes, with the explicit purpose of pushing the boundaries (thinking about Cheng Yizhong 程益中, Southern Weekly 南方都市报, and their coverage on the Sun Zhigang case—and the fallout).

I do wish one day we don’t have to play this game but, looking on the positive side, some creative expressions came out of it. These are super old internet memes but grass-mud-horse (草泥马) and river crab (河蟹) became popular out of the anger over censors and through fun wordplay. More recently, people’s efforts to archive a profile of doctor Ai Fen turned into an uncontrollable outburst of creativity, except now they’re playing against AI censors, not humans. Boundary ball is knowing how content detection technology works, and “translating” a text article into formats unreadable by the censor AI. I posted two of my favorites on Twitter:

Krish: This makes me wonder if boundary ball is a model for algorithmic resistance. It needs a keen gaze keeping constant witness. And in accepting the shifting incompleteness that results from heavy censorship, it creates this...negative space of thought within the system.

Caiwei: Producing content for social change in China feels like perpetual guerrilla warfare. You are constantly taking tentative steps and developing devious tactics, hoping to outrun the forces that doom any effort at progress.

As Yan has mentioned, journalists are constantly playing boundary ball. A recent example might be the interview NetEase News published with Du Meizhu, survivor and main accuser of singer Kris Wu’s sexual exploitation of underaged women. The article successfully “set the tone” (as Chinese media often says) for public opinion and led to a quick and decisive verdict on the issue.

But as the state’s regulation on media ownership tightens, I wonder if that will still be the case. Boundary balls these days seem to be played more by extremely online Weibo or Douban users, employing thickly-veiled sarcasm. I am reminded of 阴阳怪气, a phraseology prevalent in Chinese public discourse characterized by irony and backhanded insinuation. Instead of saying what cannot be said, an 阴阳怪气 statement implies it by saying what is allowed to be said in a clearly disingenuous tone, making it extremely hard to pin down the person’s real stance. While creative, I am often  astounded when comparing the prevalent tone of meta-heavy posts on Weibo with those on news-site Matters, where a genuine, unironic manner of expression still thrives.

Simon: I first heard of boundary ball at work when it was jokingly suggested as a potential translation for the title of an untranslatable project… and so one might say my colleagues were playing boundary ball (oof). Reading through, one thing that struck me is how 擦边球 stands out slightly from other example phrases: it is forged specifically in China’s media environment. Swap “involution” for “burnout” or “Wanghong” for “influencers” and you’ve got an imperfect but clear connection to the mundane horrors of late capitalism pretty much anywhere on the globe. From a Western perspective boundary ball might remain more esoteric, though unfortunately the situation it describes might be quite familiar in other countries with limited press freedom.

Tianyu: Is boundary ball a feature of China’s regulatory regime, or a bug? On the one hand, the fact that the phenomenon exists is a reflection of bureaucratic failures—it’s often less about how much of a threat you are to the state than, say, whether your activities fall under someone’s jurisdiction and if authorities have the means to control it. On the other hand, Chinese companies have often stepped into new territories without existing regulatory oversight, yet still getting implicit government approval. The regulations often come later, but these boundary-ball “industries” (consider social media and ride-hailing) are often vehicles that drive economic growth under Chinese state capitalism.

Jaime: In more optimistic estimation, playing boundary ball is not without convenience and advantages, and I want to think of it as a feature not a bug—the underexamined vibes of why life here, at its limited best, can feel more chaotically liberating than in more bureaucratically rigid places, in terms of how rules can be selectively applied in more quotidian aspects of life.

For example, the fact that pandemic measures and health codes can often easily be bypassed here while, say, in Hong Kong, it is way more rigidly enforced. In fact, I hear “boundary ball” used most often irl muttered by some disgruntled low-level public utility staff when I’m dealing with bureaucracy that is either confused by my marginally recognized ID, frustrated by my confusion, or adjusting to lack of clear procedure (whichever comes first) for rare operations “outside the system” (shit like having weird combinations of currencies in a bank account, having an English name in a system that only wants to deal with pinyin). It’s so obvious that the “rules” are being made up as it goes even though both of us have to pretend there is some higher authority that we are now both frustrated by. In reality, people just want to get the damn thing processed for me and go home.

With the current phase of mainlandification of Hong Kong, another under-examined vibes-based conjecture of what makes crackdown regulations under NSL feel scarier in Hong Kong at the moment is that you know these colonial bootlickers and their relish for enforcement, while on the mainland, things have evolved to a point where playing boundary ball is possible.

Under this revisionistic administration, it is as if the existence of Hong Kong SAR itself was a result of some historical boundary balling—the city being treated as an administrative loophole.

There is, of course, a scale of stakes at play here. And it is precisely not knowing when you’ll get caught that keeps you edging on compliance more often than not.

Yi-Ling Liu is a writer in China. She’s a boundary ball novice.

Yan Cong is a Beijing photographer now based in Amsterdam.

Krish Raghav is a comic book artist in Beijing.

Simon Frank is a writer, editor, and musician in Beijing. He misses all Chaoyang exiles.

Tianyu Fang is a writer from the Chaoyang diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area. +1s.

Caiwei Chen is a writer, journalist and podcaster.

Jaime (bot) works in Chaoyang and has moved to Chaoyang.

Tianyu: China’s relationship with video games is complex. On the regulatory side, there are strict restrictions on what games are released domestically and who gets to publish them; authorities have also enforced real-name policies in online games and prevented minors from gaming on weekdays. Yet it’s also home to the world’s largest gaming market and major game publishers. Beneath the headlines, gaming and indie game development is...thriving.

Krish: Like elsewhere, video games are frequent targets of societal moral panics here, but these come with teeth. Recent waves of regulatory tut-tutting and “guidance” towards the games industry suggest a strong desire to reign in the wilder side of Chinese games culture—controlling not just what games are available, but what these games say.

Yuxin: As an indie developer myself, these new restrictions really hurt. To call out a few: 1/ Requiring all in-game text and voice-overs to be localized: sure, that’s fine. 2/ No skeletons, no blood: goes too far but grudgingly work-aroundable, maybe. 3/ Foreign games must work with a Chinese publishing partner: that just means an even smaller slice of the cake, but 4/ recommending “no moral choices” and “no ambiguity about gender” would invalidate and force out so many indie games and developer visions.

Tianyu: Which brings us to Steam, the dominant PC games platform where you can still  download (and not pirate) video games without the restrictions of Chinese censors, and within the Great Firewall. I’m not a gamer these days, but as a clueless 13-year-old in Beijing I spent hundreds of hours in Grand Theft Auto, which, for better or worse, would never have been permitted to enter China through proper channels.

Steam operates in a rare in-between space, both in terms of legality and community, offering a relative enclave of freedom for gamers and indie developers from China.

It’s also one of the few social platforms where Chinese players would run into unmediated political confrontations with Hong Kongers or Taiwanese (the discourse is less civil than Clubhouse). It’s no surprise, then, that Chinese gamers have always wondered why the platform has yet to be fully blocked by the Great Firewall, praying that the day never comes.

Krish: In the first season of Chaoyang Trap, we’ve covered corners of China’s creator economy, from podcasters to WeChat stickers, to wanghong-driven urbanization. In this episode, Aaron Fox-Lerner looks into the multilayered dynamics, between creators and users, regulators and gamers, and the “local” and “foreign” on Steam.

Seen another way, here’s 5000 words on games writer Sisi Jiang’s tweet last month:

“Huge if true: maybe Chinese gamers are just like you.”

Aaron: Chen Guanpeng was studying for a degree in Japan when he played the game that would change his life. In Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please, you play a border guard checking documents in a fictional Eastern European communist state. It’s not a game many would describe as fun, but fun’s not the point: instead the purpose is to force you as a player into a system of complicity, making tough moral decisions as the system you work for crumbles around you.

When Papers, Please came out in 2013, it became a standard bearer for the concept of “indie games” as akin to indie music or arthouse film, so much so that it’s become a cliche to cite it as an example of games as art. As a small project that placed meaning above immediate gratification, it was a key example of how games from small studios or solo developers could experiment and focus on artistic expression in ways that were impossible for more mainstream or “AAA” games. Buoyed by digital marketplaces like Steam that enabled direct downloads instead of pricey physical copies, it was one of a new generation of indie games that began to explode in visibility and popularity.

“I played [Papers, Please] and I found out that the game was made just by one person. I’d never known that such a thing was possible,” Chen told me one evening this summer, after he’d finished work at his day job for a Japanese media company making mobile games. Originally from Guangdong, Chen used his newly gained access to YouTube outside China to watch tutorials on game-making, and inspired by Papers, Please, set out to make his own game.

When his game Booth came out last summer, it was one in a wave of Chinese games, both indie and otherwise, available on Steam, now the preeminent digital games marketplace. When Papers, Please was released eight years ago, it still had to go through a gatekeeping process on Steam called Greenlight. Since then, it’s opened up its process for developer submissions, and tens of thousands of games are listed, with hundreds added weekly.

It also has a lot of Chinese players. It’s hard to pin down exact numbers, but different surveys have estimated the number of Chinese players as ranging from 30 to 37.8 percent of Steam’s 120 million users, which means Chinese might have overtaken English to become the most popular language on the platform. So far, so obvious: there’s a lot of people in China, a lot of them play games, it’s a giant market worth a lot of money, yadda yadda yadda.

Steam’s large enough to matter, but what’s notable about it isn’t its size. Far, far more people play games on their phones in China than on computers or consoles, and even the Tencent-owned computer games platform WeGame has more Chinese users than Steam. Chinese indie games are also regularly published on domestic platforms like WeGame or TapTap.

Instead, what makes Steam crucial for Chinese players is that the majority of its games are as easily accessible in China as they are outside of it. For now, the platform exists in a gray zone: not blocked in China, but not officially allowed either. Anyone can hop on Steam without a VPN, choose from thousands of uncensored games, and pay for them using UnionPay, WeChat, or Alipay.

Henry: In fact, you can also VPN into the Great Firewall and buy Steam games at a fraction of the price they’d go for in the West—something I, now a Chaoyang exile, will probably avail myself of.

Krish: Steam has been in the crosshairs since roughly 2017, when it started adding fairly powerful community features—user-organized groups, social forums—and centering community content. Sure enough, Chinese developers were early adopters in creating political games on a briefly-free platform. All community pages were swiftly blocked in China right after but, to widespread surprise, the rest of Steam remains operational to this day.

Aaron: Steam’s liminal status has benefited Chinese developers too, allowing them to bypass absurdly strict censorship and the laborious, expensive process of getting officially approved for release in China, while still reaching players both at home and abroad. The platform’s now full of all kinds of games from China: passion projects sweated over by hobbyists, schlocky meme games pumped out by obscure developers, polished projects backed by Chinese tech behemoths, anime-style visual novels made by Chinese otaku, and an (un)surprising amount of porn.

This has turned Steam into a major part of the Chinese gaming world, a conduit allowing foreign games to find audiences in China and Chinese games to reach audiences globally. An entire Steam-focused ecosystem has sprouted across Chinese social media in response to the platform’s new prominence: Official Accounts (公众号) reposting Western game news on WeChat, users spouting off about over- or underrated games on Zhihu, hours-long game critiques on Bilibili, guides to female friendly games on Xiaohongshu.

Aaron: The rise of Steam in China has also coincided with a wave of commercial and critical success for Chinese games overseas—and for many of those games, the platform’s been a critical part of their success. In fall last year, the free-to-play anime style RPG Genshin Impact, from mid-sized Shanghai studio Mihoyo, was released simultaneously on mobile and PC (although notably not on Steam) and quickly became one of the most popular games in the world. In January this year, Dyson Sphere Program, a sci-fi strategy sim from a six-person studio in Chongqing, was released on Steam and went on to sell over a million and a half copies. Most recently, Shanghai-based indie studio Pixpil’s gorgeous pixel-art RPG Eastward rocketed up both the Steam and Switch sales charts upon its release last month. And these are only the most prominent of the Chinese hits to have garnered global attention. Others like My Time at Portia and Bright Memory have also earned strong sales, while upcoming games like Black Myth: Wukong and ANNO: Mutationem have successfully generated a lot of hype among both Chinese and global players.

Krish: Special shout-outs to the incredible upcoming 躺平 simulator Exhausted Man by Beijing indie studio Candleman. It’s already my game of the year:

Yuxin: Great for these devs! It’s interesting that although funding and revenues for indie games in the US now increasingly involve platform deals with storefronts like the Epic Store, Apple Arcade, Oculus Store, Playdate, or Humble Bundle, Chinese indie devs are, so far, still largely committed solely to Steam.

Aaron: Unlike seemingly any other kind of art or culture from China, Chinese video games have been given the space to be video games first and Chinese second. While it feels like every Chinese movie or novel is forced into a dichotomy of being either a brave dissident statement or symbol of China’s unstoppable rise, both players and games media have mostly reacted to Chinese games on their own terms. Part of this may simply be that there’s nothing distinctively Chinese about the planet-devouring automation of Dyson Sphere Program or the cute, colorful apocalyptic fantasy world of Eastward. Still, it’s not as if any of these recent hits are hiding their country of origin, and other relatively successful games like The Rewinder boast ancient Chinese settings.

Christina: I spent a bit of time talking to Chinese indie devs in 2015 or so, and one thing that really struck me was how the Chinese game industry—even the indies!—saw itself then as much more closely aligned to the tech industry than to other forms of media. In the U.S., game developers tend to look to Hollywood studios and filmmakers as their closest peers, and games are clearly positioned as a media product like films, whether blockbuster or indie. In China, probably due to the explosive prominence of the mobile games industry or to the inescapable presence of Tencent (which is arguably as much a games company as it is a tech company), game studios felt and acted much more like startups—corporate slides, rags-to-riches overnight stories, way too much investment funding and all. I suspect the thematic freedom games enjoy is related: tech companies aren’t media, and just get to convert users and make money however they see fit.

Krish: Could there be anything more Chinese than this bit of lore from Tale of Immortal, though?

Aaron: These “international” hits have been matched by a series of games made for Chinese audiences that have mainly gained international attention due to their visibility on the Steam sales charts. Games like Scroll of Taiwu, Chinese Parents, Sands of Salzaar, GuJian 3, Amazing Cultivation Simulator, and Tale of Immortal are hugely popular on the platform with Chinese players while largely baffling or simply going ignored by international games media. Many are RPGs or management sims based in xianxia, the uniquely Chinese fantasy genre, and centered around the idea of “cultivation” (修仙, xiu xian. Put very simply, raising yourself from a mortal into an immortal).

Krish: Put not so simply, “cultivation” is sort-of the culmination of a very particular videogame pleasure called “Number Go Up.” You introduce many numbers, within interlocking systems, that can go up, and modifiers to those numbers that can make them go up faster (spoiler: some numbers may go down). Cultivation games require mastery of steep learning curves, with the promise of an immensely satisfying gameplay experience for the patient.

Aaron: “Cultivation and some of the wuxia themes seem way too niche for the Western market, and not just niche, but really, really complicated,” Zhu Jingtong, a producer at a major Chinese games publisher and tireless booster of Chinese indies on Twitter, told me. “Even as a Chinese person, I don't fully understand what it means. I was always explaining what cultivation is to non-Chinese people, but I always failed, which means that the cultural barrier is way too high for this particular genre to be popular outside of China.”

As a story-heavy RPG with a decent English translation, GuJian 3 has proven slightly easier for the media to cover than hyper-complex sims like Amazing Cultivation Simulator, garnering comparisons to The Witcher and Final Fantasy. But as a fan of classic wuxia who’s often annoyed by the genre’s higher fantasy offshoot, the game’s overly complicated, melodramatic story embodied much of what irks me about xianxia.

Yuxin: xianxia is awesome 🥺.

Aaron: Right, it doesn’t really matter if I liked it: the game has its own intended audience, and I’m simply not part of it. “I do think that these games are made for Chinese people by Chinese people, so I don't think it's a problem or anything,” Zhu said. “Games that are not xianxia, wuxia, or games that are not too Chinese can find a bigger audience, especially more modern ones like Dyson Sphere Program.”

Krish: It’s interesting to think of Chinese indies as a retelling of the last decade of global games discourse. Game Studies as an academic discipline is dire here, and concepts like “ludonarrative dissonance” never made it into mainstream game or meme discourse. Chinese indies, in contrast to their global peers, are less afraid of maximalist interfaces and jarring “gamey” transitions to logic puzzles and skill challenges, even where the game relies on atmospheric immersion. Looking at you, The Rewinder.

Aaron: Yeah, a lot of Chinese indies don’t have a strong emphasis on providing alternative experiences to “mainstream” games, but their prominence has still complicated stereotypes and provided an alternative for the Chinese game industry, which is mostly focused on free-to-play mobile titles.

Yuxin: True, and for a reason. Although all games published in China are required to obtain a license, in practice paid games or games with in-app purchase are under more scrutiny than free-to-play games that only have ad revenue.

Aaron: As the market has grown for higher quality, premium Chinese titles, Chinese tech giants have moved into the space as well. Netease recently released its martial arts battle royale Naraka: Bladepoint on Steam, while Bilibili has used Steam to publish games from smaller studios like Eastern Exorcist, a side-scrolling action game set in ancient China whose gory combat and horror themes would likely disqualify it from an official mainland release. Perhaps most telling is Tencent, which has used its NExT Studio imprint to release games like Unheard, an audio-based detective puzzler, that are much more experimental than the company’s typical mainstream mobile releases.

On the other side, there’s also no shortage of surprising niche games and personal projects from Chinese developers on Steam. You can play a visual novel adventure with entirely Cantonese voice acting, or simulators for making tofu or practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine. You can play satires of Chinese work culture or a narrative game about coming out as gay. Some rare games even venture into politics, like the work of developer 内购人生 PABL, whose surprisingly well-received Big Brother is Shaping You, somewhat less didactically named 假如我是人工智能 (“If I were an AI'') in Chinese, is less a game and more a convincing interactive polemic about the dangers of algorithmic curation. There are also impressive, modest successes from solo devs, ranging from the surprisingly polished action platformer Final Swordsman (末代侠客), made as a month-long side project by a combat designer for a larger game company, to the cult hit Bad Kids (坏小孩), an irreverent pixel-art story of growing up as a delinquent in 90s China.

Simon: Going back slightly to Aaron’s earlier comment about how Chinese video games are seen as video games first and Chinese second, that really is the dream for arts and culture from China. As a non-gamer obsessed with other scenes, I can only look on with jealousy. Perhaps stating the obvious, but might some of this happen to do with how games are consumed? It seems this kind of narrative gaming is more often done by yourself, with the social aspect occuring online. Film and literature still seem to require studio and publisher support to cross international boundaries in a meaningful way, and in music the social experience of live performances as well as the added prestige of a physical record/CD/whatever are still quite important. So it is exciting that video games might be uniquely well placed to connect people!

Aaron: Chen Guanpeng’s game Booth is a perfect example of the kind of fascinating and idiosyncratic games that have been able to emerge in this market. Set in a dystopian world grappling with dire food scarcity, the game casts the player as a food inspector stuck in an isolated booth, checking food products being imported along a conveyor belt into their country. Your only escape from the daily grind of work is the relationships you can form with the three different girls who deliver meals to you, but you later discover that even your personal interactions with them are being used as a method of control and surveillance by your government. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s a truly interesting one with a compelling story invested with player choice.

With its focus on food safety, air pollution, and isolation broken only by deliveries, the game feels incredibly Chinese in its themes and strikes an especially resonant if accidental chord with our post-pandemic society. And yet, Booth’s setting isn’t Chinese at all.

Still, Chen said that while the game “was influenced by my experience living in China, where people tend to have this polarization about something, you know, it's either black or white,” the audience he had in mind was “mainly Chinese players and American players, or players that speak English...For pure commercial considerations, we have English speaking players and Chinese players, they make up the most plays on Steam.”

Chinese and American players each make up about 30% of the game’s player base, but according to Chen, reviews on Steam were largely the same regardless of country: “Their contents are basically the same except for the language. There are well-written as well as irrational ones for both languages. The only difference I noticed might be that Chinese players tend to be more generous in giving a recommendation when it's a game made by domestic developers.”

The term “国产” (guochan, “domestically made”) is now often used as a selling point for games, with many Chinese gamers eager to see the development of a domestic games industry finally moving beyond a reputation for cheap clones and mobile games in favor of more prestigious indies and AAA games. It’s not unusual to see positive reviews for Chinese games on Steam specifically mentioning that the reviewer is supporting the game because it’s Chinese made.

That said, Chinese players’ willingness to engage with interesting games extends far beyond domestic productions. For indie developers from other countries, Chinese support can be the crucial thing keeping their games afloat in a tough marketplace. Six years ago, the developer of a successful indie game could list Chinese localization as a hypothetical afterthought. Today, it’s clear to most developers that not localizing their games into simplified Chinese means missing out on a huge portion of the market. Chinese translations for everything from AAA games to tiny indies—none of them officially licensed for release in China—are now common.

While it may fill an important role, though, Steam’s far from perfect as a platform. For starters, it takes a hefty 30% cut of game sales. While there are other digital marketplaces with fairer sales cuts, Steam still dominates the market, especially internationally: Chen says Booth is also available for subscribers to the Humble Monthly subscription and on the indie-friendly marketplace itch.io, but “on itch.io, I only have like 20 copies sold. So far, more than 95% or 99% of copies [sold] are still on Steam.”

Steam’s algorithm tends to favor established hits over newcomers, and the platform’s audience can end up flattening out available games in other ways too. “Steam users are more like the core gamer type,” Zhu Jingtong told me. “I would say the majority of Steam users are more like one of those traditional gamer types, but that’s changing these days because the groups of people who are not really seen as gamers are starting to use Steam as well, due to the popularity of some big titles, for example, PUBG, or some Chinese indie games such as The Invisible Guardian,” an interactive FMV (full-motion video, essentially a movie) game that’s proven a runaway success with Chinese gamers.

While mobile gamers in China are almost evenly split between men and women who don’t necessarily identify as gamers, Steam’s presumed main Chinese audience of middle- or upper-class urban male gamers means a lot of games end up in the same male-focused genres and are often heavy on gratuitous T&A. And that’s before you get to one of Steam’s weirdest categories: hentai games.

Steam has had a complicated and uneven history with porn on its platform, ultimately settling on the current status quo: porn games can be sold on Steam, but the platform reserves the right to take them down for any reason. While illustrated or computer-generated nudity is allowed, photos or videos are not. The result has been a booming, little-remarked upon market for porn games, much of it driven by Chinese players and Chinese studios.

While straight-up porn games are inaccessible to Chinese users, one of the platform’s China-specific restrictions, a lot of games use a simple workaround: providing risque but not pornographic content, and then making everything from nudity to hardcore sex scenes available with the download of a simple patch. Popular Chinese Steam curators with hundreds of thousands of followers will eagerly recommend cheap porn games like Tower of Waifus 2 alongside games like the gentle, personal non-binary-led narrative indie No Longer Home, just so long as they all have Chinese localization.

Given the illegality of porn in China, “there is definitely a very high risk for developers who make adult games,” Zhu said. In the case of She Will Punish Them, a “sensual dark fantasy ARPG” that the analysis site SteamSpy estimates has between half a million to a million owners, “it sold really well in China, but I think a couple of months ago, the developer decided to pull it from the Chinese market, mostly to avoid any risk because they were getting really popular on social media and they were afraid that the popularity might get them into trouble.”

Krish: This centrality of the Chinese market to the commercial success of many titles hasn’t gone unnoticed. It’s important to reiterate here that Steam’s community/discussion sections are completely walled off if you’re accessing the site from China, which makes Chinese gamers isolated from larger conversations unfolding on Steam (even if most are flaming trash heaps.)

Aaron: Despite porn’s illegality in China, it’s been far from the most controversial aspect of the marketplace when it comes to China. Instead, the biggest symbol of culture clash has been the adoption in China of an old GamerGate-esque tactic: review-bombing campaigns, in which Chinese gamers will leave large numbers of negative reviews on games that have offended them politically or thematically.

First used by Chinese players to pressure foreign game companies into providing Chinese localization, its purpose started to shift as Steam became the site of political controversies for Chinese players. The first of these to gain international attention was with a controversy over the removal of the potentially gendered phrase “好汉 haohan” (hero) in Kerbal Space Program, followed by an incident involving the post-apocalyptic strategy game Frostpunk in 2018, when Chinese players took issue with how the game scolded players for turning to extreme measures like child labor in order to ensure the survival of their city. Frostpunk was an interesting case. The controversy sprang from real differences in how gamers in China and the West view political systems and liberty. And there was a point to Chinese players’ complaints: it doesn’t make much sense for the game to condemn totalitarian rule if it’s also the only method most players have of ensuring the survival of the human race. At the same time, it takes a special level of paranoia or vitriol to try to ruin a game’s success over this.

Yuxin: Sometimes all it takes is a simple hat to cause online fights between South Korean and Chinese players, eventually forcing developers to issue questionable, sus apologies.

Aaron: Frostpunk remained popular in China anyway, but the next major review-bombing incident would turn out much differently. When Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games’ horror game Devotion came out in 2019, it was originally seen (and marketed) within mainland China as a standout guochan game, dominating attention in the Chinese games sphere and receiving overwhelmingly positive reviews from Chinese players on Steam. Then it was revealed that a seal in the game contained text mockingly comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh. More tenuous, speculative claims that the game contained easter eggs attacking mainlanders followed.

Red Candle Games’ previous game, Detention, was a sharp, thoughtful 2D horror game that grappled directly with the legacy of Taiwan’s period of White Terror under the KMT. The fact that it found such success in mainland China showed the hunger Chinese gamers have for good, emotionally resonant games still based in some kind of Chinese cultural experience, but with its clear engagement with historical atrocities, also represented the kind of game that simply couldn’t have been made by a mainland developer. Once Devotion came under attack, Detention also became the target of review bombing.

The effects of this campaign still reverberate today. Devotion was pulled off Steam, and the game’s Chinese publisher was shut down by the government. Detention remains available, but not for anyone accessing it from China.

Today, looking for traces of Devotion on the Chinese internet leads you to a dead zone: mentions of the game have been scrubbed from social media, making it hard to track exactly how the backlash to the game was built. Instead, even while it’s now available again, Devotion seems to linger on for the rest of the world like a ghost story, used more as an example of China’s repression seeping into the rest of the world than played as a game in its own right.

Henry: Or take Disco Elysium, a not-so-subtle send up of the failures of world socialism, which evaded possible censorship by translating “communism” into the bizarre, phonetic nonce word, kangmizhuyi (it took me about thirty minutes to realize what was being referred to).

Aaron: Review bombing campaigns aren’t unique to China and aren’t representative of most Chinese gamers, but they’ve still provided plenty of fodder for anti-Chinese sentiment from other gamers. That kind of sentiment hasn’t been enough to stop Chinese games from finding international success, but it’s also not uncommon, with player paranoia about popular Chinese games like Genshin Impact or Chinese-funded companies like Epic Games (partially owned by Tencent). Meanwhile, Chinese review bombing campaigns have continued unabated, most recently targeting Fallout 76 (Chinese communist soldiers are featured as an enemy type in the game’s satirical post-apocalyptic Cold War world) and Life is Strange: True Colors (a Tibetan flag is visible in a storefront in the game’s small-town Colorado setting).

The negative Chinese reviews and broader player reaction to them within Steam have come to operate like a particularly brain-damaged microcosm of the discourse around China: Chinese players come in with ridiculous nationalist outrage, only to receive responses from other players that veer from outright racism to cringeworthy condescension. It’s not uncommon to see Western players on Steam replying to Chinese review bombing with blithe assertions that the Chinese reviewers are all posting to boost their social credit scores, a claim that’s laughable for anyone actually familiar with how life in China works.

This gulf between Chinese and Western players could grow even wider if Steam ever gets blocked in China.

Yuxin: The future is a sword hanging over our head. Apple estimatedly removed nearly 100k unlicensed games from the Chinese App Store in 2020 alone. Only 1414 games were granted a license in 2020, among which about 10% are foreign developed games. Most of these removed games will never be able to return.

Aaron: In February, Valve partnered with the Chinese game company Perfect World to launch Steam China, an officially sanctioned version of the platform for the Chinese market. Upon launch, the platform boasted only 53 titles. I checked back in on Steam China recently, and it’s now raised that number to a grand total of...61 titles, including unreleased ones. By contrast, Steam global has nearly 50,000.

When Steam China launched, many Chinese players were afraid that this would lead to Steam’s global version getting blocked in China, but so far that hasn’t happened. Interestingly, Zhu told me that the Chinese version of Steam and its domestic partnerships may actually be helping to prevent the global version from being blocked: “Most people just assume that one of the things that might be working is the fact that they kind of set up Steam China as a shell for Steam. Legally there is Steam China, so it makes sense for it to still exist somehow.”

Zhu remains relatively confident that the status quo can continue for at least a little while: “No one knows whether or not it's going to be blocked, because blocks are  usually triggered by some kind of event. So unless that event is important enough for the authorities to notice, I don't think the current situation is going to change anytime soon.”

I hope so, but it’s hard not to worry that all it will take is one incident to summon official attention and lead to the closure of Steam’s global version in China. Recent trends have not been encouraging. Last month, the Chinese state-backed games industry association released a pledge signed by hundreds of Chinese game companies vowing not to use international platforms to circumvent Chinese regulations, among other promises. If Steam were cut off, it could have a devastating effect for Chinese indie developers, as well as the many makers of foreign indie games who have come to rely on passionate Chinese player bases to help keep their games afloat.

I asked Chen, now at work with a small team on a new game called Slumhack, what he would do if Steam were to be blocked in China. He told me bluntly that he’d rather forgo a Chinese release than have to go through the process of having his game compromised:  “Personally, I won't make any games and at the same time try to get on any platforms with this censorship from the Chinese government...I’d rather give up on that share of the market and just choose normal Steam or other foreign game platforms.”

Krish: If you’d like to play any of the games mentioned in this piece, or check out Chinese indie titles—we’ve converted this essay into a Steam Curator page and recommendation list!

Aaron Fox-Lerner writes games and other things. He has a shamefully large backlog spread across Steam and itch.io.

Jason Li is a freelance graphic artist, editor at Paradise Systems and 88 Bar-tender.

Yuxin Gao is an indie game developer and producer. She created the video game documentary Out for Delivery, and curated Year of the Pig, a sibling exhibition to this episode.

Christina Xu was once emcee at the Game Developers Conference in China. She will not be taking any further questions.

Krish Raghav is a comic book artist in Beijing. He misses Home of the Underdogs, the OG proto-Steam.

Simon Frank is a writer, editor, and musician in Beijing. He misses all Chaoyang exiles.

Henry Zhang is a writer who lives in New Haven and dreams of Chaoyang.

Tianyu Fang is a writer from the Chaoyang diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In the house this week: Brian, Chen-Yu, Miaoju, Lev, Nathanel, AU, Simon, Krish, Tianyu, Yan, and Ting.

Krish: This episode is about Taiwan.

Specifically, Taiwan’s influence on Chinese music. How it’s shaped Chinese pop culture even as its origins are deliberately obscured or denied.

For decades, Taiwan⇔China has been one of the oddest musical circuits in the world. In the 1970s, there was the “ethereal presence” of singer Teresa Teng (鄧麗君), whose songs singularly captured the transformation of everyday life in post-Mao China. She is an enduring icon, her presence and influence so ubiquitous that the writer Andrew F. Jones argues Teng was “not so much a historical personage [but a] particular acoustic effect...and even a kind of domestic appliance.”

Throughout the 1980s, 90s, and 2000s, Taiwanese pop dominated airwaves and TV screens, blasted everywhere from taxi radios to college dorms. They constitute much of karaoke canon. In the last half-decade, Taiwanese indie bands like No Party for Cao Dong (草東沒有派對), deca joins, or Sunset Rollercoaster (落日飛車) seem to take turns to headline every Chinese music festival.

Their dominance has not, however, insulated Taiwanese culture from the...rollercoaster of broader political headwinds. Especially now, when China’s idols and films are the top show in town and a poisoned online environment is deployed as a paranoid border guard.

This big question we’re asking is, “how is Taiwanese music thought about (and encountered) in China today?”

Simon: Keeping our focus mostly on music more in the realm of Chaoyang Trap’s interests, “indie rock” and “underground club music” (with an awareness that both genres are sometimes big business), how are Taiwanese artists perceived in China, and how do they think about working in China?

Unexpectedly, the Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t caused cross-straits touring to totally peter out: bands have put themselves through quarantine to participate in reality shows like The Big Band (乐队的夏天), or embark on their own headline tours.

On the one hand, we could say this is great. People are overcoming would-be political barriers to share music.

On the other hand, if non-mainstream music is meant to carry some sort of alternative message, and if by entering the Chinese market Taiwanese artists who tilt “Green” (i.e., generally supporting a DPP-abetted status quo or independence) must remain silent, is meaningful exchange or communication still happening here? Is this a soft power win for hipster Taiwan? Or does the fact that this music is allowed into China normalize for fans here that the place it comes from is part of a cultural-political space that they can claim ownership of?

Krish: There is a kernel of truth to every part of this either/or question, and our one weird trick here is to treat choice as polarity—reject “either/or”, embrace “yes/no.”

Is this meaningful exchange that takes us forward, or normalization of a cursed status quo? Yes.

Simon: As Krish pitched the idea of Chaoyang Trap amongst friends last year, one thing that made it appeal to me was noticing the disconnect between cultural products in China that certain media outlets tell you to care about (i.e., rappers that support the police), and things that are actually worth caring about. There’s a wealth of interesting cultural activity (i.e. the subject of this episode) that still feels like it hasn’t been properly examined or critiqued in English.

If you were introduced for the first time to the “Chinese music scene” in 2021 without much context, you might be surprised to discover that many of the bands that seem to have something to say, or simply are operating at a slightly more professional level…are actually Taiwanese. How come? In my opinion this question alone makes our topic for this episode worth discussing.

Krish: We invited a dream team of contributors to take us through this. Brian Hioe is a writer, DJ, and music journalist in Taipei. Dr. Chen-Yu Lin is an academic and music industry professional who studies the Chinese audience. Miaoju Jian has been researching the cross-straits circulation of underground music for more than a decade. Lev Nachman, now at Harvard, has run @taiwansongaday for many years, and Nathanel Amar keeps the internet’s best archive of sinophone punk rock history.

A note on terminology:

For the purposes of this discussion, we use “Taiwan” to refer to the island of Taiwan (plus some other islands) and the Republic of China. We use “China” or “PRC” to refer to the People’s Republic of China or mainland China. Names of bands and musicians from Taiwan are rendered in traditional Chinese characters, while those from China are in simplified.

Between ROC and a Hard Place

By Brian Hioe, Chen-Yu Lin, Lev Nachman, Miaoju Jian, Nathanel Amar, and Simon Frank

Simon: I got the idea for this episode singing karaoke with my colleagues in the spring of 2018. I’m not exactly joking: after a couple of months working a new job in Beijing, I went to a KTV parlor with my co-workers, and was a little shocked to see people who I knew from an environment where emotional vulnerability was generally frowned upon belting out tear-jerking ballads. And if they weren’t singing something by Faye Wong, it was probably an old Taiwanese song. While these musical choices might have reflected more about the group of people I was with than wider trends, the way these songs were being used as a conduit for hidden feelings did bring to mind something that I embarrassingly hadn’t given much thought to before—namely, how is Taiwan thought about in China, not as a big political topic, but in all the ways that don’t look political but which are in fact deeply ideological.

As a music video flashed across the screen, showing a small bar-cafe café that I could have sworn was somewhere in an alley near Shida Night Market, I wondered if Taiwan was perceived as a utopian “island of affect”—a kind of hyper-California that provides pop songs, actors, and models to the mainland, idyllically preserved from the hassles of daily life.

Nathanel: I think the first time I realized the importance of Taiwan music in China was 2012, when I was drinking in a Wuhan punk bar. I went outside for a smoke and there were 4 older guys sitting down, around 40-50 years old, with a lot of beers and whisky bottles on the table. Their presence was quite unusual—not the typical demographic of a punk bar. They were in fact the 老大 (lǎodà) of the neighborhood, the guys you have to pay respect to and give free alcohol if you don’t want any problems with your business. Some of them were ex-policemen. They were really nice and invited me to drink with them. As we were beginning to get drunk, they decided that we had to sing a song together, and immediately began to sing Teresa Teng’s “月亮代表我的心” (“The Moon Represents My Heart”). Why would these guys instinctively choose to sing this song, even though we were just talking about their life during Maoism?

Miaoju: I went to China for the first time in 2008 to research the reality show Super Girl (超级女声). Since 2012, I have traveled to Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and other cities to conduct my long-term research on the indie music scene. What impressed me at the time was always hearing familiar Taiwanese pop songs on taxi radios, whether it was Sarah Chen (陳淑樺), Wakin Chau (周華健), or Jay Chou (周杰倫). Be it the host of a talk show or the driver who sang along, they were all intensely familiar with these singers, almost like they were close friends. But to me, these were old songs. Some were from the 1980s, and others the early 2000s, yet they were mashed together into a single soundscape for people’s daily life. Being loved and cherished but through a kind of bizarre feeling.

At the same time, Mayday’s (五月天, “The Beatles of the Chinese World'') first concert in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium sold out in seconds, and some young urban professionals did follow popular rock and alternative performers like Cheer Chen (陳綺貞), Deserts Chang (張懸), and Sodagreen (蘇打綠). But Taiwanese indie bands were then barely known to the public, except maybe for Skip Skip Ben Ben, who lived and played music in Beijing, and Hakka singer-songwriter Lin Shengxiang (林生祥) who had been touring China within the folk scene since 2008.

When I returned to Beijing in 2015, the situation was different. All my musician friends were very interested in indie bands from Taiwan. Besides Skip Skip Ben Ben, who had drummed for Carsick Cars in the early 2010s, Forests (森林) came to Beijing to play at XP in 2014. When I visited again in 2018, friends in Beijing were already discussing why so many Taiwanese bands had been touring there.Three names in particular, big in Taiwan already, were huge in China: No Party for Cao Dong (草東沒有派對), deca joins, and Sunset Rollercoaster (落日飛車).

For me, there are three types of musical exchange: 1) Mainstream Taiwanese pop music which is listened to by the public; 2) Taiwanese indie music mainly listened to by students and urban young adults; 3) Avant-garde, noise, and experimental music listened to by niche, underground music fans. My study mainly focuses on the second category.

I. History/Precedents

Simon: So… how did we get here? What created the demand for Taiwanese bands in China? Krish and I have joked that bands in Taiwan are generally better than those in China at a similar career level because they actually have a chance to develop—there’s less hype from the get-go, a slower pace of life even in big cities (which leaves time to practice and write songs), and a music scene with low stakes but decent infrastructure. So might it actually have something to do with Taiwan being more “Californian”?

Brian: I wonder if that’s precisely it—the demand for Taiwanese bands in China is rooted in Taiwan as thought of as signifying a sort of more laid-back pace or life or a different set of values.

Nathanel: I think Brian is right, there is something like an unheimliche feeling—a strange familiarity—in the demand of Taiwanese bands in China. We should also historicize this particular demand, from Teresa Teng to COM’Z. Someone like Hou Dejian (侯德健) was the symbol of a pan-Chinese identity, something that was later reappropriated by Wang Leehom with his own reinterpretation of the song 龍的傳人 (Descendents of the Dragon).

(Editor’s note: Hou Dejian’s version of ‘Descendents of the Dragon.’ Written as an anthem for Taiwan, then popularized as a pan-Chinese call for unification, then recast (by the lyricist) as an anthem in support of the students at Tiananmen Square, and then subsequently used by both mainland and Taiwan broadcasters as a ‘patriotic’ song.)

Chen-yu: I agree—I think it is helpful for us not to see Taiwanese bands touring in China as a series of specific, stand-alone events, but rather an extension of the long history of Taiwanese acts being heard in the China market.

In many ways, Taiwanese pop and indie soundtracked the drastic changes in Chinese society for the post-1990s generation. Many of my interviewees told me they had to “adapt” to pop music from Taiwan—namely S.H.E., Jay Chou and Mayday—when they were first exposed to it, as they were too different from the music their parents listened to.

Taiwanese indie music, I think, exemplifies the construction of “cultural imaginations” among music audiences. There have  been many discussions about how the twee xiao qingxin (小清新) aesthetics left a strong impression on the PRC’s music audience; labels such as ‘bourgeoisie’ (小資) and ‘cynical’ (厭世), used to describe quite a few Taiwanese acts, are descriptors of lifestyles too. For a China audience, Taiwanese music provides a kind of “organizing material” of subjectivity (as DeNora puts it), and I think the demand for Taiwanese music— past and present—is driven by it.

I also agree with Krish and Simon that there has been an advantage for Taiwanese musicians as the infrastructure here has been developed earlier and better. Even today, bands can apply with the Ministry of Culture for governmental subsidies to record their albums (something unthinkable on the Chinese side). These schemes specifically encouraged bands, not DJs or Hip-Hop artists.

Miaoju: I think the development of China's huge music festival market, especially the  “fountain explosion” (井噴) era since 2010, was a major reason. Taiwanese bands gave capable live performances with good energy, and appealed to the core youth demographic. Not only did international acts increase the attractiveness and diversity of a lineup, the ambiguous identity of Taiwan artists (simultaneously local and foreign) gave festivals the best of both worlds. In addition to well-known female artists such as Joanna Wang (王若琳) and Waa Wei (魏如萱), the performance opportunities and demand for Taiwan indie bands greatly increased as well.

Krish: I worked for a Shanghai music festival from 2015-19, and can second this strongly. Taiwanese bands were easier to process visas for, and sold more tickets than, their indie counterparts from Europe or the US. They were also, on balance, better headliners, more used to playing on big festival stages. They were, in most cases, used to dealing with non-standard equipment or improvised technical set-ups. The ambiguity of their identity (“Chinese-ish”) also smoothed over concerns of “excessive foreignness” with local police and culture bureaus.

Miaoju: The diversity of music festivals, from independent and underground to mainstream and genre-focused, dovetailed with the rise of talent shows, where Taiwan bands found opportunities too. The two seasons of “The Big Band” (乐队的夏天) in 2019 and 2020 were key for participating Taiwanese bands, with all of them now in high demand for bookings, tours, and festival slots.

Nathanel: Now with The Chairs (椅子樂團) and COM’Z (康姆士)—two of the Taiwanese bands in the last “The Big Band” season—I feel they sell the idea of the “laid-back pace of life” that Brian is talking about. You can picture them on their scooter doing their 環島 (huandao, a “circuit” around the island) when you listen to their music—at least it’s my own feeling (and as Su Rui 蘇芮 taught us, we should “go with our feelings”). Is there something like a 小幸福 kind of music that people are attracted to in China?

Krish: Yeah, this is a really fascinating question. I wonder what makes their particular brand of laid-back 休闲 feel "realer" than, say, the self-proclaimed “leisure pop” (休闲流行) of Fuzhou band The 尺口MP? Andrew F Jones refers to this through the idea of “timbre”—why do certain sounds or genres “represent” a historical moment? Do particular eras really have a signature sound?

This is a question more than a comment, but if we accept that the timbre of an era is a reality we can grasp as it unfolds, could Taiwanese indie be, in a sense, a sound that anticipated China’s “involuted generation?”

Simon: If Teresa Teng soundtracked the Chinese 80s, and now Taiwanese bands are a frequent sight on stages and screens in China, what happened in between? On the surface, there’s a big gap between Teng’s ballads and today’s bands, who, spiritually and in some cases literally, emerged from underground scenes, even if their music is fairly polished.

Yan: As someone born in the 90s in Beijing, I remember music from Taiwan in different mediums—OG boy band Xiao Hu Dui (小虎队) in 1992’s CCTV Spring Festival Gala, Mavis Fan’s (范晓萱 )  “健康歌” (“Song of Health”) as background music in McDonald’s, Jay Chou’s first three albums on tape and subsequently on CDs; many others as ambient music over dinner (there’s a 6:40pm pop music program on BTV (Beijing TV Station) that I always watched while eating), or on radio when I did my homework at night. At the time, Taiwan pop music was mainstream, you didn’t have to go out of your way to listen to it. Compared to my father’s generation who had to listen to Teresa Teng in secret, it was a completely different experience.

Nathanel: I love the story of Mayday’s (五月天) first concert in China, which in turn reminds me of Beyond’s first concert in China. It’s an interesting story. Sorry if I’m making weird connections but I think these examples show how music circulated between China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1980s on.

So I’ll start with the Hong Kong rock band Beyond. They toured China in 1988. At the time they were quite unknown there, and basically there was no audience for Cantonese rock in Beijing. The concert was a commercial failure, but more importantly it was also a missed encounter between Hong Kong and Beijing rock. Cui Jian (崔健) came to meet the band before the concert—he did not stay for their performance—but they couldn’t communicate. Beyond’s Mandarin was very poor at the time, and Gene Lau, their lyricist and interpreter for the tour, was not there. In his memoirs, Gene Lau remembers that “halfway through the concert, half the audience had left”, even as Beyond sang a Mandarin version of “Great Earth” (大地), written phonetically by Gene Lau, but also Cui Jian’s “Nothing to My Name” (一无所有) and even “The East is Red” (东方红)! A stark contrast with Beyond's second tour in China in 2003, at a packed-out Beijing Worker’s Stadium, two months after the end of the SARS outbreak in China and Hong Kong.

So, flash-forward to 2004, when Mayday was already a huge band in Taiwan but fairly unknown in China. At the time, people in Beijing confused the Taiwanese band with self-styled punk He Yong’s (何勇) first band, also named 五月天. Their Beijing concert was organized at Nameless Highland (Wuming gaodi 无名高地), an underground bar near the north side of the 4th Ring Road in Chaoyang, with the legendary punk-rockers Joyside. The entrance fee was 30 yuan (20 for students). People came for Joyside, and when Mayday took the stage, there were only about 30 people left. According to the legend, the audience booed Mayday, but after two songs, people began to pogo. This Taiwanese band had won the hearts of Beijing punk rockers—quite the achievement!

I also heard that, several years later, a member of Joyside ran into Mayday at the Hong Kong airport, but the Taiwanese band didn’t recognize him, or remember their concert. All this to say that there were/are some prejudices regarding Hong Kong and Taiwan bands in the underground Beijing communities, who sometimes think that “rock authenticity” is the sole property of Beijing. I remember reading the headlines of Beijing newspapers during Beyond’s 2003 concerts in China: “Hong Kong doesn’t have rock and roll, except for Beyond, Taiwan doesn’t have rock and roll, except for Lo Ta-yu (羅大佑).”

Simon: Wow, I haven’t thought about Nameless Highland in a while! Beijing’s claims to rock authenticity bring to mind the way these things are often gendered, with the stereotype that rough, masculine men from Beijing play “real rock,” whereas music from Hong Kong and Taiwan is feminized, lightweight, and “pop.” This offensive view might also be connected to why some Taiwanese indie is seen as an “aspirational product”—a way out of certain gender roles, an artifact of a gentler life? It’s also interesting that while there’s a degree of gender balance in the music we’ve been discussing, when I visualize a band being marketed through 乐夏 these days, it’s pretty much gonna be four guys with guitars.

Nathanel: Yes there is something like an “excessive virility” of Beijing rock, a mythology constructed since the 1980s in opposition to the more "feminine" Cantopop, as De Kloet and Chow put it. Of course it doesn't mean that it's true, but these kinds of stereotypical discourses have real implications.

Partly as a result, I think there has been a kind of hesitancy to talk about the influence of Taiwanese (and Hongkongese) music, and particularly pop music, in China by music scholars. The focus on “Beijing rock” and the false debate on its “authenticity” have prevented us from seeing the historical complexity of Taiwan (and Hong Kong) influence, even in the “underground” music scene.

When I was interviewing participants of the scene in China, especially outside Beijing, musicians were telling me the importance of Taiwan and Hong Kong pop music in the early 1990s for them, consumed through pirated tapes and radio-waves. And at the same time, you can see the “Beijing tough-guys” spirit towards Taiwanese bands on The Big Band (乐队的夏天) for instance, people mocking the Taiwanese accent of COM’Z or Fool and Idiot (傻子與白癡) and the way they pronounce “哥们儿,” or the fact that the guys from The Chairs are not drinking alcohol or eating spicy food.

Krish: This mix of familiarity and othering is interesting. Given this history, and the many possible opportunities for a young Taiwanese band in China, at what point in a band's existence do they start thinking about the "China market?" What are the routes to building an audience?

I'm guessing it doesn't come naturally for Taiwan bands to have a Weibo account, so who (or what) is  "translating" Taiwanese music to platforms inside the Great Firewall?

Miaoju: One important factor has been the opening of mainland students to study in Taiwan since 2011. Many exchange students who have come to Taiwan seem to have a special sense of intimacy towards the music scene, and were important sources of information.

For example, in 2015, there was a Weibo account called "Wanwan Choking Sound" (湾湾呛声), which was created by exchange student Lu Xiaowei (陆小维). At that time, 湾湾呛声 was followed by around 800 people and was dominated by her favorite Taiwanese indie bands Touming Magazine (透明雜誌) and Wayne’s So Sad (傷心欲絕). At the end of 2017, another Weibo account "Wanwan Independent Music News" (湾湾独立音乐速报) appeared, later renamed "Island Music News" (小岛音乐速报).  It was followed by 10,000 people in the early days, and now that number has increased to 400,000. The music platform StreetVoice was influential too. It established a branch in Beijing in 2016, and ran Shanghai’s Simple Life Festival where many Taiwanese bands played.

All the major music platforms in China, from the erstwhile Xiami Music (虾米音乐) to Douban and NetEase Cloud have special sections, tags, and playlists for Taiwanese indie bands. Of course, the rise of the “self media” era (自媒体) was also very important for introducing Taiwanese bands.

On the other hand, Taiwan's indie bands also have great personal interest to perform in China. In the early 2010s, you would tour with a little help from musician friends. But this was a relatively hard period of adaptation, from figuring out opaque and tricky application procedures to dealing with equipment quirks and technical issues in local Chinese music venues. Ticket sales were low, and hard to balance with the cost of traveling and flights.

In September 2015, Sunset Rollercoaster and Forests toured together for the first time in China, playing 11 shows including one in Hong Kong. After returning to Taiwan, frontman Kuo Kuo (國國) shared his experience on Facebook. He said that he lost money at the box office and only solid merchandise sales helped balance the cost.

Krish: Fast forward to 2019, and Sunset Rollercoaster is playing a sold-out arena show at Beijing’s Workers’ Gymnasium to 5000+ people.

Miaoju: Almost all of Taiwan's indie bands had to pay such “tuition fees” to learn how to enter the touring market in China. In 2016, Touming Magazine was invited by Qiii Snacks, a DIY indie label in Guangzhou, to make their China tour debut. This kind of casual, DIY touring was much more normal back then, but after 2015, bands with more experience were able to find diverse (and more lucrative) ways to develop, like mixing and matching festival slots with solo tours and branding opportunities. Because Taiwan’s music tour market is too small, the chance to make it in China's cities was very attractive.

Chen-yu: “To navigate the PRC market or not” is a decision musicians would have to make at some point. Politically inclined metal bands like Chthonic (閃靈) have decided not to be on this route, but a lot of bands try to figure their ways out. Key here are bookers and promoters, who are able to help Taiwanese bands craft applications to obtain approval on the China side (報批). This process is indeed political, as the selection of acts with “appropriate attitudes toward China'' takes place here. While media platforms play an important role in sharing information to music-lovers and gig-goers in China, it is often still down to the artists and their teams to manage their own image in order to actually get in there. I have seen musicians’ PR teams pushing foreign press away when questions about cross-straits relations are asked. Most often than not, the artists have to carefully manage their social media profiles too. After the outbreak in Taiwan in May 2021, a few musicians went to China straight away for work opportunities. I think the balance between maintaining an appealing profile in Taiwan and in China is going to be more difficult to strike.

II. Models/Economies/Incentives

Simon: So, let’s talk about the internet. Is cross-straits touring an issue at all on the Taiwanese web? How do fans or other musicians react to hearing people have gone over to China to play some shows? Is there any pushback to more politically-active artists actively touring in China?

Krish: Related to this, it's clear that the atmosphere within the firewall has changed for the worse. You have stars like Jolin Tsai (蔡依林) and Dee Hsu (小S) being roasted on Weibo for even marginally "insinuating" Taiwan’s separate identity, not to mention overtly pro-China figures like Ouyang Nana (歐陽娜娜). Do similar controversies come up on the Taiwan web, where celebrities get questioned for pandering to the PRC market? Brian has written recently about how people assume being pro-KMT might shield them, but this isn’t really the case is it?

Lev: You used to hear indie bands in Taiwan say “Touring in China is for making money, touring in Japan is living the dream” and I think this really describes what most indie artists feelings towards touring in China are like—it’s not a political statement, it’s not an endorsement of anything, it really is just an opportunity to actually make money as a musician. A lot of mild envy or jealousy really stems from seeing bands get tour deals in China because it is a sign of having “made it” to some degree. But really the jealousy kicks in when bands tour in Japan. So much of Taiwan’s indie rock scene was heavily influenced by Japanese rock. Even today Japan’s music is put on a pedestal in Taiwan as being inherently better than anything Taiwanese bands cook up. I think it's interesting to think of how the flow of indie rock scenes made its way around East Asia—Japan’s scene influences Taiwan’s scene which goes on to influence China’s scene.

Then of course are the politically inclined bands who refuse to play in the PRC or have no way of playing in the PRC. Beyond the obvious bands like Chthonic or Fire EX. (滅火器), a lot of musicians, especially in the activist scene, take it as a point of pride to not tour in China. Again, they don’t judge bands that do but do consider it a badge of honor to be unable to tour in the PRC. The one exception may be some resentment towards No Party for Cao Dong because so many are still blown away that they’ve become so monumental in China, but it’s nothing serious. For bands who can’t tour in the PRC, their alternatives and financial possibilities become much slimmer but there are some cool connections they do make in either Japan or Hong Kong that make it possible. The Hong Kong route will no longer be a viable option because of the National Security Law, but once upon a time there was some interesting solidarity between Hong Kong and Taiwanese bands. Hong Kong bands like Seasons for Change used to tour with OBSESS from Taichung and would invite each other to Taiwan/Hong Kong respectively to do shows.

There is also something to be said about why some Taiwanese bands chose not to tour in the PRC—to some it’s a fear, but I also hear plenty of musicians see the need to self-censor or have to fight with a label about what they can or cannot say on Facebook as more of a frustration (or a hassle) than a fear. I have one friend who used to be infamous for long political rants, but once he signed to a label and toured the PRC he was told he had to stop posting about politics, otherwise the band wouldn’t be able to play. He jokes that it ended up saving him a lot of time on social media, but every election he gets frustrated for not being able to join in on the KMT hate.

Brian: In 2014, Mayday got flak for walking back support of the Sunflower Movement because of concerns how it would affect their ability to maintain a presence in the Chinese market. Sometimes bands or artists view going to China as a way to make a lot of money quickly, given low salaries in Taiwan, but I think there’s maybe a certain degree of allowance for bands being strategically quiet in some circumstances—it’s when bands are viewed as reversing course politically that they’re more often criticized.

I wonder if so far it just simply is that the indie scene hasn’t particularly been targeted in any way though, it’s always these more mainstream figures that come under scrutiny. That might change. No Party for Cao Dong is thought of as pro-independence, for example, but has still managed to tour China—maybe that’s because a lot of the pro-independence politics are expressed more in terms of sentiment rather than explicitly politically laying it out.

Krish: Fans also tend to overlook that No Party for Cao Dong wrote the closing theme for Devotion (還願), a Taiwanese indie game that got extremely banned in China. For an internet culture very devoted to teasing out guilt by association, this oversight feels like “strategic silence” is practiced on the China side too.

Brian: I also do wonder if the political mood has shifted somewhat in past years. Xiangyu, the tankie rapper, got mileage in the past in a way I can’t really imagine in the present, for example.

There’s maybe something about the band that originally sings in Taiwanese which stops doing so to try and seek mainstream success, as well. This doesn’t get pointed out but feels explicit—the big example is Mayday, but you see this with newer groups like Amazing Show (美秀集團) too.

Nathanel: You have the historic precedent of A-mei, banned from touring China for several years after singing the national anthem during Chen Shui-bian’s presidential investiture. And you have artists such as Jolin Tsai or Jay Chou who make most of their money in China, and have thus to display a non-controversial Chinese identity in their songs.

The problem for indie Taiwan bands touring China nowadays is that, with new regulations, the cost of a China tour is becoming more and more expensive. And they can be blacklisted from one day to another.

What also interests me is the notion of language in Taiwanese songs. The major, most mainstream bands sing in Mandarin, but you have more bands using taiyu in their songs—can they perform in taiyu in China, and is there an audience for it? Again, I’m thinking of the last season of “The Big Band,” where you had Wutiaoren (五条人) and their impromptu song in haifeng hua, which is close to minnan and taiyu. But what really surprised me is the reception of The Chairs’ (椅子樂團) songs in taiyu. They were not doing great during their first few performances, but then they switched to taiyu and you could see that the audience was very receptive, like they were finally “singing their own songs” (a reference to Lee Shuang-tze ahah) and expressing what’s in their hearts. That’s why I think even taiyu songs can trigger a profound emotional response in Chinese audiences.

After this taiyu performance, there was this “professional music lover” (专家乐迷) saying that as Fujianese himself, he was moved to tears by The Chairs because it reminds him of home, to hear this familiar but repressed language. Again, I think the Freudian concept of Unheimliche is particularly adapted to this kind of reception—familiar but strange at the same time.

Simon: I wonder if perhaps Taiwanese bands offer a way for regionality to exist in a way that it cannot in China, due to language standardization, etc. The 尺口MP demonstrate how the aesthetics of regionality seem to be quite influenced by Taiwanese artists, even if the band sings in Fuzhou dialect, rather than minnan/taiyu. Their first release bears the heavy imprint of garage rock-era Sunset Rollercoaster, and as Krish has previously written, the aesthetic is extremely laidback. Yet they’re also devoted to a highly specific seam of nostalgia for their hometown. Perhaps Taiwanese bands break the myth that everything must be in putonghua to have a wide appeal?

Brian: Some Chinese indie bands become highly popular in Taiwan—Omnipotent Youth Society or Wutiaoren are prominent examples that come to mind. I’ve also heard someone like Fish Lin of Community Service (勞動服務) expressing admiration for politically-minded Chinese bands and rappers. The way he phrased it specifically was that he felt that they were the real deal, while he was less so by comparison, given the risks they take.

Nathanel: My own experience in the Taiwanese punk sphere was quite interesting regarding Chinese punk bands. I think Wuhan punks SMZB’s (生命之餅) 2018 tour in Taiwan was a turning point in the relationship between the Chinese and Taiwanese underground. It was organized by several groups, among them Trapped Citizen (愁城), one of the most interesting punk/alternative collectives I have seen. It was complicated to organize as you might suspect, visa-wise and all. But they managed to make it happen—the concert at Pipe was supposed to have been awesome, with Taiwan punk legends 88 BALAZ opening the show. There’s a video of SMZB singing “Great Wuhan” (大武汉), and you can see the response. I think it resonated with them, disrupting the usual representation of what a Chinese band is supposed to be, to say. This tour had a lasting effect, people still talk about it, there was a special issue of the fanzine 场景报告 (“Scene Report”) published by Trapped Citizen featuring an interview of Wu Wei, and another article on SMZB in White Rabbit Records’ magazine. More recently, in January 2021, during the “Anarchy in Taiwan'' punk festival at The Wall, the band Mr. Noproperty (無先生) covered “Great Wuhan” and everybody was cheering and singing along:

This relationship to Wuhan punk re-materialized during the early stage of the pandemic. When Wuhan was in lockdown, Trapped Citizen organized an event to support the Wuhan punk community. We had a WeChat video-call with Wuhan friends, and the people behind Trapped Citizen produced beautiful woodcut posters for the occasion. When The Big Band was airing in China, they also organized a screening of Joyside’s documentary Wasted Orient.

What interests me also is the representation, and sometimes the fantasy, about the Chinese underground in Taiwan. I’ve screened Wang Shuibo’s documentary on Wuhan punk several times in Taiwan together with Wang himself, and I was fascinated by the audience response. They were saying things like, “there are real punks in China, they have to fight in a very hostile environment in order to survive, but we can’t have that kind of punk in Taiwan, because who do you fight against?”

It’s discourse. This doesn’t represent the full reality of Taiwan punk, but it shows the fascination with the Chinese underground and the representation of Taiwan as a relatively stable and boring society—of course that’s not true, you have plenty of social mobilizations and anger if you look closer. You can also see this when you talk to Taiwanese punk bands, a lot of them really want to go to China and Wuhan, to see the scene with their own eyes. I think it also has to do with their politics, they’re very different from green-leaning bands like 拍謝少年 (Sorry Youth) or Fire EX. They despise the DPP as well as the KMT. Just listen to Accomplices’ (共犯結構) songs. It’s actually easier for them to connect with the Chinese underground on an emotional and political level. That reminds me of a poster during a punk festival in Taipei, which said:

“Fuck

sexism

Homoph-

obia,

racism,

DPP

& 黃偉哲” (the DPP mayor of Tainan who was criticized for his urban renewal policies).

Krish: How do some people manage to strike a balance? To jump back to the mainstream, I’m thinking about someone like Wu Bai (伍佰), both a Taike icon (台客) and huge star in China.

Chen-yu: It has become increasingly difficult for artists from Taiwan to still “profit” from the PRC market without backlash, or to ust shy away from expressing their political stances (or have a pro-KMT outlook). I think exploring ways to Southeast Asia and Japan is a valiant attempt. Recently, I had a chance to visit Taipei Music Center’s Cultural Cube. Its exhibition hall is the first of its kind to open in Taiwan dedicated to popular music. As glamorous, educational and exciting as it is,  I do think that we Taiwanese— especially the generations that witnessed the heyday of Taiwan’s music taking over the PRC market— have this belief that we are, or at least used to be, the music centre of Sinophone world (“華語流行音樂中心”). The problem is, we never really had the lasting infrastructure to navigate markets other than the PRC. Rock Records (滾石唱片) might have expanded to other countries (including Thailand, South Korea, Japan and so on) for a bit, but this was never a common practice. I think the first thing that we need to confront is that the need to export music to locations outside of the PRC has not been something the Taiwanese music industry was equipped for. So we do have a lot of work to do to catch up.

III. Theories/Speculation/Futures

Simon: Part of what we want to get at with this episode is whether the current situation actually holds the potential to spread some positive ideas.

Does the DIY ideal that music and art can open up new ways of thinking for listeners and community members still hold? Or are things too commercialized (and China too hegemonic) for this type of exchange to take hold—might it actually have the opposite impact?

Chen-yu: At this moment, I think the positive idea we can have is to encourage musicians to think about markets other than the PRC—to think outside of the box, to think big, and to actually try to develop networks and connections in other territories. They will have to take risks if they intend to do so but developing a career too  dependent on the PRC market has become equally, if not even more risky.

We are living in a  world where these identifications— such as 台獨 (taidu, pro-Taiwan independence), pro-China or 辱華 (ruihua, to insult China)—are fluid and in flux. One day 小S can be a model entertainer, and the next day she is the one to blame. These dominant narratives have political implications and impact audiences; the need to create a unified and homogenous “Chineseness” has increased. On a positive note, even though many entertainers are at the receiving end of backlash, I still believe some listeners will reflect and make their own judgements, like in all other markets and territories. Eventually, music might have the potential to encourage listeners to draw, redraw, and renegotiate these boundaries—politically, and culturally.

Krish: For some bands, being boxed in by nationality/territory is itself a trap, and creating the space for artists to move beyond being just a “Taiwanese band” or “Chinese band” (while acknowledging the pride and belonging that comes with it) feels crucial.

It’s also important to point out here that while we’re talking about changes in China, the scene in Taiwan isn’t static by any means...

Lev: Yes, and context matters when asking if Taiwanese take pride in their indie music scene. Recently people seem more down on the band scene as rap and individual artists take up most of the mainstream. There are still bands that have broad pop appeal, but I know a lot of rock musicians feel like they’re a dying breed in Taiwan these days. That being said, plenty of new, talented bands are constantly popping up and blowing me away. The silver lining is there is always new music worth looking forward to in Taiwan.

To give an example, since audiences on both sides of the Strait grew up on the same pop music, I feel like you’re almost as likely to hear a DJ mix a Elva Hsiao (蕭亞軒) or S.H.E. track into some club music at a party in Shanghai as you are at Final in Taipei. Is this a good thing, or is a false claim of ownership being asserted in the former scenario? Or, is approaching the issue like this simply too paranoid?

Ting: I've definitely felt this in terms of Guangdong/Hong Kong—I think a lot of us growing up in Guangdong, from my parent's generation to my own, do feel in a strange sense that Hong Kong music is ours in some way, just because it exists in such proximity and thrives in the sonic landscape. On an emotional level I don't want to interrogate that identification too much, but I think that memory does form the backdrop of current imaginations of Hong Kong.

Brian: Thinking of Sinophone (“Chinese-speaking”) circuits is a useful framework for evaluating this sort of phenomenon, since there’s a shared Sinophone cultural memory between kids from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China in this sense—though these are not even relationships, nor are they always two-way. I wonder sometimes if the strong political affinities between Taiwan and Hong Kong are not only because of the shared “China factor,” per se, but because many young political people are around the same age, grow up consuming each other’s cultural exports, and that creates a sort of affective nostalgia for the other—sometimes without ever having been to Hong Kong or China.

A lot of the throwback tracks I hear in clubs leverage this sort of affective nostalgia. Interestingly enough, that’s a period in which tensions between Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China weren’t as strong, as well as before the young people of today were thrown into harsh economic and political realities—a period in which a sense of broader pan-Chineseness was still possible.

The current generation of Taiwanese indie is primarily individuals that have grown up observing the political and economic rise of China. There’s some concern about what the next generation might look like, since they’re people who have grown up only with China having always been more economically larger and prosperous than Taiwan. For example, there’s the fact that bands like Lao Wang (老王樂隊) sing with an unusually Chinese-sounding accent, which I think has pushed the band to appear at political events to avoid accusations of being pro-China or whatever. Even No Party for Cao Dong are sometimes seen as singing with a somewhat Chinese inflection.

There’s likely to be anxiety regarding this in the future, along with the incorporation of Chinese terms into Taiwanese vernacular, like saying 視頻 instead of 影片. Exchange of vocabulary and loanwords is natural, but it’s bound to cause anxieties about identity around this.

On the flipside, I also wonder if leaning too much into Taiwaneseness will be seen as something of a cliche, too, as exaggerated taike-ness. DJ Didilong (whose work has also drawn on the sort of Sinophone affective nostalgia I mentioned) might be an example of this. You increasingly see this sort of playing up Taiwaneseness or use of retro nostalgia in artists who straddle the boundary between the indie and the mainstream, like 9m88’s collaboration with Mars Ma, and I think the more explicitly indie types might react against this.

Nathanel: Totally agree. I think Andrew F. Jones’ notion of “circuit listening” is a very useful one—understanding the dynamism of local mediation of global cultures by thinking of “circuits” that light up simultaneously at different nodes.

He doesn’t use the term “Sinophone” in his work for different reasons, but there is something like a circuit between all the different hubs of the Sinophone world and the diaspora. There was a Cantopop/Taiwanese Mandopop circuit since the 1980s, people singing Beyond and Teresa Teng in KTVs across Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, Bobby Chen singing “One Night in Beijing”, Faye Wong circulating between all these different places and musical genres. But are we experiencing a new era of the Sinophone musical circuit? Sometimes you have the impression of a closed-circuit, as Brian said, with the retro nostalgia and the closure of Chinese musical borders. But I’m still hopeful, I think that marginal circuits, such as the one between the Wuhan and Taipei underground, may prevail in the long run.

Krish: A small aside, but the idea of “circuits” is also useful in parsing some of the early-Internet BBS-to-Douban era influences on the PRC musical underground that, among others, created significant fanbases for bands like Hong Kong’s My Little Airport (this can be a whole separate Chaoyang Trap episode!)

To close out, I wonder if there are any current examples that exist to guide us to what a better future might look like in the music scene?

Simon: I see something like the experimental-psychedelic-noise label WV Sorcerer Productions (巫唱片) offering a more positive model. It’s run in France by Nanjing-born musician ruò tán, and has released music by Taipei band Mong Tong. As Nathanel mentions, perhaps more marginal circuits, less oriented towards money, have the chance to be more equitable and foster more interesting work. At the same time,  even though there’s nothing overtly political about Mong Tong’s music, it really captures for me what makes Taiwan’s underground so vital, and different from China’s—up till now much of their music and identity has been based on researching weird new age publications from Taiwan in the 80s and 90s. Equivalent material exists in China, but I can’t imagine a band doing something similar here—eventually you’d collide with the Falun Gong. So that line of thought is cut off, and somebody with similar interests here would likely create something just drawing on cliches of UFOs and psychedelia—actually making something more globalized and homogenous in the end!

Brian: Apart from leaning heavily into Japanese indie music, there’s also been some efforts within the music industry to import Korean bands for a Taiwanese audience. That hasn’t been as successful to date, but given mainstream interest in Korean culture it does seem like something that would have a market.

Particularly where links to Japan are concerned, I think many strong ties develop through Taiwanese students that study in Japan. I’m always surprised how many indie spaces there are that incorporate a strong element of fascination with Japan—say, Senko Issha, The Bar, Mangasick, Sanchoya, and a few others just off the top of my head. There’s nothing comparable for other contexts, you won’t find something like in-depth knowledge of Hong Kong indie bands as commonly, for example—though I wonder if the wave of migrants from Hong Kong will change things, with the emergence of new spaces run by them.

That hasn’t happened yet, but I wonder if it may.

Miaoju: 2021 is special. Reportedly, 16 Taiwanese indie bands have recently performed in China. But I feel that these bands are cautious, staying low-key and speaking obliquely. At the same time, few of these bands' tour schedules in China have been announced within Taiwan. Even if these tours are successful, they will not talk about it in Taiwan. Even if fans at home know that these bands are currently in China, they don't pay special attention to it. There seems to be a tacit understanding here: no one will talk or comment because they know those bands need the China market for a sustainable career.

Of course, for many these tours can be a dream come true. It will be a pity if these dreams come attached with different levels of compromise. Here, Taiwan’s creative freedom is its strength. It produces diversity, so I don’t think we should pin our hopes or expectations on a single band or few examples. Even if some choose a form of silence to work in the China market, “truth-telling” through music will remain.  There will always be other bands and musicians who continue to express, critique, and create great works. We should believe in that. Continue to listen, sing and support the artists you admire. That is my thought.

Au Chang is a designer, illustrator and tattoo artist. She is based between Taipei and Shanghai.

Simon Frank is a writer, editor, and musician in Beijing. He released the album So Dream It on Absurd TRAX this year. He misses Taipei.

Miaoju Jian is a researcher and indie music fan based in Chiayi, Taiwan. She writes both academic and media articles. She misses friends in Beijing, Shanghai and many places in China.

Chen-Yu Lin is International Development Manager for the Liverpool Sound City Music Festival and a popular music researcher wandering between Taipei and Liverpool. She wrote about the concept of “Chineseness” in Sinophone popular music for her PhD thesis.

Brian Hioe is a writer, translator, and DJ based in Taipei. He is one of the founders of New Bloom Magazine, which covers activism, politics, and youth culture in Taiwan.

Nathanel Amar is a researcher based in Taipei. He still has a blog ‘cause he was born in the 1980s.

Lev Nachman is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Fairbank Center and a music nerd who spends too much time making playlists but forgets to post them for @TaiwanSongADay

Yan Cong is a Beijing photographer now based in Amsterdam. She is one of the founders of Far & Near, a Substack about visual storytelling in China. You should subscribe!

Tianyu Fang was a writer in Beijing. He is still a writer, but no longer in Beijing.

Krish Raghav is a comic-book artist in Beijing. He has unheimliche feelings towards Wuhan’s 小面窝, because they remind him of medu vadas.

Ting Lin is a writer now based in San Francisco.

Krish: Welcome to our season finale.

The word “wanghong” (网红) is inescapable in China. It’s everywhere as a descriptor, online and offline. There is no precise translation. At the simplest level, it means “internet famous,” referring in its earliest iterations to viral personalities or social media influencers. The word has since mutated, expanding and venn-diagramming with a particular hipster aesthetic, strands of urban design and kinds of tech platform architecture. It can refer to people, places, cities, entire counties. Reliance on wanghong status can drive local economies, even a large coastal archipelago of villages, beaches and hills.

Depending on who’s using it, wanghong can be an aspiration, a warning (“you’ll have to queue at that bar, it’s wanghong”), or a judgement (“this art show’s vibe is a bit wanghong”). In almost all contexts, though, it suggests a certain shallowness. A hollow facade.

Tianyu: The most wanghong architecture I can think of is the Binhai New Area Library in Tianjin, first opened in 2017. With bookshelves on the ceiling shaped like an eye, the library is wanghong in every aspect: the spot is popular among social media influencers because of its interior design. If you look at the pictures, you’d wonder how readers are able to get the books so high up on the shelves—but don’t worry, the books are fake anyway. It was never designed to be a space where one reads, but rather where one poses for photos.

Krish: Here’s another, personal, example: I work for a wanghong brewpub in Beijing. It “became” wanghong in October 2020 due to this backdrop, first shot by a wanghong, an influencer, on Xiaohongshu. Here it is poorly reproduced by me, in a faux-wanghong style:

This table at our bar always has a queue. Everyone wants to “check in” (打卡) at this spot. Endless variations of this shot are uploaded hourly on every social media platform. It’s been the setting for elaborate short videos on Douyin, magazine fashion shoots with stylists and light rigs, and at least one wedding proposal. All because it’s “wanghong.”

We’ve used wanghong in the last few paragraphs to refer to a brand, a place, a building, an architecture, an aesthetic, a person, a phenomenon, and a process. Like a recent piece on the word “influencer,” in this issue we try to answer the writer Sara Ahmed’s call to “follow language around to see what it can and does do.”

Here’s why this is important. Wanghong is a concrete product of a specific tech-enabled historic moment in China. What we need is a theory for it. What does wanghong obscure, and what does it reveal? Can we ask who wanghong serves? What does itdo to our online lives, our neighborhoods, and even our entire city?

TL;DR: wanghong wanghong wanghong...wanghong?

Staring into the wanghong abyss for us are Drs. Amy, Asa, and Carwyn, three academics based at the University of Manchester (Amy, Carwyn) and the University of Leeds (Asa) who hosted a panel in May on wanghong culture, the aesthetics of Chinese cities, and the possible futures of wanghong urbanism.

Asa: My entry point to wanghong came from doing fieldwork in Chongqing between 2015 and 2017, and witnessing how certain sites in the city that I passed through gradually took on new significance as the background to a thousand selfies and short videos: most infamously, the Liziba subway station, where a light rail line passes through the side of a residential block. I didn’t realise it, but I was witnessing the start of a wanghong takeover of urban spaces.

Carwyn: Lockdown boredom in 2020 took me to Zhihu posts about Changsha, and I kept seeing Changsha being described as a wanghong city (网红城市). This is the first time I remember seeing the term scaled up to an entire city and became interested in what was being described. As a serious scholar sitting in bed, I was soon obsessed with the Changsha wanghong food-experience, Wenheyou Superb (超级文和友, now just Wenheyou, with branches in Changsha, Shenzhen and Guangzhou).

Changsha Wenheyou is the recreation of a 1980s-style Changsha neighbourhood, set in Changsha’s high rise central business district and started by a young Changsha restaurateur. It's a seven-storey high nostalgia trip housing some of Changsha’s most well known food and drink spots with entry limited through a lottery system.

Amy: I started doing research on arts districts in Chinese cities 8 [😱] years ago, because I found it interesting how these places essentially function like a kind of theme park to many people. So, when wanghong attractions (网红景点) and wanghong cities started emerging, I saw them as an extension of those arts districts—may I even suggest arts districts were predecessors of wanghong attractions before this term came to existence?—but on a much larger scale.

What is wanghong urbanism?

Asa: For me as an urban geographer, the interesting thing here is how talking about these practices as a form of “urbanism” means thinking about how they intervene in the politics of daily life, place and space which make up the urban. I think Amy can explain this better than me…

Amy: Obviously, sharing photos of and experiences of visiting particular places online is not a new thing (I’m thinking of Douban, Mafengwo, and even the old Xiaonei/Renren and BBS), and it has helped make some places popular. But, the rise of app-based sharing platforms greatly increases the speed and scale of the circulation of these images and texts. In a way, the replacement of words that were used for describing certain places as being popular (for example, remen, 热门) with the term wanghong is an indication that we are now seeing a qualitatively (and quantitatively) different kind of intersection between online platforms and urban spaces.

Carwyn: One of the most interesting things is the move from wangluo hongren (网络红人, internet celebrities) to wanghong. Search analytics data suggests that wanghong gained dominance in 2015, meaning that non-humans accounts or figures could become celebrities, opening up new possibilities and forms of celebrity and celebrity interaction. Perhaps there is an ease of access to wanghong places that is not possible with human celebrities, and then one can filter that out to one’s own networks to become a bit more hong in one’s own social circles.

Asa: “Checking in” (daka, 打卡) is pre-existing terminology that takes on new significance in the wanghong city context.

Amy: The production and consumption of wanghong places seem to be very much about the imageries, whereas the experiences of these places are often secondary and are not necessarily the focus when people share about these places online.

Carwyn: Yes, my friend has been to Wenheyou in Shenzhen several times and, due to the lottery system, failed to get in. Nevertheless, she has taken pictures of the visits; daka-ing and showing off.

Shot:

Chasers:

Jaime: Wanghong now has way less to do with experience than “aesthetic proof,” to the point where buildings or restaurants or infrastructures are now being built and marketed for the sake of wanghong-ness, at the expense of prioritizing public or social functions or purposes. These are not spaces that facilitate interactions between their users, counter to what we usually think of urban social dynamics, but rather as more like a monologue between the users and the space. How did wanghong architectural design come to be valued this way?

Tianyu: In bringing oneself into the interactions between the user and the space, as Jaime noted, what role does the individual play? The OG wanghong—the internet celebrity on Xiaohongshu, Weibo, or Instagram—seems to imagine themselves as the visual protagonist of said location, as their presence and media influence make the space trendy or avant-garde. Do others who visit locations for their wanghong-ness, however, imagine themselves to be in that same social influencer position? We might think that those who patronize wanghong restaurants aspire to be wanghong themselves, but anecdotally I don’t think that’s the case.

Yi-Ling: I am going to make a big leap here: if fandoms are a form of worship, wanghong celebrities deities reincarnated in contemporary form, aren’t wanghong locations, in some ways, temples to pay homage to? The God of tech-driven capitalism—in this case, the Dianping/Meituan algorithm—has deemed this particular glitzy bookstore significant, meaningful, worthy of your attention, and so, you must go and pay homage. Because chances are, if you are a young Chinese person living in a city, you don’t have shrines, anymore, to imbue meaning on. All you have is a wanghong restaurant. And I guess, if you still remember the revolutionary days, Yan’an.

Henry: To add to all three points: if loving wanghong is worship, then it seems to be a form of idolatry—the images of these places and people are much more powerful than the real McCoy (or 真佛); architecturally, I’m reminding of Don Delillo’s “world’s most photographed barn,” whose physical existence is dwarfed by its digital presence. Human-wise, I think of the “wanghong face,” an almost baroque set of features (straight nose bridge, Disney-princess eyes, sharp, conical chin) achievable only through plastic surgery, and which seems to be made-for-camera. In this sense, I wonder if the OG wanghong don’t gain their power by becoming secondary to their online representations.

Krish: We’ve gone this far, so:

If wanghong is an idolatrous religion, can we expect an imminent rise in iconoclasts?

What is wanghong aesthetics?

Amy: One of the things that first interests me about this phenomenon is: Why this particular aesthetic??? [Cue wanghong city starter pack] What does this tell us in terms of young urban professionals’ “deep desire”?? (lol)

Carwyn: Looking at premier wanghong site, Changsha Wenheyou, we can see a mixture of desires. I mentioned that Wenheyou is built around 1980s nostalgia, and one of the central Changsha born co-creators is a collector of objects discarded during the demolition of Changsha’s old neighborhoods. Coupled with these aesthetics, the experience of being in Wenheyou suggests turning back the clocks, including modes of eating and group socialising more associated with pre-highrise urban China, or at least, an urban China where food culture is more organic and not policed into the ground by urban law enforcement and erased through demolition and eviction. Wenheyou looks unlicensed, it gives the sense of a street stall, it may even feel like one is eating on a street corner, but it is actually a controlled, scripted, and formalized environment.

Jaime: A real street cart food experience would include chengguan showing up to disperse the show at any moment.

Krish: An “Escape (the chengguan) Room.”

Carwyn: A place like Wenheyou only becomes possible because of the demolition and erasure of the places it mimics and sanitizes. If small restaurants and food stalls could function in a regulated, not revanchist, system, then Wenheyou would not need to exist. That is a lot of ifs and butts, and the reality is that Wenheyou does exist, and it stands in stark contrast to central Changsha’s other buildings, including the Changsha IFS Tower, China’s ninth largest building and only a ten-minute walk away.

The landscape around Wenheyou is that of high-rise urban modernity, built through top-down urban planning. This urbanism represents demolition, homogenization of the urban experience, the triumph of verticality, and the end of locality. This story is common throughout China’s large urban centres, it has taken place over the past 30-years and is still ongoing. Importantly for this discussion, this urbanism is repetitive, it does not create the eye catching difference that wanghong seeks. That is not to say this way of creating an urban fabric or being urban is bad, but its ubiquity creates blandness, and within homogenous landscapes created through top-down urban planning, sites of alterity may become fetishized.

While Wenheyou is commodifying some slowly disappearing forms of urban life, its popularity in Changsha, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and across numerous digital sites makes a clear statement: “MANY OF US STILL LIKE THIS WAY OF BEING URBAN!” In my opinion, wanghong-ness is not necessarily about nostalgia—although in this case, nostalgia plays an important role—rather, wanghong urbanism is about highlighting other ways of being. It is about multiplicity. When everything looks like a bigger or smaller version of the IFS Tower, and everyone must act in the same way regardless of which version of that tower they are in, then places like Wenheyou become sites of consumerist-alterity that highlight some of what is missing from people’s daily urban lives.

I might be pushing this too far, and this definitely isn’t the case for every urban resident, but wanghong urbanism might enable (or capture, in the camera lens) a slight democratisation of urban space and lifestyle. This democratisation has been relatively absent in the top-down “government x real estate company” vision of urban China that has dominated during Reform and Opening Up, and despite the many problems that might arise I see this as beneficial and refreshing.

Simon: The idea of wanghong-ism representing a slight democratization of urban space is an interesting one, but isn’t this often imitative behavior within different tiers of wanghong-dom? The true influencers, with corporate or tech support, help define standard behaviors and tropes, and then people with fewer followers aspirationally copy them. In a different context, there’s the example of Hong Kong’s Choi Hung Estate, where public housing became an Instagram influencer spot—a vestige of welfare state “democratization” mutating into something pretty strange. Perhaps a wanghong-led approach to gentrification crowdsources the initial impetus towards urban transformation, which is then pounced on by brands and government. As a proto-wanghong site, 798’s transformation began through ground-level actions by artists (then lacking the social or financial capital they now possess). But today the district’s state-run enterprise landlords, Seven Star Group, are happy to run the show.

It’s also worth noting that not every city, or wanghong site, is created equal. I remember taking a trip to Chaozhou and Shantou last year, and noticing that there were already signs of wanghong culture—third wave-ish cafes, restaurants with a certain aesthetic, Airbnbs—in these cities, coastal but not the most prosperous. But a few weeks later I was in Shanghai for work, and found myself thinking, while young people in Chaozhou were probably pretty excited that this stuff was available in their hometown, they would be over the moon to be in Shanghai, with its rows and rows of cafes and better preserved Republican-era architecture, already narrativized by the popular influencers based there.

Krish: Speaking of multiplicities, may I present the Hebei Academy of Fine Arts,featuring a spectacular wanghong architecture graft of Disney / Hogwarts / Neuschwanstein faux-baroque rococo. This was deliberate, a ploy to attract people to come and take photos at the university and raise its profile online:

Tianyu: I’ve recently visited Changsha’s Wanjiali International Mall, which, despite its notoriety on some parts of social media for its unbearable aesthetics, is often characterized as a wanghong mall on Dianping and other platforms. The complex, up until the 8th floor, is your typical Chinese mall, but above that there’s a wax museum, a pseudo-imperial garden featuring (pixelated) murals of pretty women and effigies of Mao and the Buddha, a giant exhibition hall introducing Xi Jinping, famous people from Hunan, and the biography of Huang Zhiming, founder of Wanjiali. At the top of the mall are eight helipads, and though it’s unclear if any helicopter has ever landed there, it’s a pretty popular wanghong “check-in” spot:

The post-socialist, nationalist, nouveau riche aesthetics of Wanjiali may be at odds with what one typically thinks of wanghong spaces. First, Wanjiali caricatures the fictitiousness of wanghong places—evident from the fake imperial garden, the useless helipads, and the imaginary official-ness the Xi exhibitions embody. The pictures of it look great, but a closer look reveals its counterfeit nature. This doesn’t undermine the fact that most of Wanjiali remains a community mall, with milk tea shops and Haidilaos, but it’s the fictitious aspects that are amplified by online influencers. Second, the wanghong aesthetics aren’t singular. The term’s versatility (there’s a wanghong narrative to almost anything) belies the fact that different strata of China’s urban society could have different answers to what wanghong is: a patron of Shanghai’s wanghong Bulgari Hotel may not be impressed by this fake Greek sculpture at Wanjiali’s outdoors garden at all.

Asa: One thing I would say is that this idea of a different way of being urban or a different form of modernity is very much in the eye of the beholder, and if that is the gaze of a first-tier urbanite imagining a more meaningful version of urban life in Changsha or Chengdu that it is just that: imagined, and based on interpreting at these places as “other” to the cosmopolitan modernity of the first tier cities of Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou.

I would see this as easily feeding into a kind of shallow fetishization of authenticity and an aestheticized vision of old-fashioned urban ambience (市井气息) which remains largely ignorant of the local economies and cultures which become wanghong-ized. In this respect, it reminds me of the fetishization of a certain aestheticized vision of city life in discussions of “new urbanism,” “creative cities,” and ultimately gentrification in Europe and North America—which is not to say that wanghong is the same as gentrification! But there is a clear parallel with the kind of conspicuous consumption of nostalgic and notionally “authentic” built environments which Richard Ocejo describes in his ethnography of craft labour in Brooklyn.

Amy: Right, and this kind of aestheticization of the “run-down” or fetishization of “authenticity” is also not new in Chinese cities. I’m thinking of my previous research on arts districts based in (post-) industrial spaces. The popularity of these places partly comes from an aestheticization of industrial decay and the urban past, which depoliticizes the meanings of those preserved traces and fragments of a generally lost urban past.

I would argue that the appreciation of an alternative urban aesthetic is not entirely done by urbanites from tier 1 cities, but it is more a reflection of the concerns of certain stratas of the society, not necessarily those who are more socio-economically disadvantaged. The fact that Changsha’s Wenheyou was shortlisted for the “City for Humanity Awards” organized by Sanlian Weekly this year, which intends to promote more “human-centered” city-making, demonstrates the limitations of such appreciation.

Carwyn: If wanghong sites can someday influence the production of a more human-centred city, one that the interlocutors from my previous research project (migrant food stall and restaurant owners) are not violently erased from, then I don’t want to be completely cynical. The caveat being, as we’ll discuss more later, only certain cities are wanghong cities, and it is mostly provincial capitals that carry this label right now.

How is wanghong reproduced?

Jaime: If we take away the digital aspects of wanghong-ness, what about wanghong’s similarities to traditional tourism? Why and how wanghong proliferated from leisure spaces, especially considering the tremendous amount of labor to contribute to and reproduce in the wanghong economy—the styling, the shoots, the equipment, the time spent on the whole photo enterprise…)

Tianyu: Daka is the V-pose of Chinese Gen Z.

Jaime: And who is the Balzac of Chinese Gen Z? A recent article on chibo (吃播) and food waste by Lina Qu makes a good point about how China’s new Gilded Age is related to this grotesque display of affluence—but I think not only in terms of being rich in content, but also being rich in time (that immediately gets exploited):

“The parasitic relationship [between Chinese popular culture and political propaganda] is strengthened in the era of social media by the vanishing distinction between venues for information and leisure. How the prevalence of food visuality on social media echoes the state-engineered discourse of Chinese affluence attests to this ‘parasitic relationship’.”

Amy: Now this links to the next aspect that I see in the connection between wanghong places and wanghong people: wanghong places serve as the backdrop of (some) wanghong people’s photos and become part of their brands. The influence of wanghong people as trend setters then drive a section of urban consumers to consume the same places and aesthetics, producing hundreds of similar photos at the same spot and from the same angle in order to demonstrate that they are keeping up with the trend, or, as Carwyn mentioned, to “become a bit more hong” in their respective social circles.

What’s especially interesting to me here is a necessity for the sameness of the “outputs” coming out of the consumption of wanghong places, which goes beyond the typical experience of photographing and documenting a visit. For example, when reading a guide for visiting Changsha as a wanghong city, I noticed the guide repeatedly mentions how to find the exact angle to take the “classic” photos that are associated with Changsha’s wanghong-ness. While any images shared online of a city are always fragments of the city, wanghong consumption leads to an even more reductionist representation of the city. The attention and labor goes into reproducing the uniform wanghong “outputs” also raises more questions about the potential and limitations of appreciating an urban alternative on aesthetic basis.

Xuandi: What Guy Debord said decades ago has become more relevant than ever:

“In societies...all of life announces itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

It is haunting when I imagine how people might travel and navigate an unfamiliar place through revisiting and recreating what they’ve seen online—there is almost some dictatorial power to wanghong-ness—constraining your mobility and stripping away all the potential serendipities from randomly strolling around a place.

Carwyn: One question people might be thinking: is this not Instagramification? Although simultaneous phenomena, the geographies of wanghong fame differ from those of Instagram fame. Crystal Abidin’s work has explored in detail internet celebrity as an industry and phenomena across the globe, but in Abidin’s extensive writing on fame the person is still central. When the human is decentred on Instagram, it is becoming replaced by algorithmically created artificial humans, as discussed by Alice Marwick. Certain places become famous, but that fame rarely becomes central to the narrative. For instance, the pastel wall at Sugarhouse Studios in London did not become a site through which new forms of profit could be extracted for its creators or the Greater London Authority, even though it ticked many of the aesthetic boxes. Rather, it became an image reproduced devoid of context on smartphone covers and recreated in Beijing, part of an exhibition of global wanghong walls. What differs from Instagramification is less the aesthetics, more the industry building up around these sites, the centrality of space and place in celebrity, and how space is being exploited for profit.

It is precisely this spatial element, and its relationship to politics and economics, that is interesting about wanghong urbanism in China. Not every city is a wanghong city, some cities have wanghong-places and sites of tourism, but wanghong cities are their own niche and many cities labeled this way are provincial capitals.

Amy: This is about a consumption-led production of the urban. What do I mean by this? To me, wanghong urbanism is about taking wanghong places onto a larger scale or projecting a city’s wanghong places onto the city. So for a city to be a wanghong city, it must have a presence of unique wanghong places that are strongly associated with the city and that are recognized not only locally but also nationally. Thus, wanghong-ness, in terms of a particular kind of place and aesthetic, becomes the identity and brand of the city.

Jaime: “I'm internet famous because I possess many internet famous characteristics and I display internet famous behaviors.”

Asa: This also links to Dino Ge Zhang’s work: wanghong as a logic rather than a noun.

Amy: It is the intersection between the rise of consuming wanghong places and the lack of existing, strong aesthetic identity/brand of certain cities that generates wanghong urbanism: to me, this particular kind of city branding (whether intentionally or unintentionally) and the dynamics behind it are what wanghong urbanism is about.

The reproduction of wanghong aesthetic and facade that takes place not just through individuals’ visits and replicated images but also by literally replicating a site in different cities is certainly another important aspect of wanghong urbanism. The latter demonstrates how certain cities and urbanism actually become influencers who exert influences on other places and cities over their aesthetic choices, just like those Weibo and Instagram influencers. And the fact that it is Changsha (a tier 2 city in China’s urban hierarchy based on economic development) influencing Shenzhen (a tier 1 city) not the other way around is an interesting dynamic.

Carwyn: WHITHER THE (so-called) TIER 1 CITY!

What kind of criticism is wanghong facing?

Asa: An important point to note here coming out of Amy’s discussion is that some of this is not particularly new. We have to understand the idea of a city itself being wanghong in a broader history of “city branding” and “place making” which has long been a tool for cities marketing themselves or seeking to project a certain image.

One of the interesting things in the case of wanghong cities is that these are images of the city and visions of the urbanism which are “chosen” for prominence by the users and recommendation algorithms of these apps. The application of wanghong to a place is decentralised and networked. So they are potentially a lot harder for city governments or propaganda departments to control, and not necessarily easy for businesses to exploit or benefit from, or for a place to stop being wanghong once it has become so!

There’s no single person or body which can grant or refute wanghong status—rather it (at least in theory) emerges out of lots of millions of individual shares and likes. It introduces a degree of uncertainty in the semiotics of these places and how they are visualized and used: you cannot always choose which places become wanghong and for what reasons.

Carwyn: I agree, but we must also remember that institutions, companies, governments and people will try and influence it. There are numerous wanghong influencer companies, though some within that industry are hugely dissatisfied with their jobs as wanghong. And anybody who has been to a gallery or cafe in the last ten years sees that environments are being designed for 赞-worthiness. But, to my knowledge, there isn’t the same level of wanghong industry producing wanghong places and cities… yet.

It is also very important to remember that tech companies—most of which are based in tier 1 cities—are extracting profit from this entire process, and from the activities that take place in other urban and rural places across China. If someone just “checks in” for a photograph outside of a wanghong place and then moves on, they're producing content which generates value for Tier 1 cities and makes little economic contribution to the wanghong city itself.

Amy: As the joke goes, “Hangzhou is wanghong’s city; Chongqing and Changsha are wanghong cities.”

Krish: I feel like this raises an interesting question of what the wanghong is in relation to cultural production and “scenes.” Echoing n+1’s classic panel discussion on hipsters, is the wanghong a “permanent cultural middleman” in hypermediated capitalism, selling out and co-opting alternative sources of social power developed outside tech and official hegemonies? A poisoned conduit that completes the circuit between cultural capital and the marketing machine.

Tianyu: We should consider the emergence of wanghong culture in the broader context of the conglomeration of Chinese technology behemoths in the most recent decade. As one consumes wanghong culture on Weibo, buys tickets to wanghong cities on Fliggy (飞猪), looks for recommended wanghong spots to “check in” on Amap (高德地图), and eventually pays the vendor on Alipay, tech giant Alibaba’s corporate synergy is involved throughout this process.

The wanghong “gaze”

Asa: There’s also something interesting going on with temporality here, imagining the first-tier vs rest hierarchy in terms of an inhumane present and a more human past. This temporal aspect is something which came up really regularly during my fieldwork in Chongqing. I had several conversations with people visiting from tier 1 coastal cities who would say the thing which they found most appealing about Chongqing was this sense of temporal disjunction: an urban core which looks in some ways more “futuristic” than Beijing or Shanghai, combined with a sprawling periphery that (as I was told) felt like going back in time to the 1990s. It’s a sense of juxtaposing futuristic modernity with unfinished “authentic” local culture, and I think a lot of the wanghong sites in cities in Western China play off this aesthetic. The wanghong gaze loves combined and uneven development!

For me the most interesting point becomes how the gaze of wanghong urbanism impacts those “other” places it lands upon. Chongqing is a great example to talk about in this respect, because while it has become one of the pre-eminent wanghong cities, the places which tend to get imaged as wanghong are largely not dedicated tourist sites or commercial centres. Besides Hongyadong (basically a nostalgically-themed mall) and a few restaurants / night markets, the most wanghong places in Chongqing are very unlikely sites of consumption: a subway station, a footbridge, the edge of a highway, an old cable car from the 80s. These aren’t sites which have deliberately cultivated the wanghong image (at least initially), but they have quite accidentally found themselves the subject of wanghong attention.

The result is a kind of wanghong-ization of infrastructure. There is no better example of this than the infamous Liziba “building-piercing train” (穿楼轻轨) in Chongqing.

When I was doing fieldwork in Chongqing, I started to notice young tourists riding the train through the station and taking videos of it, or gathering on the street below to take photos of it, from around 2017. Cut to the present, and we have a new “viewing platform” constructed next to the station to cope with the volume of tourists, residents complaining about people crowding the street and knocking on their doors, and plans to regenerate the area and construct a giant LED resembling a hotpot on the side of the building so that the train appears to be plunging into it.

The problem here is that the city has different values for different people who encounter it. If a bit of urban infrastructure becomes wanghong, that can potentially disrupt the actual day-to-day function of that infrastructure and the lives and needs of local residents around it who are dependent upon it.

Carwyn: Wrapping up, I just want to tie what you said to something mentioned earlier. When people just engage in wanghong tourism, visiting the wanghong sites of so-called wanghong cities, they produce profit for tech companies and become a small bit of information in larger data economies. But, during this process, they may not always be supporting local people and businesses. We’re still early into our enquiry of the wanghong city, but, if engagement with the wanghong city means profit for Tencent or Alibaba but an unsustainable future for locals, then it is important to consider how a wanghong city reproduces and deepens existing urban inequalities.

Henry: The (Beijing) exhibition of wanghong walls that Carwyn mentioned reminds me of China’s World Park, which offers a kind of “poor-person’s backpacking trip” (or espouses a kind of “isolationist cosmopolitanism”). But in (pre-Covid) present times, plenty of Chinese hipsters are visiting the actual Berlin wall and Sugarhouse Studios, which makes me wonder: is wanghong-dom contiguous with Mainland China, or can its borders be extended overseas by such image-production?

Amy: I think the reach of Chinese tourists around the world has already extended the borders of wanghong consumption, which generates spatial effects. For example, with the steady flow of Chinese international students to UK universities, during COVID, we have seen wanghong gaze resting on more unlikely sites. Asa and I recently took a field trip to a scenic spot in the Peak District national park, which has become an unexpected wanghong site for students to check in, prompted by popular posts about the spot on Xiaohongshu. The wanghong status has noticeably increased the number of visitors to this particular spot. However, we are yet to see whether wanghong-induced spatial production would similarly extend overseas.

Carwyn: Pumping money into the built environment in these ways requires specific economic and political conditions. But economic and urban development does not follow a linear path, other areas of the world may move in different directions, or produce different results while attempting to follow the wanghong urbanist path. At the corporate level, though, companies are obviously learning from one another. ByteDance—owner of TikTok and Douyin and a major force behind wanghong city branding—is a huge global player while Euro-American companies have a potentially unhealthy and orientalist obsession with the Chinese internet. I could definitely imagine British based companies or joint-ventures attempting to reproduce the forms of profiteering described above, whether they will succeed in reaping the profit they so desire is another question.

Amy Zhang is from Chaoyang and now works in Manchester. Her research sites have all become wanghong sites.

Asa Roast is an academic based in Leeds, missing Chongqing.

Carwyn Morris is a Manchester based academic who is yet to arrive in Manchester. He writes on dynamic stillness in Beijing.

FATFISHBOY is a Shenzhen-based illustrator who loves fountain pens.

Tianyu Fang was a Beijing transplant in New England, but he’s moving to California. His website shows up if you look up “Chaoyang Trap” on Baidu.

Krish Raghav is a comic-book artist in Beijing. He works for a wanghong craft brewery.

Jaime (bot) works in Chaoyang and has moved to Chaoyang.

Yan Cong is a Beijing-based photographer, and one of the founders of Far & Near, a Substack about visual storytelling in China. You should subscribe!

Yi-Ling Liu is a writer in Beijing. She believes deeply in the importance of spinal integrity & flexibility.

Simon Frank is a writer, editor, and musician in Beijing. His new album So Dream It is out now on Absurd TRAX.

Henry Zhang is a writer in Beijing. He believes in life after love.

Xuandi Wang is a writer who grew up in Zhejiang. His spiritual animal is Sufjan Stevens.