Mapping Digital Game Culture in China: From Internet Addicts to Esports Athletes (East Asian Popular Culture) 3030361101, 9783030361105

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
Abbreviations
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: Mapping China’s Digital Gaming Culture
The Problematic
Chinese Popular Culture and the State in the Era of Participatory Media
A Topography of Digital Game Culture
Youth Culture in China
A Situational Analysis Approach to Culture
Research Mechanics
Chapter Overview
Chapter 2: Internet Cafés: Nostalgia, Sociality, and Stigma
Internet Cafés in China and Beyond: The Literature
A Once-Rebellious Social Space: High-School Experience in the Wangba
Leaving the Wangba Behind: Changing Perceptions and the Spatialization of Class
Nostalgia for the Impossible Return
Chapter 3: Spiritual Opium: The Internet Addiction Panic and the Spiritually Ailing Nation
A Timeline of the Internet Addiction Moral Panic in the Chinese Press
Visualizing Internet Addiction in the Chinese Press
Spiritual Opium and Cultural Pollution
Class Consciousness: The Double Discursive Construction of Opium/Internet
Cultural Capital: Profiting from Opium/Internet Addiction
Moral Panics and Their Consequences in the Era of Participatory Media
Chapter 4: Patriotic Leisure: Internet Games, Esports, and the Discourse of Productivity
Internet Games: What’s in a Name?
Late Socialist Neoliberalism and Patriotic Professionalism
From Patriotic Professionalism to Patriotic Leisure
Healthy Dianzi Jingji in Official Discourse
Wangluo Games and Danji Games in College Student Narratives
Blurred Boundaries
Exceptions and Ironies of Patriotic Leisure
Transforming Affect into Capital
Speaking Patriotic Leisure, Confronting Internet Addiction
Chapter 5: Carving Out a Spiritual Homeland
Online Videos: Extensions of the Game Space
The War of Internet Addiction
Belonging, Friendship, and Equality
Residence and Mobility in a Beautiful World
Sideways Mobility and Nostalgic Longing
Chapter 6: “Losers” “Acting Gay”: Internet Slang, Memes, and Affective Intensities
Affective Intensities
Glossing the Terms: Diaosi and Jiyou
Diaosi (Loser; Literally: Penis Hair)
Gaoji/Jiyou (to Act Gay/Gaming Buddy; Literally: Gay Friend)
Toying with the Heteronormative in Game-Related Web Series
Heteronormative Failure and the Crisis of Masculinity
The Loser Transformed?
The Internet and the Circulation of Affective Intensity
The Semiotic Openness of Diaosi and Jiyou
The Potential/Danger of Loser Affect
Chapter 7: Conclusion: Mainstreaming and Marginalizing Digital Games
Protests of the Imagination
Precarity, Privilege, and Affective Deficit
Problematizing Escape
Finding Space
A Changing China and the Enduring Panic
Glossary of Chinese Terms with English Equivalents
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

EAST ASIAN POPULAR CULTURE

Mapping Digital Game Culture in China From Internet Addicts to Esports Athletes Marcella Szablewicz

East Asian Popular Culture Series Editors Yasue Kuwahara Department of Communication Northern Kentucky University Highland Heights, KY, USA John A. Lent International Journal of Comic Art Drexel Hill, PA, USA

This series focuses on the study of popular culture in East Asia (referring to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) in order to meet a growing interest in the subject among students as well as scholars of various disciplines. The series examines cultural production in East Asian countries, both individually and collectively, as its popularity extends beyond the region. It continues the scholarly discourse on the recent prominence of East Asian popular culture as well as the give and take between Eastern and Western cultures. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14958

Marcella Szablewicz

Mapping Digital Game Culture in China From Internet Addicts to Esports Athletes

Marcella Szablewicz Pace University New York, NY, USA

East Asian Popular Culture ISBN 978-3-030-36110-5    ISBN 978-3-030-36111-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36111-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Getty Images, piranka This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

It was 1997. I was a teenager, thrilled to be let loose in Beijing for a summer of language study and exploration. My visit coincided with the British handover of Hong Kong, and also with the earliest stage of Internet development in China’s cities. It was a defining moment in the establishment of China’s modern identity, as it was in my own. Five years later, I arrived in January 2002 for a semester’s study in Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province. China’s Internet had exploded since my first visit to China, and Internet cafés peppered Harbin’s frigid city landscape. Like our Chinese peers, we American students staved off the cold by darting from underground shopping mall to smoky Internet café (wangba), fluidly transitioning between physical and virtual social spheres. I conducted my first survey of activities in Internet cafés in Harbin, as part of an undergraduate project with a sociology professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology. Sitting amid a sea of boys and young men playing Counterstrike, I first became aware of the extent to which Internet cafés and digital games had become an important part of many young people’s leisure activities. On June 17, 2002, not long after I left Harbin, a fire broke out at the Lanjisu Internet café, an unlicensed Internet café in Beijing. Twenty-five young men engaged in an all-night Internet gaming session died. Investigation showed that two teenage boys, disgruntled about being thrown out by the café manager, had set the fire. The incident incited media frenzy over illegal (black) Internet cafés (hei wangba), and the government shut down cafés across the country. v

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Two years later, I found myself in 2004 in a vastly different urban landscape and climate: Shanghai in its humid summer typhoon season. There I began studying urban Internet café and digital gaming culture in earnest. With the help of my Chinese research assistant Mike, I spent the summer hopping from café to café, learning about the mystical world of Qiji, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), and getting to know the people living behind on-screen avatars. Many young people lacked Internet access in dormitories, did not own a personal computer with Internet access, or were not permitted to play digital games at home. For them, the Internet café offered the central setting for their leisure activities. My research focused on these spaces and the social interactions that occurred both in the physical setting of the cafés and in the virtual spaces the cafés supported. As young people’s infatuation with digital gaming intensified, so too did government and media concern about the phenomenon. In the years following the Lanjisu fire, an abundance of articles about Internet gaming and Internet cafés sensationalized the risks associated with these virtual and physical social spaces, churning out reports about Internet addiction and its consequences in violence, suicide, and crime. In 2008, China became one of the first countries to recognize Internet addiction as a clinical disorder, and many pointed the finger at games as the source of young people’s pathological attachment to the Internet. I returned to Shanghai in September 2009 in the midst of this Internet addiction panic to revisit my earlier field sites and embark upon a year of in-depth ethnographic research. Both the social and the technological landscapes had once again changed drastically. Mike, who had worked with me in 2004, no longer played Internet games. He described his years spent gaming (roughly from 2000 to 2008) as a “phase” that he had left behind. Now in his 30s, Mike was preoccupied with issues of love, marriage, and family. We talked about the pressures facing Chinese men in Shanghai, about how, in a city with more men than women, finding a wife hinged upon providing security: a stable job, a house, and a car. The Internet cafés outside of East China Normal University (ECNU), where I had conducted my 2004 fieldwork, had also changed. Out of seven cafés that I had frequented, only three remained. One of those that had disappeared, the Liuhuaqing Wangba, had been selected five years earlier as a “model” café by the party newspaper Shanghai Liberation Daily. When I returned in 2009, I discovered that, like so many crowded alleyways in urban coastal China, the small lane where the café had once stood

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no longer existed. The eateries serving regional snacks (xiaochi), print shops, and Internet cafés that had once teemed in the narrow streets behind the back gate of ECNU had yielded to a construction site for ECNU’s latest campus expansion. The Liuhuaqing Wangba’s disappearance is not unusual. In the cramped cityscape, space is at a premium. China’s urban landscape is in constant flux; businesses pop up and vanish with dizzying rapidity. Even those businesses that do survive often undergo transformation. For example, the Dongfang Wangdian and Puwen Wangba, two of the three cafés surviving among those that I had observed in 2004, had changed quite a bit. Dongfang, part of a large chain of Internet cafés, had remodeled and downsized. The place had once crawled with underage gamers (easily identified by their blue and white school uniforms); now, the rows of remaining computers were spotted with adult clientele. When I approached the front desk to sign up for a computer, the clerk asked not only for my passport but also for my certificate of temporary residence. Shocked at being asked for the residence permit for the first time since I began my Internet café-going, I told her that I had only brought my passport, not my residence permit. She unapologetically informed me that, because it was the weekend of the National Day holiday (the People’s Republic of China celebrated its 60th anniversary that year), security was tight and she could not let me log on to a computer. It soon became obvious that Internet cafés in Shanghai indeed faced tough times. This was not surprising, given both the increasing numbers of private computers and the stringently applied government regulations for Internet cafés. One of the cafés that I observed in 2010 gave me the opportunity to watch this dismal transformation as it unfolded. The owner of the Xinyi Wangba was a seasoned veteran, in the business since 1999, but he was not hanging onto hope for a bright future. I first visited his café in January 2010, and over the course of eight months I observed as the café continually shrank in size. Computer terminals disappeared and rows shifted. One day new walls went up, creating a separate space that the owner eventually fashioned into a fast-food restaurant to earn money on the side and service the customers in the wangba who, too absorbed in their games to go home to eat, would order delivery in the form of fried rice and noodles. Fast-forward to the summer of 2015, and I found myself at the Yin Yang Wangka on Tianlin Road, observing the Shanghai qualifiers for the newly created World Cyber Arena, an international esports tournament.

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Thanks to competitive gaming, Internet cafés were experiencing a minor resurgence. Yet cafés like Yin Yang were vastly different from the dilapidated and smoky caves I first encountered in Harbin over a decade before. To illustrate this rebirth, Yin Yang noticeably opted to use the term wangka or (net café) as opposed to the more pedestrian wangba (net bar). In order to thrive, these new Internet cafés offered blazingly fast connection speeds and plush accommodations. And while the old Internet cafés epitomized the rough, frontier-like nature of the early Internet, these sleek new businesses were, for the most part, the products of officially sanctioned corporate investment. This personal history illustrates the speed with which the technological landscape in China has been and still is shifting. Once an underground and unofficial leisure pursuit, digital gaming has grown into a massive industry in China, attracting the attention of both the government and the media. The attention works at cross-purposes. While government ministries like the State Administration of Press and Publication and Ministry of Education seek to restrict the time young people spend playing digital games in order to guard against Internet addiction, for example, the General Administration of Sport recognizes and promotes competitive gaming as an official professional sport. Alongside these changes, popular perceptions about digital games and those who play them are shifting as well. This book is a record of the ways in which members of an entire generation of urban Chinese youth experienced digital gaming and Internet technology. Born mainly in the 1980s and early 1990s, these young people recall with clarity the moment that the Internet entered their lives. They grew up with it, and in it, and they cannot imagine living without it. But while the Internet has remained a constant presence, the spaces and discourses that surround Internet use have shifted drastically. Using China’s digital gaming fervor as a case study, this book is also a record of urban China’s changing technological landscape and the shifting social imaginary that surrounds it. New York, NY, USA

Marcella Szablewicz

Acknowledgments

I have spent so many years working on this book that it is hard to imagine that I won’t forget to thank someone, and for that I apologize at the outset. First and foremost, this research was made possible by the help of my assistants, Mark Shao, Joy Shen, and Wang Xiang. There are also a number of people I would like to thank by name, but whom, for reasons of anonymity, I cannot. To my friends from Caijing University, ECNU, Fudan University, Tongji University, and the Xinyi Wangba, I hope you know that you are heart of this book. I would also like to thank the members of my master’s and doctoral dissertation committees for their excellent help and guidance in formulating this research project. I owe a special thanks to Ralph Litzinger, who has been a truly generous mentor and source of inspiration throughout the years spent pursuing my MA, PhD, and beyond. June Deery, Tamar Gordon, Ekaterina Haskins, and Nancy Campbell were the dissertation dream team, and this book would not be what it is today without them. I also owe thanks to my other faculty mentors at Duke, Anne Allison and Leo Ching. At MIT, Ian Condry, T.L.  Taylor, and Jing Wang offered excellent advice on the manuscript and helped guide me through the transition from student to scholar. Many others have taken the time to offer valuable advice about this project. Thank you to Guobin Yang, Cara Wallis, Fan Yang, Jack Linquan Qiu, Silvia Lindtner, Tricia Wang, Susan Brownell, Wei Wei, Shaohua Guo, Hu Yong, Jin Ge, and the faculty and participants of the 2010 Association for Asian Studies Dissertation Workshop. At Pace, I benefitted from the support of my colleagues Emilie Zaslow, Adam Klein, SJ Min, ix

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Aditi Paul, Barry Morris, Satish Kolluri, and Melvin Williams, as well as discussions with Joseph Lee and participants in the Pace Faculty Research Forum. In China, thank you to the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and all its staff: Director of the SASS International Programs Office, Dr. Li Yihai, Dr. Bao Leiping of the Institute of Youth and Juvenile Studies, and Li Li. Finally, thank you to Dr. Mingzheng Shi, who was a constant source of support and encouragement throughout my graduate work. For helping me to navigate the publishing process, thank you to my editors at Palgrave, Camille Davies and Liam McLean, and to my first point of contact, Shuan Vigil. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers who provided excellent advice and to Kate Hartford who came to this project in the ninth inning and hit the ball out of the park by providing a much-­ needed pair of fresh and insightful eyes. For supporting this project financially, from its inception as a dissertation to its transformation into a book, I recognize Pace University’s Kenan Professional Development Fund, the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council, the Fulbright program, and The National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. There were also many other professionals, friends, and loved ones who served the dual purpose of helping me with my intellectual work and helping me escape from it, when need be. Lynn Focht counseled me through the emotional turmoil of academia and beyond. During my various research stints in China I survived with the help of an incredible group of friends. Ketty Loeb and Isabella Jackson—you were incredible roommates and scholarly companions, and without you I would have lost my mind. Thank you to my IUP and Fulbright families, in particular Reggie Hui, Huong Trieu, and Kjell Carlsson. And thank you to my fellow MIT Mellon postdocs and RPI classmates, all of whom are incredible. Finally, to my high-school friends, Mythri, Heather, and Danielle—you are all such amazingly smart, funny, and supportive women, and I’m so glad we found each other. Last but not least, thank you to my family. My parents, John and Teri Szablewicz, set me on the path of studying China by trusting that, at 15, I was ready to explore the world on my own; they were on the phone during moments of self-doubt and they always boosted me back up. My dad, a brilliant teacher and a true intellectual, was my earliest role model. Thank you also to my parents in-law, Dick and Pat Parker, and my brother-in-law Steve Parker, who always offered a well-timed “how’s the book going” to keep me on my toes. Finally, a huge thank you to my partner Rick Parker,

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who has read this material more times than any other human being ever would. He is the one who has truly had the behind-the-scenes view of this process, and it was not pretty. Still, he was always willing to help me work out the things that were troubling me, and he kept me sane by providing a source of calm, level-headed guidance. Most importantly, he helped me bring our daughter, Ramona, into the world. Seeing this funny, intelligent, beautiful girl’s smiling face every morning has been my ultimate source of joy and inspiration.

Contents

1 Introduction: Mapping China’s Digital Gaming Culture  1 2 Internet Cafés: Nostalgia, Sociality, and Stigma 29 3 Spiritual Opium: The Internet Addiction Panic and the Spiritually Ailing Nation 51 4 Patriotic Leisure: Internet Games, Esports, and the Discourse of Productivity 81 5 Carving Out a Spiritual Homeland111 6 “Losers” “Acting Gay”: Internet Slang, Memes, and Affective Intensities135 7 Conclusion: Mainstreaming and Marginalizing Digital Games167

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Glossary of Chinese Terms with English Equivalents183 Bibliography185 Index205

Abbreviations

BBS CCP CF CNNIC CS DOTA DSM-5 ECL ECNU FPS ICD-11 IELTS LAN LOL MMORPG MOBA PK QQ RMB RO RPG RTS SARFT

bulletin board system (electronic threaded discussion board) Chinese Communist Party Crossfire (FPS game) China Internet Network Information Center Counterstrike (FPS game) Defense of the Ancients (MOBA game) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition Esports Champion League East China Normal University first person shooter (type of game) International Classification of Diseases, 11th revision International English Language Testing System local area network League of Legends (RTS game) massively multiplayer online role-playing game multiplayer online battle arena (type of game) player kill QQ instant messaging service Renminbi, main unit of Chinese currency Ragnarok Online (MMORPG) role-playing game real-time strategy (type of game) State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (now the State Administration of Press and Publication)

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ABBREVIATIONS

SASS War3 WCG WoW

Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Warcraft III (RTS game) World Cyber Games World of Warcraft (MMORPG)

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Mentions of various forms of addiction in full text of Chinese press (print only) January 1, 2000–December 31, 2018. (Source: China Core Newspapers Database, https://www.cnki.net) Fig. 3.2 Mentions of Internet cafés, Internet games, and Internet addiction in Chinese press headlines (print only) January 1, 2000–December 31, 2018. (Source: China Core Newspapers Database, https://www.cnki.net)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Mapping China’s Digital Gaming Culture

One bright and unseasonably warm morning in March 2010, I boarded a public bus that took me on a 90-minute trek to the far outskirts of Shanghai. As the bus wound its way out of the crowded and glitzy city center, I was struck by the transition from Shanghai’s densely built downtown to the sparser surroundings of the suburbs. Unlike in the United States, where suburbs are replete with green manicured lawns and cookie-­ cutter houses, the Shanghai suburbs evoked a sense of development-in-­ waiting. A newly constructed highway extended endlessly into the horizon, but aside from that single stretch of freshly laid pavement little else disturbed the flat and dusty plain. Only occasionally did I spot a few car dealerships and manufacturing plants. People seemed scarcer still. My destination was Tongji University’s Jiading campus.1 Anyone expecting a bustling college town in Jiading would have been sorely disappointed. Eyeing nothing but empty highway stretching to either side of the gates, I turned my attention to the vast campus before me. Large, austere buildings spread across a wide flat expanse. The lawn was meticulously kept, but the young trees planted in neat rows looked like mere weeds cowering in the shadows of the gigantic concrete edifices they surrounded. Robin Visser refers to such constructions in urban China as evoking a sense of socialist monumentality.2 Yet while the buildings did indeed evoke a sense of Spartan socialist grandeur, it was an empty

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Szablewicz, Mapping Digital Game Culture in China, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36111-2_1

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grandeur, offset by the absence of students. The campus at first glance seemed nearly a ghost town. This too is a common sight in China, where the development of suburban college campuses and residential complexes often far outstrips actual demand. The center of student life in Jiading, I found, was an on-campus pedestrian street lined with restaurants, cafés, and convenience stores. At one end of the strip a small grocery store provided students with daily staples. The busy little pedestrian street seemed like a stage set, as if the stores and restaurants were meant to create the illusion of a bustling town on an otherwise vacant stretch of land. Where kids in downtown Shanghai always seemed in need of space to escape to, the kids on this campus seemed suspended in a bizarre purgatory, between China’s urban and rural landscapes but part of neither. Far from being lost in the crowd, the students here were completely disconnected from it. I was on campus to see Xiaomei, a female gamer whom my college-­ aged research assistant Luke had introduced me to a few weeks earlier. Xiaomei seemed a bit of a tomboy. She did not wear makeup or dresses, her main accessory was a pair of glasses, and she seemed to have more male than female friends. Xiaomei expressed a keen interest in getting to know me, probably because she planned to apply to business and finance graduate programs in the United States. She was drawn to the American stock market; I later learned that she had inherited that interest from her parents, who in their retirement enjoyed trading stocks on the Shanghai stock exchange. Xiaomei had been playing games since before elementary school. Her father had introduced her to digital gaming when he brought home a television game console when she was five years old. She first encountered Internet games in fifth grade, at about age ten, when a friend took her to an Internet café. She did not begin gaming in earnest until her first year of middle school. Throughout middle school and her early high-school years, she and her mostly male friends went to Internet cafés an average of three times a week. By the time she reached her second year of high school, however, the cafés had begun to enforce stricter regulations prohibiting minors and she could not go as often. Still, she and her friends had tactics to get around the restrictions: primarily, creating fake IDs, and lying to their parents about their whereabouts. The evening of our first meeting Xiaomei introduced me to her friends Yuanqi and Wanghui. Yuanqi was a fast talker, never at a loss for words. He

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was the joker of the group and would often do or say funny things to amuse his friends. Wanghui was an earnest and studious young man. He surprised me by coming to our meeting prepared with his own set of questions to ask me. The three friends told me that when not studying for exams, they devoted their time to “studying” and playing Warcraft III, a real-time strategy (RTS) game. Though they seemed like friends who had known each other all their lives, the trio had actually met only one semester before, through the campus bulletin board system (BBS) on a discussion thread devoted to finance majors. Having discovered their shared interest in War3, as it is nicknamed, they quickly bonded over late-night gaming sessions. In China, most college dormitories are segregated by sex. Therefore, although they lived on the same campus, Xiaomei’s gaming sessions with Yuanqi and Wanghui had to be coordinated online, through the instant messaging service QQ. After a game concluded the three would continue to chat online: sharing funny videos, discussing class assignments, and analyzing game strategy. Wanghui approached games like an algorithm to be decoded. Xiaomei and Yuanqi teased him about his once staying up all night to chart out the best possible times to harvest vegetables in the game Farmville, an online social networking game where gamers cultivated a farm and could steal vegetables from other farms. Xiaomei, Yuanqi, and Wanghui talked with me enthusiastically for hours that first night, and we fast became friends. Xiaomei and I continued to chat over QQ , and it was not long before she inducted me into a private group chat. Through chat I met another two of her friends: Deming and Ting. Xiaomei’s group shared a desire to travel and experience new things. Two of the five, Xiaomei and Wanghui, planned to apply to graduate school in the United States. Wanghui and Ting had spent semesters abroad, Wanghui in Ireland and Ting in Canada; Deming had interned in California. Xiaomei and Yuanqi were the only ones who had not yet been abroad, though Xiaomei was in the process of applying to study-abroad programs and would leave for a semester in Ireland shortly after I departed China. It was an exciting, if dizzying, experience to be chatting online with this vibrant group of young people. The good-natured banter of my new friends was, in and of itself, a lesson in Internet slang. It was not long before Xiaomei informed me that they were planning a trip to Huangshan.3 This was to be their first domestic trip without their parents and their first

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time to travel with friends. Whether it was because I was a foreigner and the group was eager to show me a good time or because they simply wanted to try something new, Xiaomei asked if I would like to join them. I spent four days traveling with Xiaomei and three of her friends: Yuanqi, Deming, and Ting. Wanghui, who was involved in the planning process, ultimately decided he was unable to join because of an impending exam. Though he was disappointed to miss the trip, his decision to stay behind and study served to illustrate the extent of his academic motivation. By most American middle-class standards, it was not a luxurious vacation. As students, Xiaomei, Yuanqi, Deming, and Ting were on a tight budget. We purchased hard seats on the slow train, three of us to a row, and we slept leaning on each other’s shoulders during the overnight journey.4 Once we arrived at the foot of Huangshan, we haggled with restaurant managers over meal prices. On the mountaintop, the six of us crammed into a single dorm-style room with bunk beds. During this time, no computer was touched, no e-mail checked, no games played. The sole exception to the digital blackout were cell phones, one of which, much to my amusement, burst out in a digitized snippet of a popular song just as we were enjoying a particularly quiet moment at the peak of the mountain. It turned out to be Yuanqi’s parents calling to check in: How was everything going? Was he having fun, staying safe? Parents’ phone calls aside, our group spent the days at Huangshan immersed in nature, albeit a very crowded and touristy version of it. As we ascended the mountain’s narrow stone steps, we stopped occasionally for a rest or to fuel up on the chocolate and nuts we had brought along. After eight hours of uphill hiking we stopped for the night at the hotel. We woke before dawn and stumbled our way along the dark mountain paths together with hundreds of other Chinese tourists to watch the sun rise above the misty peaks of the mountain. At one point Yuanqi and Xiaomei broke into song and, inspired by the scenery, everyone stopped for a spontaneous xiu (Chinese slang for “show”). It was like some idyllic and slightly surreal scene from a musical, and the heartfelt, unmitigated joy of my young friends was a jolt to me, accustomed as I was to American college students’ cynicism. On the bus back to Shanghai, Yuanqi, Deming and I sat in the back of the bus, while Xiaomei and Ting took seats toward the front. Tired from the combination of physical exertion and the excitement of travel, Yuanqi dozed off beside me. As Yuanqi slept, Deming and I continued to chat. Our conversation at first focused on American popular culture. He spoke

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of his fondness for American television series such as Lost and Heroes, and his excitement about the new Twilight series. But one topic of conversation sticks out clearly in my mind. Somehow our conversation drifted to the pressures of everyday life in modern China. By that spring of 2010, a series of recent incidents had laid bare the sense of anxiety that bubbled beneath the surface of society. Some of the incidents, such as the 2008 tainted milk scandal, had become fodder for jokes.5 I learned, for example, that it was common for students to insult each other’s intelligence by asking if they “had been raised on tainted milk powder.” Dark humor aside, Deming expressed concern about the direction of Chinese society and the difficulty for individuals to find firm moral grounding and a sense of life’s purpose within a sea of rapid changes. We talked in particular about a recent bout of elementary school stabbings and the reports of numerous suicides at the Foxconn electronics factories in Shenzhen.6 Our conversation shifted to those moments when people’s despair and the uncertainties of contemporary life broke through the surface. There had been suicides at the school, Deming reported; in his dorm building a student had recently jumped to his death from the roof. In his opinion, incidents such as the elementary school stabbings occurred because of people’s despair at their inability to effect change within their own lives. They felt that their own destiny had been taken out of their hands; only through violence or suicide could they break free from this monotonous cycle. The same kind of feeling overcame both factory workers and students. They felt lost, trapped, like cogs in a machine. It was a lot to ponder as we returned to the students’ isolated college campus on the outskirts of Shanghai, and our conversation stood in sharp contrast to the innocent and euphoric singing at the top of the mountain. Even on our frugal budget, the trip we had just taken was one that many young Chinese could not afford. Having enough disposable income to travel is one of the markers of financial success in China, especially in a place in which mobility is tightly controlled by a residence permit (hukou) system and migrants frequently do not even earn enough to return home for the all-important Chinese New Year holiday.7 Not long after our Huangshan trip, I returned to Jiading to visit the group again. But on that visit we were running out of activities to occupy the time. After the momentous beauty of Huangshan, everyone glanced around feeling, no doubt, that some of the magic was gone. We had returned to everyday reality, and there simply wasn’t much to do there. We lingered over lunch for as long as possible, chatting until the food

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grew cold. We moved on to another café, where we conversed over ­all-­you-­can-drink/eat dessert and sodas, even though everyone was already full. Growing restless after sitting for hours, the group began to discuss what else they could do to occupy the time. Well, I prompted them, what would you be doing if I weren’t here? Xiaomei and Yuanqi ran back to their dorm rooms to retrieve their laptops and, upon their return, everyone crowded around them as they engaged in virtual battles in Warcraft III.

The Problematic The scenes I have sketched here may seem like unremarkably ordinary scenes from college life in China. Yet this story helps to illustrate the complicated way in which digital gaming figures in the life-world of many young Chinese. According to a February 2019 report by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), approximately 484 million Chinese, or slightly over 58% of Chinese Internet users, play online games.8 With respect to younger generations, CNNIC reports that approximately two-thirds of youth play.9 Simply put, China is home to a nation of gamers. However, understanding these young gamers and their online pursuits is not a simple matter. How do government and media frame digital gaming and gamers? What do parents and schoolteachers think of them? What do those who play think of their own leisure choices? As will be discussed throughout this book, the answers to these questions depend largely upon the circumstances under which play takes place. Are these gamers huddled in a college dorm room or a glitzy private apartment? Are they playing in a dimly lit and smoky Internet café, or are they sitting center stage in a crowded sports arena? Should these distinctions even matter? When I first embarked upon my fieldwork, I was not fully aware of the extent to which such questions were significant. I often summarized my research by stating that I was studying Internet games (wangluo youxi) in China. This, it turned out, was a gross oversimplification. The description was accurate, in that my research did not focus on any one Internet game but rather on a variety of them. Despite this, many people, especially those who were avid gamers themselves, were disconcerted by my choice, noting that each game has its own cultural practices, rules, and social norms. This is certainly true, but my decision to study such a broad category and to cut across a number of different games was

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deliberate, born of my desire to study what I will call the topography of digital gaming in China. I wished to probe the diversity of discourses, practices, and meanings that shape general attitudes about games and the places where play takes place. Many different types of games were being played in the Internet cafés, dormitories, and apartments that served as my field sites, making it impossible to study one game and not another. This should serve as fair warning to anyone who expects this study to be a traditional ethnography of digital games. Although digital games occupy a central position in my work, this book is not so much about life within these games as it is about the social relations, imaginaries, and discourses that flow through and around them. What I did not bargain for was that a number of the young gamers I would encounter in the cafés, dormitories, and apartments I visited would deny that they played Internet (wangluo) games at all.10 This declaration clashed with my own perceptions about the games these young people were playing. I observed people sitting at computers, logging on to games through Internet servers, and engaging in multiplayer game scenarios with gamers in another room, another dormitory, or even another province. How was it possible that these games they played were not Internet (wangluo) games? The complex answer to this question will be discussed at length in Chap. 4, but the boundary work inherent in the claim that some games played via the Internet are not Internet games epitomizes the kinds of discursive processes that are the central concern of this book. As T.L. Taylor notes, these gaps in meaning are the places “in which different definitions become problematized or previously hidden practices are accounted for.”11 As this book will demonstrate, digital game culture fosters affective experiences that are sometimes at odds with and sometimes aligned with dominant cultural representations. What is more, digital media are subject to a double discursive construction whereby they are framed as something with simultaneously both positive benefits and negative consequences. Often, the difference between a “healthy” leisure pursuit and an “unhealthy” addiction has to do with factors related to class and power. By closely investigating the nature of these ambiguities and the ways in which youth navigate them in order to cope with and challenge dominant perceptions about failure (and success), the book provides a critical lens onto youth culture and the politics of everyday life in contemporary China.

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Chinese Popular Culture and the State in the Era of Participatory Media The complex relationship between Chinese popular culture and the state attracted the attention of contemporary China scholars in the years surrounding and following the Tiananmen Square tragedy.12 Responding, in part, to this literature, Jing Wang worries that a common binary of official versus unofficial culture dominates the “Western fantasy about China.”13 She argues that the official/unofficial binary reifies boundaries between the state and the people and creates a simplistic model of total domination and complete resistance; state-sanctioned cultural productions are always assumed to propagate official messages while grassroots cultural productions are unofficial by default. Wang urges the reader to resist such binary models, noting, “Chinese people have more choices of agency than being victims or martyrs.”14 Within the complex reality of contemporary China, official and unofficial often mix and meet in unexpected ways. Not all Chinese people are resistant to the state, and even state-sanctioned cultural products may send mixed messages. In recent years, many have noted that the Internet has given rise to a kind of participatory culture that enables new modes of civic engagement and political protest. For China, this has led to a large body of scholarship focused on the tensions between state efforts to censor the medium and average citizens’ ability to outsmart the “Great Firewall” through the use of inventive Internet slang, memes, and software.15 A common question seems to underlie this scholarship: will the Internet democratize China? While digital media have certainly altered the relationship between popular culture and the state, this question is but the newest iteration of the official/unofficial binary that preoccupied scholars in the post-­Tiananmen era. In this book I seek to turn the focus away from broad speculation about the emancipatory potential of the Internet (and the Western cultural bias embedded therein) in order to examine the very particular ways in which young people’s digital leisure practices are both shaped by and operate in contention with the governing mentalities of the contemporary Chinese state. Internet cafés and digital games are intertwined with the state’s efforts to expand its technological expertise and soft power, at the same time that they are the target of government raids and media reports deploring their moral corruption of China’s youth.16 Neither can the young people who play digital games and share Internet memes be easily categorized as marginalized subcultures resisting the authoritarian state. While some are critical of government censorship and argue for expanded

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gamer rights, others speak the very discourse of Internet addiction that is used to lambaste their choice of leisure activity. This book will demonstrate the complex and often contradictory nature of youth subjectivity in light of these portrayals. This is not to say that the book avoids issues of politics. Indeed, as I will discuss at length in Chap. 6, play and humor are, by their very nature, political. But rather than focusing on digital media’s democratizing potential, this study argues that digital culture’s overlooked political contribution has been to filter, solidify, and amplify popular affect. Here, I invoke Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s definition of affect as “those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension.”17 Not passive but not fully active, the emotions and states of being fostered by digital leisure culture have today become the fertile ground out of which political awareness blossoms. It should come as no surprise that for today’s youth, affect often crystallizes on the Internet, a platform that allows group expression to gain visibility and volume.

A Topography of Digital Game Culture It may strike some as odd that, in attempting to move beyond the simplistic official/unofficial binary, I have chosen discourse and affect as the two modes of analysis through which to frame my study. For many, discourse belongs to the realm of the official, while affect is precisely its opposite—an unofficial process that is perceived as being “beyond, below, and past discourse.”18 Rather than keeping the two separate, I intend to demonstrate how discourse and affect intertwine. As Margaret Wetherell notes, this requires paying attention to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “middle ranges of agency” that exist between the “extremes of compulsion and voluntarity.”19 In rejecting the notion that individuals are either complete subjects of discourse or entirely free agents, Sedgwick focuses on the complexity of texture, noting that its affiliated sense of touch: makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always also to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.20

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If texture serves as a useful analogy for overcoming simplistic binaries and thinking about the interplay of discourse and agency on an individual level, then on a systemic level it makes sense to employ the parallel concept of topography. A topographical map reveals the textures of a landscape, the numerous hills and valleys that have formed over time and as a result of various seismic shifts and pressures. While paying attention to the texture of individual agency at the micro level, this book also engages with the topography of digital gaming culture at a macro level, tracing the contours of dominant discourse and the ways in which young people collectively react to and shape these contours through the power of their affective attachments to digital games. The concept of topography is also a natural extension of the spatial metaphors that govern our understanding of the Internet. Digital media, and digital games in particular, are often conceived of as places that we travel to and through, and, as I will argue, the affective experiences central to digital gaming culture are intimately tied to this sense of space and simulated mobility. In urban China, there are numerous ways in which young people’s physical and socioeconomic mobility is constrained. In particular, the stringently controlled hukou system and intense competition for housing, jobs, and life partners make movement a daunting challenge. In the face of such trammels, digital media are often conceived of as carving out alternative spaces and modes of advancement. Scholars and intellectuals have long argued that spatial mappings are implicated in particular relations of power. Writing in the 1920s, Virginia Woolf famously notes that having “a room of one’s own” is of paramount importance for women.21 For her, the affordance of a private physical place is closely linked with social place and status. Yet it is not enough simply to show how spaces are implicated in relations of power. It is also important to focus on the particular practices by which individuals live within, absorb, and contest such spatial ordering. To this end, Michel de Certeau examines the agency of individuals who, having no space of their own, poach upon institutional spaces to carve out a niche in an otherwise alienating system.22 He stresses the micro-techniques or tactics by which individuals subvert the dominant order. In his famous discussion of walking in the city, de Certeau explains the modes by which pedestrians cut across parks and jaywalk, ignoring the intended routes in order to carve their own paths and claim agency over the institutional order. Geographer Doreen Massey applies such concepts with regard to spatialities of youth cultures.

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Her analysis echoes Woolf in highlighting young people’s need to create a space of one’s own. She states: From being able to have a room of one’s own (at least in richer families), to hanging out on particular corners, to clubs where only your own age group goes, the construction of spatiality can be an important element in building social identity.23

In this book, I am concerned with the processes by which certain gaming practices and spaces become emblematic of national pride while others are marked as sources and locations of disgrace and addiction. By illuminating what Michel Foucault refers to as dividing practices, I hope to demonstrate the complexities of youth subjectivity in contemporary China.24 I will show how young people respond to such divergent discourses by creating alternative spaces of game play, spaces they, too, refer to as spaces of their own. Finally, I will elaborate upon the discussion of space and identity in the context of an online battle to defend virtual territory from Internet addiction specialists and the government, who seek to censor and control it.

Youth Culture in China The young people born in China in the 1980s and 1990s matured under a unique set of circumstances. They were the first generations to grow up under the one-child policy, instituted in 1979 and not repealed until 2016. They were also the first to mature amid the effects of economic reforms instituted in the late 1970s after the death of Mao. And they faced the extreme pressure of the college entrance exam system (gaokao), reestablished in its current form in 1977. Vanessa Fong notes how the Chinese state’s efforts to modernize played into adoption of the one-child policy.25 She argues that China, in pursuing a “cultural model of modernization,” has been trying to reconfigure itself and its population so as to achieve First World status. Families with many children once produced a large pool of cheap labor, allowing China, under the reform-and-opening policies, to become the “world’s factory.” Through the one-child policy, however, the government aimed to produce a “high quality” population of only-children prepared to work in whitecollar jobs and join the global elite. But while parents and ­competitive,

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high-pressure schools raise children on dreams of excelling, the number of such white-collar jobs has not kept pace with the number of college graduates. As a result, many of China’s only-children have grown up grappling with a discrepancy between expectations and reality. This, I will argue, is precisely where digital games come into play. Meant to afford all students an equal chance for higher education, though far from equal in practice, the college entrance exam is also the primary factor determining whether or not a student will attend college.26 Given the importance of the exam, middle-school and high-school education focuses on test preparation, while extracurricular activities are neglected. There is little emphasis on discussion and reflection but a great deal of emphasis on rote memorization. Fong notes that despite initiatives meant to encourage schools to expand quality education through extracurricular activities, teachers largely ignore these directives and continue to focus on test scores, as these are the only criterion determining rewards for students and teachers. When tutoring students in English, she relates, she at first focused on games, skits, and other creative means to improve students’ oral communication skills. However, when these methods failed to produce results on the tests, parents’ complaints forced her to change her methods.27 It is important to clarify that in employing the term youth I am referring to a wider swath of the population than most readers may assume. My oldest informant, Mike, whom I met in 2004, was in his mid-30s by the time I completed my doctoral research in 2010. My youngest informants were still teenagers at that point. Fengshu Liu points out that China has traditionally adopted a broader age range than the West when discussing youth.28 However, I would argue that today this expansive view of youth is not confined to China, but is rather a global phenomenon. This extension of the indeterminate phase of youth may in many ways stem from the precarious economic situations of young people in contemporary times, situations that make marriage and children, key markers of heteronormative adult status, unachievable for many. Such themes will be discussed in greater depth in the following chapters. Specifically with respect to Chinese youth, many of the youth in my study belong to the generations that have come to be known as the post-­ 1980 (baling hou) and post-1990 (jiuling hou) generations. Stanley Rosen, for example, writes about these generations and notes that, until recently, the Chinese press was awash with reports about the post-1980 generation, which was

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characterized as the “me generation” and criticized for being “reliant and rebellious, cynical and pragmatic, self-centered and equality-obsessed,” as well as “China’s first generation of couch potatoes, addicts of online games, patrons of fast food chains, and loyal audiences of Hollywood movies.”29

This critique soon gave way to a focus on the post-1990 generation, and following them, the post-2000 generation (lingling hou), and the lament that “each generation is worse than the last.”30 The young people whose views are expressed in this book are in many ways located on the cusp of what is known as the post-1990 generation. Most of them, between the ages of 18 and 22 when I met them, were born between 1988 and 1992. Still, many would go out of their way to identify themselves with the post-1980 generation. My research assistant Luke, for example, held fast to the notion that he was part of the post-­ 1980 generation even though he was born in 1990. In an e-mail to me he stated: You mention the post-1990 generation…they really are an interesting group…. Many of my friends are leaders from various parts of the community. The problem they confront today is that when they are ready to retire they can’t find suitable successors—almost everyone I know is faced with this sort of divide, they don’t think well of the post-1990 generation, they feel that although the post-1990 generation is full of ideas and opinions, they are also self-centered and not detail-oriented…. Especially those who entered in 2010 (I entered school in 2008)…. Their concerns about the post-1990 generation are also a great worry of mine (although I was born in 1990, I feel that the post-1990 generation really begins from 1991), but perhaps it is also that I can’t adjust to society’s changes…who knows…. Haha.

Luke’s comments about the post-1990 generation, and his refusal to include himself in this group despite having been born in 1990, are an indication of the extent to which the post-1990 and post-1980 categorizations are both problematic and subjective. Throughout my time in Shanghai, I continually asked my friends and informants their opinions of the post-1990 and post-1980 generations; I often met with conflicting and inconsistent responses. Because of the inconsistencies, I will try to avoid emphasizing these terms, except for instances in which my informants explicitly used them. But while the dividing line between the post-1980 and post-1990 generations may be fuzzy, the generational divide between that entire group,

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who grew up under the one-child policy and the college entrance exam system, and those who matured before them is stark. Given that the hopes and dreams of almost every urban family rest upon the shoulders of an only child, with fortunes riding on the results of one test, it is safe to say that these youngsters in China face enormous pressure on a daily basis. Against the backdrop of this intense pressure, many young Chinese talked about the need for a release (faxie). As I will discuss in Chap. 2, for those born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Internet cafés and Internet games were considered a location and form of release that played a particularly important role in their coming-of-age.

A Situational Analysis Approach to Culture The study of popular media culture poses quite a challenge for the ethnographer. Media anthropologists are plagued by issues of what Tom Boellstorff refers to as scale. In his book Coming of Age in Second Life, Boellstorff concedes that his field site, Second Life, was both too big and too small. He states, “Too small, because most of those who resided in Second Life during my fieldwork participated in other virtual worlds or online games, as well as blogs, forums, and other websites.” Too big, because he ignores the many subcultures taking shape in Second Life and instead chooses to study Second Life “as a single culture.”31 Ian Condry, who studied Japanese hip-hop culture, sums up the problem: “One of the tenets of anthropological fieldwork is that you cannot understand a people without being there, but in the case of hip-hop, where is ‘there’?”32 In delimiting the research field site, media scholars grapple with the seemingly infinite expanse of the virtual and its geographically dispersed physical manifestations. Such issues of scale may explain why many games scholars choose to focus upon one specific game, or even one specific guild within a game. While grappling with these issues, digital anthropologists must also confront dilemmas about the nature of the field and culture that have permeated anthropological debates for decades. “Culture is the essential tool for making other,” Lila Abu-Lughod famously argues.33 She asserts that a rigid culture concept tends to “freeze differences” and “overemphasize coherence.” She replaces the word “culture” with “discourse and practice,” suggesting that these concepts be used to discuss social life while avoiding the pitfalls of a culture-bound approach.34 Similarly, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson argue that cultural ­difference

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should not be mapped merely by physical location, but should instead be thought of as the result of multiple factors such as class, gender, race, and sexuality. To illustrate this point, they note that there is a “need to account sociologically for the fact that the ‘distance’ between the rich in Bombay and the rich in London may be much shorter than that between different classes in the ‘the same’ city.”35 Given these arguments, it becomes clear that geographic boundaries— be they the imagined boundaries of the nation-state or the coded boundaries of a map within an MMORPG—cannot contain a single entity called culture. Yet in the initial rush to apply ethnographic methods to the study of digital games some scholars cast these lessons aside, preferring to study each game as a neatly packaged culture. This is not entirely their fault. In venturing so earnestly to show how the game world contains real interactions of worth, scholars are also implicitly replying to a dominant discourse that casts digital games as worthless. For example, in explaining the decision to study Second Life “in its own terms,” Boellstorff stresses that both Second Life and physically embodied life are “real.” This, in and of itself, is an important corrective to what Nathan Jurgenson has termed digital dualism—the tendency to believe that the digital world is merely “virtual” while the physical world is “real.”36 But by constructing his field site so tightly, Boellstorff inadvertently reifies the boundaries of culture itself. As Alex Golub quips in his response to Boellstorff’s claims, “anthropologists have always argued that cultures are not bounded objects. Understanding ‘the village’ (even the virtual village) requires us understanding the broader context in which it is situated.”37 By contrast, numerous scholars have intentionally brought anthropological critiques of culture to bear on the study of the digital field. Mimi Ito probes “network localities” in which offline identity and location are fostered through online engagement, in particular interest-based social networks, Christopher Kelty criticizes works that “make up a culture” rather than “seeing virtual worlds and online environments as built on top of or extruded from existing worlds,” and E. Gabriella Coleman critiques grand theories of rupture and transformation that cast the Internet in a determinist light and create misperceptions about the “universality of digital experience.”38 Like Abu-Lughod, Coleman wishes to focus instead on the particularities of online social life. And, what is more, she notes that the particular need not ignore large-scale and global change: “Details can be tethered to action, global formations, other material artifacts, and social processes of translation.”39 Similarly, Arjun Appadurai’s

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concept of mediascapes stresses the subject of mobility and provides fertile ground for theorizing mediated culture as an unbounded and multisited phenomenon.40 The complexities of studying such an amorphous media environment are undoubtedly compounded by the ways people customarily talk about the Internet and Internet culture. Unlike topics such as work, religion, and family, which command a certain degree of gravitas, Internet culture is a subject that many are quick to dismiss as inconsequential or frivolous. Although people spend a great deal of time laughing at and creating memes, playing games, or simply surfing the web, these activities are often portrayed as something one does to pass the time or fill in the gaps between more supposedly meaningful activities. As will be shown in Chaps. 3 and 4, the dominant discourse casting the Internet as wasteful and addictive works its way into the narratives of young people, who protect themselves from being stigmatized as addicts by describing their online activities in terms of skill building and productivity. That defensive tactic generates an environment in which few venture to attach significance to activities that cannot be justified in such productive terms. When asked to explain a meme, game, or slang term, many are quick to dismiss the question, describing it purely as “fun.” The unwillingness to attach significance to phenomena of digital culture also stems from an inability to articulate their meanings fully and precisely. This, I would contend, is a hallmark of affect. Like spontaneous anger or laughter, the emotive states fostered by these viral bits of digital media emerge from a space that prefigures conscious thought or intention. Memes work their magic by keying into a complex web of subconscious desires and anxieties. We see these images and words and identify with them on a gut level—they are pregnant with significance and possibility—but we often can’t explain exactly why. And no wonder. These pieces of digital culture riff on heavily freighted themes like success and failure, the normative and non-normative, empowerment and disempowerment, but those meanings lie beneath the surface cloak of humor. As I will demonstrate in Chap. 6, sometimes these memes are so fraught with the pressures of everyday life that laughter is the only way of confronting and releasing the tension. As Brian Massumi argues, affect functions to “interrupt a situation” and to pry open a “threshold of potential,” but it is non-­ specific in its goals.41 A final challenge for those who study memes and forms of Internet slang and humor is the fact that serious analysis is considered antithetical

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to all that Internet humor represents. In China, one of the calling cards of the diaosi (loser), to be discussed in Chap. 6, is the claim of renzhen jiu shule (if you take it seriously, you lose). This phrase is in many ways an extension of a global trolling culture, and researchers who study the ethics of trolls and hackers have enumerated the many difficulties of studying individuals who approach the subject with this mentality.42 For these communities, analyzing a meme is tantamount to killing it, and the true loser is the one who doesn’t get the joke. Scholars of digital media culture, however, must dissect memes and parodies in the attempt to isolate their slippery affective center. They thus grapple with a strange job: they kill the thing they study. These various aspects of digital culture—its lack of physically bounded location, its stigmatization in dominant discourse, its affective register, and its own participants’ reluctance to take it seriously—present difficulties for the researcher who wishes to analyze that culture’s significance. Given these challenges, this book departs from traditional ethnographic methods. Rather than relying solely on interviews and participant observation, I pay particular attention to the historical, cultural, and political contexts that shape popular engagement with and understanding of digital media.43 The methodology I employ, situational analysis, is particularly well suited to studies of positionality and the amorphous, yet pervasive, nature of media culture. Situational analysis encourages the researcher to think beyond the imposed boundaries of place or culture in order to address the meta-level notion of the situation. Situational analysis draws insights from symbolic interactionism, multisited ethnography, and grounded theory to emphasize differences of perspective in the social/cultural production of knowledge. Adele Clarke explains: “Situational analysis allows researchers to draw together studies of discourse and agency, action and structure, image, text and context, history and the present moment—to analyze complex situations of inquiry broadly conceived.”44 Such an expansive compilation of data permits “incisive studies of differences of perspective” that emphasize what Donna Haraway famously refers to as “situated knowledges.”45 This too shares a common thread with Abu-Lughod’s argument that “every view is a view from somewhere and every act of speaking a speaking from somewhere.”46 In other words, in investigating the social and cultural production of knowledge, Clarke’s methodology forces scholars to ask: “Who is authorized and not authorized to make what kinds of knowledges about whom/what, and under what conditions?”47

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In practice, situational analysis involves an expansive collection of data. Clarke encourages researchers to engage in the activity of mapping—creating what she calls situational maps, social worlds/arenas maps, and positional maps of the research topic. This approach creates a seemingly messy picture, but that is precisely the point. Rather than engage in a classic deep ethnography from the (presumably unified) perspective of one group, I have aimed to pit different perspectives against one another. Rather than add to the body of literature that simply seeks to prove the value and importance of digital leisure culture, my work turns the lens outward. I examine how media, government, and those not participating in games frame the digital, and how these representations refract back into the communities and subjectivities of youth, for whom these spaces are of vital importance. It is in this sense that I have found it useful to think of digital games as both a place and an artifact of culture.48 Contrary to technologically determinist arguments that posit technology as a force that drastically alters social life, my approach emphasizes the social and cultural forces at work in shaping our relationship to and understanding of technology. Put in Clarke’s terminology, digital games are the “nonhuman actants” in my study’s situation, the material things that are molded, shaped, and then remolded by the various government policies, media discourses, game designers, corporate interests, and practices of those who engage with and seek to define them. Situational analysis, in other words, is the methodology by which we may examine the topography of digital gaming culture in China. The expansive collection of data demanded by such an approach creates unique circumstances for conducting research in the field. This book engages with a wide array of voices and texts, from professional esports athletes to self-professed Internet addicts, and from government documents, news reports, and corporate-produced television series to grassroots-­produced micro-films (wei dianying). In particular, a number of individuals played important roles in helping me to establish vital new contacts with gamers who ultimately became key informants in my study. Each of these key informants brought to the research project his/her own invaluable opinions about Chinese Internet game culture and how to access it. One of the threads running throughout this book is the underlying question of what constitutes a “real” gamer. As my project sought to investigate the discursive construction of Internet game culture, I found, in comparing the views of my various research assistants, an opportunity for conducting a meta-level analysis of how knowledge about game culture was being produced within my own study.

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Research Mechanics As indicated in the preface, I have followed the development of Internet gaming in China for nearly two decades. Although this book draws heavily upon data collected during a one-year period of fieldwork conducted in Shanghai from September 2009 to October 2010, it also includes my early observations of Internet cafés in Harbin in winter–spring 2002 and in Shanghai in summer 2004. After 2010, I conducted follow-up fieldwork trips to Shanghai during the summers of 2012, 2014, and 2015, and I attended the World Cyber Games finals in Kunshan, China, in November 2012 and 2013. My fieldwork comprises interviews, informal conversations, participant observation of the physical spaces where gaming takes place, and also participant observation of online realms that support games such as blogs, bulletin boards, and online chat. Additionally, I conducted extensive analysis and observation of media coverage about Internet addiction, Internet games, and esports between 2000 and 2019. During my primary period of fieldwork from 2009 to 2010, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 57 individuals involved in Internet games and esports and talked informally with many more. Of these 57, I would classify 49 as “gamers,” though a number of them were also professionally involved in the Internet games and esports industries, working as designers, promoters, researchers, announcers, and so on. Twenty-two of the approximately 50 gamers were college students from various Shanghai universities including Tongji University, Fudan University, East China Normal University (ECNU), Shanghai Caijing University, and a local vocational college. Four of these gamers were professional esports players, and one was what I will classify as semi-professional. Out of the gamers, only eight are women. After my initial period of fieldwork, I maintained close contact with eight of my key informants and spoke informally with numerous others, though I must admit I lost count of how many additional interviews I conducted in the ensuing years. My efforts to reestablish contact with many of my informants stalled due to the fact that they had graduated from college and/or moved on to other places by the time I returned to Shanghai in 2012. With few exceptions, interviews were conducted in the spaces where gaming occurred: dormitories, apartments, and Internet cafés. When this was not possible, interviews took place at restaurants or coffee shops. As I was interested in learning as much about these gamers as possible, most were interviewed at least twice and interviews were often supplemented by

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observation and informal conversation that transpired over the course of a number of months. On occasion, face-to-face interactions were also supplemented with interviews over the Chinese instant messaging software QQ. With the exception of some of the individuals involved in the esports industry (who resided in Beijing) and one individual interviewed only through QQ (who resided in Chengdu), all of the informants in my study were currently living, working, or attending school in Shanghai. Unless otherwise noted, all of my interviews were conducted by me in Mandarin and transcribed in Chinese with the help of my research assistant, Luke, and his sociology classmates at Tongji University. Informants were selected using a snowball method through the personal connections of three different research assistants, Mike, Luke, and Liang, and, in a couple instances, through the connections of colleagues who happened to know Internet gamers. In many cases, an interview with one individual opened up the opportunity to interview the members of that person’s circle of friends and when this was the case I would often conduct group interviews. In this way, I was able to get to know and observe a number of different gamer cliques. Following the lead of digital ethnographers such as Gabriella Coleman, T.L. Taylor, and Lori Kendall, I also attended the offline events that supplemented and informed online identities. Among the many events I attended, of particular note was China’s largest digital games expo, ChinaJoy, to be discussed in Chap. 6. I also had the opportunity to observe a newly developed esports class at a vocational high school. This class became the object of media attention, with newspapers around the country denouncing the decision to bring computer games into the classroom. Finally, I observed numerous esports competitions, promotional events, and practice spaces. My textual analysis includes media coverage of Internet games, Internet addiction, and esports published in the Chinese press over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I also viewed and analyzed popular micro-films and web series connected to popular games and esports. In particular, the release of War of Internet Addiction was a notable event that occurred halfway through my yearlong stay in Shanghai, and it is a subject that I will discuss at length in Chap. 5. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of interviews, Chinese texts, and films are my own. Finally, so much of this book is about positionality that I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my own subject position and its effect on

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my data. As a white female researcher who does not play games, I consider myself to be an observer of, but not a full participant in, the world of Chinese digital gaming. My view of digital games is a view from outside, above, below, but not from within. In this sense, my book takes a different approach than previous studies of gaming culture in China. Books that have addressed the subject of gaming in China have thus far offered snapshots of unique issues that arise within the games. Larissa Hjorth and Dean Chan’s compilation, Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific, provides a fascinating perspective on a multitude of issues related to gaming in the Asian region.49 The two chapters devoted to gaming in China investigate the subject of “gold farmers”—professional players who mine for and sell virtual goods in the game—and in-game protests. Similarly, a chapter devoted to the subject of social gaming in Shanghai appears in Nina Huntemann and Ben Aslinger’s compilation Gaming Globally: Production, Play and Place.50 While providing useful case studies, these books necessarily address but a narrow slice of digital gaming and leisure culture in China. Indeed, scholarship on digital games in general has tended to focus on in-game sociality, often under-emphasizing the extent to which issues of politics, class, and economics infuse gaming discourse and practice from the outside-in. Bonnie Nardi’s book My Life as a Night Elf Priest offers an excellent ethnographic account of life inside the game World of Warcraft, focusing on the aesthetic experience of playing games in the United States and China.51 However, Nardi does not discuss the larger social and political context in which meanings about games are formed and contested. By contrast, my study traces shifting discourses and practices of digital gaming in urban China without diving deeply into the games themselves. Traditionally minded ethnographers may believe that my view from outside invalidates my study, but I contend that, for the purpose of conducting a situational analysis it is, on the contrary, ideal. In explaining their practices to me gamers often spoke in ways that they might not have with their peers. In many cases, they spoke to me, I suspect, like they would have spoken to a teacher or a mentor. It was my position of relative authority that elicited the kind of defensive language about the value and productive nature of games discussed in detail in Chap. 4, thus making it possible for me to see how young people rationalized their leisure choices in the face of a disapproving public. Yet it would also be false to suggest that my status as a gaming outsider means that I never became a participant in the lives of the people I worked with. As illustrated in this chapter’s

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opening anecdote, our interactions encompassed so much more than games, and, over the course of time, many relationships were transformed from that of researcher-informant into that of trusted friends. Similarly, the issue of my gender is also an important one. Although women play games as much as men, the Chinese digital gaming landscape is perceived as being heavily male. I discovered, for example, that other men often expressed surprise at women’s participation in the gaming world. Xiaomei, discussed in the opening passages, was considered an enigma. When I asked Yuanqi and Wanghui how they felt about playing with a female they both responded positively but whispered to me that “she is the first female gamer we have seen in the flesh.” In the world of digital gaming, women are highly fetishized.52 At ChinaJoy, the Chinese games expo, the bodies of scantily clad young women are used to sell new games, and the games industry is not above employing real-life sex goddesses, in the form of pornography stars, to promote their product. Indeed, as I learned during the course of research conducted in 2004, many male gamers select female avatars to make themselves more attractive within the game, hoping that a male avatar looking for an in-game wife will offer them virtual goods and support in order to establish the partnership. Thus, though female avatars are prevalent, few gamers actually expect that flesh and blood females lurk behind them. The few women in my study (eight total) largely expressed disinterest in gender issues and often dismissed them with little discussion, though they did note that they sometimes felt boys would change their online tone if they discovered a female in their midst. I was certainly aware that many young men censored their discussions in front of me, refraining from cursing or talking about sex. Here, the presence of my male research assistants helped to break the ice.

Chapter Overview The chapters in this book follow a roughly chronological order meant to give the reader a feel for the shifts in the topography of the digital gaming landscape over time. Many of the chapters begin with an anecdote about a particular individual or group of individuals in order to lay the ­foundation for the theoretical arguments to come. The choice to highlight these stories is more than stylistic; they are meant to illustrate the diversity of discourses and practices of digital gaming in urban China. This technique has also been referred to as tactical humanism, a strategy meant to counter

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totalizing and homogenizing descriptions of any one culture.53 By no means are these stories meant to represent all the different perspectives or kinds of gamers in China. On the contrary, they are meant to stress the very particular ways in which gaming was taken up and incorporated into the lives of a number of young individuals. In these narratives, games are not the focal point so much as they are the medium through which youth grapple with the challenges of contemporary life—the pressure to succeed, the likelihood of failure, and the desire to rebel. These stories also highlight the affective register on which games are incorporated into the everyday life-world; games are spaces in which youth cultivate deep emotional and physical attachments that often defy clear articulation. In these situations, affect is something too slippery to fully describe. As with a memory or a dream, affect is something that must be evoked, and it is with this in mind that I offer these introductory snapshots from my fieldwork. Chapter 2 explores young people’s reminiscences about gaming in the Internet cafés through interviews about the coming-of-age experiences of the post-1980 and post-1990 generations. The analysis focuses on the role of nostalgia in young people’s relationship to their current circumstances. For youth facing the drudgery of everyday life and poor prospects for upward mobility, digital games, and locations such as the Internet café are constructed as places that embody youthful hope, optimism, and happiness. Ironically, those who remain in the cafés after others moved on are cast as failures: migrant workers, high-school dropouts, and troublemakers. Through a close examination of young people’s affective attachments to Internet cafés and digital games as emblems of their carefree youth, I show that these spaces are sites not only of sociality but also of the negotiation and formation of class identities. Chapters 3 and 4 move from the individual affective sphere to the realm of dominant discourse, analyzing the portrayal of Internet cafés and Internet gaming in the official media. In Chap. 3, I explore the claim that the Internet and the products and spaces associated with it represent a dangerous form of spiritual opium. This framing in the Chinese context is highly significant, for opium figures in the popular memory as one of the central failures of China’s imperial government to protect the nation from the nineteenth-century encroachments by Western imperialist powers. The official media thereby frame the Internet as a foreign substance that poses a threat to the nation and, most notably, the productivity of its young male citizens. Yet before opium became the scourge that it is known as today, it was first thought to be a substance that could replenish the

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spirit. This double discursive construction mirrors that of the Internet café, as portrayed in the previous chapter. By engaging with academic scholarship on the social use of opium and the manner in which the social significance of opium use itself has shifted over time, I draw out issues of class that lie hidden within the present-day discourse. Finally, the chapter addresses the network of actors and concerns contributing to the moral panic about Internet addiction. Despite the panic in some sectors about youth who play digital games, China is also home to a burgeoning esports culture. Esports, a form of professional competitive digital game play, is sanctioned by the Chinese government and supported by both local government and corporate actors. Chapter 4 builds upon the preceding chapter’s discussion of Internet addiction by closely examining the criteria used to differentiate “healthy” from “unhealthy” games. I argue that such categorizations reveal competing political and ideological orientations guiding the modernizing logic of the Chinese state. Even realms of leisure often assumed to be free are assigned their proper place in the narrative of upward mobility in which China’s young middle-class urbanites are entangled; games too are governed by a kind of neoliberal logic, reflecting notions about what constitutes productive play and proper behavior in the quest to better the self. Through analysis of ethnographic interviews, I also demonstrate how characterizations of games as either addictive or athletic insinuate themselves into young college students’ own narratives about game play. Far from completely resisting official efforts to control Internet gaming, many young college students become active agents perpetuating the discourse of Internet addiction and stigmatization of Internet games in general. As a result, we come to see how the same segment of the population Lisa M. Hoffman  describes as “patriotic professionals” are also cultivating, or at the very least paying lip service to, a sort of patriotic leisure.54 Chapters 5 and 6 move beyond the two preceding chapters’ focus on dominant discourse to a deeper examination of digital media and affect. These chapters show how online films, Internet slang, and other artifacts of digital leisure culture serve as outlets for affective intensities: shared, embodied, and actively felt states of being that thrive on the Internet, but that nonetheless defy articulation and fixed interpretation. Chapter 5 examines the perspective of a set of gamers who reject the addiction discourse and argue that Internet games are, in fact, an important space of one’s own. Through the narrative lens of the machinima War of Internet

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Addiction, I investigate the filmmaker’s claim that games are a “spiritual homeland” (jingshen jiayuan), imagined communities with both a social and a geographical reality.55 Unlike the college students who spoke about games in terms of skill building, the gamers whose voices enliven Chap. 5 offer visions of the game space are often utopian, portraying it as a bucolic landscape of equality, camaraderie, and physical beauty. The film demonstrates that games, far from being mere escapism, are also locations of potential political mobilization. It portrays government efforts to control the game space as an instance of interrupted manifest destiny and suggests that freedom of mobility, including the freedom to live, work, and play where one wishes, is a key point of tension between the state and the people. Chapter 6 examines the elements of digital leisure culture on display at ChinaJoy, China’s largest digital entertainment expo. In particular, I focus upon two popular memes and slang terms: diaosi (loser) and jiyou (gay friend). Through a close examination of the terms’ use in popular culture, I demonstrate how the affective intensities cultivated by digital media enable youth to playfully challenge the heteronormative model of ideal citizenship and patriotic leisure discussed in Chap. 4. In proudly identifying themselves as losers, young people battle against the dominant standards of socioeconomic success by questioning the extent to which such success is possible or even desirable, and by using digital leisure culture to pry open a space in which queer identities may emerge. In Chap. 7, I conclude by considering the larger political implications and limitations of our affective attachments to digital games and media, both within China and beyond. As games become more mainstream, and the marginalization felt by gamers bleeds into a general sense of dissatisfaction with China’s increasingly stratified society of winners and losers, have digital media also lost some of their efficacy as political tools? In answering this question, I probe the dividing line between digital activities that push for change and those that may make individuals more complacent in their everyday conditions.

Notes 1. Due to rapid urbanization, many large universities have begun to build satellite campuses located on the outskirts of the cities. At the time of my visit Tongji University boasted four separate campuses, three of them located in the suburbs. 2. Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside, 16.

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3. Huangshan, or Yellow Mountain, is a popular tourist destination in Anhui province, China, about 500 km from Shanghai. 4. The rail system in China is well developed, but the comfort and speed of trains vary greatly depending on what passengers can afford. Many cities and popular tourist destinations are now connected via high-speed trains. A high-speed train from Shanghai to Huangshan takes approximately 2.5– 3.5 hours whereas the local train we boarded took 14 hours. Additionally, trains generally have four different levels of accommodation. Sleeper cars and seats are either “soft” or “hard.” In the same vein, soft seats are more spacious and plush, while hard seats are more narrow and bench-like, with three to a row as opposed to two. 5. In 2008 and again in 2010, Chinese citizens were shocked to discover that baby formula and powdered milk products were tainted with melamine, a form of chemical used in plastics. In 2008, six babies died and over 300,000 were made ill by use of the products. The ensuing investigation in 2008 found that one in five dairy suppliers was guilty of using the chemical. Despite a crackdown by authorities, more tainted milk product was discovered in 2010 (“China Dairy Products Found Tainted With Melamine,” BBC News, July 9, 2010). 6. In early 2010, parents and citizens were shaken by a spate of stabbings at elementary schools (see, for example, “Eight Children Stabbed To Death in China Primary School Attack,” The Telegraph, March 23, 2010). In most cases, the perpetrators were single adult men. Around the same time, a number of young factory workers jumped to their death from the roof of Foxconn’s Longhua factory in Shenzhen. Foxconn is an electronics manufacturer that produces, among other things, the Apple iPhone. In the ensuing debate about working conditions at the factories, many blamed the suicides on long working hours and the social isolation of the production lines (see, for example, Tania Branigan, “Tenth Apparent Suicide at Foxconn iPhone Factory in China,” The Guardian, May 27, 2010). 7. See Chan, “Chinese Hukou System”; since the early 1950s, the Chinese government has restricted the mobility of its citizens by requiring that households register their residence, tied to place of birth, with the government. One’s residence and employment status in turn determine one’s eligibility for services such as education and healthcare. Initially meant to stem the flow of villagers into the cities and prevent high urban unemployment rates, the de facto result of the hukou system has been to create a great urban-rural divide that persists to this day. In the 1980s, the Chinese government began to ease restrictions and allow rural residents to travel to the cities in search of work, but they continued to deny them permanent resident status and the benefits awarded to local citizens. Still, workers flooded the cities. Known as the floating population, these immense

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numbers of migrants and their willingness to work for low wages have been the cornerstone of China’s economic development, earning China the title of the “world’s factory.” 8. CNNIC, 43rd China Statistical Report; this number reflects those who play online PC games, and does not even take into account the number of people who play mobile games. As of 2019, CNNIC estimates 56.2% of Internet users play mobile games. 9. CNNIC, 2015 qingshaonian shangwang xingwei; note that this statistic applies to youth with Internet connectivity. 10. The Chinese term wangluo literally translates as “network” while the formal term for Internet in Chinese is hulianwang. However, in recent years wangluo has become the colloquial term for Internet and I will employ this colloquial usage throughout the book. 11. Taylor, Play Between Worlds, 10. 12. See Link, Madsen and Pickowicz, Unofficial China; Zha, China Pop; Barmé, In the Red; Link, Madsen, and Pickowicz, Popular China; Wang, Locating China. 13. Wang, “Guest Editor’s Introduction.” 14. Wang, 4. 15. The Chinese government uses a firewall to block access to sites deemed politically sensitive. In China, bloggers and activists jokingly refer to this as the “Great Firewall.” 16. See Nye, “Changing Nature of World Power”; the Chinese government has embraced the concept of soft power and, following on the heels of Japan and South Korea, has been working to expand its pop cultural influence abroad. 17. Gregg and Seigworth, Affect Theory Reader, 1. 18. Wetherell, “Affect and Discourse,” 350. 19. Wetherell, 358. 20. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 14. 21. Woolf, Room of One’s Own. 22. de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life. 23. Massey, “Spatial Construction of Youth Cultures,” 129. 24. Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 777. 25. Fong, Only Hope, 20–21. 26. In practice, the college entrance exam is not as equal as it seems. Wealthy families ensure success by hiring private tutors and paying extra fees to secure admission to competitive college prep high schools. Students with Shanghai and Beijing hukous also enjoy numerous advantages, while children of migrant workers are often barred from attending the schools in the cities in which they live. 27. Fong, Only Hope, 117–118.

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28. Liu, Urban Youth in China, 5. 29. Rosen, “Contemporary Chinese Youth,” 360. 30. Rosen, 364. 31. Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life, 7; Though it is often characterized as a “game,” Second Life is better described as virtual world in which individuals create avatars and, through them, live out alternative lives. 32. Condry, Hip-Hop Japan, 5. 33. Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” 143. 34. Abu-Lughod, 148–149. 35. Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture,’” 50. 36. Jurgenson, “Digital Dualism.” 37. Golub, “More on Coming of Age.” 38. Ito, “Network Localities”; Kelty, “Culture in, Culture Out,” 11; Coleman, “Ethnographic Approaches.” 39. Coleman, “Ethnographic Approaches,” 497. 40. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 41. Massumi, Politics of Affect, 3, 8. 42. Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy; Phillips, Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. 43. See Coleman, “Ethnographic Approaches,” 2010. 44. Clarke, Situational Analysis, xxii. 45. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.” 46. Abu-Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” 141. 47. Clarke, Situational Analysis, xxv. 48. Hine, Virtual Ethnography. 49. Hjorth and Chan, Gaming Cultures and Place. 50. Huntemann and Aslinger, eds., Gaming Globally. 51. Nardi, Life as a Night Elf Priest. 52. See Taylor, Jensen, and de Castell, “Cheerleaders/Booth Babes/Halo Hoes.” 53. This technique is one that has been adopted by other anthropologists, such as Vanessa Fong and, preceding her, Lila Abu-Lughod. 54. Hoffman, Patriotic Professionalism. 55. A machinima is an animated film created through the use of in-game graphics.

CHAPTER 2

Internet Cafés: Nostalgia, Sociality, and Stigma

I met Mike, a budding young actor, during the summer of 2004 through a friend, a director in the Chinese TV/film business. Mike ran odd jobs for my friend and became my very first, and ultimately most important, interlocutor. At the time we met, he had been spending multiple hours per day in Shanghai’s Internet cafés (wangba) playing the then-popular Chinese Internet game Qiji (known in English as MU Online). As an actor, Mike had a natural gift for talking and describing events in detail, and he took to his research assistant role with ease. Over the course of that summer, he introduced me one by one to his network of friends, all of whom were either gamers or providers of gaming through the Internet café business. Together we interviewed an amateur competitive gaming team, an Internet café manager, a group of IT professionals who played Counterstrike in the Internet cafés as an after-work activity, and a friend who helped Mike level­up in the game Qiji. Mike introduced me to social life in the Internet cafés and to young working professionals’ use of Internet games. By the time I returned to Shanghai in 2009, however, he and many of his friends had given up gaming and stopped frequenting the wangba. The youth known as the post-1980 and post-1990 generations share an intimate connection with information technology. The popular emergence and maturation of the Internet in China mirrored their own progress from adolescence into adulthood. These younger generations lack the collective

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memory of the Mao years that forged a cohesive experiential bond for older generations; those generations of educated youth remember the ­collective farms and factories to which they were sent during the Cultural Revolution. By contrast, the digital experience has become a form of collective identity for those born during the last decades of the twentieth century, a unifying force for a group with little claim to any sort of revolutionary past. Today, despite the diversity of gamers and gaming practices in urban China, a major point of commonality exists in gamers’ nostalgia for the site where they began to play games in earnest: the Internet café. If the generations of youth who grew up during the Cultural Revolution share a collective memory of being “sent down” to the countryside, then we might say that the post-1980 and post-1990 generations share a collective memory of being kicked out of Internet cafés. Whether this desire to link collective identity to technology is a positive or negative thing is up for debate. Game artist and filmmaker Feng Mengbo seems to cast doubt upon the Internet’s ability to ever fulfill the spiritual lives of its inhabitants. Feng shot his short film Q3 entirely within the first person shooter (FPS) game Quake III Arena. Yomi Braester reads the film as commentary on memory and politics in post-Tiananmen China.1 The film depicts an interview between a real news reporter and a virtual clone fighting for freedom in the context of the video game Q3. Braester argues that, through scenes that show the reporter’s transformation from documentarian of the truth to player in the game, Feng intends to question the agency of writers and artists faced with the inability to fully document personal experience.2 Beyond the film’s critique of the futility of bearing witness in a society that is forced to erase its memory of historical traumas, Feng also laments “the intoxication of a memory-less society that roots its identity in virtual reality.”3 He states: In the Internet age, our poor children can play games only one way. It’s their poetry, cinema and music…They can only play millions of video games via the Web—they are born there and they die there. Even memory isn’t etched in stone, only recorded in bytes.4

For Feng, in contemporary China, the Internet and games have become locations where life itself plays out, but these virtual worlds are hedonistic, anonymous, and detached from history. Ironically, the same generations that Feng critiques for abandoning collective memory are also simultaneously accused of being overcome with

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nostalgia. Fengshu Liu, one of the first to note the swell of post-1980 nostalgia, cites the proliferation of blogs and bulletin board systems (BBSs) devoted to that generation’s reminiscences about their childhoods. Liu analyzes a forum called www.80end.com, on which young people devoted hours to uploading pictures and memories from their childhoods. These were not pictures of themselves as children. Rather, they posted pictures of objects (snacks, toys, and advertisements), idols (pop stars and movie stars), school items (textbooks, grammatical sentence patterns), media (video games, films, songs, television programs), sentiments (jokes, ideals, stories), and sometimes even the implements with which they were beaten as children.5 This kind of commodity nostalgia is not limited to Chinese youth. In many parts of the globe young people seem to be experiencing an acceleration of nostalgia tied to particular products and forms of media. For example, The New  York Times published an article about young Americans’ nostalgia for the Nickelodeon television shows they watched when growing up. The author, Brian Stelter, poses the question, “Are 18- to 34-year-­olds too young to be nostalgic?” He goes on to note that young people’s nostalgia for their childhood shows has been, “‘bubbling up’ for four to five years, largely on the Internet.” As Stelter suggests, part of this surge of nostalgia may be the result of new media, which make it easier for people to simply google any memory.6 The proliferation of archival memory on the Internet allows for a new kind of nostalgia. Rather than looking at a static memory, like a snapshot of ourselves as children using a specific product or playing a specific video game, we can now search for and locate the item itself. Through YouTube clips we can relive the experience of watching the show or playing the game as we did when we were children, and in the comments section we can add our own memories. We use the Internet to revive our experiences over and over again; not only can we see photographs of the objects and shows we encountered as children, but we can also purchase and rewatch them. This, as Ekaterina Haskins notes, is the nature of “digital memory,” which “collapses the assumed distinction between modern ‘archival’ memory and traditional ‘lived memory’ by combining the function of storage and ordering on the one hand, and of presence and interactivity on the other.”7 In addition to transforming the distinction between archival and lived memory, the turn to nostalgia on the Internet is also intimately linked to the precarious nature of contemporary life. John Gillis connects the desire

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to compile the artifacts of the past to the uncertainty of the future, stating, “[t]he past has become so distant and the future so uncertain that we can no longer be sure what to save, so we save everything.”8 Svetlana Boym eloquently elaborates on this point, arguing that: Somehow progress didn’t cure nostalgia but exacerbated it. Similarly, globalization encouraged stronger local attachments. In counterpart to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual global village, there is a no less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world. Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.9

This is also the case in China. For example, Guobin Yang discusses the nature of nostalgia as it has affected the generation of “educated youth” sent down to the countryside under Mao. He argues that a wave of nostalgia hit this generation in the 1990s, emerging “as a form of cultural resistance against the changing conditions of Chinese modernity.” It may seem surprising that members of this generation, who endured countless hardships during the Cultural Revolution, now look back on their past as “containing beauty, meaning, and purpose,” but Yang argues that these idealized reminiscences of the rural past must be understood against collective dissatisfaction with the present.10 Liu similarly suggests that the collective remembering of the post-1980 generation serves as an “emotional support” in the face of economic and political uncertainty.11 In this chapter, I trace young people’s changing perceptions about what it means to go to the Internet café. As I will show, in the course of one generation’s shift from childhood to adulthood, the wangba went from a main site of sociality, to a nostalgic place of the past, and, finally, a location disdained as dirty and low class. As the firsthand accounts in this chapter will demonstrate, nostalgia for Internet cafés is a consequential form of collective affect; the space of the café itself has become a symbol of youthful rebellion and optimism. My young informants recalled their experiences in cafés in rosy hindsight, but their stories also reflected entrenched notions about class difference and what it means to be a productive citizen in contemporary China. Their nostalgia was tempered by the presumption that actually returning to the café as an adult was a sign of failure.

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Internet Cafés in China and Beyond: The Literature In the early 2000s, Internet cafés became the symbol of the information society in developing countries. Scholars around the globe published papers on the importance of Internet cafés, but tended to focus on a narrow range of issues. First, a number of scholars address the role of the Internet café industry in the development of technological infrastructure in underdeveloped and developing nations, exploring primarily issues related to the digital divide.12 A second set of articles focus on Internet café regulation and the implications for information access in restrictive political regimes such as China.13 A third large set of articles examines the social and cultural implications of the Internet café.14 This latter set argues that Internet cafés are not only points of public Internet access, but also important social spaces. For example, in the introduction to a special issue of New Media & Society devoted to cybercafés, Sonia Liff and Anne Sofie Laegran note that “the forms of sociality associated with a café environment are seen as enhancing, or complementing, the experience of internet access.”15 Sarah Lee’s study of Internet café use in Southeast England makes the complementary claim that “public use of the internet is not just a transitional phenomenon which precedes home internet adoption.”16 In this vein, Fengshu Liu observed and interviewed young Chinese in urban Internet cafés, concluding that wangba play an “irreplaceable” role in young people’s lives, even when other modes of Internet access are available through the home. Liu characterizes the Chinese Internet café as a “heterotopian third place.”17 She argues that the Chinese café subverts the social hierarchies found in everyday life; unlike the situation in school or at home, in the Internet cafés everyone is equal. She notes also that young people gravitate to the café largely because they perceive it as the only affordable leisure choice (“where else could one go”) and value the location for its atmosphere (qifen). They consider it of particular importance during the years leading up to the high-school entrance exam, as a place where one can relieve stress and kill time (dafa shijian). Liu underscores the youngsters’ perception of these spaces largely as locations of entertainment, not work; most Internet cafés don’t even offer printing or word processing services. Such observations fall into what might be termed a third-place interpretation of the Internet café. The concept of third place is based on the work of Ray Oldenburg. Oldenburg highlights the necessity of locations of sociality that exist separate from the spheres of home and work, and their

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users’ feeling that these places offer a welcome retreat from the zones with the most rigid social stratifications. But I object to characterizing those third places as neutral locations in which “all feel at home and comfortable,” the notion being that they necessarily act as a social leveler in which all are equal regardless of their worldly status. Oldenburg’s work romanticizes spaces of leisure and overlooks the social and economic inequalities that pervade them. Take, for example, the scenario detailed by Oldenburg in which Yale college students comfortably mingle with locals in working-­ class dive bars.18 While this mixing might happen in everyday life, it is by no means common. In many urban areas, public leisure locations are segregated along class lines; there are so-called townie bars and there are student bars, bars for the yuppie set and bars for the hipster set. Rarely does someone from one set enter the space of the other. In this regard, Oldenburg’s work comes across as a less politically engaged version of Jürgen Habermas’ public sphere, and is subject to many of the same pitfalls.19 Just as Habermas has been critiqued by scholars who note that the ideal of the public sphere in fact excluded women and other marginalized groups, Oldenburg’s concept of third place largely ignores issues of class, race, and gender, and in so doing overlooks the social dynamics at work within such spaces.20 We should therefore be particularly cautious about using the concept of third place to describe the Chinese wangba. As I will demonstrate in this chapter and the next, wangba are not mere sites of conviviality and equality; they are locations of highly contested and shifting social significance. Socioeconomic status is not magically checked at the Internet café’s door. Quite the contrary. For the students I spoke with, the mere act of going to an Internet café was indicative of one’s real-life status. Liu herself admits that Internet cafés were not unproblematic in this regard, stating “the notion is: a really good child seldom, if ever, goes to the wangba.”21 While Fengshu Liu finds Internet cafés in China to be places in which all are equal, I would argue that this sense of equality exists only within a select group of specially skilled insiders. Internet cafés can foster conversation and a sense of equality among regulars, but they are also highly specialized locations organized around the Internet and, in particular, digital games. While some may go to the Internet café to check e-mail, the vast majority of patrons play video games, and those not participating in this activity will probably find themselves excluded from the café’s social scene. Rather than being inclusive places, these locations tend to exclude anyone without the relevant technical expertise.

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My argument here is similar to the critique of third place offered by Todd Harper, who contends that online game forums constitute communities of expertise—not third places—that form around game play.22 Even when someone has the technical knowledge necessary to engage wangba patrons in conversation, individuals are not easily accepted into the group. Most young people frequent the Internet café with an already established circle of friends, and cliques tend to form based upon pre-existing social connections. In this regard, as public places they act more to facilitate private social interactions than to promote the mixing and mingling of different patrons. Jenna Burrell’s account of Internet cafés and youth in Ghana is consistent with this critique: Although I witnessed youth traveling through the cafés in groups, occupying it for a time with their noise and numbers, these were inevitably pre-­ existing groups. The key dynamic was one of traveling through. The Internet café was a departure point, either to online spaces or to subsequent physical destinations. It did not seem destined to become the sort of café-as-third-­ space thought to play a role in civil society formation.23

With this notion of traveling through, Burrell highlights the transitional role of the café, which is not, in and of itself, a final destination. It may be that China’s Internet cafés will persist as important places of entertainment despite technological advances making the need for such public-­ access sites obsolete. But that importance will likely continue only for certain age groups or people of certain socioeconomic status. In urban Shanghai, many already view Internet cafés as places of the past. In college students’ narratives, Internet cafés were places frequented largely by middle- and high-school students or by lower-class youth who had dropped out of school. Most college students, although they may have spent time in Internet cafés when they were in middle or high school, found that their university dormitories or apartments took over as sites of Internet use. Rather than invoking third-place theory, which does not adequately problematize the space of the Internet café, I therefore prefer to characterize the wangba as a liminal space. Liminal is here meant to work in a number of registers. First, we may recall the traditional anthropological invocation of liminality as used by Victor Turner, to refer to that transitional stage in which one is “betwixt and between.” Turner argues that liminality is a marginal state, but also “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.”24 Many of the

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s­ tudents in my study closely associated the Internet café with their transition from childhood to adulthood. It was both a site of rebellion from parents and a location in which young people experienced intense feelings of solidarity and equality with their peers—what Turner calls communitas—as they collectively prepared for and waited out the results of the much-­ anticipated rite of passage that was the college entrance exam. Secondly, we may view Internet cafés as liminal in the sense that the wangba itself is a location in which people float in a liminal state, between the physical and the virtual. Finally, the wangba holds somewhat ambiguous status in the public eye; it is a site that houses technology and heralds its advances at the same time as it is viewed in the traditional media as a location of backwardness and regress. Here, Turner usefully refers to the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, who argues that anything “unclear and contradictory” is often regarded as unclean.25 To outsiders, the Internet café has long been marked as an unclean space. Elders do not fully understand exactly what young people do in the space of the Internet café, but claims that these spaces foster Internet addiction, crime, and sexual deviance (through pornography) are common. These popular attitudes will be taken up in more detail in Chap. 3, which examines at length the manner in which the media have framed Internet games and Internet cafés as harmful spiritual opium.

A Once-Rebellious Social Space: High-School Experience in the Wangba The Internet café’s position as an interstitial place was retrospectively noted by many of the college students I spoke to. They associated the wangba with the transitional period between middle school and college, a time when one’s future had yet to be determined by the results of the college entrance exam (gaokao) and the pressure to excel seemed to leave little space for sociality either at home or in school. In my discussions with many college student gamers in 2009 and 2010, Internet cafés and games served as symbols of their fleetingly rebellious youth. In their recollections, Internet cafés were valued for their exciting atmosphere (qifen) as not only a social space, but a deliciously illicit one. The Internet café served as a site of leisure that existed beyond the confines of parental control and a stressful and monotonous educational career. Chinese gamers’ reminiscences about sneaking into the cafés

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­ arallel American students’ stories about sneaking into bars. Consider the p following scenarios described by Li, Xiaomei, and Xiaolong. Li, a Fudan University student, highlighted the extreme pressure during his time in a competitive boarding secondary school known for its rigorous and successful program prepping students for the college entrance exam. He and his friends frequented Internet cafés almost daily after class: Because when you are in high school, studies are extremely intense, and so the school won’t allow for Internet [in the dormitories]; we also didn’t have a television, we had nothing, just a dorm, so therefore you had to go to an Internet café…but you had to find a café that was further away…if you went to one near the school the teachers would find you.

Li thus described his time in the café in relation to the stressful atmosphere of school. Xiaomei, on the other hand, found the Internet café exciting because her parents did not want her to frequent that space. At first, when asked why she did not go to Internet cafés anymore, she mentioned issues related to technological change. However, when questioned further about how her attitude toward cafés differed from when she was a child, she brought up her parents. Xiaomei:

MS: Xiaomei:

When I was little the Internet wasn’t very widespread. I don’t know whether there was any broadband or not back then, it seems like there probably wasn’t, only dial-up, anyway the connection speed was very slow, and then now, well, I don’t really go to the Internet café, occasionally I might arrange to go with some other classmates, to get that qifen that comes from playing together. Do you feel that your opinion of the wangba has changed at all? Do you feel that the wangba is the same as before? It doesn’t hold the same attraction as before…because people have this feeling—what you can’t have always seems so great, at that time dad and mom really watched me very closely, and they wouldn’t let me play, so it was like reverse psychology, it made me want to sneak out and see what it was like. Now that I am in college they don’t pay much attention, like when you go on the Internet they don’t try to control you, so I won’t really go to the ­Internet café, before when I went it was mainly because at home my parents wouldn’t let me go online.

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Xiaomei noted that on her first visit to an Internet café at age ten, she and her friend played the real-time strategy (RTS) game Starcraft. However, she played the most in middle school, when she was around 13 years of age, and she and her male friends would go to the Internet café after school two or three times a week, and would stay for around three hours. In the beginning, her parents did not know that she went to the café. When we first started [going to the wangba] they didn’t know. Then there was this one time, our school was supposed to have some activity that was originally supposed to go very late, to 8 or 9 p.m. There was one time that we got let out early and we went to the café and stayed there playing until midnight. At first my parents didn’t know; I just told them I would be home late, but then the teacher called the house and we were exposed. But usually, because they wouldn’t come to meet me after school let out, they wouldn’t know if I was a little late.

Aside from the perverse incentive caused by parental disapproval of the wangba, the thrilling rebelliousness of going to the café was heightened by the legal prohibition against minors’ entering those spaces. Xiaomei explained the process by which she and her friends got around the restrictions, usually with the help of the Internet café manager: Back then the government had a policy, but some of the wangba wouldn’t pay attention to it, and then when there were inspections the manager would just stop us from going in, and when we were slightly older he told us that we could just provide him with a photocopy of the ID, so then we went and found some IDs and copied them, and we changed the numbers and then pasted our pictures on top and then we photocopied it again, and so then we could go in.

Here, we may again see a common element in underage drinking in the United States and Internet café culture in China: the creation of fake IDs. What is more, like underage drinking, sneaking into the Internet café was rarely done alone. Almost all of the young people I spoke with said that they would go only with friends. Caijing University student Xiaolong, whose devotion to games will be discussed at length in Chap. 5, made that clear: Xiaolong: We went with friends. In middle school you wouldn’t dare go alone, because minors weren’t permitted in the wangba, and sometimes the police would come to see whether or not you were underage.

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MS: Did you personally experience this? Xiaolong: Was I caught by the police? No, I ran relatively fast. Sometimes the police would come, and there was this one time that my classmate got caught, and then they called his parents to have them come get him. And what’s more, when they find minors in the wangba there will be lots of fines, so after that incident that wangba would never let minors in again. When we first started going it was because they weren’t very strict about the inspections, but when they started being strict about it we couldn’t go in. In 2010 I held a series of group meetings with three students from East China Normal University (ECNU). Here referred to as Carl, Quentin, and Lingling, the three seemed to egg each other on, each relating a nostalgic anecdote more vivid than the last. Carl talked about his initiation into café-going: The first time I encountered the Internet was probably in fifth grade, and then at that time the game CS [Counterstrike] was pretty popular, when it first started it wasn’t even online, and then, we would sneak off to the wangba, and there I would see a bunch of middle- and high-school students, a bunch of students who were older than me, playing. So I started to play with them, and eventually I learned how to, and so I started bringing my classmates to play, and then eventually it was common for a large group (over ten) to go to the wangba to play games every day after school if we didn’t have something going on.

The other ECNU students went on to agree that going to the Internet café was something that had to be done in a group. Quentin: Carl:

Quentin:

In general I won’t go to the wangba alone. Yes, I usually won’t go alone, usually I would go with a group of two or three, if others don’t call you up [to go] you usually wouldn’t go call up someone else, everyone has to decide as a group and then go together, it was always like this, a single person would rarely go to the wangba, because if you go alone you don’t know what to do. Because there are home computers now, it is boring to go to the wangba alone, you go to the wangba in order to play some group games, for example CS, CF [Crossfire], wangluo games… Now wangluo games are more popular, before there were lots of people playing on Local Area Networks, now not so much.

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All of the students I interviewed saw going to the wangba as a social affair. No one chose to go to the wangba alone; it was perceived as being fun— and safe—only when in a group. Given the increasingly negative attention paid to Internet cafés and the feeling that these spaces were somewhat forbidden and illicit, the lively company and security of a group of peers became essential.

Leaving the Wangba Behind: Changing Perceptions and the Spatialization of Class While Internet cafés played an important part in many young people’s coming-of-age, their attitudes toward the café space changed once they entered college. Having acknowledged that they once frequented Internet cafés, they also argued, in retrospect, that these were morally questionable places for young people. Interestingly, this perception of the café had less to do with the types of activities (digital games) that were played than with the unpleasant physical surroundings and mixed clientele. ECNU student Lingling deplored the violation of age restrictions: In our hometown, Internet cafés are everywhere, one part of town is practically all Internet cafés and pretty much all the people on the Internet are those little kids—elementary-school students, middle-school students and high-school students. Usually adults have computers at home, so they won’t go to the Internet café to play, only kids go to the Internet café, it’s very serious, I personally think that we need to take this seriously. Every time I come home for vacation and go to an Internet café, the Internet café is practically full, and the majority of people are elementary-school students, really little kids, like fifth or sixth graders, and then there will be some third or fourth graders watching on the sidelines, this kind of situation really ­worries me. I personally really feel that those cafés now are really [gestures negatively]…and the Internet café managers are really black-hearted, they just want to make money so they don’t follow restrictions. At that Internet café there is a sign plastered on the wall that says minors under the age of 18 aren’t permitted to go on the Internet, they have that plastered right at the entrance, but as soon as you go in and look inside, it’s all elementary-school students…I just really feel they are very black-hearted, if they need to check ID, the managers themselves will go and find some IDs, and if you are underage they will just give you an ID and let you go online, and when you are done all they have to do is remember to continue to give you the same card, that kind of thing is really bad.

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Here, we can see how young people’s attitudes about the Internet café change once they themselves have no need of it. While Lingling admitted that she would sneak into Internet cafés when she was younger, she now saw such behavior as problematic. Perhaps most importantly, Lingling went on to argue that only certain “types” of young people were found in the Internet cafés: And there are two main kinds of Internet cafés there—one kind is all students, and another kind is all those “society youth” (shehui qingnian) those society youth they will sit there and smoke and use the Internet, that is the thing that annoys me the most, every time there are so many people smoking, and everyone in the vicinity…and I just can’t stand that smell, as soon as you leave the Internet café your whole body has that really strong smell of smoke, it’s really so annoying, I remember that once when I went to a café I even brought a facemask.

Carl, upon hearing Lingling mention the smoke, chimed in with his own memories of the bad environments at the wangba: We didn’t wear a facemask, we brought bug repellent. If you went to the Internet café to use the Internet you had to bring bug repellent, because the Internet café’s atmosphere was so, you know, it was so full of smoke and mosquitoes; you had to bring bug repellent. And then the café I would go to had a disco on the second floor, you would be on the first floor using the Internet, and people would be dancing back and forth upstairs…and when people had enough of dancing upstairs they would come downstairs and use the Internet, and when they had enough of the Internet they would go upstairs to dance.

Lingling’s use of the term “society youth” to describe those young people who were not students is worth highlighting. Although the term “society” has a largely positive connotation in English, as in high society or member of society, here the term is used as a derogatory label for dropouts, those aimless young people who are not in school and who have few prospects for moving up in society. According to Baidu Baike, the term “society youth” is frequently used as an antonym for students (xuesheng).26 Lingling’s usage is therefore more akin to the English slang term “townie,” but, to stay true to the Chinese, I will retain the literal translation. Carl’s comment bolsters this notion that, aside from students, the cafés are full of unmotivated, hedonistic youth, who do nothing but dance and play on the Internet to fill the time.

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Lingling and Carl both spent a good deal of time in the wangba when they were younger. During my fieldwork in 2009 and 2010 I encountered a number of young gamers who grew up with Internet connections in their home and felt no need to frequent the wangba. Rather than expressing a fond nostalgia for the places, some of these young gamers express extreme disapproval of them, echoing the negative attitudes of the press and state officials. One Tongji University student, Beibei, said that he had visited Internet cafés fewer than ten times in his entire life. He confirmed the distaste expressed by Lingling and Carl: Internet cafés…sometimes I am a bit repulsed by Internet cafés because the interior is so chaotic; there are lots of people smoking, and then, inside, umm, inside there are people of so many different “professions,” sometimes there are fighting incidents and the like, sometimes there will be identity theft and the like, they are not very safe places.

These guarded comments about “different professions” not only hint at the low-class status of many café patrons, but also suggest that the cafés are full of thugs and criminals. The disdain for Internet cafés among college students highlights the politics of public versus private space. As we shall see in Chap. 3, public spaces of consumption such as Internet cafés, like opium dens in the prerevolutionary era, often receive negative attention. Private consumption practices, however, become a marker of sophistication and class. Given a space of their own, gamers turn their rooms into a kind of social gaming space, not unlike an Internet café, but open only to a select group of invited friends. Not long after I started my fieldwork in Shanghai, I came across a newspaper article entitled “A dorm becomes an Internet café, a computer becomes a gaming device. The spread of ‘Internet gaming illness’ in college dormitories.” The sensationalized title is characteristic of the media moral panic that will be discussed more in the next chapter. My own observations of college dorms in Shanghai confirm that, for many college students, dorms have become de facto Internet cafés. Indeed, when I first asked my research assistant Luke to accompany me to Internet cafés to interview gamers, he suggested that we begin with his dorm, noting that it was just like an Internet café. And so I ventured into his Tongji University men’s dormitory on one cold December evening.

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Our first stop on that trip was the room of Luke’s friend, Jun Zhang, an avid gamer who played the Korean game Ragnarok Online (RO) as well as the Chinese game Fantasy Westward Journey (Menghuan Xiyou). The lights were out in his room and the late afternoon sun had begun to set, casting the south-facing room in a mix of shadows and dim rays of light. Jun Zhang’s desk was cluttered with snacks and soda: two cans of Pepsi, bread, and some packaged processed hotdogs. The small garbage bin overflowed with food wrappers. Not long after I arrived, a group of young men came rushing in to take stock of the action, presumably because they had heard a foreign female was in their midst. Eventually, they turned the lights on and two other students settled at their desks beside us in order to play their own games. After a while, my conversation with Jun Zhang lapsed, and I sat back to observe the environment created by the three different gamers. I was impressed by the lack of other noise in the room. All three players had muted the sound on their respective games and played quietly, with nothing but the persistent clicks of their mice tick-ticking throughout the room. The screensavers and backgrounds on each of the laptops advertised the owner’s favorite game. I would later return to Luke’s dormitory to interview others. As Luke had promised, the hallway was just like an Internet café; behind nearly every door groups of young men huddled around computer screens playing games. In one room I encountered a lively group of six students crowded around a couple of laptop screens. From another room across the hall, shouts could be heard. It turned out that the two rooms were pitted against each other in the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game DOTA.27 Though the players seemed at first somewhat apprehensive about my presence, they invited me inside, allowing me to observe the remainder of the game. While one of those in the room sat off in a corner playing World of Warcraft, the other four were absorbed in DOTA. Only one had the sound on, which was enough: the air was punctuated with ominous statements from the computer such as “The hunt awaits,” and “We must hurry, we’re wasting time here.” After a few minutes I settled in to watch the play and they seemed to forget my presence. The game lasted another 20 minutes after my arrival. Once it ended they all stood up to go to dinner, and seemed surprised to find that I was still there. danah boyd discovered that students in America reproduced race and class distinctions through the social networking services they choose.

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MySpace was once the premier social networking site, but with the advent of Facebook many began to leave one in favor of the other. She argued that there was a “digital white flight” of middle-class white teenagers away from MySpace; these young white students saw MySpace as “ghetto” and frequented mostly by groups that were either “ghetto or hip hop rap lovers.” What is more, parents believed that MySpace was unsafe, while they felt more comfortable with the “gated” nature of Facebook—which originated as a college networking space. Though unfounded, parents invested in the notion that Facebook was more private than other social networking websites. In China, I observed similar divisions. For example, MSN instant messenger was once perceived as being used by the more internationally oriented Chinese business crowd, while domestic Chinese students and other youth generally used QQ. Similarly, Chinese social networking sites Renren and Douban attracted different groups of users. And, as we shall see in Chap. 4, certain types of digital games were seen as attracting a more intellectual group, while other types were thought to attract dropouts and Internet addicts. For the purpose of this chapter, however, distinctions were based not so much on the type of hardware or software used, as on the locations of use. The Internet café may very well be a nostalgic site for post-1980 and early post-1990 youth, but it is also a space relegated to a specific time. Over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, laptops, mobile phones, and private Internet connections eclipsed Internet cafés in importance for those with purchasing power. As Mayfair Yang notes, China has historically been plagued by spatial concerns.28 Political centralization of space during the Maoist era denied people private familial space and forced relations out into the public. Under the work unit (danwei) system, apartments were apportioned to workers through their jobs; the state owned homes and not just ­workplaces. Today, although the collectivist notion of space has given way to increasing privatization, China’s urban populations continue to face spatial challenges. Li Zhang argues that in contemporary China “socioeconomic differences get spatialized and materialized through the remaking of urban communities.”29 Increasingly, the emerging middle and upper-­middle classes assert their spatial superiority through their power to purchase real estate: villas and garden apartments located in private gated compounds. By contrast, large numbers of young people—from jobless college graduates to poorly educated migrant laborers—cannot afford this high-priced real estate and continue to squeeze into cramped

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rental apartments. These young people have become known as China’s “ant tribe.” For them, personal space is scarce. It is therefore not surprising that it is mainly young students and migrant workers who colonized the Internet cafés.

Nostalgia for the Impossible Return The nostalgia of China’s post-1980 and post-1990 generations for the rebellious experience of Internet café-going is not lost on the digital gaming industry. In the early 2010s companies such as Tencent and Giant Interactive adopted the grassroots spirit and narrative format of micro-­films (wei dianying), produced for the Internet, to create nostalgic appeals meant to promote game play. Micro-films fall into a number of genres, one of which is known as the “inspirational struggle” (lizhi fendou) genre.30 Old Boys (Lao Nanhai), directed by the Chopsticks Brothers (Kuazi Xiongdi), is the quintessential example of this style. In the film, the “old boys,” two young men bored by their dreary everyday existence, seek to recapture the excitement and idealistic optimism of their youth by taking part in an Americanidol-like game show. The online movie is both funny and heartfelt, and it struck a chord with Chinese netizens. The film clocked more than 28 million views in the first three months after its October 2010 release.31 In May 2011, not long after Old Boys’ success, Giant Interactive, maker of the MMORPG Zhengtu 2, released We Grew Up Playing (Wan Dade). To say that Wan Dade borrows from the aesthetic of the Chopsticks Brothers’ films is an understatement. The story employs many of the same rhetorical tropes as Lao Nanhai, but notably replaces the excitement of performing in a talent show with the excitement of playing video games in the arcade. We Grew Up Playing (Wan Dade) tells the story of two teenage boys, Dunzi and Yanjing, who spend all their time in arcades playing the game King of Fighters. Together, they get into all kinds of mischief trying to scrounge up money to play games in the gaming hall. Despite encountering petty challenges—being bullied by thugs and yelled at by their parents—both young men are brimming with youthful optimism. They try to outdo each other in the game, deciding on an ultimate duel that will determine who is the “King of Fighters.” But, tragically, before they can realize their dream of staging this ultimate match, Yanjing’s family relocates to the city. Dunzi and Yanjing are separated, never having managed to stage their final duel.

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Cut to the future. Dunzi has become a manager of a small video-game store, while Yanjing has settled into the life of a corporate middleman. Their childhoods had been marked by fantasy, rebellion, and dreams of entrepreneurial success; their adult lives are a disappointing drudgery, all dreams abandoned as hope and success seem always to elude them. By chance, the two run into each other and rekindle their friendship over drinks. They resolve to realize their childhood dream of staging an ultimate King of Fighters match. They search all the new arcades and Internet cafés, but they cannot find their beloved game. Ultimately, they recapture their youth by downloading King of Fighters to a computer and building a cardboard arcade console around the screen to make it resemble the arcade-style video games of their childhood. We Grew Up Playing is an obvious attempt to capitalize on gamer nostalgia by suggesting that youthful happiness and hopefulness can be found in a return to games (though ironically the company that produced the movie is trying to sell an MMORPG to people who grew up on classic arcade fighter games). The director of the short film evoked this connection in his director’s note: Today we are the ones making games, but in the past we all played them. Everyone has a string of tales. We have named ourselves the “generation that grew up playing.” Making this film was sentimental and tearful, as it is closely related to our own memories and passion. We hope that these scenes of childhood will bring out memories from the bottom of your heart… Today, even though you may already find it hard to recapture the happiness of those years, give thanks to those people who created those classic games for us to play. Now, we only hope that we can ourselves become those kinds of people.32

Marketing ploy or not, the story told by the movie does resonate with many, as is obvious from the comments of the director himself and from the viewers’ comments posted beneath the video. Old Boys and We Grew Up Playing convey the notion that adult life lacks imagination and inspiration. While youth is marked by dreams and high hopes, the protagonists as adults have been forced to settle for much less in their adult lives. What is more, in both films we see the cruel hand of the market economy, where those who get ahead do so through a combination of luck and corruption, while others wallow in an unhappy middle-­class existence. The stories introduce us, for example, to a hairdresser in an unsuccessful barbershop, a video-game store manager, a

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wedding announcer, and a young businessman working for his father and mired in the cycle of endless bouts of after-work drinking and karaoke. These characters seem burdened by a loss of hope. Hope is resurrected only through reliving childhood memories and resolving unfulfilled childhood dreams—no matter how insignificant. Lacking the power to change their careers or living situation, they achieve catharsis by embracing those small things that once seemed so important: a video-game challenge never taken, a talent show act never performed. For the youth in my study, the Internet café was an equally important focus of this nostalgic yearning, and yet the impossibility of a return to this site of the past made the precarity of the future even more acutely felt. College students’ reminiscences and descriptions of time spent gaming in the Internet café reveal the wangba’s contradictory position as both an important social gathering space and a space marked by stigma and disrepute. Descriptions of the wangba as smoke-filled, dirty, and forbidden embellish narratives of fleeting rebelliousness while at the same time becoming markers of liminality and rationales for rejecting the wangba as a legitimate social space later in life. Many college students related tales of sneaking into the Internet café as minors with some glee, but they also suggested that going to the wangba was not so much a choice as a necessity, given the lack of other available leisure spots. This ambivalence feeds into Lingling’s depiction of two different kinds of youths in the wangba—students and society youth. While students’ presence in the wangba was accepted and understood as a temporary phase resulting from a lack of other social leisure options and spaces, non-­ students who use the Internet café were dismissed as idle and troubled. Presumably, these society youth will never leave the wangba for a better life or better leisure but will continue to stagnate in these smoke-filled dens. College students who once used the wangba with some frequency therefore hasten to distance themselves from it lest they be identified with those unproductive society youth. Ultimately, the collective remembering of the young college students I interviewed was more about coping with the challenges of the present than it was about the longing for a restoration of the past. Internet cafés and the games played within them may seem, to outsiders, to be nothing more than the hedonistic calling cards of self-absorbed me-generations, but for the young people who actually experienced them, they are, in fact, monuments to the pressures of maturing in contemporary Chinese society. The collective Internet café memories of the post-1980 and post-1990

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generations may not be as traumatic as the collective recollections of the generations that experienced the Cultural Revolution or the pre-/post-­ Tiananmen era, but they nevertheless tell us a great deal about Chinese urban youth at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The experience of spending time in the Internet café as middle- and high-school students has become a calling card of the post-1980 and post-­ 1990 generations. Now, with Wi-Fi-enabled mobile phones and laptops in hand, the same young people who once had nowhere to go but the wangba eschew the space of the café in favor of playing with friends in the privacy of their college dormitories and apartments. Memories of Internet cafés and the events occurring in them may be seen as contributing to a unique brand of nostalgia that has overcome many young people as they move into the workforce and grapple with the hardships of adult life in the city. Still, in a time in which being technologically mobile is the rage, the Internet café, once a sign of urban China’s rapid technological development, now stands as a symbol of the urban technological past.

Notes 1. Braester, “Real Time to Virtual Reality.” 2. Braester, 99. 3. Braester, 98. 4. Feng quoted in Braester, “Real Time to Virtual Reality,” 89. 5. Liu, Urban Youth in China, 155. 6. Stelter, “The Good Ol’ Days.” 7. Haskins, “Between Archive and Participation,” 401. 8. Gillis, Commemorations, 15. 9. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 10. Yang, “China’s Zhiqing Generation,” 267. 11. Liu, Urban Youth in China, 156. 12. See Mutula, “Cyber Café Industry”; Salvador, Sherry and Urrutia, “Less Cyber, More Café”; Wahid, Furuholt and Kristiansen, “Internet for Development?” 13. See Qiu and Zhou, “Prism of the Internet Café”; Tsui, “The Panopticon as the Antithesis”. 14. See Chee, “The Games We Play”; Laegran and Stewart, “Nerdy, Trendy, or Healthy?”; Lee, “Private Uses in Public Spaces”; Liff & Laegran, “Cybercafés”; Liff & Steward, “Shaping e-Access”; Powell, “Space, Place Reality and Virtuality”; Uotinen, “Involvement in (the information) Society”; Wakeford, “The Embedding of Local Culture”.

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15. Liff and Laegran, “Cybercafés,” 308. 16. Lee, “Private Uses in Public Spaces,” 332. 17. Liu, “Not Merely About Life on the Screen.” 18. Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 26. 19. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 20. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere”; Warner, Publics and Counterpublics. 21. Liu, Urban Youth in China, 121. 22. Harper, Culture of Digital Fighting Games, 139. 23. Burrell, Invisible Users, 33. 24. Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 97. 25. Turner, 97. 26. See “shehui qingnian,” Baidu Baike; Baidu Baike [Baidu Encyclopedia] is a wiki-based encyclopedia run by the Chinese search engine Baidu. Throughout the book, I will rely on Baidu Baike for definitions of key Internet and game-related terms. While not an official dictionary, this site is a useful reference because it captures the colloquial and shifting uses of words and phrases that may not be included in more traditional reference texts. 27. DOTA, also rendered DotA, stands for Defense of the Ancients. It is a mod of Warcraft III, played in two teams of five. 28. Yang, “Spatial Struggles”. 29. Zhang, In Search of Paradise, 108. 30. “Wei dianying,” Baidu Baike. 31. Zhao, “The Micro-Movie Wave.” 32. Luo, dir., Wan Da De.

CHAPTER 3

Spiritual Opium: The Internet Addiction Panic and the Spiritually Ailing Nation

In the time between my research for my master’s thesis in 2004 and my return in 2009 to conduct doctoral research, much had changed in Shanghai. Upon my arrival this second time I looked up my old friend Mike and contacted my newly assigned advisor at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS). I quickly learned that Mike had abandoned games in favor of a far more pressing concern: marriage. Suddenly our conversations, once focused on Internet cafés and the mystical land of Qiji, became intense discussions of the difficulties of finding a wife in a city in which men outnumbered women.1 Clearly, Mike would not be able to help with the research this time. I turned to my advisor in the Youth and Juvenile Studies Department at SASS, hoping that she could connect me with a college student who played games as a hobby. But she obviously disapproved of my intention to study games and the discourse of Internet addiction, perhaps because of its controversial nature. I still recall her frown when I told her I planned to look into Internet addiction treatment facilities. This definitely was not the topic that she thought her white female advisee should study. I wanted to learn about the young people engrossed in role-playing games in the Internet cafés; she steered me toward educational games designed for elementary school children.

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Szablewicz, Mapping Digital Game Culture in China, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36111-2_3

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Ultimately, as the topic of this book indicates, I chose not to pursue her favored line of research. But serendipity does have its value; it was through my advisor that I was able to attend a conference on Internet health for World Mental Health Day, and to observe a vocational high-school class on esports (discussed in the next chapter). Perhaps her greatest influence on my research, however, was that her attempt to steer me away from the topic served in itself to flag Internet addiction as a point of contention among the Chinese scholarly community. Like the parents telling their children to stay away from the Internet café, her attempt to dissuade me from investigating the topic served only to ignite my curiosity. This chapter moves from the unofficial space of nostalgia to the realm of official government and media discourse. The previous chapter demonstrated how Internet cafés once served as important social spaces for young people born in the 1980s and 1990s, and showed the shift in popular perceptions of the Internet café over time. These are nostalgic spaces for many young people, and scholars have noted that Internet cafés persist in importance as social spaces despite the proliferation of home and mobile computing. However, the cafés are also locations marked by class discourse and social stigma. As we will see in this chapter, the shifting attitudes strongly reflect government and media efforts to construct Internet cafés and the games played within them as a threat to the healthy development of youth and of the nation. Some scholars have referred to the press response to Internet cafés, Internet games, and Internet addiction in China as a media moral panic.2 As others note, however, media moral panic can be fully recognized and understood only in retrospect.3 Any attempt to analyze the Chinese media response to Internet addiction therefore must examine the trajectory of press coverage over an extended period of time. Previous studies are limited by their close proximity to the events and coverage in question. My analysis, in contrast, engages with media reports published over the course of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This longitudinal view extends nearly as far as the history of the Internet in China, thus making it possible to pinpoint the years in which coverage peaked, and to match particular events and policies to this heightened media attention. Close analysis reveals that Internet addiction coverage in the Chinese press does indeed follow the classic pattern of media moral panic as first outlined by Stanley Cohen.4 All of Cohen’s criteria are present: the emergence of Internet addiction as a “threat to societal values,” its “­exaggerated,”

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“stylized and stereotypical” presentation in the press, the emergence of “experts” and “moral entrepreneurs” who seek to benefit from the crisis, the evolution of treatment methods, and a sudden decrease in coverage as the panic eventually wanes. Yet the most controversial aspect of media moral panic theory has to do with the extent to which it is ever possible to establish when media coverage is exaggerated or disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the putative problem. The concept of Internet addiction, far from being a mere figment of media imagination, has sparked interest among medical professionals throughout the globe. In 2013 the fifth edition of the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) listed Internet Gaming Disorder as a condition warranting further study. In 2018 the World Health Organization included Gaming Disorder in the draft 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). Numerous games scholars and addiction experts collectively object that these new designations are premature, given that research on the subject is inconclusive and fraught with methodological problems.5 Without going into the question of whether problematic gaming behavior warrants a clinical designation, I must point out that, from a sociological perspective, what constitutes “addiction” changes over time. Scholars of addiction studies often view behavioral addiction as a “hybrid entity” resulting from both biological factors and “discourses, identities and labels.”6 In this hybrid sense, Internet addiction must be understood as at least in part a social construction, dependent upon a particular social body’s definition of what constitutes problematic Internet use. One unstated aim of efforts to control addiction is to shape citizens’ behavior in ways desired by those in power. Attempts to control behavior deemed addictive also rely upon a number of cultural assumptions—what Nancy Duff Campbell calls the “governing mentalities.”7 The goal of this chapter, then, is not to question whether or not such a disorder as Internet addiction exists, but rather to demonstrate how a particular set of governing mentalities and cultural anxieties shape government policies, media discourse, and public attitudes about Internet addiction. Games are both financially lucrative and culturally significant, and efforts to regulate Internet addiction must be seen not as an attempt completely to suppress such games, but rather as efforts to mold youth, the Internet, and the market for digital products. Those efforts through both policy and discourse influence the public’s perception of Internet games

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and those who play them. Regardless of what biological, chemical, or neurological processes might occur inside the bodies and brains of young people as they play games, public understanding is shaped not by scientific fact but by the ways science, culture, and history are manipulated and invoked in popular discourse. While official policy may avoid emotional language, the news media often rely on symbolism to sway their audiences through the power of affect. The press acts as what Stuart Hall et al. refer to as a “secondary definer,” placing official and quasi-scientific rhetoric about Internet addiction in relief through the invocation of public memory.8 One of the chief metaphors they have used to describe the Internet is spiritual opium (jingshen yapian), a phrase with great ideological and historical significance. In 2009, an article appearing on CCTV.com, the website of China’s state-­ run television news network, proclaimed that “Regulating Internet Spiritual Opium is the Responsibility of our Entire Society.” The impassioned plea is quoted in the Baidu Baike entry on “spiritual opium,” which states that: The “net” is a gathering place for all types of different viewpoints, different cultures, different values; all types of information intermingle and therefore must be screened. The original intention of most Internet users is to gather information and broaden their horizons. However, spurred on by a novelty-­ seeking mentality, the inability to resist games and other temptations, as well as graphics and language that cause the face to flush and the heart to race, they lose self-control. Over the course of time, they play to the point of forgetting, they abandon themselves to not thinking and learning, and they become captives of “spiritual opium.” This is a new kind of “spiritual opium,” and those parents, scholars and members of society who have a sense of responsibility, those with a sense of justice, will detest it.9

In addition to appearing in official news reports, sensational labels like “spiritual opium” and its cousin “digital heroin” (dianzi hailuoyin) frequently pop up on blogs and BBS message boards, an indication of the extent to which those metaphors take hold in the popular imagination. Indeed, as suggested by the quotation above, campaigns against cultural products deemed spiritual pollutants are not new, and decrying Internet games as spiritual opium is but the most recent application of a phrase that has circulated since at least the early twentieth century. However, as will be seen later in this chapter, the comparison of opium and the Internet is far more than the deployment of a tired metaphor.

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A Timeline of the Internet Addiction Moral Panic in the Chinese Press Did the Chinese media exaggerate or sensationalize the problem of Internet addiction? To answer this question, I examined the quantity and quality of news coverage about the topic between 2000 and 2019. While it remains difficult to address the chicken-or-egg question of whether media attention incited heightened concern or reflected it, it is nonetheless possible to empirically show that Chinese news coverage of Internet addiction was disproportionate insofar as it eclipsed coverage of other pressing social problems, such as drug addiction. Charting the number of mentions of Internet addiction in the print media also enables us to see when media coverage of Internet addiction reached its peak and when it began to decline. In conjunction with a timeline of key events in the classification and treatment of Internet addiction, we learn that explosive reports in the press frequently predated official legislative action. This is not unusual in China, where the state maintains strict control over the news media and uses it to prime the public to accept various legislative measures.10 In this regard, the focus on Internet addiction in the press may well be seen as a tactic meant to encourage popular support of government control of the Internet in general. The Internet (and Internet cafés) first appeared in China in 1997, three years before my media analysis begins. This is an unfortunate limitation of the China Core Newspapers Database, which stores newspaper articles from 2000 on. While this means that the present analysis omits the earliest media coverage of Internet cafés, it is still possible to see that as of the year 2000, these topics were rarely reported on in the print media. As I will note, coverage of the subject of Internet cafés, Internet games, and Internet addiction first begins to spike in 2002, following the notorious Lanjisu Internet café fire. Therefore I am confident that the analysis presented herein captures the full trajectory of the media moral panic. Despite these limitations, the China Core Newspapers Database is ideal for the purpose of understanding general trends in Chinese media coverage; the database culls news articles from 544 national and local Chinese newspapers. As shown in Fig.  3.1, coverage of the subject of Internet addiction (wangyin) increased dramatically in 2005, reached its peak in 2009, and dropped precipitously after 2010. From 2005 to 2010 Internet addiction was mentioned in newspaper articles more frequently than drug addiction,

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600

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2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Internet Addiction (wangyin)

Gambling Addiction (duyin)

Drug Addiction (duyin)

Alcoholism (jiujingzhongdu)

Fig. 3.1  Mentions of various forms of addiction in full text of Chinese press (print only) January 1, 2000–December 31, 2018. (Source: China Core Newspapers Database, https://www.cnki.net)

gambling addiction, or alcoholism. Indeed, of the 140 articles whose titles mentioned any form of addiction (yin) in 2009, the vast majority (119, or 85%) focused on Internet addiction. During that year, Internet addiction appeared in newspaper article titles more frequently than the subject of drug use (xidu) and as often as the subject of gambling (dubo). This is a pattern that holds true over time. Of 1135 headlines that mention addiction published between January 1, 2000, and July 31, 2019, 711 (over 62%) were about Internet addiction. Peak coverage of Internet addiction coincides with peak coverage of Internet games and Internet cafés in the press (see Fig.  3.2). The year 2009, with the most press mentions of Internet addiction, is also the year with the highest number of articles (451) whose titles mention Internet games. Coverage of Internet cafés reached its peak a few years before, in 2006, at a time when the topic of Internet addiction was gaining steam in the press. As with the subject of Internet addiction, the topics of Internet games and Internet cafés experienced a sharp decline in press coverage after 2010, though, for reasons to be explained, stories on Internet games and Internet addiction have been experiencing a minor resurgence since 2016. It is no coincidence that the coverage of these three topics follows

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2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Internet Addiction (wangyin)

Internet Café (wangba)

Internet Game (wangyou)

Fig. 3.2  Mentions of Internet cafés, Internet games, and Internet addiction in Chinese press headlines (print only) January 1, 2000–December 31, 2018. (Source: China Core Newspapers Database, https://www.cnki.net)

a similar trend. Indeed, between 2005 and 2010, among all articles with Internet addiction in their titles, the text mentions Internet games in 75% of them, and Internet cafés, in 50%. Such overlapping coverage cements the connection of Internet addiction to the topics of Internet cafés and Internet games in the popular imagination. To explain this media trajectory, it is important to understand some key events in the history of Internet cafés and Internet addiction in China. Without a doubt, the origins of China’s moral panic over unhealthy Internet use can be traced back to the notorious fire at the Lanjisu Internet café in 2002. On June 17 of that year, two disgruntled teenage boys who had been thrown out of the illegal gaming hall by the café manager set a fire that would ultimately kill 25 people. This incident resulted in a media frenzy over the growing problem of illegal Internet cafés (hei wangba), many of which were frequented by minors and operated under unsafe conditions, with windows barred and doors locked to keep customers in and police out. The government responded to the much-publicized tragedy with a round of raids and mass closings of Internet cafés as well as

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harsher regulations that included strictly enforced closing hours and age restrictions.11 American media scholar Henry Jenkins referred to this incident as the “Chinese Columbine,” noting that the crisis about digital games and youth that erupted as a result of the incident was similar to that of the frenzy over violent video games in the wake of the Columbine School shootings in the United States.12 In the years following the fire, the government continued to portray Internet café culture as a cause for concern. In 2005, Li Kuinan, a deputy of the National People’s Congress, made headlines for claiming that nearly 15% of China’s middle-school students were “Internet addicts.” In an article published in the People’s Daily on March 15 of that year, Li referred to the 2002 fire at the Lanjisu Internet café and a “large number” of crimes committed due to the Internet as grounds for tightening China’s governance of the Internet as a whole. Li’s pronouncement coincided with the opening of one of China’s first Internet addiction treatment facilities, which operated out of the Beijing Military General Hospital.13 Press coverage of Internet cafés, Internet games, and Internet addiction built to a peak in the ensuing years. In 2006 alone, People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), published 43 articles that discussed Internet cafés. My survey of those articles reveals coverage that was overwhelmingly negative in tone, with the majority of articles referencing subjects such as the regulation and closing of Internet cafés, the problem of illegal (black) cafés (hei wangba), and the need for healthy (green) cafés (lüse wangba). Some of these articles made astoundingly bold claims, such as a Xinhua news report that stated that 80% of college dropouts were due to Internet addiction.14 This spike in the official media discussion of Internet cafés primed readers for measures adopted in the 2007 “Law on the Protection of Minors” (Wei chengnian ren baohu fa). Article 66 of the law dealt explicitly with Internet cafés, prohibiting them from being built in areas surrounding primary and secondary schools. It also made punishable by law any Internet café that permitted minors to enter and/or failed to display signage about the prohibition of minors on their premises.15 In July 2008, an explosive documentary, entitled Battling the Net Monster (Zhan wang mo), premiered on CCTV.  The seven-part series, filmed by Liu Mingyin and based on a book of the same title, stirred controversy. The film cast questionable Internet addiction treatment methods in a positive light and erroneously charged that games like World of Warcraft encouraged gamers to steal others’ items and arbitrarily kill players for goods.16

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Yet another key event occurred on November 8, 2008, when a panel of medical experts at the Beijing Military General Hospital, led by Tao Ran, published the “Clinical Diagnostic Criteria for Internet Addiction” (Wangluo cheng yin linchuang zhengduan biaozhun).17 The criteria included symptoms such as a strong desire to use the Internet and bodily discomfort or irritability upon logging off. Most controversially, the standards stipulated that individuals who used the Internet for more than six hours per day for a period of three months or more could qualify as Internet addicts. Even in a media environment prone to exaggeration, such claims were met with skepticism. The decision to designate Internet addiction a clinical disorder elicited concern from parents and scholars, and ignited a debate between two leading Internet addiction specialists, Tao Ran, who introduced the clinical criteria, and Tao Hongkai, who considered Internet addiction to be an issue of reform through education and persuasion (ganhua).18 The debate may have had less to do with science than culture; in China, mental illness is heavily stigmatized, and many parents, though desperate to address their children’s excessive Internet use, balked at the idea of labeling them mentally ill. Despite or because of concerns about these newly created clinical standards, the panel’s November 2008 announcement paved the way for a number of Internet addiction-themed events and policies. It is hardly a coincidence, then, that Internet addiction coverage in the press peaked in 2009. In the spring of that year, the Chinese government rolled out controversial censorship software known as Green Dam Youth Escort (Lüba huaji huhang). Initially, the government required pre-installation of this censorship software—aimed to create a safe (green) web environment for children—on all computers sold in China beginning on July 1, 2009.19 While designed to block access to pornography, violent video games, and other content deemed harmful to youth, the software was broadly criticized for its potential to censor political discussion. Due to public outcry, the plans to make the software mandatory were postponed indefinitely before they went into effect.20 While the government was struggling to implement its Green Dam software, a different kind of regulatory battle was underway. During the summer of 2009, World of Warcraft, an MMORPG distributed by the American company Blizzard Entertainment, came up for relicensing. The Ministry of Culture (MOC) and the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) both claimed jurisdiction over the licensing of Internet games. The standoff between the two bodies forced Blizzard’s

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Chinese carrier, NetEase, to shut down its game servers on June 6, 2009. This left approximately 5 million gamers with no game to play.21 In the midst of this government infighting, China’s Internet addiction centers came under increased scrutiny after revelations about patient mistreatment. On May 7, 2009, China Youth Daily published an explosive exposé on Yang Yongxin and his Internet Addiction Treatment Center at the Fourth People’s Hospital in Linyi, Shandong. According to the report, Yang Yongxin used electroshock therapy, known medically as electroconvulsive therapy or ECT, as well as other harsh and abusive tactics, to treat approximately 3000 teenagers at his facility between 2007 and 2009. Yang claimed that his shock therapy treatment had a near 100% success rate, but the report called this into question, citing message boards in which former patients recounted their traumatic experiences at the Center as well as the ineffectiveness of Yang’s treatment methods.22 In July 2009, in response to this report, the Ministry of Health sent a letter to the Health Department of Shandong Province, calling for the end of electroshock therapy.23 The entire ordeal was covered in the prestigious American journal, Science.24 To make matters worse, in August 2009 a young man by the name of Deng Senshan was beaten to death at a treatment center in Guangxi. The incident drew attention from both Chinese and international media; the Associated Press picked up the story, and reports appeared in the English-­ language China Daily, the Los Angeles Times, BBC News, and Wired Magazine, among others.25 Perhaps in response to this series of events ranging from embarrassing to horrifying, the Chinese government declared its focus for World Mental Health Day on October 10, 2009: “Internet Health.” In observance of this day, Chinese mental health institutes, gaming companies, and academic institutions scrambled to promote healthy uses of the Internet. A flurry of activities and studies were released at the appropriate moment. A mental health hospital in Shanghai inaugurated an online survey about Internet addiction, and a new Experimental Children and Internet Research Center opened its doors, advertising a “sunshine therapy” for treating Internet addiction.26 But while the media touted the sunshine therapy as an effort to combat Internet addiction, in an interview with a university faculty member involved with the program I discovered that the so-called anti-addiction “sunshine therapy” was the product of media exaggeration. In conversation with me, the faculty member dismissed the Center’s links to addiction treatment, describing the initiative as nothing more than an Internet literacy effort. Capping off this public relations push, in November 2009 the Ministry of Health issued a document

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intended to solicit public opinion on the matter of Internet addiction. The new document attempted to walk back the clinical standards introduced the previous year, stating that there was no precise definition of the problem and instead outlining a number of guidelines concerning so-called inappropriate use of the Internet. The move was discussed in the press as an effort to downplay the problem of Internet addiction following the revelations about abuse in addiction treatment facilities.27 The height of the Internet addiction media panic can thus be identified as the period between the November 2008 designation of Internet addiction as a clinical disorder and the November 2009 Ministry of Health document revising these clinical standards. From 2010 on, coverage of Internet addiction, along with coverage of Internet games and Internet cafés, would show a steady decline (see Fig. 3.2). It is not clear that the media lost interest on their own. As will be discussed below, the CCP has historically tried to save face by containing and covering up the country’s battles with addiction and mental illness, lest those be interpreted as a sign of national weakness. Without a doubt, the well-publicized death of Deng Senshan and international reports about the abusive treatment of a number of other “Internet-addicted” youth were seen as a national embarrassment. Given the tight state control of the press in China, it would not be far-fetched to suspect that the sudden decline in media coverage resulted from a conscious government effort to suppress such news. Despite efforts to downplay the problematic treatment methods in Internet addiction camps, the issue has continued to garner the attention of the media, both internationally and domestically. In 2013, an American-­ Israeli duo released the feature-length documentary film Web Junkie, chronicling the life of a number of teens in a Chinese Internet addiction camp. The film screened at numerous international film festivals and was picked up in the United Kingdom and United States by the BBC and PBS. Domestically, media interest in Internet addiction remained in decline until 2016, when a series of events catapulted the issue back into the headlines. First, in August 2016, the Beijing Morning Post published a scathing editorial that accused Yang Yongxin of continuing to administer electroshock therapy at his Internet addiction facility, despite the orders from the Ministry of Health. The author of the article stated that the failure to enforce the ban was “a sadness for the rule of law” (fazhi de beiai) and called for official legislation.28 Following this, on September 30, 2016, the newly created Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released a draft of proposed legislation on “Minor’s Rights in Cyberspace.”29 The proposed legislation, which was revised in January 2017, would prohibit

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“abuse, coercion, and other unlawful methods” in the treatment of Internet addiction. It would also make it illegal for online game companies to allow minors to play their games between the hours of midnight and 8 am.30 As of August 2019, the draft legislation had yet to be adopted, but the People’s Daily predicted that the measures would be signed into law by the end of that year.31 In late 2017, the World Health Organization announced its intention to include gaming disorder in its 2018 revision of the International Classification of Diseases. Perhaps not coincidentally, around the same time the Chinese government also placed renewed emphasis on the regulation of Internet games. In December, the Ministry of Propaganda, along with eight other government ministries, issued an “Opinion on the strict regulation of Internet game market management.”32 A flurry of regulatory activities aimed at removing obscene and violent games from the market culminated in the State Administration of Press and Publication entirely halting the approval of licenses for new game titles between March and December 2018.33 In the midst of this regulatory stopgap, on August 30, 2018, the Ministry of Education released the “Comprehensive Implementation Plan for the Prevention and Control of Myopia in Children and Adolescents.”34 In this plan, the Ministry of Education highlighted the effects of digital media, including digital games, on young people’s eyesight. The Ministry further suggested that it was necessary to control the number of Internet game titles and devise ways to limit the amount of time young people could play games. Finally, the issue of Internet addiction was discussed at the all-important joint session of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (lianghui) in March 2019, with the media reporting that the government had reached a “consensus” about the need to strengthen internet protections for minors. In particular, the National Youth Federation proposed further regulations on games, reigniting the push for real name registration and identification systems meant to bar underage gamers.35

Visualizing Internet Addiction in the Chinese Press The frequency of press mentions of Internet addiction, Internet games, and Internet cafés is significant in and of itself, but far more important than the frequency is what Cohen has called the “stylized and stereotypical” nature of media coverage.36 The negative tone of many of the reports

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on Internet cafés, Internet games, and Internet addiction has already been noted. It is the particular images and metaphors invoked in the media that frame and contextualize the topics in such a way as to incite panic. In photographs, the mainstream Chinese press treats the young “Internet addict” with a panoptic gaze that robs them of their agency and ability to speak back. In 2008, as the Internet addiction panic neared its peak, I conducted an image search for the term wangyin on the Chinese government website www.gov.cn. The search returned 379 results culled from various Chinese news sources, a number of which were cartoon renderings.37 Limiting my analysis to the photographs contained in the results, I conducted a visual discourse analysis and determined that the images could be easily classified as belonging to five main categories of representation: Internet zombies, the medicalization of Internet addiction, physical harm, desperate mothers, and scenes of rehabilitation and reunification. By classifying these pictures, I highlight the process by which dominant discourse solidifies around certain one-sided narratives.38 The specific implications of these categories of representation are discussed below. One of the most insidious portrayals of youth and technology, both within China and across the globe, is what might be termed the screen zombie. In these images, a child sits alone in the dark, frozen before an empty, glowing screen. This representation predates the Internet, and has been used to demonize other screen media such as film and television.39 Those in the United States might recall, for example, the enduring image of the little blonde girl and the static-filled television in the 1982 film Poltergeist.40 Rather than showing groups of young people engaging with media together, these visual representations isolate the individual gamer, zeroing in on a single boy mesmerized by the computer screen or, in animated renderings, somehow attached to or being sucked into the screen. Often, the image shows the back of the user’s head, rather than his or her face, thus emphasizing the lifelessness of the body sitting before the screen. When the image does feature the face, it is perhaps even more shocking. The faces we do see are entirely expressionless; they do not smile or frown or laugh.41 The message is clear: those who engage with technology become blank, bathed in the nefarious glow of a screen we cannot see. In the Chinese media, photographs of children in the dark Internet cafés replicate and expand upon this common trope. Frequently, the photographer takes the shots from a bird’s-eye view, capturing the café as a vast space with an expanse of row upon row of young people at comput-

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ers. The image reveals nothing but the tops of black-haired heads contrasted against a sea of glowing screens.42 In these photographs, the viewer loses any sense of the diversity of activities taking place on the computers. We see only bright white screens, not the colorful and frenzied activity on and around them. Though they are pictured together, we see no social interaction among the computer users, who appear entirely oblivious of their physical surroundings. These images perpetuate one of the greatest myths of digital media use: the notion that time online is a socially isolating and altogether passive activity. The viewer concludes that, rather than engaging with friends or taking part in productive leisure pursuits that build desirable skills, these youngsters are wasting away before the computer screen. In such depictions youths lack agency, becoming slaves to the technology itself. The emotional appeal of the Internet café zombie image is bolstered by photographs that fall into a second group, those that appeal to the audience’s sense of logic by portraying Internet addiction as a hard scientific fact. In such pictures, the viewer is regaled with scientific diagrams or images of brain scans and electrodes.43 Nikolas Rose argues that an image of a brain scan has greater rhetorical force than a simple argument or psychological explanation.44 While medical professionals in various parts of the globe have yet to determine whether Internet addiction even warrants a clinical designation, such images work to obscure the ambiguity. Brain scans seemingly pinpoint exactly what is wrong with the minds of young people who play games, while also creating the perception of Internet addiction as beyond the control of the individuals or their families. The images suggest that digital media are reworking young people’s brains in damaging ways, but the text accompanying the images rarely interrogates the implications of those changes. Indeed, while it may be true that digital media use alters brain activity, it is also true that all new stimuli lead to changes in our brains.45 The third group of photographs focuses on the aftermath of addiction: physical harm. The press amply covers the consequences of allowing children to become addicted to the Internet, through photographs of ­bandaged young people laid up in hospital beds. One such image shows a young man who reportedly attempted to cut off his index finger in a desperate attempt to free himself of his addiction.46 Another article, taken from a CCTV broadcast, shows a catatonic young person in a hospital bed as well as a trashed wangba caused by a violent fight between two Internet-­ addicted youths in Kunming.47 The report reveals that the fight left one

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dead. Where the scientific diagrams and images drawn from brain scanning suggest that there is something wrong with the brains of Internet addicts, images of young people in hospital beds and surrounded by physical wreckage confirm that addiction spells danger for both the individual and society. Such portrayals may feed parents’ sense of desperation and panic, serving as fodder for the booming business of Internet addiction treatment. The fourth group of photographs might be described as scenes of desperate mothers. The image of the Internet café zombie carries over into this depiction of distraught mothers, with photos showing women shaking despondent young boys or pinning possessed teens to the ground.48 Again, it seems as though these boys’ bodies have no life, and their lack of animation is accentuated by the frenzied actions of their mothers. That they are invariably sons resonates culturally. In Chinese society, male children have long been heavily favored, a preference intensifying for the generations of youth born under China’s one-child policy. Mothers in particular are depicted as reliant on these only sons, what Fong refers to as the family’s “only hope.”49 While the Internet-addicted youth is portrayed as isolated and detached from family and friends, the final group of photographs, which focus on rehabilitation, depicts the opposite. In images devoted to the successful treatment of Internet addicts, young men are pictured surrounded by tearful family members or holding hands with peers. In one such image, male teenagers in white polo shirts stand side by side, arms crossed in front of their bodies, hands clasping hands, to create a human chain. The caption reads “‘hand in hand, we are all good friends;’ children who rejected real-life social relations break out of themselves.”50 After eliciting fear through images of screen zombies, brain scans, hospital beds, and desperate mothers, this final group of images offers parents a seemingly simple solution: treatment. As of 2019, a Baidu image search for wangyin returns close to 130,000 results. Although I did not formally code these images, a scan of the results reveals that most of them rely on the same visual tropes as the images returned in my 2008 search. One notable addition is the images of teenagers in Internet addiction boot camps. In these photographs, teens in camouflage army fatigues are shown doing group exercises such as jumping jacks and pushups. These boot camp photographs fit within the final category of rehabilitation, though they also hint at the controversy over the nature of addiction treatment. Certainly, an image of teenagers doing

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military drills is far less warm and fuzzy than a picture of polo-shirt-clad young men holding hands. Still, for parents convinced that their children are in the grip of games, such images seem to offer reassurance that military discipline will achieve what parental discipline cannot.

Spiritual Opium and Cultural Pollution Images of Internet addiction in the press paint a singular vision of the harmful effects of digital games, but one powerful textual analogy warrants extended discussion, that of spiritual opium. With that metaphor, we may also see the resonance of Internet addiction with the old fear that opium would corrupt the country’s young men. As a Chinese friend noted, the power of the phrase spiritual opium lies in taking a phenomenon that the older generation does not understand— the Internet—and relating it to a national embarrassment that none will soon forget: opium. In China, history is often valued as a source of moral guidance. As Jonathan Unger states, in China “history was and is considered a mirror through which ethical standards and moral transgressions pertinent to the present day could be viewed. This perspective was based in Confucian doctrine, which admonished followers to plumb the past for such lessons.”51 But that past is subject to remaking. Academic scholarship on the social use of opium can help us excavate issues of nationalism, class, economics, and youth agency that are concealed within the Internet addiction discourse. Alexander des Forges investigated what he called the “double discursive construction of opium” in late nineteenth-century Shanghai, noting that opium was constructed alternately as a means of replenishing the spirit (jingshen) and of depleting it.52 Although his work may seem far afield from the subject of this book, his observation about the discursive construction of opium offers a striking parallel to the discursive construction of digital games in contemporary China, where a similar duality exists. Digital games, Internet cafés, and the Internet itself have been both praised as healthy leisure activities and condemned for their addictive and harmful properties—hence their denunciation as the modern-day spiritual opium. There are numerous parallels between the history of opium use and the rise of Internet use in China, not least of which pertains to the Chinese nation’s standing in the world and in relation to Western imperialism, both military and cultural. Far from simply casting the Internet as

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something negative, the label spiritual opium reflects deep-seated anxieties about the nation and the Chinese government’s ability to regulate its youth in the face of a growing tide of foreign influence. Unlike the practice of opium smoking in the nineteenth century, however, the phrase spiritual opium as applied to games and Internet addiction is unequivocally pejorative. Gone is any sense of what might have been understood as a positive and healthy leisure pursuit. Instead, the equating of games to spiritual opium rests upon a hegemonic construction of public memory, one that seeks to recast the history of opium use and opium dens one-sidedly, and, in so doing, to revive national fears about dependency and weakness, modernization, and the legacy of colonialism. In this sense, Alex Golub and Kate Lingley note that the choice of opium as a metaphor for the Internet clearly references China’s struggle to gain independence from colonialism.53 While China has long been free of foreign military presence, the new threat comes in the form of cultural imperialism. Given China’s penchant for historical comparison, it is not surprising that media stories about the dangers of Internet gaming and Internet addiction often reference moral transgressions of the past. Spiritual opium is best described as what Michael McGee calls an ideograph. In introducing the concept, McGee argues that rhetoricians often place far too great an emphasis on argument, overlooking the fact that words themselves contain ideological commitments. According to McGee, “words used as agencies of social control may have an intrinsic force.”54 His concept of the ideograph depends on the notion that particular words build upon a history of antecedent usages, while also maintaining “flexibility as cultural signifiers” in the present.55 In this sense the ideograph, as a historically and contextually dependent word or utterance, is “culture-­ bound.” Xing Lu notes that during the Cultural Revolution the state-­controlled media were particularly adept at employing ideographs in their propaganda.56 Political sloganeering is no longer so heavy-handed as it was during the reign of Mao, but the use of ideographs is still prevalent among the Chinese government and media. Spiritual opium is one such ideograph. While the phrase may seem overblown from a Western perspective, in the Chinese context the phrase builds upon China’s defeat during the Opium Wars and subsequent humiliation at the hands of European imperialist powers, a particularly traumatic period in Chinese history. The wars left an indelible mark on China, and to this day they remain a symbol of the injustices wrought at the hands of Western imperialism.

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Moral panics about youth, technology, and modernization in developing countries often have to do with fears about Westernization and the loss of cultural tradition and uniqueness. Kyong Yoon cites Partha Chatterjee in noting that “new technologies have had specific meanings in particular local contexts in relation to the construction of local or national identities.”57 In the case of South Korea, mobile technologies become synonymous with a “global material culture” and become a source of anxiety about tradition and cultural identity. Similarly, Margaret Lock notes that during the 1970s and 1980s, in the wake of Japan’s rapid internationalization, a moral panic emerged in Japan over nihonjinron (being Japanese).58 The rhetoric in the Chinese situation shows a similar pattern. In describing the Internet as spiritual opium, the Chinese government and media demonstrate fears about youth and technology revolving around a perception of the Internet as a supposedly foreign element that threatens the proper development of Chinese spiritual civilization. A website devoted to the China Internet Civilization Project (Zhongguo wangluo wenming gongcheng) quoted CCP Secretary Jiang Zemin: Both domestic and foreign enemies will try to use [the Internet] to vie with our party for [control of] the masses and youth. We must research its characteristics and adopt effective measures to face this challenge; we must launch an active attack on the enemy and strengthen our positive publicity work and influence on the Internet.59

Here, Jiang’s rhetoric suggests that the Internet is a potential source of foreign influence. His comment links the government’s concern about the Internet to fears about Westernization and the possibility that the battle for the hearts and minds of Chinese youth is being lost, via the Internet, to foreign products and culture. Viewed in the context of Jiang’s warning, it becomes clear that the opium analogy is meant not only to imply that the Internet is a “drug,” but also that it is a foreign drug. This comparison is noted by Golub and Lingley, who quote an online forum post that argued that China was “‘just like the Qing empire’—full of the promise of a growing cosmopolitanism that will strengthen China and integrate it into a global political system but also exposed to foreign influences that may lead to its downfall.”60 Paul Pickowicz traces the evolution of the CCP’s campaigns against “spiritual pollution” in the 1980s, arguing that the notion of spiritual pollution as a byproduct of foreign cultural influence extends back to the

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Qing Dynasty.61 In Chinese films of the 1930s, he points out, the countryside was depicted as the seat of Chinese culture and morality, while the city became synonymous with corrupting Western influences. In the 1960s, the label spiritual opium was applied to Western cultural products and ideals—often transmitted through films and literature—seen as inducing a drug-like state that led to infatuation with the excesses of the West. For example, a headline from a People’s Daily article published during the Cultural Revolution urged the masses to “Awaken from the throes of a harmful poison.”62 The author of that article passionately argues that, although opium addiction caused a great deal of harm, a still more harmful kind of opium drugs people’s thought processes: American films and books propagating sex and violence. Officially, China’s stance with regard to foreign cultural products has not changed drastically since the 1960s. While pirated movies are widely available for download via the Internet, the Chinese government has maintained strict control over the films allowed in the theaters. In recent years, quotas for foreign films have increased, but as of 2019, China continues to limit the number of foreign titles that are shown each year. Video games are but the newest cultural product to come under scrutiny. The issue is compounded by the fact that many of the most popular MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, are based on Norse mythology, making them prime targets for culture-based appeals. In a Beijing Morning Post article that one could easily mistake for a piece of Cultural Revolutionera propaganda, author Hao Xiaohui decried the harmful ideological effects of Internet games: Values can be attached to games and spread throughout the world. To a child that has played World of Warcraft since he was small, the “dragon” he sees in his mind’s eye will be a dragon modeled after a Western understanding of “dragon,” it will take the shape of a monster. Will this same child still identify with the notion that he is a “descendant of the dragon”? Online games are important parts of culture, they are the manifestations of a country’s soft power…Now then, do you wish him to worship a Chinese hero or a foreign one?63

To circumvent the dominance of Western narratives, the Chinese government has worked hard to promote games with Chinese cultural content. Providing the Chinese counterweight to Western game narratives, a growing number of online games claim to have “Chinese characteristics.”

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Those games fall into two main genres. The first is based upon classical Chinese novels and folklore such as Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. One of the most successful examples of this genre is Fantasy Westward Journey (Menghuan Xiyou), a game based upon the mystical travels of the Monkey King. A second genre is known in Chinese as “red net games” (hongse youxi). These games usually focus on China’s communist history and legacy. In 2005, Shanda earned a great deal of press for its creation Register of Chinese Heroes, a game that resurrected such revolutionary figures as Lei Feng, the selfless and self-sacrificing young soldier who died in 1962, and who was raised to legendary status by the Cultural Revolution.64 That same year, there were numerous headlines about Anti-Japan War Online, a game created by the Communist Youth League, in which players had the opportunity to undo the Japanese invasion and occupation of China from 1937 to 1945. A spokesperson for the youth league told Interfax China that the game was intended to bolster youth’s “patriotic feeling.”65

Class Consciousness: The Double Discursive Construction of Opium/Internet The discourse of opium use in the Qing Dynasty shares even more with the present-day discourse of Internet use than is initially apparent from the framing of the Internet as a foreign cultural product akin to opium. Previous accounts of opium use tended to focus on China’s unequal treatment by shamelessly greedy British and French traders, who discovered they could reverse their trade imbalance with China by getting the population hooked on drugs. Frank Dikotter finds that scholars of modern history generally accepted unequivocally the premise that China was poisoned by opium; however, he claims that opium has no severe medical side effects unless smoked to excess.66 That, in his analysis, was not often the case. Like tobacco, opium was a drug that was generally consumed in moderation. During the early eighteenth century, opium use spread alongside consumption of other psychoactive substances such as tea, coffee, and alcohol, but the consumption of any of those was a highly social activity. Dikotter notes that “Even among the less privileged, the example of the ‘lonely smoker’ was generally eschewed: smoking was a collective experience, and occasion for social intercourse.”67 In this regard, opium smoking also became a fashionable form of conspicuous consumption in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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How, then, did spiritual opium come to have so negative a connotation? As Yangwen Zheng highlights, opium’s prestige waned as the lower classes began to partake of the substance. “Opium is the perfect example of the political redefinition of consumption,” she states. “When the rich smoked it, it was cultured and a status symbol; when the poor began to inhale, opium smoking became degrading and ultimately criminal.”68 It is not surprising, then, that early efforts to suppress opium use targeted public places of consumption—opium dens—rather than the smoking of opium in general. Rich officials and wealthy families who enjoyed opium in the confines of their homes were not affected. Yongming Zhou stresses that public smoking of opium was often seen to disrupt the “moral order” of society. The language of the first imperial edict against opium, written in 1729, is telling, according to Zhou: The edict was very simple. It targeted trafficking and operating opium dens as two main offenses. The traffickers were to be punished in the same way as those involved in transporting prohibited goods; the opium den operators, however, were treated as promoting heresy and were subject to capital punishment for their role in seducing ‘youngsters of good family.’ 69

From its inception, the official anti-opium discourse centered upon issues of moral order and youth. Dikotter et al. expand upon this point, noting that the Yongzheng emperor, who issued the edict, was particularly concerned about the “break-down of moral and social order in a context of rapidly changing socio-economic realities.” While opium smoking by the elite was easily overlooked, “popular consumption raised fears of social disorder.”70 These portrayals of the way opium smoking first became a source of anxiety for the government bear an uncanny resemblance to the furor over Internet addiction. In official rhetoric, the Internet as a whole is described as a “double-edged sword.” The Complete Guide to Establishing 21st Century Socialist Spiritual Civilization, a three-volume tome instructing party members in the official perspectives of the government, contains over one thousand pages of transcribed government speeches, official ­documents, newspaper articles, and commentary by party members and public intellectuals. In the section “Globalization and the Moral Foundation of Chinese Youth” party official Zhao Yongfu argues that “At the same time that the Internet is a treasure trove of information, it is also a garbage pit and trash heap.”71 In 2007 CNNIC also invoked the metaphor of the

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“double-edged sword,” recognizing the huge economic potential of the games industry at the same time as it cautioned that many gamers had submersed themselves in games, a habit adversely affecting their ability to function normally at work, in school, or in everyday life.72 As with opium, the double discursive construction of the Internet betrays fears about the type of users. Used in the right place by the right people, the Internet is a site of progress; used in the wrong place by the wrong people, it is a site of peril. When Internet cafés first appeared on the urban Chinese scene in the late 1990s, they were considered sites of technological refinement, but as cafés became more commonplace and accessible to lower-class patrons they quickly waned in prestige. As Jack L. Qiu argued in 2009: Even the phrase for Internet café has changed. Ten years ago, it was called wangluo kaifeiwu, meaning literally “network coffee house,” a place of enlightenment, culture, and taste for the brainy and foreign minded. Ten years later, it is known simply as wangba or “Net bar.” The short term succinctly signifies the loss of its elite appeal and descent into a working-class ICT [information and communication technology].73

My former assistant Mike attested to the veracity of this claim, noting in 2009 that Internet cafés had become unsuitable locations largely occupied by migrant workers.

Cultural Capital: Profiting from Opium/ Internet Addiction A final parallel between the crisis over opium in Chinese history and the moral panic over digital games in the contemporary era is the lucrative market for both products. As Christopher Munn notes, during the period following the first Opium War, the Hong Kong government (by then in the hands of the British) defended opium consumption in order to protect profits in the domestic Chinese opium trade. Munn states that the government praised Chinese opium smokers for being “moderate and restrained,” arguing that the choice of opium as a recreational drug was healthy in comparison to the choice of alcohol.74 If British colonialism’s defense of opium smoking is unremarkable, Alan Baumler’s discussion of the Qing government’s ambivalence about

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opium is noteworthy. Baumler asserts that rather than completely suppressing the trade, the Qing government sought to bring it under its own control in order to tax it for revenue. It sought control rather than suppression.75 The PRC’s government has taken a similar approach to digital games, selectively promoting them as a healthy leisure pursuit when doing so benefits its own cultural and financial interests. Chinese laws requiring foreign game companies to find domestic carriers for their games are one such method of controlling the lucrative games market. The government’s selective platform of support is also evident in its promotion of domestically produced games, such as the red net games discussed above, as well as in efforts to grow China into a global esports powerhouse. That topic will be taken up in greater depth in the next chapter, as I discuss the lengths Chinese officials go to in order to draw a distinction between so-­ called healthy gaming habits and addiction. Another driving force in this addiction moral panic is the desire of self-­styled doctors to profit from treating Internet addiction. In a 2009 blog post, well-known Chinese academic Hu Yong makes an impassioned claim: It must be pointed out that those who wantonly exaggerate the so-called problem of “Internet addiction,” especially those who have fabricated the so-called Internet addiction crime phenomenon, are vilifying the Internet; they are suppressing this space of potential vitality in Chinese society for personal profit, and in doing so they are consciously murdering the Internet and, in turn, murdering our future.76

On August 23, 2009, the CCTV program “Economic Half Hour” ran an exposé on the Internet addiction rehabilitation centers and their profit motives. The piece was provocatively entitled: “Internet addicted youth become whose money tree?”77 Similarly, at the plenary session of the Seventh International “For the Children” Conference, Xi Jieying, Director of the China Child and Youth Research Center, harshly criticized the lack of regulation and organization in the treatment of Internet addiction, charging that many addiction treatments violated the human rights of young addicts.78 Newspapers have followed suit, criticizing the harsh ­electroshock treatments and beatings used at many clinics, even likening them to profit-driven concentration camps.

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Moral Panics and Their Consequences in the Era of Participatory Media In assessing the state of moral panic literature over three decades since its creation, Nachman Ben-Yehuda notes that the original models fell into the trap of theorizing a monolithic moral culture. He sums up a call from more recent scholars to “re-think possibilities for the generalizability of moral panics in societies that have become fragmented and multicultural.”79 This fragmentation of society has no doubt been augmented by access to new media and by the participatory nature of the Internet and Web 2.0. Writing in 1995, Angela McRobbie and Sarah L. Thornton foresaw the importance of new media channels, arguing that the study of moral panics needed to take into account participatory media, which allow for more contestation and diversity.80 Their early essay presages what Ben-­ Yehuda refers to as the second wave of moral panic literature, a body of scholarship focused on matters of agency. For China, where the voice of the state has long been perceived as a monolithic force determining media content, the relationship between fragmentation and participatory media becomes an intriguing issue. As we will see, however, Web 2.0 formats such as blogs and bulletin board systems (BBSs) in China have created limited spaces for subversion and contestation. Indeed, the monolithic party line often comes under attack on the bulletin board systems of the Chinese Internet. Guobin Yang describes this as the “playful” but “contentious character” of Internet culture in China, through which “people engage in cultural contention to express or oppose values, morality, lifestyles, and identities.”81 For Internet gamers, BBSs and blogs serve as platforms to discuss game tactics, sell virtual goods, publish “emotion stories” about the effects of gaming on their lives, and, not least, to debunk myths and stereotypes pervading the media moral panic about Internet addiction and Internet gaming. An event in July 2009 provides a particularly vivid example of such contestation. That month, China’s “Number One Internet Addiction Specialist,” Tao Hongkai, criticized unhealthy Internet games on national television, calling them a dangerous drug. In response to this statement, angry Internet gamers lashed out against Tao. They engaged in a “human flesh hunt” (renrou sousuo) and posted personal details and slanderous comments about Tao on the web. Tao’s blog logged over one hundred thousand messages, most of them within a few months of his television appearance. Many of these messages flamed Tao, cursing him using colorful Chinese net-speak.

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Despite such efforts to push back against the dominant discourse, the moral panic over Internet addiction continues to affect the gamer community. Aside from the proliferation of Internet addiction rehabilitation centers, self-help materials, and propaganda aimed at creating a green Internet, the moral panic continues to provoke stricter regulations for Internet game design and play. In the early 2000s, top online game companies were compelled to take a self-pledge to work toward the healthy development of the industry.82 As demonstrated by my earlier discussion of regulatory efforts, little has changed since then. In one notable example, during the summer of 2017 the tech giant Tencent was forced to place gameplay time limits on their wildly popular mobile game Honor of Kings after online editorials in People’s Daily referred to the game as a form of “poison” and a “drug.”83 The moral panic about Internet gaming, addiction, and youth is frequently interpreted as a convenient red herring, distracting the public from more politically sensitive Internet-related issues such as online citizen activism and censorship. This, again, follows the model of spiritual pollution proposed by Pickowicz, who  suggests that such campaigns served to “account for corruption, lawlessness, disorder, alienation, cynicism, and other nagging social problems without having to point to the failings of the Party itself.”84 That the Party-state is only marginally concerned with Internet addiction and Internet gaming seems a plausible interpretation. Though the government’s efforts to establish a harmonious society, a green Internet, and spiritual civilization pay lip service to combating pornographic and violent Internet content and protecting Chinese youth from Internet addiction, those rationales offer a handy pretext through which the government gains a broad consensus for censoring, controlling, and surveilling Internet content as a whole. Chinese netizens have not failed to notice this fact; they are so familiar with government speak that those who find their blog posts or other messages censored will openly joke that they have been “harmonized.”85 Despite this, China’s Internet addiction moral panic is not simply a government-engineered response but rather the result of a complex web of actors and overarching cultural/historical concerns. Economic and political interests as well as contemporary anxieties about technology, modernization, Westernization, the educational system, and class are all fodder for the crisis. It should also be noted that moral panics, while sharing many attributes, actors, and stages across time and space, are ultimately unique to the cultures from which they spring. Finally, though the media, in reporting on a moral panic, give an impression of repre-

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senting a unified moral front, moral culture is not monolithic. Within our increasingly fragmented, globalized, and participatory media culture, opportunities for contestation are multiplying. In the Chinese case, though both government and media are centrally controlled, citizens have become increasingly savvy and willing to critique propagandistic rhetoric. Alternative moral cultures, such as those produced through human flesh hunts, gamer forums, and creative video productions, provide platforms for questioning and contesting the validity of the dominant media discourse. However, by far the most serious consequence of the Internet addiction moral panic, and one not so easily escaped, is the social stigma that plagues youth who play Internet games. Often, moral panics about youth and technology cast youth as the victims of a dangerous media environment. This differs from classic moral panics in which a particular group of deviants such as drug addicts, dance-hall musicians, mods, or rockers seem to be acting out some innate perversion through their criminal or subcultural lifestyles. By contrast, the folk devil and deviant at the heart of many of the controversies about youth and technology is either the technology itself or the sexual predators and criminals that lurk behind the anonymity technology affords. In certain instances, such as the panic over video-game violence and its purported effects on youth (as exemplified by the case of the Columbine school shootings), technology becomes the reason that good kids have gone bad. But in almost all of these cases it is the technology that is to blame, not the youth who become addicted to it. Young gamers do not suffer demonization, but, problematically, this blaming of technology robs the young gamer of agency. From the Chinese government and media perspective, young people are unable to resist the siren lure of games—foreign drugs sure to derail their educations and careers and rob them of their national pride. Similarly, Western media narratives portray Chinese youth as the agencyless products of an authoritarian society that, like an Orwellian dystopia, suppresses individuality and creativity. In this environment, games become distractions that lull young people into quiescence in the face of an oppressive regime. As we will see, that is far from the case. Throughout this chapter, I have demonstrated how these simplistic media narratives mask deeper concerns related to issues of nationalism, class, and economics. The next chapter takes up how these discourses act upon and are adopted by young gamers who increasingly learn to talk about their game play in binary terms of

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productivity and addiction. In Chaps. 5 and 6, I then reveal how Chinese youth challenge these narratives through the power of their own discursive practices and affective attachments to games. Although media coverage of the topic seemed to peak in the years surrounding the Chinese government’s 2008 decision to label Internet addiction a clinical disorder, the struggle around the narratives remains very much alive; as mentioned earlier in this chapter, there has been a notable resurgence of interest in Internet addiction following more high-profile deaths related to Internet addiction treatment in 2016 and 2017. That this topic has not yet faded away, as Stanley Cohen’s classic model of moral panic would predict, emphasizes the extent to which the subject of digital media use and its consequences continues to elicit fear and debate in China and throughout the globe.

Notes 1. World Economic Forum, “Global Gender Gap Report”; China’s gender imbalance has grown steadily worse since the imposition of the one-child policy. According to the 2018 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report, China’s sex ratio at birth is 0.87 (female/male), meaning that there are only 87 females to every 100 males at birth. This score places China last out of all 149 countries measured. 2. Jenkins, “The Chinese Columbine”; Golub and Lingley, “‘Like the Qing Empire’”; Qiu, Working-Class Network Society, 240; Szablewicz, “Effects of Opium for the Spirit.” 3. Vogrinčič, “The Novel Reading Panic,” 113. 4. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. 5. Aarseth et al., “Scholars Open Debate Paper.” 6. Latour, Have Never Been Modern; Vrecko, “‘Civilizing Technologies,’” 37, 40. 7. Campbell, Using women, 8. 8. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 60. 9. Yan, ed., “Zhengzhi wangluo ‘jingshen yapian’”; see also Baidu Baike, “jingshen yapian.” 10. See Zhao, Media, Market and Democracy and Repnikova, Media Politics in China. 11. Ni, “Dens of the cyber addicts.” 12. Jenkins, “Chinese Columbine.” 13. For a detailed discussion of Internet addiction treatment in China see Bax, Youth and Internet Addiction in China. 14. “Fan keyi bu chi.”

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15. Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, Wei chengnian ren baohu fa. 16. “Shi nian youxi zhanzheng.” 17. “Wo guo shou ge ‘wangluo cheng yin.’” 18. Bax, Youth and Internet Addiction, 16. 19. MacKinnon, “China’s Green Dam.” 20. MacKinnon, “Green Dam is Breached.” 21. Cao, Wang, and Lan, “Warcraft Row.” 22. Bai, “Yige wang jie zhongxin.” 23. Jiang, “Dianji zhiliao wangyin.” 24. Stone, “China Reins in Wilder Impulses.” 25. Zhang, “Wang yin shaonian sile.” 26. Cui, “‘Ertong yu wangluo shiyan shi.’” 27. Huang, “Weisheng bu ni fouding wang yin.” 28. Jiang, “Dianji zhiliao wangyin.” 29. See Creemers, “Pivot in Chinese Cybergovernance”; The Cyberspace Administration of China was created in 2014 in an effort to centralize control over the Internet and rectify jurisdictional infighting between government bodies (such as the aforementioned spat between the MOC and GAPP over World of Warcraft licensing). 30. Ma, “China Mulls Banning.” 31. He, “Wei chengnian ren wangluo baohu.” 32. Wang, “Zhong quan zhengzhi luanxiang.” 33. Niko Partners, “Nearly 1,000 Games.” 34. Zhonghua renmin gonghe guo, “Zonghe fang kong ertong.” 35. Xiao et al., “Qingshao nian wangyin cheng.” 36. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 1. 37. I have omitted cartoons from this analysis, but it is worth noting that drawings grant journalists far more artistic license in depicting Internet addiction. By far the most prevalent cartoon is one in which a young child, usually a boy, is being literally sucked into a computer screen. There are numerous variations on this theme: sometimes the wire of the mouse has wrapped itself, like a python, around the body of a screaming child, and sometimes parents are depicted pulling at the pant-leg of their child, in desperate game of tug-of-war with the computer. 38. Due to a lack of copyright permissions, I cannot reproduce these photographs here. Where possible, I provide a citation with a link to the original newspaper article and image. 39. boyd, It’s Complicated, 79. 40. It is no coincidence the evil spirits that kidnap little Carol Anne emerge from within the television screen. In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans were in the midst of their own techno-panic. Marie Winn published her

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sensational book The Plug-In Drug in 1977 and Neil Postman published The Disappearance of Childhood: How TV is Changing Children’s Lives in 1982. 41. Xiao and Chou, “Xinhua diaocha: yige wangyin qingnian.” 42. “Xinmi tanli: Wangyin.” 43. “Nao dianbo chengxiang.” 44. Rose, Politics of Life Itself, 234. 45. boyd, It’s Complicated, 92. 46. Jin, “Shaonian wei jiechu wangyin.” 47. Han, ed. “Kunming liangwei.” 48. Huang, “Fuqin hui dao zican.” 49. Fong, Only Hope. 50. “Wangyin shaonian zhaohui.” 51. Unger, ed., Past to Serve the Present, 1. 52. Des Forges, “Opium/leisure/Shanghai,” 168. 53. Golub and Lingley, “Just Like the Qing Empire.” 54. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 6. 55. Condit and Lucaites, Crafting Equality, xiii. 56. Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 52. 57. Yoon, “Making of Neo-Confucian Cyberkids,” 754. 58. Lock, “New Japanese Mythologies.” 59. “Zhongguo Wangluo,” n.d. 60. Golub and Lingley, “Just Like the Qing Empire,” 60. 61. Pickowicz, “Theme of Spiritual Pollution.” 62. Shi, “Cong duhai zhong jingxing.” 63. Chen, “Hao Xiaohui tan Zhongguo wangyou.” 64. Davies, “Patriot Games.” 65. Xiao, “PowerNet and China Communist Youth.” 66. Dikotter, “Patient Zero,” 3–4. 67. Dikotter, 11. 68. Zheng, Social Life of Opium, 4. 69. Zhou, Anti-Drug Crusades, 13, emphasis added. 70. Dikotter, Laamann, and Zhou, Narcotic Culture, 35. 71. Zhao, “Qianqiuhua yu zhongguo qingnian,” 224. 72. China Internet Network Information Center, 2007 nian zhongguo qingshaonian, 2. 73. Qiu, Working-Class Network Society, 22. 74. Munn, “Hong Kong Opium Revenue,” 109. 75. Baumler, “Opium Control versus Opium Suppression,” 271. 76. Hu, “Huxi ye shi shangyinde.” 77. Jingji ban xiaoshi, “Wangyin shaonian chengle.” 78. Xi, “Impact upon Chinese young people’s development.”

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79. Ben-Yehuda, “Foreword: Moral Panics,” 2. 80. McRobbie and Thornton, “Rethinking ‘Moral Panic.’” 81. Yang, Power of the Internet, 3. 82. “China Web Portals Pledge.” 83. Yu and Wang, ed., “Renming Wang Yiping: ‘Wangzhe rongyu.’” 84. Pickowicz, “Theme of Spiritual Pollution,” 38. 85. See MacKinnon, “Eating River Crab.” The building of a “harmonious society” was a slogan used by the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao administration. MacKinnon notes that following Wen’s proclamation at the World Economic Forum in 2007, the government in fact began a “purge” of Internet data centers and controversial websites. As a result, Chinese netizens began to use the word “harmonize” as a euphemism for Internet censorship.

CHAPTER 4

Patriotic Leisure: Internet Games, Esports, and the Discourse of Productivity

In August 2010, my year of doctoral fieldwork in Shanghai was nearing its end, and I was on my way to the Shanghai practice base of a prominent professional esports team. Like the residences of Xiaolong and Xiaomei, the team’s headquarters were located on the outskirts of Shanghai—this time in Baoshan, about 40 minutes’ subway ride from the city center, and just east of Jiading. Unlike other gated communities with massive high-­ rise apartment buildings, the team headquarters were located in a compound lined with row upon row of townhouses. I’m not sure what I expected. Perhaps I was looking for some glamorous and ultra-high-tech space that would befit professional athletes with international corporate sponsorships and millions of devoted fans. But when I arrived at the address, I found myself standing before a house like any other. In fact, when I entered, this “professional” practice space struck me by its resemblance to the apartments of Xiaolong and his friends. The distinctive difference hung suspended from the center of the vaulted ceiling: an ostentatious chandelier, signaling that these townhouses were intended for high-end customers. Despite such fancy built-in features, the team had done little to decorate the house. It had a grungy feel, as though it had been quite some time since the pricey space had been properly cleaned. In what would have been a living room, large tables for the players’ computers lined all four walls. Each of the seven team members had his

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Szablewicz, Mapping Digital Game Culture in China, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36111-2_4

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own station, as did the two team managers. Two of the walls displayed enormous posters featuring the team’s top players. The gamers all sat in ergonomically designed chairs emblazoned with the team logo. Each player used a special keyboard and mouse. Indeed, the pros always carry their own keyboards and mice to esports matches, much as a musician carries his own instrument. During a competition, being comfortable with the placement and feel of the keys is critical. While some of the players practiced Warcraft III or watched replays of professional matches, others were chatting on QQ , surfing the web, or, in the case of a couple teammates, playing online poker. As one of their team managers would later explain to me, a number of the older players were preparing to retire from esports and had decided to deploy their gaming skills in playing online poker professionally. Typically, players retire when they are still relatively young, yielding place to teenagers with sharper reflexes and training in the latest game titles. A team manager escorted me to the dining room table, where the gamers came one by one to talk with me. While Jordan, the team’s star player, conversed with me, another gamer stumbled downstairs. It was already four in the afternoon, but he had just awakened. Both he and Jordan had stayed up past five that morning practicing. Although the townhouse was technically a practice space, many of the players saved money by sleeping there rather than renting another apartment. That way, Jordan noted, they could practice from the moment they woke until they went to sleep. Jordan was in his late twenties—old by professional gaming standards— with a successful career under his belt. His attitudes about esports and Internet games reflected a maturity gained with age and experience. When I asked him to compare Internet games and esports, he seemed well aware of the fact that these categories were burdened by unnecessarily complicated definitions: You can’t escape the fact that esports and Internet games are both just “games”…their main function is to make people happy, it is just like basketball or soccer. We often watch the NBA or the World Cup, but it’s not every person that can go play in the NBA or the World Cup. Esports is also like this, not everyone can be like us, a professional athlete, but lots of gamers can go to the Internet café, they can watch us compete, and they can play with their friends. It’s just like when we go out to play soccer or basketball, sometimes it’s not because it is a competition, but because it is fun.

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When I then asked Jordan if he personally still found digital gaming to be “fun,” his answer was unequivocal: We play these matches without stopping, and sometimes we have to run all around the world and then go play in these competitions, and because of this I sometimes feel mentally and physically exhausted.

Sitting in this room and talking to these players made it clear that being a professional esports athlete was not as glamorous as one might assume. The situation of esports athletes has changed a great deal over the course of the near decade since I sat in that practice space, but, back then, even the most highly paid esports athlete earned just shy of US$3000 per month, or an annual salary of $36,000, excluding prize money.1 While one can live more than comfortably on such a salary in China, it is not exceptionally high, and not enough to retire on. To this day, most professionals find it necessary to seek other employment after retiring from esports, thus the online poker practice. Overall, Jordan showed a keen awareness of the contradictions faced by the esports industry and its pros. He and his teammates were professionals in a profession that was wildly popular with youth but marginalized by society at large. In Chap. 3, we saw how the media and government stigmatized digital gaming by referring to it as spiritual opium. Similar to opium, however, games have proven to be a lucrative endeavor, and, as a result, the government has sought ways to promote the domestic games market while avoiding the stigma of Internet addiction. In this chapter, I delve further into the complexities of the dominant discourses that frame digital game play and leisure in contemporary China. Specifically, I focus on the criteria used to separate “healthy” games from “unhealthy” games and how such distinctions shed light upon competing political and ideological orientations guiding the modernizing logic of the Chinese state. Scholars have long examined leisure in connection to broad concepts such as the rise of industrial society, social class, and capitalist consumer culture.2 Here, my analysis takes a cue from David Leheny’s work on the politics of leisure in Japan. Leheny notes that efforts to affect citizens’ recreational choices can “tell us a great deal about leaders’ views of the qualities that make for a good citizen or healthy lifestyle.”3 Similarly, Jing Wang closely examines the “culture leisure campaigns” that occurred in Beijing in the mid-1990s, observing that the Chinese government sought to cultivate a “civilized subject” through the promotion of certain leisure activities.4

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I argue that the criteria by which games are sorted into the categories of healthy and unhealthy follow a late socialist neoliberal logic that is selectively and somewhat disingenuously applied to suit the interests of those wielding it. While the state seeks to promote national competitiveness through sanctioned forms of free enterprise and free-enterprising individuals, it also closely monitors economic and cultural activities, cutting off any that, whatever their potential profitability, are seen as a threat to the state’s predetermined developmental priorities. Games, ostensibly an innocuous leisure activity, are positioned at the center of these competing neoliberal and authoritarian logics. They therefore serve as a litmus test for judging the acceptability of various forms of leisure activity in the eyes of the government. Beyond tracing the links between the government’s stance on digital games and larger political and ideological orientations, this chapter will also demonstrate how characterizations of games as either addictive or athletic insinuate themselves into young college students’ own narratives about game play. Lisa Hoffman outlines how urban China has witnessed the rise of the patriotic professional: young, educated middle-class urbanites who simultaneously speak a neoliberal language of self-enterprise and self-development while also acting in accord with the interests and demands of the state.5 For my friends Xiaomei, Yuanqi, and Wanghui, digital games such as Warcraft III constituted a form of what I will call patriotic leisure, skills-oriented leisure activities that they viewed as healthy and productive in contrast to the aforementioned games that are deemed wasteful and addictive spiritual opium. Their judgments about healthy and unhealthy modes of game play uphold the claim made by Fengshu Liu that Chinese youth now subscribe to a notion of what it means to be a “proper” and “good” netizen.6 Liu observes that young people often distinguish their online activities from other activities and habits deemed to be harmful. The data discussed in this chapter reveal similar thinking among my informants. In closely examining the mechanisms by which such distinctions are made, this chapter also aims to show the complex interweavings of official and unofficial discourse. Far from completely resisting official efforts to control Internet games, many college students support those efforts and become active agents in promoting the discourse of Internet addiction and the stigmatization of Internet games in general. As with the discourse on Internet cafés, support for the addiction discourse has a great deal to do with the interlocutor’s class and educational background, further demonstrating the selective functioning of neoliberal logic among certain segments of urban youth.

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Internet Games: What’s in a Name? Despite my desire to find youth who were self-proclaimed “Internet gaming addicts,” my advisor at SASS had other plans for me. When I approached her to ask if she could find an undergraduate student who played games to assist with my research, she produced Luke. At the time I met him, Luke was a sophomore majoring in Sociology at Tongji University, and an A student. Though he was eager to help, Luke did not play Internet games, frequent Internet cafés, or express any interest in taking on gaming as a new hobby. Like many parents and teachers, he believed that gaming was a potentially dangerous waste of time. I initially lamented my bad luck at having assigned as my research assistant seemingly the one young man in all of China who did not play Internet games. I worried that his dislike of the hobby would show during interviews and color the responses of my informants. But Luke had access to a college dormitory teeming with students who played Internet games, and he seemed eager to mine his contacts for potential interviewees. We agreed to start with the people around him, allowing our research contacts to snowball outward through his web of connections. Luke was the one who introduced me to Xiaomei. The first time I met her, I asked what game she most liked to play. She responded by saying that she usually played “Moshou.” In my mind, I automatically associated this with the MMORPG World of Warcraft (Moshou shijie). But, as it turned out, Xiaomei was referring to a different game, the RTS game Warcraft III (Moshou Zhengba).7 Beyond my initial confusion about the name of the game that Xiaomei was playing, her insistence that Warcraft III was not a wangluo or Internet game especially intrigued me. Xiaomei classified Warcraft III as a danji game, not a wangluo game. The literal translation of danji is “single computer” or “single device,” but as defined on the Chinese wiki Baidu baike, the term refers to the following: Danji youxi (ConsoleGame [sic]) refer to electronic games that operate independently through a single computer or other gaming platform. As opposed to Internet [wangluo] games, these games do not need a specific server in order to operate normally, some of these games also allow for multiplayer competition through the use of a local area network. On a single unit, console games can operate in hot seat or split screen mode. The game can be played on a single computer without the use of the Internet, mostly in man vs. machine battle mode. Because it cannot connect to the Internet, the game’s interactivity is slightly worse, but with the use of a local area network it is possible to conduct multiplayer battles, and the game does not need a specific server to operate normally.8

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Historically speaking, it makes sense to refer to a game such as Warcraft III as a danji game, because it was initially designed for play on a single computer without the use of an Internet connection. But the term danji is also somewhat misleading, because rarely are such games actually played in a single-computer scenario. Throughout my time in China, every self-­ proclaimed danji gamer I met played the so-called danji games almost exclusively in online multiplayer scenarios with friends. One gamer, Xiaolong, went so far as to state, “Danji games are not interesting unless you have lots of people. Unless you have [at least] two people to play a danji game it is boring.” These gamers did not play on the same computer (what is referred to as hot-seat or split-screen gaming) but rather through multiple computers linked through a local area network (LAN) or online server. As Chap. 2 discussed, playing games in Internet cafés was once an important aspect of many young people’s coming-of-age in urban China. Some of the college students’ reminiscences about their gaming experiences in high school highlight the crucial social element of danji gaming and the link between this type of gaming and the Internet café. Fudan University student Li explained that when he was in middle school, he had to go to an Internet café in order to play danji games with friends: It is one thing to have a computer [at home], but if you are at home alone playing against the computer it is boring, it is only interesting if you are playing with classmates, this is why there are so many people in the Internet café…in high school the dormitories didn’t have computers, of course I could play at home…but if you are playing danji games you can’t play if each person is at home, you have to go to an Internet café.

Like Xiaolong, Li maintains that danji games must be played in groups to be fun. And because few households in China would have had either laptops or more than one computer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Internet café was one of the few spaces where young people could play their games together. These observations align with my findings from preliminary fieldwork conducted in Harbin in 2002. At that time, one of the most popular Internet café activities was playing Counterstrike, the FPS game played through a LAN. This remained true in 2004, when I studied Internet cafés in Shanghai and noted that Counterstrike was the quintessential wangba activity. The popularity of LAN gaming in the Internet cafés helps to explain how Xiaomei could claim that she spent a great deal

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of time playing games in the Internet café, but not “Internet games.” Yet another ECNU student recalled how he and his friends sneaked LAN games in after hours in the computer classroom at their high school: When we were in our second year of high school, we took that class, Computer Science. When we were in class we could download CS, once we downloaded it then all the computers in the room could play the game together. During class the teacher saw that we were playing, and so he immediately disconnected the network cable, but later, because there was a LAN and the game was on the computers’ hard drives…you just couldn’t play during usual times, but if you went on Friday afternoon or Saturday, you could connect the LAN and play together or you could play on a single computer (danji).

This description shows once again the semantic inaccuracy of calling multiplayer LAN games danji, as the student notes that the game, once downloaded, could be played either through a LAN or in single-computer (danji) mode. While many college students recall a time when games such as Warcraft III and Counterstrike were played through LAN connections, it has since become more convenient and popular to play such games by connecting through Internet servers. In 2002, when Warcraft III was released in the United States, the game had built-in Internet capabilities and could be played through Blizzard’s official server, Battle.net. In China, a number of similar companies offer Internet battle platforms. By the time I conducted my fieldwork in 2010, most of the Warcraft III players I spoke with connected through one of two domestic servers: Haofang (www.cga.com.cn), opened in September 2002, or VS (www.vsa.com.cn), established September 2004. It is clear that, at least since the early 2000s, even danji gamers are able play their games through the Internet. Most now do so. How are media scholars to describe a game that is neither single PC or single player nor fully dependent on the Internet? In English, we might use broad categories such as digital or online to label such games. Consider the following two scholarly definitions of digital and online games. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman argue that digital games are defined by four traits: immediate but narrow interactivity, manipulation of information, automated complex systems, and networked communication.9 The word “Internet” is not mentioned among the criteria, thus allowing for the inclusion of games played over other kinds of networks, such as LANs.

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And, as Ernst Adams notes, “online gaming is a technology rather than a genre.”10 In other words, any genre of game, RTS, RPG, FPS, and so on, can be played online if the proper technology is in place. According to Adams, online game is used to refer to multiplayer distributed games in which players’ machines are connected by a network. (This as opposed to multiplayer local games in which all the players play on one machine and look at the same screen.) While online games can, in principle, include solitaire games that happen to be provided via the Internet, …the online aspect of solitaire games is incidental rather than essential to the experience.… Online games do not need to be distributed over the Internet; games played over a local area network (LAN) also qualify as online games.11

Aside from allowing for games that are not played over the Internet, both of these definitions place an emphasis on networked sociality. This would apply perfectly to the gaming style of the self-identified danji gamers I interviewed, all of whom stressed the importance of playing these games with friends. Yet in Chinese, the terms “digital” (shuma or shuzi) and “online” (zaixian or xianshang) are rarely used in such a way. None of the students I spoke with chose to label the kinds of games they played either digital or online. Instead, unlike Adams, the Chinese gamers I interviewed conflated technology with genre. When I asked many of the young people who played danji games to define a wangluo game, they often responded by giving me examples of types of games rather than a technical definition of one. In general, the games that were served up as examples of wangluo games were MMORPGS such as World of Warcraft or the Chinese game Fantasy Westward Journey. My other research assistant Liang, who studied and played games for a living, even went so far as to argue that only those who played MMORPGs qualified as “real” wangluo gamers.12 Why did the self-proclaimed danji gamers insist that I not confuse their style of gaming with wangluo games? As I will show, the shunning of the label “Internet game” was yet another indication of the dominant cultural construction of the Internet and its harmful effects; given the association of Internet games with spiritual opium, young people labored vigorously, if subconsciously, to demarcate and defend their leisure choices from attack. They distinguished danji games from wangluo games on the basis of qualitative rather than quantitative differences. It was not their play on the Internet or on a PC that separated them (as the literal translation of

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the terms wangluo and danji suggest); rather, judgments about the kinds of social interaction, competition, skills, and investment of time or money that these different game genres were presumed to entail determined the category they were placed into. I came to understand that the danji gamers’ insistence on separating their style of gaming from that of wangluo gamers was in fact in line with a government-led mission to keep the two separate. To both the government and many of the college students I spoke with, danji games were described as being better than wangluo games. Better how? Better in the sense that wangluo games were considered addictive, while danji games were understood to be athletic.

Late Socialist Neoliberalism and Patriotic Professionalism The Chinese state is adept at controlling cultural activities; it has been especially skillful in achieving such control through an emphasis on individual morality and the crafting of the ideal citizen. Models of ideal citizenship have changed over time, from the Confucian notion of the “gentleman” (junzi) to the Cultural Revolution notion of the “model worker” (laomo). Hoffman describes how the notion of the model worker has, in the post-Mao years, been replaced by that of the patriotic professional. In the Maoist era, individual interests were sacrificed for the interest of the state and all skill building was justified in collective terms under the guise of improving the nation. In what Hoffman calls “late socialist” China, emphasis has increasingly been placed upon the development and training of individuals, for both their own sakes and that of the nation. She states: The notion of developing and training the self through work was not alien to China’s socialist path, but the kind of self-development, career advancement, and family prosperity sought by the young and aspiring professionals I met was distinctly different from that of the Maoist era.…Similar to— although not the same as—prevailing rationalities in U.S. and British neoliberal regimes that encouraged people to “enterprise themselves,” these reforms governed in a more distanced way, requiring the formation of subjects who were both autonomous and responsible.13

Simply put, the emphasis has shifted from centrally directed self-sacrifice for the nation, to autonomously chosen self-development—still for the

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nation. At the same time, Hoffman explains that the Chinese state has taken an active role in “conditioning autonomy”: shaping the choices, goals, and ideals of the young generation through campaigns that promote a “harmonious society” or “socialist spiritual civilization.” They have produced a generation of young people who speak the language of individual choice yet act in the interest of the nation. Hoffman labels the political orientation giving rise to this model of citizenship “late socialist neoliberalism,” and suggests that neoliberal and socialist ideologies combine in complex ways under the umbrella of the Chinese state. In recent years, neoliberalism has become something of a dirty word, but references a great many contradictory policies and practices. In its broadest sense, neoliberalism is often understood as an economic doctrine that places an emphasis on limiting the scope of government and expanding the “freedom” of individuals to operate as autonomous and self-­ enterprising subjects in the interest of the market. The rise of the era of neoliberalism in the West is often attributed to efforts, under the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, to deregulate big business, lower taxes on income and capital gains, and reduce government spending on social welfare programs. In academic scholarship, there are two prominent modes of theorizing neoliberalism: one, which Aihwa Ong refers to as Neoliberalism with a capital “N,” follows the Marxist tradition; the other—neoliberalism with a lower-case “n”—has its roots in Foucauldian thought. According to Ong, the first branch of theory invokes Marxist concepts of class ideology and structural change. These theories of Neoliberalism tend to portray it as an “epoch-making order” that is the “latest stage of capitalist hegemonic domination” and which relies upon the “restructuring of relationships between nation-states and transnational agencies.”14 Such arguments often focus on the roles to international agencies such as the IMF and World Bank, taking a macroscopic view of the ways in which such global organizations effect change and shift the balance of power in favor of international corporations. Ong describes a second strand of theory, the lower-case neoliberalism, as a “technology of governing ‘free subjects’ that co-exists with other political rationalities.”15 This kind of neoliberalism is tied closely to the scholarship of Nikolas Rose, who invokes Foucault’s concept of governmentality, understood as “the array of knowledges and techniques that are concerned with the systematic and pragmatic guidance and regulation of everyday conduct.”16 As Ong explains, Rose’s neoliberal governmentality

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suggests a code of conduct modeled upon market-driven “truths”; though individuals in advanced liberal regimes are purportedly free to act as they wish, their conduct is conditioned by a market logic that places an emphasis on responsible, self-governing, and self-enterprising citizen-subjects. Whereas industrial capitalism placed an emphasis on the production of goods, the neoliberal system emphasizes the “production of educated subjects.” A central metaphor of this brand of neoliberalism is the production of knowledgeable citizen-subjects. But Ong also qualifies Rose’s argument by noting that neoliberalism is a “malleable technology of governing” that is often selectively and unevenly applied by ruling regimes in East Asia. In this manner, she argues, governments such as the PRC’s invoke neoliberal logic as “exception,” applying it to certain groups and select territories, such as the educated elite and special economic zones, while maintaining their authoritarian grip over the population and nation writ large.17 Hoffman’s study follows Ong’s in this regard, as her concept of the patriotic professional applies mainly to college-educated middle-class urbanites—an exceptional segment of the population—and is not applicable to the rest of the workforce or the country as a whole. Similarly, as shown in this and other chapters, the fact that the discourse about the so-called healthy danji games was most commonly perpetuated by the middle-class college students I spoke with is key. It reinforces the notion that neoliberal logic functions as exception, attaching itself only to certain populations and regions.

From Patriotic Professionalism to Patriotic Leisure Models of ideal citizenship need not address issues solely of work. Indeed, going back to the concept of the Confucian gentleman, China has a long history of emphasis on cultivating the entire person, not just an individual’s capacity to labor. Here, and parallel to Hoffman’s concept of the patriotic professional, we should recognize a similar emphasis placed upon the concept of patriotic leisure. In turning to the subject of leisure, I wish to emphasize that though work and leisure are often juxtaposed, many scholars have demonstrated their linkages. For example, leisure scholar Chris Rojek critiques the conflation of freedom and leisure, noting that we are never really free to do what we like with our free time.18 In establishing his argument, he cites the influential scholarship of the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson. Thompson

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maintains that the rise of industrial society brought with it the “problem of leisure” and how supposedly free time should be spent. Rojek recaps Thompson’s argument, noting that, in the context of the industrial capitalist system, workers could spend their free time in whatever fashion they selected, so long as their non-­ work activities reinforce their competence as credible consumers and reliable workers…This is a very strange idea of “freedom” and comes with an even more peculiar idea of what “leisure” means. In effect, “free” choice and non-work activity is held to be inter-laced with principles of fitness-to-work and responsible citizenship.19

Thus, acceptable leisure is the kind which reinforces one’s standing as an ideal citizen, while unacceptable leisure interferes with Real Life or at least what respectable society considers to be Real Life’s priorities, that is, becoming a productive citizen. In addition to this dialectical relationship between work and leisure, in contemporary times the dividing line between professional life and leisure is, on a number of levels, increasingly blurred. The new knowledge economy requires that individuals prove themselves to be worthy “commodities” by demonstrating their social skills, creativity, and ability to think and adapt to changing situations. Nowhere are these skills more evident than in the realm of leisure culture. This is particularly evident in China, where personal connections (guanxi) have long been integral to achieving success. In China, business connections are often forged during leisure hours, through after-work banquets, drinking bouts, and karaoke sessions. While none of the students I spoke with said that they played games with friends only because they wished to build guanxi, once they enter the professional workforce, games may very well help furnish the guanxi for these generations. During the course of preliminary fieldwork in 2004, I encountered a group of young professionals who had formed an after-­work gaming team and would use games to compete with other companies.20 Silvia Lindtner, who followed a group of young urban professionals who joined “Killer Game Clubs” in order to network with peers of similar quality (suzhi), makes a similar observation; the group she observed  justified their leisure activities by pointing out their productive and self-­developmental aspects.21 The self-described danji gamers I spoke with were also clearly trying to make their leisure seem more professional. The danji games that these

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college students played and the way that they spoke about them indicated that they were arenas in which students built skills they saw as important for their future careers. If nothing else, the students would argue that the games taught them about the time, effort, and self-discipline necessary to become competitive individuals. In support of this argument, Nick Yee writes of the blurring boundaries between work and play, arguing that “video games are inherently work platforms that train us to become better game workers” and that the work expected of us in corporations increasingly resembles the kind of work performed in video games.22 The issue here is not only that work has crept into our leisure time, but that the cultivation of leisure, in and of itself, is seen to contribute to the crafting of these young people’s productive selves.

Healthy Dianzi Jingji in Official Discourse Beyond this notion that danji games teach valuable life skills, the government has also endorsed the notion that playing these kinds of games competitively may itself be a profession. In 2003, the Chinese government designated competitive gaming, known in Chinese as dianzi jingji or esports, as China’s 99th professional competitive sport. At the time, China, following South Korea, was one of the first countries to officially recognize professional esports. Fifteen years later, professional esports has spread throughout the globe and entrenched itself enough to garner significant attention from games scholars.23 Though digital games have been played competitively since the 1970s, the concept of esports as a global competitive sport did not crystallize until 2001, when South Korea hosted the first World Cyber Games (WCG) in Seoul.24 Broadly speaking, esports involve a number of different game genres including FPS games, sports games, racing games, action games, RTS games, and even MMORPGs. These games are played ­competitively, either one-on-one or in small teams. Only those competitive games selected for inclusion in an international esports competition are considered to be professional esports.25 Esports is not simply about skill building and competition. International competitions promote the Olympic ideal of “international understanding” and the cultivation of a “peaceful world”; in other words, the competitions are also about global diplomacy.26 One cannot help but note the irony that many esports games such as Warcraft III are actually about the violent clash of civilizations, in which one side annihilates the other and

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conquers the land. Irony aside, however, international competitions do draw a diverse group of representatives from countries all over the world. In its heyday, WCG brought in 800 players from close to 80 different countries.27 Since dianzi jingji became an official sport, the Chinese government has made reserved efforts to legitimize it and call attention to it as a source of national pride and goodwill. For example, Sky, a Chinese professional gamer, carried the Olympic Torch through Hainan province as it made its way to Beijing in 2008, and a German-Chinese friendship match took place at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010. In 2009, 2012, and 2013, China hosted the World Cyber Games, with each competition bringing in 500–600 players from 38 to 70 different countries.28 Perhaps most notably, in 2019 Shanghai hosted The International, a DOTA 2 tournament with a prize pool of over $34 million.29 Scholars who study sport in China note that sports play a mediating role between nationalism and internationalism.30 Indeed, the Chinese government’s promotion of international esports events and goodwill tours suggests that it views esports as a form of soft power. Domestically, however, Chinese esports is plagued by the public’s generally negative attitude toward gaming, one that, as Chap. 3 showed, has been exacerbated by a government-approved media moral panic over Internet addiction among Chinese youth. Aside from promoting esports as a professional competitive sport in its own right, government officials also position it as a healthy alternative to wangluo games. What is more, despite the fact that many different genres of games, including MMORPGs, have been officially included in the register of esports, in China it is largely presumed that only danji games are true “esports.” This was made clear to me both by official rhetoric and by the student gamers, who interchanged the terms danji youxi and dianzi jingji as though they were one and the same. The constructed dichotomy between healthy dianzi jingji and harmful wangluo youxi became most obvious when I attended a government-­ sponsored esports competition in the spring of 2010. At the Chinese Esports Champion League (ECL) tournament held in Beijing, the official opening the competition declared that “dianzi jingji is a sport, it must be strictly separated from wangluo games.” At this same event, my presence as a foreign scholar drew much attention from organizers. Perhaps because of my unique position as a Caucasian female who could speak in Chinese about the subject of games, I was asked to participate in an interview

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about my views on the dianzi jingji industry. Prior to the interview, a young ECL employee rehearsed a few questions with me. He asked me about my research and I noted that I had observed many young people playing both wangluo games and dianzi jingji in the wangba (Internet cafés). But when I mentioned the terms wangluo (Internet) and wangba (Internet café), it was as though an alarm had sounded. The young man took me aside and carefully coached me to avoid any mention of wangluo games or wangba when speaking in front of the cameras. Obviously, ECL employees had been told to avoid mentioning these terms in connection with the competition, so as to keep Internet cafés and wangluo games separate from dianzi jingji in the minds of the audience. Indeed, it is difficult to find official rhetoric about dianzi jingji where it is not being actively positioned in contrast to wangluo games. For example, in an April 2011 article published by the Global Times, Zhao Li, Director of the Information Center of the General Administration of Sport of China, stressed: E-sports is very different from online gaming, but people always tend to see them as the same thing. The great competitiveness that requires sophisticated strategies and quick reactions within a certain period of time makes e-sports worth watching just like other sports events, but online gaming is only self-indulgent and time consuming.31

The same article quotes Olympic Council of Asia President Prince Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah as stating: “E-sports have the effect of improving intellectual development, which is beneficial to children as well as youth….It’s a good exercise which both educates and entertains children.” Such remarks serve to bolster the notion that esports cultivate a skilled, efficient, and generally productive young citizenry.

Wangluo Games and Danji Games in College Student Narratives My Tongji University student informants’ explanation of how danji games differed from wangluo games very much accorded with the government rationale in support of dianzi jingji and, by extension, danji games. Xiaomei, Yuanqi, and Wanghui described the danji/wangluo games’ difference as hinging upon three main points: (1) investment of time and money, (2) skill, and (3) individual competition versus group cooperation.

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The use of the Internet and multiplayer capability were not considered distinguishing criteria. They considered wangluo games to be a waste of time and money, and a black hole of temptation for Internet addicts with no self-control. They complained that many MMORPG games such as World of Warcraft charge an hourly rate of 4 mao (approximately US$0.06). Other wangluo games were supposedly free to play but required one to purchase items in the game in order to achieve any sort of success. Some of the so-called free-to-­ play games were purportedly so bad that money completely trumped skill. A relative newbie willing to invest enough money in virtual equipment could win a PK against a skilled longtime player.32 Alternatively, those with money could purchase a pre-leveled avatar so as to skip the less exciting and more time-consuming work of playing up through the different levels, or leveling-up. Rather than working their way up, these gamers began at the top. This has led to a phenomenon of “RMB soldiers” (renminbi zhanshi), who win only by spending RMB (Chinese currency) in the game. Unlike these wangluo games, danji games are relatively inexpensive to play. In fact, at the time of my research, most Chinese gamers played with free pirated copies of the games. In games such as Warcraft III and Counterstrike, no virtual items could be bought. Every gamer started on a level-playing field and had to build up his/her strength throughout the game. Time investment is the other side of the money issue. Those MMORPG gamers who could not afford to buy a pre-leveled avatar or expensive virtual items had to invest a great deal of time into leveling-up. Even once the highest level was achieved, the wangluo game did not end. This never-­ ending game scenario is one of the features of MMORPGs, most commonly associated with Internet addiction.33 By contrast, the students explained that the structure of RTS games keeps gamers from being addicted because games have a concrete end point. Where role-playing games such as World of Warcraft go on forever, the average RTS game comes to a conclusion in under 30 minutes, thus constituting a relatively efficient use of time. Of course, there is nothing to stop RTS gamers from playing multiple games in one sitting, a kind of chain-smoking style of play. Indeed, I observed many danji gamers do exactly that, despite their claim that danji games took less time and were less addictive than wangluo games. My student informants largely ignored this point. But as the links between the never-ending game and discussions of Internet addiction suggest, the issue with games and those who played

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them came down to one of self-control. The first time I spoke with Xiaomei, she told me that she, Yuanqi, and Wanghui had recently quit playing the danji game Warcraft III in order to study for graduate entrance exams. The notion that games, whether they be danji or wangluo, took a back seat to Real Life was an important one for many of the students I spoke with. This was one of the criteria by which they separated themselves from those they considered to be wangluo game addicts. Xiaomei, Yuanqi, and Wanghui also argued that danji games highlighted skilled individual competition, while wangluo games promoted relatively unskilled group cooperation. They perceived it as acceptable when the danji gamers spent hours playing Warcraft III or Counterstrike, because they were learning strategy and skill. Much like chess players, danji gamers often studied replays of professional dianzi jingji matches. At night when chatting over the instant messaging service QQ , Yuanqi and Wanghui would occasionally share links to replay videos so that they could study the professional players’ strategies. Following matches, Yuanqi, Wanghui, and Xiaomei often had discussions analyzing various moves made in the game. By contrast, danji gamers portrayed wangluo games as requiring little skill. They would allow that wangluo games did have a certain learning curve, but argued that once a basic skill set was acquired, no further strategy or study was needed. Moreover, while danji gamers relished the competition against their peers, wangluo gamers cooperated in groups (guilds) to defeat the computer. When put together with the wangluo games’ fantasy role-playing feature, all of these criticisms contributed to the danji gamer’s dismissal of wangluo games as nothing more than immersive escapist fantasies for people dissatisfied with Real Life. To these students, wangluo games were a quick fix, an addictive drug for losers who could only achieve a sense of satisfaction or success in a relatively unchallenging game, while danji games were inherently about skill and competition, about sports.

Blurred Boundaries The major problem with the diametric opposition of wangluo games and danji/dianzi jingji is that increasingly these genres are blurring. It is often only a matter of personal preference that separates dianzi jingji from wangluo games. Experientially, the stories of those who play wangluo games and those who play danji games blend in a number of ways. As I noted at

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the outset of this chapter, in Internet cafés wangluo games and dianzi jingji are played side by side; many gamers play both. When professional esports players discussed with me the origins of their esports careers, almost all of them recalled that they began by playing in Internet cafés. This helps to explain why, despite the fact that online games or Internet cafés were alarming unmentionables in my interview, esports competitions have been sponsored by online game companies and chains of Internet cafés. The arguments danji gamers use to differentiate their style of gaming from wangluo games verge on the specious. As noted above, many gamers play danji games such as Warcraft III many times in succession, thus undermining the argument that they take less time or are less addictive. Secondly, many wangluo games such as World of Warcraft may also be played competitively; I have met gamers who play it in professional esports competitions. Thus, the notion that wangluo games don’t require skill or are not a kind of esport is also false. Despite official efforts to separate healthy (dianzi jingji) from unhealthy (wangluo) games, the press and the public often confuse them. When a Shanghai-based vocational school announced plans to offer a dianzi jingji elective in March of 2010, the media were quick to report on the development. However, much to the frustration of the school principal and the students leading the class, the reports confused Warcraft III with World of Warcraft. For example, one local newspaper headline proclaimed, “A New Experiment: A Shanghai Vocational School Initiates a ‘World of Warcraft’ Elective.” Similarly, when I spoke with the people who worked the grounds of the Beijing stadium where the government hosted the ECL tournament, few of them could tell the difference between dianzi jingji and wangluo games, believing that both were bad for children. This blanket opposition to games, regardless of type, meant that many of the young people who aspired to go pro lacked familial support. The professional dianzi jingji gamers I spoke with noted that when they were young, their parents tried to stop them from playing. It was only by defying their parents’ wishes that they became professionals at all. The very real struggles of the professional gamer Sky were fictionalized in the online film Dianjing zhi wang, which literally translates as King of Esports, but was published under the English title Fly to Sky. The film portrays a young man’s rocky road to esports success. Along the way he faces disapproval from his father and his sister, both of whom hope to stop him from competing so that he can pursue some more respected profession, such as medicine.34

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The early development of esports in China also struggled with a lack of proper training programs and infrastructural support. Even if aspiring esports pros managed to overcome familial opposition, few knew how to go about training for this career. In 2010, I had a chance to visit the vocational school making headlines for its esports elective. While the principal and the students insisted that Warcraft III differed greatly from World of Warcraft because of its emphasis on skill building, inside the classroom I observed that there was little emphasis on strategy. Occasionally, the head student would list some tactics or play a video footage of professional matches, but no real effort was made to study these. Rather, the students seemed eager to count down the minutes of their class period by casually playing the game. A teacher patrolled the room, keeping bad language in check and making sure that general order prevailed, but otherwise stayed largely unengaged. There was no effort to reflect upon the game at the end of each session, or to identify areas for improvement. My observations convinced me that, despite the rhetoric, Warcraft III was not in this case being treated as a legitimately coached sport. Indeed, the students in this class placed considerably less emphasis on studying dianzi jingji than did Xiaomei’s group of friends, for whom it was supposedly a leisure activity. Perhaps most telling, while the government pays lip service to the development and promotion of dianzi jingji, it has also stood in the way of its continued development. Recall the ECL esports competition in Beijing at which I was interviewed. While this very official event was set up to look good on camera, the competition itself was poorly promoted and sparsely attended. I recall with what great anticipation I first approached the arena. When I reached the destination, I thought at first that I had arrived too late. Colorful balloons and banners announcing the c­ ompetition surrounded the rundown arena, but the parking lot was nearly deserted. The lone booth attendant told me that tickets for the event were only being sold at certain hours, and that I wouldn’t be able to obtain a ticket— never mind that I was there and ready to pay admission. After I sat on the steps of the arena for nearly two hours, observing a mere handful of young men milling about, some security guards finally took pity on me and let me in without a ticket. In I went, only to discover that the large arena was as empty as the parking lot outside. South Korea is often mentioned as having the largest esports fan base. Notes T.L. Taylor, “South Korea is regularly spoken of as the place where your taxi driver plays StarCraft and the geeky skilled kid can

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become a star.”35 By contrast, the Chinese esports industry, although far from new, stills struggles with government red tape. Jordan, the professional Warcraft III gamer introduced early in this chapter, explained that South Korean esports had publicity on its side, while Chinese esports was poorly promoted: Even though it became an official sports program in 2003, I feel that in the media and on TV there hasn’t been very much publicity, if there is no publicity, then most people won’t understand what esports is all about, so this has resulted in the fact that many parents, those in their forties or older, don’t understand it. So I feel this, that as society develops, as our own generation grows up and enters their thirties and forties, our children will slowly come to understand, and as time passes there will be more and more people who understand these things.

Here, Jordan alludes to the legal obstacles that stand in the way of the promotion and development of the industry on television. In April 2004, the now-defunct State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) released the “Circular Regarding the Prohibition on Broadcasting Television Programs about Online Games.” Arguing that such programs “adversely affect the healthy development of minors,” SARFT ordered that all shows about online games be removed from the air.36 Included in this ban was the popular CCTV-5 television show “Electronic Sports World,” which had been broadcast nationwide since 2003, the same year that the government proclaimed esports to be the country’s 99th national sport. Despite protests from the show’s creators, who argued that dianzi jingji were not wangluo games and therefore not subject to the ban, the show was forced off the air in June 2004. Years later, Global Times reporter Shen Weihuang noted that the “ban places e-sports in an embarrassing situation,” one where it enjoys government backing but is treated as harmful to the interests of China’s youth.37 This paradoxical situation was put on display in 2018, when the Asian Games in Jakarta included esports as a demonstration event. Despite the fact that the Chinese team won multiple medals at the event, CCTV-5, China’s national sports channel, did not broadcast the competition. When CCTV news programs then reported the medals, unhappy esports fans took to Weibo to express their exasperation at the ban.38 Professional dianzi jingji athletes conceded that wangluo games and dianzi jingji are bleeding together, but this was not confusion on their part. Rather, it stemmed from their inside view of the dynamics of change

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in the game world. One professional Warcraft III player had this to say about the matter: Even we sometimes mix the two together, for example today many Internet games, like World of Warcraft, also have a competition arena, they also have PK, they have a highly competitive nature. Today many dianzi jingji, such as StarCraft2, require you to play through Blizzard’s online battle site, although it maintains its high-level competitive nature, there are also characteristics of it that are becoming more and more like a wangluo game. So, in the future, I feel that many dianzi jingji games will be wangluo games, and some wangluo games will also be considered dianzi jingji.

A manager of a prominent Shanghai-based esports team admitted to me that revenue was a large problem for China’s esports industry. He suggested that, in order to survive, esports would need to partner with Internet game companies: By nature they are all games, you can’t make lofty statements about how [esports] should be separated from Internet games. I feel that in the future a big trend will be that esports and Internet games come together, because it’s like this, talking from the perspective of games, their development must be self-sustaining; they must earn money. All over the world, esports based on “PC games” are having a hard time surviving. That is to say, if we want to continue to develop, I think that merging with Internet games is a relatively good path to take.

One fact emerges from the confusing picture: dianzi jingji (esports), danji youxi (single-computer games) and wangluo youxi (Internet games) mix and overlap. The concerted efforts to keep them separate in both official rhetoric and student narratives would be perplexing were it not for the discourse of Internet addiction and the desire to separate addictive games from athletic ones. However, whether a game is merely addictive or athletic has to do largely with the disposition of the gamers who are playing it. In order to become an athlete, one must first engage in what many would consider to be excessive play, hence the resistance of families, as seen above. But, as is illustrated by the case of the students at the vocational school, playing by itself is not enough. In order to become e-­athletes, gamers must actively study the game and the strategies and tactics required to excel in it; they must aim not only at pleasure in the game itself, but also at success and distinction.

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Exceptions and Ironies of Patriotic Leisure To return, however, to the notion that gamers are cultivating a sense of what constitutes patriotic leisure, we can see the complex ways in which official discourse intertwines itself with young gamers’ own justifications for play. But what does the official effort to keep wangluo games separate from esports really accomplish? In line with Ong’s observation that neoliberal logic in Asia often works “as exception,” Andrew Kipnis has warned us that in China, neoliberal discourses are often disingenuous.39 Indeed, the various inconsistencies pointed out above seem to suggest that the separation of healthy dianzi jingji from unhealthy wangluo youxi is a disingenuous rhetorical construction rife with inconsistency. Dianzi jingji is singled out as a source of national pride and lauded for its ability to build valuable skills when it suits the government’s interests, but in the eyes of a public insensitive to the nuances of shifting propaganda, it remains nothing more than another kind of addictive video game, and is banned by another branch of government from being legitimized by television broadcasts. What is more, in casting wangluo games as activities that lack skill and waste time, the government is willfully ignoring two facts: not only that wangluo games also qualify as esports, but also that for those with the appropriate skills, wangluo games may become a highly profitable activity. Indeed, wangluo games have given rise to a different sort of professional gamers, those who sustain themselves through a black market of virtual items and avatars that are sold via the Internet for real cash value. These so-called gold farmers have been much discussed by scholars and in the press.40 Game economists such as Edward Castronova argue that governments should take the virtual game economy seriously and start taxing virtual revenue, and Julian Kücklich coins the term “playbour” to refer to the mixing of play and labor that occurs when players modify game components to improve a game, thus doing labor for game companies through their play.41 Despite all of these real-world implications for the market economy, games continue to be denied real-world status, and are relegated to the realm of fantasy. Here, it is useful to consider the work of Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, who discuss the unintended side effects of neoliberal modes of governing. The Comaroffs refer to youth as a “virtual citizenry” that is seeking out alternative modes of profit making under the umbrella of neoliberalism. They elaborate:

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In the late twentieth century, the image of youth-as-trouble has gained an advanced capitalist twist as impatient adolescents “take the waiting out of wanting” by developing remarkably diverse forms of illicit enterprise—from drug trafficking in the urban United States, through the “bush” economies of West and Central Africa, which trade diamonds and dollars, guns and gasoline over long distances (Roitman 1999; De Boeck 1999), to the supply of services both legal and lethal. In this they try to link the poles of consumption and production and to break into the cycle of accumulation, often by flouting received rules and conventions.42

To the list of illicit enterprises mentioned by the Comaroffs, we might add this contingent of alternative-professional wangluo gamers. Unlike the dianzi jingji professionals, these pros are not recognized and certainly not rewarded by the government, for the games in which they earn their money are the very wangluo games most stigmatized in the discourse about Internet addiction. This is yet another indication that self-­ enterprising behavior by wrong people or with regard to the wrong type of activity is shunned. Since finishing my fieldwork, I have learned that—as prefigured in the activities I observed in that upscale Shanghai townhouse—a number of retired professional esports gamers have turned to online poker to make money. Though online gambling is technically illegal in China, these retired gamers get around restrictions by locating their virtual operation on the island of Seychelles. In 2010, the professional Twitter account of one of the most prestigious professional esports teams in China contained tweets about online poker. As one might imagine, this is hardly the Chinese government’s idea of a spiritually civilized or quality activity. But these strange mutations of professional gaming in China serve to illustrate the ironies of the neoliberal model employed by the Chinese government. While danji games are held up as healthy for promoting skilled competition, the professional gamers who wish to actually profit from their play are forced to do so through the black market. But the government’s effort to portray all wangluo games as wasteful does do ideological work by indicating to young people that games are okay only if they are somehow productive in terms dictated by the state. By contrast, the positive rhetoric that surrounds esports trains young people such as Xiaomei, Yuanqi, and Wanghui in the kinds of values and selfdiscipline the government hopes to instill in its young ideal citizens. We can see how the ethos of the skill-building patriotic professional also

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extends to leisure culture, with distinctions between wangluo youxi and dianzi jingji providing a roadmap for the dos and don’ts of “civilized” and “quality” gaming.

Transforming Affect into Capital While the spectacle of patriotic leisure frames digital games in terms of nationalism and culture, esports events are also clearly related to economics and the monetary potential of the Chinese games market. Critical media scholar Dallas Smythe reframes media analysis by suggesting that the product of the mass media is not so much the content of their programming as it is the (buying) power of the audience. Programming content, from his perspective, is merely the “hors d’oeuvre” that “whet[s] the appetite” for the advertisers so that they can sell their commercial products during the break.43 Similarly, the live esports event is constructed to attract a crowd that will impress upon the international companies and sponsors the buying power of the Chinese games market. In 2012, I found myself sitting in a crowded arena at the World Cyber Games in Kunshan, China, awaiting a Warcraft III match. Fans speculated that 2012 might be the last year that Warcraft III would be selected for official WCG competition. It was the end of an era, and the spectacle was memorable. An estimated 40,000 Chinese fans crowded into the 12,000 square meter hall.44 The sound of Linkin Park’s hard rock song “Wretches and Kings” surged over the loudspeakers, and the fans excitedly awaited the entrance of their hero. Suddenly, he was announced, and the mood and music shifted dramatically. I sat with Sky’s fan club, a Chinese flag in the shape of a heart on my cheek. As the camera settled on Sky’s face, the raging sound of Linkin Park gave way to Paul Anka’s sappy tearjerker “I Did it My Way.” Reinforcing the swell of nostalgia elicited by this song, two large screens on either side of the stage projected the status updates of fans in the audience: “Warcraft 3 is a beautiful memory of my youth”; “Today I bid farewell to my youth”; “In many people’s eyes, War3 is not merely a classic game but a memento of youth, a kind of spiritual sustenance.” While these messages flashed on the side screens, the large screen in the center showed close-ups of Sky, looking determined, and fans, waving Chinese flags and signs of support. The nostalgic atmosphere surrounding Sky’s last matches at the 2012 WCG was genuine, but it was also a highly curated affair. The event coordinators were ready for the fans’

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outpouring of support for Sky and their favorite childhood game, and they had choreographed the moment beautifully. As it turned out, 2012 was not the final year for Warcraft III. The following year, at the 2013 WCG, Sky was eliminated in qualifying rounds and thus did not compete in the grand finale. This, however, did not stop producers from upping the ante on the show’s nostalgic elements. To the side of one stage, there was a wall devoted to Warcraft III. Near the second stage, a wall invited audience members to sign and write their favorite memories of esports. Sky, despite his absence from competition, made appearances at signing events, and even served as a guest announcer for the final match of Warcraft III between Chinese gamer THOOO and South Korean gamer Moon. Given such an emotionally charged atmosphere, it would not be surprising if the organizers had planned in advance the delayed starting time of the match. Indeed, in both years, the spectacle of spectatorship did not disappoint. According to official WCG statistics, the 2012 WCG reportedly brought in 110,000 live spectators, while the 2013 event improved on these numbers with a reported 155,000  in attendance.45 Mackenzie Wark, referring to the current state of social media and commoditization as a “spectacle of disintegration,” argues: [t]he disintegrating spectacle chips away at centralized means of producing images and distributes this responsibility among the spectators themselves. While the production of goods is outsourced to various cheap labor countries, the production of images is insourced to unpaid labor, offered up in what was once leisure time.46

Wark’s observation hammers home the notion that spectators, in showing up in droves to the match, in writing those nostalgic reminiscences, and in taking all those pictures, are doing the work of producing images necessary to sell China’s national strength in digital gaming culture. Under such circumstances, the collective affect of the crowd, though genuine, is co-­ opted by event producers, and the cascade of images created by the fans becomes yet another way in which the live event is turned into a representation packaged for international consumption. This is one of the central ironies of young people’s affective attachments to digital media, which cultivate intensities that hold the potential to disrupt dominant discourse while simultaneously reinforcing and bolstering corporate and state interests.

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Speaking Patriotic Leisure, Confronting Internet Addiction Not long after I first met Jordan at his practice base, I had the opportunity to observe him at a promotional event on the campus of Tongji University. The fall semester was about to begin; new students were arriving that week for freshman orientation. Student volunteers were scattered about campus and group tours were in session. Jordan was there to promote a cell phone company’s introductory plan for new college students. Any students who signed up for the plan earned the right to an autograph and photo-op with Jordan. It was a fairly steamy late August day. Wanghui and I sat in a square on the Tongji University main campus. He had taken a bus from Jiading to this campus just to meet Jordan. Given my previous interactions with the members of the team, Wanghui expected that my guanxi would gain him a special introduction to the gaming star. True to form, he came equipped with a list of what he wanted to know. With a tenacity that surprised me, Wanghui proceeded to drill Jordan with questions. To what did he attribute his success in Warcraft? How often did he practice? What kinds of methods did he use during practice? What keyboard–mouse combination was the fastest? Throughout the conversation, Jordan behaved like the consummate professional, taking time to answer all of Wanghui’s questions and then to pose for a photograph. Following the meeting, I asked Wanghui why he had picked those particular questions. Wanghui did not aspire to become a professional esports athlete, but he said he did aspire to success in general and wanted to find out the methods a pro gamer used to achieve it. To him, Jordan epitomized the individual who was highly successful not only in the game but also in Real Life. It was as though Wanghui were back in his dorm room at night, plotting out the best times to harvest vegetables in his game. No matter what the activity, Wanghui saw every form of work and leisure as practice for a life of future success. Many of the students who professed to play danji youxi or dianzi jingji undoubtedly spoke the language of patriotic leisure. They used much the same kind of language employed by Hoffman’s young patriotic professionals in Dalian. Where Hoffman’s patriotic professionals spoke of the desire to find jobs that would allow their “abilities to flourish” (fahui nengli) and allow them to “get good experience” (duanlian ziji), college student gamers such as Yuanqi, Xiaomei, and Wanghui talked of using games to “engage my brain” (kaifa ziji de danao) and “study” (xuexi).

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Here, it may also be useful to invoke Lisa Rofel’s concept of cultural citizenship. Struggles over cultural citizenship, states Rofel, “are contests over new schemes of hierarchical difference, over who represents the cultural competence to carry China into the future and to create wealth and power for the nation under neoliberal capitalism.”47 But I hasten to add that the students’ narratives about danji games may indicate less an actual desire to make their leisure productive than a desire to find a way around totalizing discourses such as those of Internet addiction. As youths’ stories of time spent in Internet cafés with their friends reveal, danji games were at their core also about socializing with peers. Indeed, in the cafés, danji and wangluo games were often played side by side, and many of the danij gamers I spoke with admitted to playing or having played wangluo games as well. Yet many danji gamers also tried to downplay these similarities and crossovers. Where scholars might use terms such as digital games or online games to group the different genres of games played by both the danji and wangluo gamers, the students I spoke with were intent on keeping them separate. This is most likely because they still faced opposition from their parents and society at large, who tended to lump all manner of games together and saw, rather than any of gaming’s positive qualities, only a path to addiction. It is, therefore, no surprise that the gamers most willing to acknowledge the similarities and crossovers between wangluo games and dianzi jingji were the professional gamers, who, for the most part, had already overcome the stigma of addiction by entering the realm of the celebrity athlete. In the next two chapters, I examine the narratives of the gamers’ stuck on the other side of this discourse of Internet addiction, the voices of the wangluo gamers so maligned by the press and public. Beyond simply arguing that wangluo games also involve skill and strategy, these gamers portrayed games as fulfilling a spiritual need. In explicitly constructing the game space as a spiritual homeland, they confronted head-on the claim that games are a form of spiritual opium; for them, games heal rather than harm. Importantly, the voices that animate the chapters to come provide a counterpoint to the narratives that appeared in this chapter and Chap. 2. Where the college students in these chapters saw Internet cafés and games as stepping stones in their upwardly mobile lives, the wangluo gamers in the next chapters may be understood as questioning the extent to which Real Life success is even possible. Here again, we shall see how issues of class and socioeconomic mobility emerge as a key issue shaping the topography of digital game play.

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Notes 1. Shen, “Geeks Seek Recognition.” 2. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”; Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class; Bourdieu, Distinction; Rojek, Capitalism and Leisure Theory. 3. Leheny, Rules of Play, 20. 4. Wang, “Culture as Leisure.” 5. Hoffman, Patriotic Professionalism, 12–14. 6. Liu, “Norm of the Good Netizen.” 7. Given the similarity of the names, it is not surprising that they are commonly confused, and, in fact, the games do share a connection; they are both run by the same company, Blizzard entertainment, and are based upon the same mythology. Indeed, Warcraft III is often considered a precursor to World of Warcraft. 8. “Danji Youxi” Baidu Baike. 9. Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 67–69. 10. Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design, 591. 11. Adams, 591. 12. For further discussion of Liang and his ideas about real gamers, refer to Chap. 5. 13. Hoffman, Patriotic Professionalism, 89. 14. Ong, “Neoliberalism as Mobile Technology,” 3–4. 15. Ong, “Neoliberalism as Mobile Technology,” 4. 16. Ong, 4. 17. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception. 18. Rojek, Labour of Leisure. 19. Rojek, Labour of Leisure, 2. 20. Szablewicz, A Space to be Your Virtual Self. 21. Lindtner, et al., “A Hybrid Cultural Ecology”; Lindtner and Szablewicz, “China’s Many Internets.” 22. Yee, “The Labor of Fun,” 68. 23. See Reitman et al., “Esports Research: A Literature Review.” 24. Taylor, Raising the Stakes, 3, 22. 25. Hutchins, “Signs of Meta-Change.” 26. Lowood, “Beyond the Game.” 27. World Cyber Games, “History”; The 2008 WCG competition, hosted in Cologne, Germany, holds the record for being the largest WCG event. It is worth noting, however, that while WCG posted impressive numbers in terms of country participation, its prize pool was relatively small, under $500,000.

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28. World Cyber Games, “History”; The World Cyber Games, while once at the forefront of esports, has now taken a back seat to other, better-funded tournaments. WCG was discontinued in 2013 and revived in 2019, though the latest tournament (held in Xi’an China) pulled in 196 players representing 25 countries, far fewer than previous years. 29. The International, “Overview”; Note that DOTA 2 is a different game than aforementioned DOTA. 30. See Brownell, Training the Body for China; Xu, Olympic Dreams. 31. Shen, “Geeks Seek Recognition.” 32. See Xu, “Lingo of Games”; PK stands for “player kill” but has become common Chinese slang for “compete against.” 33. See Lee, Yu, and Lin, “Leaving a Never-ending Game.” 34. Lu, Dianjing zhi wang. 35. Taylor, Raising the Stakes, 17. 36. State Administration of Radio Film and Television, “guanyu jinzhi bochu diannao.” 37. Shen “Geeks Seek Recognition.” 38. Verberg, “Despite China’s ‘Broadcast Ban.’” 39. Kipnis, “Neoliberalism Reified.” 40. See Chan, “Negotiating Intra-Asian Games”; Heeks, “Gold Farming”; Jin, Gold Farmers; Nakamura, “Don’t Hate the Player.” 41. Castronova, Synthetic Worlds; Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour.” 42. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Millennial Capitalism,” 308. 43. Smythe “On the Audience Commodity,” 242. 44. Lim, “WCG 2012 Grand Final.” 45. Lim, “WCG 2013 Grand Final”; Lim, “WCG 2012 Grand Final.” 46. Wark, “Spectacles of Disintegration,” 1120. 47. Rofel, Desiring China, 95.

CHAPTER 5

Carving Out a Spiritual Homeland

My acquaintance with Xiaolong and his friends came about by chance. It was the middle of the winter holidays and some foreign students had gathered for a small Christmas party. In the course of conversation, I learned that one of them lived above a group of avid Internet gamers. Since he was familiar with my line of research, he asked if I would like to meet them. Thus, it happened that a few weeks later I visited my friend’s apartment and met Xiaolong and his friends, students at Caijing University. It was the first time I encountered students who did not live in campus dormitories. I would later learn why they lived in off-campus apartments: they were part of a nonmatriculated Business English program. Unlike other college students who tested directly into college based on entrance exam scores, all in this group had scored below the cutoff, but high enough that they could attend the school for an extra fee. Such fee structures are increasingly common in China, where parents with money will spend extra to ensure that their children receive a college education despite low exam scores. Xiaolong explained that the nature of their program meant that on-campus housing—normally part of the tuition package—was extremely expensive for them. From the start, therefore, Xiaolong and his friends were marked as outsiders at their school. The group lived in Jiangwan Zhen, a newly developed residential area adjoining the main campuses of Fudan University, Caijing University, and

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Szablewicz, Mapping Digital Game Culture in China, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36111-2_5

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Tongji University. Although closer to the city center than Jiading, where Xiaomei and her friends attended school, Jiangwan was still located a good 45-minute subway ride from downtown. The students’ apartment was in a typical gated apartment complex about ten minutes’ walk from the subway station. As I exited the subway, I was once again struck by the bleakness of China’s suburban development. Five- to ten-story apartment buildings sprawled along either side of a wide avenue in endless, dirty gray monotony. My first impression of Xiaolong’s apartment was that it looked and smelled like an American university frat house the day after a big party. The door to the apartment stood ajar and the floor was extremely dirty, since apparently no one bothered with the standard Chinese practice of removing shoes upon entering. Half-eaten food cluttered the table to the left of the entrance to the apartment. One young man stood at the table, noisily slurping noodles. Wine and beer bottles littered the floor. It was mid-January; a Christmas tree stood in the living room and snowflake decorations hung from the ceiling. When I first entered Xiaolong’s bedroom, everyone was already engrossed in gaming. Xiaolong, after chatting with me for a brief moment, turned back to his computer and told me to go ahead with my questions. I began my conversation with him while he continued his on-screen virtual battle. Xiaolong occasionally paused in an answer to me to shout something to his friends in the other room. After about 20 minutes of this, his game session ended and he turned to speak with me directly. Xiaolong came from a town in Jiangsu province lying about an hour north of Shanghai by train. His roommate Peter came from Zhejiang province, just south of Shanghai. Both came from fairly privileged backgrounds. Though they both said that they didn’t just sit around playing games all the time, I never saw them doing anything else. Xiaolong was a Business English major, but during five meetings spanning three years, he never once spoke English with me. He was supposed to be studying for the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam, in order to qualify to study abroad in England. He had already taken it, and failed, once before, and he seemed to have little hope of passing it the second time. The stakes were now higher, however; a second failure would mean losing his place in the Business English program. On my second visit to Jiangwan, Xiaolong led me to the apartment of some of his other friends a few blocks away. This apartment was as disorderly as Xiaolong’s. We went directly to the bedroom, where everyone was

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already engrossed in a game of World of Warcraft (WoW). As I would soon learn, the group played WoW on a Taiwanese server. At the time when I met Xiaolong and his friends, the domestic carrier of WoW was in the midst of regulatory battles with government ministries, and was therefore not available in mainland China.1 The effort these gamers had to expend to play the game on foreign servers indicated both the intensity of their devotion to their game and their motivation to evade the Chinese government censorship machinery. To say the room had a lived-in feel would be an understatement. In my field notes, the best approximation I could come up with was that of an unruly nest. It was a small 8-by-12 room, a protective cocoon in which time stopped for gaming. Sticky spilt soda, empty instant noodle packages, and candy wrappers gummed together in the corners of the room. The faint odor of stale sweat hung over us like an aura, a testament to many tense hours spent in virtual battles. In the midst of the mess sat an unmade bed, sheets rumpled and still heavy with the sour smell of sleep, and a wooden table with four laptops, the wires from which tangled their way across the floor to power outlets. Early afternoon sun filtered into the room from the lone window, casting the room in a hazy golden hue. Six people, not including myself, crowded into this space. One young man lounged at the head of the rumpled bed in a knit skullcap and sweats, playing a Nintendo DS handheld gaming unit. As I spoke with him, his eyes rarely left the screen of his handheld, his detached gaze oozing cool. Xiaolong sprawled on his stomach at the other end of the bed, playing some sort of game on his cell phone. The other three young men were at the table, faces shielded by their laptop screens. I perched somewhat uncomfortably on the far corner of the bed. Beside me, the lone female in the group was also absorbed in a computer screen, shopping on Taobao, China’s version of Amazon. Unlike her companions, Natalie was dressed to the nines in a faux-fur jacket, her long curled hair tumbling over her shoulders, her manicured fingers daintily pecking at the keyboard. The room was generally silent except for the constant click of computer mice. In all the times I met Xiaolong, I never managed to see the others again despite my numerous attempts to contact them to get them to deliver on their promises to teach me to play WoW.  I later learned from Xiaolong that the group had started to fall apart; a few of them had left school and moved back home. I never did learn whether or not Xiaolong managed to pass the IELTS exam; he avoided the topic whenever we spoke.

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But while Xiaolong seemed cavalier about his schoolwork, he was anything but casual when it came to games. Shortly after our first meeting, he sent me a link to an online video, War of Internet Addiction. His ­accompanying note stated simply: “a moving video that speaks the emotions within many WoW players’ hearts.” Given the many Internet videos I encountered every day, I did not expect that War of Internet Addiction would be anything remarkable. But when I opened the link that Xiaolong had sent me, I discovered that within hours of its posting the video had garnered tens of thousands of views. Curious as to why this video had gone viral, I hit Play. The video was a World of Warcraft machinima jam-­ packed with in-game references, cultural trivia, and jokes about Chinese current events. Thus far, I have explored the topography of digital gaming in China through a discussion of how discourse and affect conjoin. Government and media sources, by portraying games as harmful spiritual opium, position Internet games in the popular imagination by tying them to illicit places and practices of China’s past. I have also examined the affective attachments to the physical settings in which games are played, and gamers’ use of the location of play to distinguish their practices from those of others. These different locations, from Internet cafés to dormitories to professional arenas, help us to see how the physical settings that surround virtual spaces inflect them with meaning. Another vital topography remains to be explored: the topography of the places that exist within Internet games themselves. This recalls the introductory discussion of the difference between my own approach and that of Tom Boellstorff, as well as Christine Hine’s argument that the Internet can be studied both as a “place, cyberspace, where culture is formed and reformed” and as a “cultural artifact…a product of culture.”2 While Boellstorff’s study of Second Life is most certainly rooted in the former definition, my own analysis has leaned toward the latter, taking Internet games as the cultural artifact and examining how people’s relationship to and understanding of Internet games in urban Shanghai are shaped by historical precedent, political interests, and cultural norms and values. Here, The War of Internet Addiction offers a case in which the notion that Internet games are a place unto themselves takes center stage. At the same time, this discussion of virtual place complements earlier analysis of the discourses that position Internet games, illustrating how gamers seek to mold dominant interpretations through the power of their affective attachments to games. The importance of the Internet as a source of dis-

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sent and unofficial interpretations of events should not be underestimated. As Guobin Yang argues, “online communities are ‘spatial havens’ and sites of resistance…They are another frontier where citizens construct alternative identities, imagine new worlds, experiment with new organizational forms, and engage in new forms of resistance.”3 What Yang calls a spatial haven, gamers in my study call a “spiritual homeland” (jingshen jiayuan). “Haven” conjures notions of safety, sanctuary, and refuge; it is well suited to a variety of online spaces that foster free expression, including BBSes, social networking sites, and blogs. Gamers find the game space too a haven or, as many of them put it, a release from the pressures of everyday life. But beyond games’ value as a site of refuge, in calling them a spiritual homeland gamers stress that they are also truly places with both a social and a geographical reality. They portray games as a utopia; a place of camaraderie and equality that exists within a beautiful virtual landscape. This chapter illustrates how Internet gamers react to government attempts to control the game space by defending their right to occupy their spiritual homeland. I suggest that, in addition to using the game space itself as a staging ground for protests against perceived abuses by game corporations and government bodies, generations of young gamers are also looking to other forms of new media as a source of both entertainment and critical commentary. Gamer sociality thereby bleeds from the game into other spheres of digital life, reinforcing my earlier point that gamer “culture,” if we are to employ this fraught term, is not delimited by any single geographical or virtual location. But beyond such observations, the story at the heart of this chapter suggests that freedom of mobility, including the freedom to live, work, and play where one wishes, is a key point of tension between the Chinese government and the people. From the gamer’s perspective, the game offers an alternate means of achieving mobility, one that allows young people to compensate for the perceived lack of Real-Life mobility. In order to differentiate this kind of game mobility from Real-Life upward mobility, I employ the term sideways mobility.

Online Videos: Extensions of the Game Space In chats conducted over the instant messaging service QQ, gamers often sent me links to funny videos and interesting blogs. The sharing of such videos and supplementary online material is an integral part of gamer sociality, making up what Mia Consalvo calls the paratexts of gaming, that is,

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everything about the game text that influences the reading of it without actually being a part of it.4 Those who do not participate in these paratextual activities are likely to find themselves out of the loop in gamer conversations. The majority of videos use the virtual game space as the setting. Some are animated films that re-create the game world, some are machinimas, and some are recordings—real-time replays of battles or events that took place over the course of game play. The videos may serve a range of purposes. Many videos offer entertaining insider narratives, picking up on particular jokes or aspects of game play specific to the Chinese situation. One popular series is I am MT, a collection of humorous animated shorts about a group’s adventures on World of Warcraft’s Chinese servers. In the first episode, one of the characters catches a new pet pig. The pig’s name is a play on words; he is called Jun Zhu (Zhu is the romanization of the Chinese word for pig). But the name is also phonetically the reverse of the name Zhu Jun, the much-hated CEO of The9, the company that was the original local carrier of China’s World of Warcraft. Upon hearing the name, one of the characters ask for clarification: “Oh is it that much reviled ∗ village leader pig?” “Yes” comes the reply, and the group proceeds to pummel Jun Zhu.5 Series such as I Am MT help to cultivate players’ sense of emotional attachment to the virtual game world by fleshing out avatars and giving them animated lives of their own that extend beyond the basic game functions of slaying monsters and collecting treasure. In addition to these fan-made videos, World of Warcraft also has a complex official history told through a series of novels that players can purchase or download from the Internet. Many gamers believe that it is these intricate details and supplementary stories that make World of Warcraft such a successful game. Given World of Warcraft’s complex narrative, many other games pale in comparison. Indeed, gamer Cang Tiange, whose on-screen nickname roughly translates as “A Very Bad-Ass and Skilled Professional Gamer,” became Internet famous for creating online movies that make fun of poorly designed domestic Chinese games. In one video, Cang uses his professional gamer skills to kick and punch his way to victory in a game. His tongue-in-cheek goal is to teach the viewer how to play a purportedly exciting new game. Of course, Cang is really satirizing the game, pointing out the many “amazing” graphics and “exciting” actions that plainly are not the least bit amazing or exciting. Cang’s videos, while humorous, also serve as pointed critiques of the Chinese game industry. As he told me in

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an interview conducted over QQ, he himself is an avid World of Warcraft player who prizes the game for its intricate story and detailed graphics. He is critical of Chinese games whose makers sacrifice quality for profit in their haste to pump them into the market. Both the videos made by Cang Tiange and the series I Am MT can be considered fan videos. They use humor as a tool to critique real situations related to the digital game industry in China. They nicely illustrate the contentious but playful nature of Chinese Internet culture described by Yang, who argues that parody is one of the main genres of “digital contention” in China today.6 These videos provide an important space in which gamers can vent frustrations with the game or its regulation and are thus a potential source of collective action. War of Internet Addiction, the video to be discussed at length in this chapter, is a particularly strong example of the mobilizing force of online videos. Some videos are purely instructional, aiming to teach gamers new techniques and tricks for game play. These instructional videos are particularly popular among gamers who play competitive RTS games, and professional esports players spend a great deal of time reviewing the gaming styles of their opponents. Unlike the fan-produced series such as I am MT and Cang Tiange’s videos, the esports videos are produced by companies and organizations promoting esports. A number of professional esports announcers make a living narrating the game play in these online videos and many of the young Warcraft III players I encountered commented on the need to study the game by attending to the commentary. A popular site, www.replays.net, provides the main repository for such online movies. Together, these types of videos contribute to the vibrant social worlds of Internet gamers, many of whom devote a great deal of time to discussing online parodies or watching strategy films and picking through the pros and cons of certain tactics. Gamers’ embrace of such films reinforces the point that Internet game culture cannot be studied merely from within the confines of the game space; play and the sociality fostered by the games spill over into other aspects of new media and Real Life. As the case study of War of Internet Addiction will demonstrate, these supplementary modes of gamer sociality also provide platforms through which gamers engage in political debate. Their stories provide humorous and effective counternarratives to those of the mainstream media. At their best, such videos craftily evade the censors while harshly critiquing government and corporate policy toward Internet games.

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The War of Internet Addiction War of Internet Addiction was produced by the Oil Tiger Machinima group and written and directed by an avid World of Warcraft gamer hailing from Sichuan who goes by the screen name Xinggan Yumi (Sexy Corn, sometimes translated as Corndog).7 It is part of a series of machinimas produced by the team, many of which spoof the unfair situation faced by Chinese World of Warcraft gamers. War of Internet Addiction, which cost no money to produce, was made in three months, with the help of over a hundred WoW gamers who volunteered their time. The final product is a 64-minute depiction of WoW gamers’ struggle to save their beloved game from government controls and Internet addiction experts trying to destroy it. It is a pop cultural mash-up, referencing Chinese television shows, ­movies, and viral videos, as well as American icons and films. The storyline of the video spoofs that of Terminator 2. The narrative is intricate, touching upon government censorship and the issues surrounding the licensing and operation of World of Warcraft alongside other hot-button news items. In the opening moments, the narrator lays out a futuristic scene in which the land of Azeroth comes under attack by the Green Dam software, a computer monitoring system that went online in June 2009 and seeks to “harmonize” Azeroth by killing its citizens.8 Green Dam succeeds in its mission on November 7, 2009, a day known as Harmony Day, in which 1.63 million WoWers are killed. Yet not all the gamers have given in to defeat. Some begin to fight back, organizing a resistance movement on the NGA forum known as the “Skeleton Party.”9 Now, with the battle between gamers and the Green Dam system raging, both sides hope to alter the future by sending a terminator back in time to destroy the other side. Green Dam has sent the evil Dr. Yang Yongxin, Internet addiction specialist.10 His mission: kill the leader of the Skeleton Party with his anti-addiction shock therapy. The skeleton party sends NetEase President Ding Lei, who seeks to wrest control of World of Warcraft from The9. The complex story details the plotting, backstabbing, and face-to-face battles between Chinese carriers The9 and NetEase as well as the behind-­ the-­scenes jockeying for power by the government “Lords” (the Ministry of Culture and the General Administration of Press and Publication). But while the various parties bicker, the final showdown takes place between Yang Yongxin and the leader of the Skeleton Party, Kan Ni Mei. In a dramatic climax, Kan, facing annihilation by evil Dr. Yang’s shock treatment, calls on the collective power of World of Warcraft gamers, who hear his

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plea for help echo across the land and send him their support by symbolically raising their fists in solidarity. Empowered by the united strength of the gamers, Kan defeats Yang and Green Dam, and all is once again right in the land of Azeroth. War of Internet Addiction attracted over 1.32 million views within three days of its January 2010 release.11 The genius of the video lies in its humorous take on many political issues, masking serious critique in Internet parody. Much to the surprise of many who initially believed the video would be censored, War of Internet Addiction went on to win the Golden Tudou award, cementing its standing as one of the most successful and influential Internet videos of the year.12 In December 2010, English-­ language China Daily named it one of China’s top ten movies of the year. It has also gained international attention, with stories in the Wall Street Journal, a screening at the Hawaii International Film Festival in October 2010, and a screening at a conference on Internet Gaming in East Asia at University of California, Berkeley.

Belonging, Friendship, and Equality Given the many ways in which Chinese gamers find their access to the game space continually restricted by government regulations and censorship, it is not surprising that War of Internet Addiction is rich with imagery about space and (im)mobility. But while the government sees Internet games as nothing more than a cultural product or online publication being pumped into the consumer market, gamers argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft are their spiritual homeland. That specific phrase is used numerous times in War of Internet Addiction, and WoWers’ love for their virtual land is powerfully captured in the final speech delivered by the movie’s hero, Kan Ni Mei. In taking a final stand against the evil Yang Yongxin, Kan states: Yang Yongxin, We are the generation that has grown up playing games. Over the years, people have changed, games have changed, But our love for this game has not changed. The weak status of gamers in this society has not changed, After a hard day’s work, we return home and open up the doors of our 2000 RMB-per-month apartments, But we are confronted with such a deformed game. We feel so helpless. It is like you said, Yang Yongxin,

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You are always claiming that we are addicted to World of Warcraft. You’re right. We are addicted. But what we are addicted to is not the game, It is the sense of belonging the game has given us, We are addicted to the friends and feelings of the past four years, addicted to four years of caring and love.

Kan Ni Mei’s passionate speech highlights the affective register on which games operate. When gamers like Xiaomei and her friends denied that they played Internet games, it was precisely this immersive and affective quality they wished to dissociate themselves from. To them, being emotionally attached to a game world was a sign that one was withdrawn from Real Life. It was their denial of games’ immersive and affective qualities that prompted my research assistant Liang to argue that Xiaomei and her friends were not real gamers. For him, college students who played games for fun in their free time epitomized the type of casual player who never understood the true appeal of games. Liang worked on a digital games research team at an international consulting firm in Shanghai. Not only had he played games since he was a young boy; he also understood the games and types of gamers most valued by corporations. He awed me when he told me that in his time at the consulting firm he had amassed a QQ contact list of over one thousand gamers with whom he chatted online regularly. He knew all the important trends in gaming, including what games are popular, where, and why. The so-called real gamers Liang introduced me to shared a devotion to games not unlike the protagonist of War of Internet Addiction. For them, games were both an escape from the Real World and an alternative means of achieving mobility within it. My conversations with Liang’s so-called real gamers revealed what makes these young people feel so strongly about their spiritual homeland. The main factors include friendships and camaraderie built in the course of play (through raids, guilds, and social functions that supplement these activities), and perhaps most importantly the belief that, unlike in Real Life, there is equality in the game. Finally, as I will discuss in the following section, these games involve intricate backstories that cultivate emotional attachments and a sense of simulated physical mobility within a richly imagined and beautiful fictional world. The World of Warcraft gamers I encountered extolled these different virtues of World of Warcraft to varying degrees. Gamers particularly stressed the friendships and team cooperation that came out of raiding,

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emphasizing that the game attracted them because it fostered feelings of success and belonging. Indeed, the structure of World of Warcraft and many other MMORPGs encourages teamwork. For example, raids are large-scale battles that require the cooperative work of a group of players in order to defeat an otherwise too powerful Boss. Gamers can choose to play alone, but without teamwork they cannot defeat these larger monsters. Most therefore play in groups and belong to guilds that organize times to play as a group. In addition to organizing raids, guilds may organize offline events such as group outings to game conventions and meet-ups at local bars, but they also hold social events in game. The gamers I spoke to offered numerous examples of such events. One World of Warcraft player noted that he and some in-game friends once chose to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the game. Rather than watching the CCTV Spring Festival Gala on TV, he and other friends set off fireworks within WoW.13 The same gamer also found his real-life wife through his WoW guild, and he proposed to her in the game. These kinds of activities go on in all multiplayer games that employ a guild system, not only in WoW. Gamers of other MMORPGs recounted similar stories. As an assistant guild leader for the game Dragon’s Nest, Bao organized a karaoke contest for guild members. The contest took place in the game, using the external voice software gamers employ to communicate during raids. Though gamers were not physically together, they fostered a social atmosphere online through the contest. Yet another gamer, Huifang, described a wedding ceremony with her guild mates that took place on a private server version of the game RO. She described the event in detail, from the ceremony to a photo shoot (using screen captures) with the wedding party. These guilds and friendships form across age, class, and gender divides, and yet, in the context of the game, all share a collective identity as WoWers. Some posted in Chinese: “We/I am a World of Warcraft Gamer!” Others used English to claim their identity as “WoWers.” Others chose to restate the climactic phrase jushou (raise hands), an expression of gamer solidarity that echoes the call made by the protagonist, Kan Ni Mei, in the final scenes of the film. After Fudan University student Li saw the movie, he changed his QQ status message to jushou. Others remarked that they were brought to tears by the final scenes. Indeed, the movie even affected those who did not play. A number of viewers commented that although they had long since quit playing WoW, they sympathized with the plight of the gamers and felt a connection to them.

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This brings us to the second quality prized by World of Warcraft gamers: equality. WoW is not only a place for friends to gather, but also one in which all are considered equal. Equality or lack thereof is a common issue in China, both in daily life and in online games. Many of the most popular domestic games such as Zhengtu and Chuanqi encourage gamers to spend money on virtual items and equipment. Gamers who do not spend money are at a clear disadvantage vis-à-vis those who do; it is possible for gamers literally to buy success in such online games. As previously noted, those who rely on money to succeed in games are often referred to as RMB soldiers. Many student gamers with little or no money to spend on games complained about this situation, saying they disliked those games because of their unfairness. World of Warcraft, by contrast, is relatively equal. As previously mentioned, it charges a low hourly fee of approximately 4 mao (about US$0.06), but advancement in the game depends largely on skill. While some gamers still purchase items from others or pay to have someone else level-up their avatar in order to advance more swiftly, gamers who do not spend money experience no major disadvantages; they can achieve success in the game by investing time and effort. In an interview with Rose Lu of Phoenix Television, Xinggan Yumi, the creator of War of Internet Addiction, explained the importance of the equality provided by WoW: The post-1980 generation is the generation that has grown up playing games, World of Warcraft is a high quality Internet game, and what is more the fees for it are very low. In this day and age of growing pressures, we chose to play games because of our feelings of helplessness with regard to our real economic power. Try to imagine, if I had money to travel and surf, why would I shut myself at home in front of a computer to play games? Because the vast majority of youth living in today’s world of high rents and low wages don’t have that ability. The reason we have selected World of Warcraft is because it is a game of confirmed quality, the game rules are equal, and especially because in the game we can achieve a feeling of satisfaction and sense of place. World of Warcraft is a game that prizes teams and cooperation, everyone is born equal, if you want to achieve the goals of the game you have to rely on teamwork and when you reach the goals through unity it is a great honor.14

Bloggers commenting on the film echoed the sentiments of the creator. In an e-mail communication with me, one blogger stated:

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This is a rare and outstanding production; after viewing this [video], basically every World of Warcraft gamer can sympathize [with its message]… In WoW everyone is equal, we can become friends with anyone, we can team up with anyone… I love World of Warcraft, I love this game, and love the friends I have made in this game!

Another went so far as to assert that, beyond addressing the equality of gamers, the movie also spoke for the experience of the entire post-1980 generation: [The video’s] voice is the voice of the same yellow-skinned, black-eyed youth, the same logic and emotions flow through our blood; we grew up in the same environment and under the same circumstances.

Finally, many gamers simply argued that the game space was a “space of one’s own” that could not be found in Real Life. Bao compared the reasons he loved both cosplay15 and online games: There is point of similarity between cosplay and Internet games: If you encounter something that you are unsatisfied with in Real Life, here you can completely ignore what other people think, you can have a space of your own.

He went on to note that games offered a kind of satisfaction that was often lacking in Real Life: Bao:

Liang: Bao:

Right, so maybe your Real Life is not how you imagined it to be, take for example a boy who is not very good-­looking in Real Life, he isn’t anyone extraordinary and he doesn’t have much money, but after he plays the game he can pretend—he can forget the jokes others tell about him in Real Life, completely forget all the things he is unsatisfied with. This imaginary space gives me some satisfaction. That’s why I started to play. You’re joking. You don’t have it so bad.

Much of my informants’ discussion of equality and games as alternative spaces contrasts those spaces with Real Life in terms of economic issues or other feelings of dissatisfaction. As we have seen in Chap. 2, this sense of dissatisfaction is increasingly common among the generations of only-­

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children who have come to be known as little emperors and taught to expect elite status as beneficiaries of China’s much touted modernization and growth. Given their inability to close the gap between expectations and reality, many youths turn to the game world for solace. Lacking the success they grew up expecting, the game world becomes the place where they are ensured both equal opportunity and success based on their efforts. Xiaomei and her friends, discussed in the previous chapter, defined their relationship to games in a manner reflecting their desired real-world position: they saw themselves as apprentice entrepreneurs, using games to rehearse the skills and strategic thinking that would be required of them in their future careers as stockbrokers, accountants, and financial analysts. The readiness with which gamers like Xiaolong and Bao characterized games as places of escape reflects their own understanding of Real Life as oppressive and unfulfilling. In both instances, young people molded their game experience to fulfill their desires and affective needs. While the accounts of Xiaomei and her friends seem at first glance to contradict those of gamers in this chapter, both groups highlighted dominant understandings of games: that games and the activities and experiences occurring therein are not real.

Residence and Mobility in a Beautiful World Beyond friendships and equality, gamers also valued World of Warcraft and other games as places. These alternative worlds hold beautiful landscapes and scenery as well as rich and complex histories. For example, in a private QQ chat, one famous gamer and online personality argued that the thing he liked most about WoW was the quality of its narrative. He stated: I play both Horde and Alliance, I like World of Warcraft’s background story and worldview,…I like to explore the background story, even though I know that someone invented it, but despite that, it still has a lot of appeal for me, I think that it is a kind of culture.

The game world was not just a virtual location that facilitated battles and challenges, but a unique and beautiful land that gamers spent time exploring with great enjoyment. Many World of Warcraft players comment on the beauty of Azeroth, both its scenery and its avatars. Huifang, the gamer who had attended an in-game wedding in RO, mentioned that she and her friends would often go “sightseeing” in the game Koudai Xiyou:

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There are scheduled in-game activities every day. And we will all arrange a time to meet and play. But if we are tired of killing monsters, we will get a group together and go here and there…You can walk or you can fly, you can also ride an animal if you have one. And then we will just hop on one of the clouds and float about looking at the beautiful scenery and will feel happy.

Huifang is but one of many gamers who described the physical beauty of the virtual game world. What is fascinating about her explanation is that the beautiful landscape is not just a backdrop for the game, but also a scenic place to be valued and enjoyed on its own terms. Doreen Massey offers a definition of place as a “a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus.”16 That gamers prize World of Warcraft for fostering friendships and a sense of belonging should suffice to signal its standing as a place worthy of our attention. But through its detailed graphical landscape and intricate narrative, World of Warcraft also possesses a geographic sense of place. Yes, the world is, in Massey’s phrasing, a “constellation of social relations” brought together through raiding and group activities, but it is also a location with recognizable physical features and unique history. It may seem absurd to suggest that a virtual place also has a material existence, but from the perspective of gamers’ experience that is precisely what it has. This sense of place, the notion that game worlds are geographically realized locations that can be explored and valued in their own terms, is strongly evoked in War of Internet Addiction. In his final speech, the protagonist, Kan Ni Mei, portrays the Chinese government’s decision to delay the release of a new expansion of the game as an instance of interrupted manifest destiny. He laments: This year, each time we arrived at Under City, we would see the empty zeppelin tower across from us. This year, even though we knew it was impossible, we swam northward ignoring fatigue, swam to the edge of the map, swam to the edge of the sea, but we still could not see that frozen land!17

Kan compares gamers’ inability to access different areas of the game map to the plight of domestic migrants in China. He states, “You have already made me a temporary resident in my own country, is it any wonder that in our spiritual homeland we are not even permitted temporary residence?” Here, Kan refers to the country’s strict residence permit system, known in Chinese as the hukou system.18 Kam Wing Chan identifies the hukou

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system as one of the major obstacles to the development of a modern Chinese state: The freedom of mobility is a fundamental one, for it not only gives an individual the opportunity to enhance his/her well-being by moving to a better place or a better job (or joining family), but also increases the individual’s political power to rein in the tyranny of a rogue state by threat of exit.19

Kan’s comparison of the situation faced by World of Warcraft gamers with that of migrant laborers highlights the extent to which the Chinese government has interfered with the mobility of its citizens in all realms of life—both physical and virtual, cultural and political. Massey reminds us that there is such a thing as “politics of mobility and access” and that “mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power.”20 Within China, the state’s efforts to control the spatial movements of its people are closely connected to the regional economy. In the case of female migrant workers or dagongmei (working girls and women) in Shenzhen, Carolyn Cartier notes: [T]he walls and gates of the factory compounds, the controls over identity cards, and other spatial strategies of capital supported by the state tell us that migrant mobility, and especially the mobility of women who would create places of their own, is fundamentally a threat to the organized, productive space of the regional economy.21

The denial of physical mobility is somewhat offset by the existence of media spaces that permit women to envision alternative realities and identities. Cartier shows that women’s magazines and television programs offer an important escape from the drudgery of the restrictive space of the factory. She posits that “[p]laces of daily life for dagongmei are important sites of identity formation and potential resistance to the state-capital alliance of the production of space.”22 Citing the work of Mayfair Yang, she refers to these popular media as metaphorical spaces of their own. But while magazines may offer a virtual escape, the women are imprisoned in terms of material spatial practices. These places combine to form a virtual leisure culture that distracts from the bleak material reality of migrant women gated within factories in order to keep them from abandoning their low wage positions in search of better pay. Ultimately, these media serve the purpose of the state; they are permitted because they manage to gain “the cooperation of the populace in industrial modernization by providing apparent alternatives to work.”23

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In a similar vein, Kan Ni Mei portrays the virtual land of Azeroth as an escape from the drudgery of Chinese citizens’ tedious lives. Kan states: This past year, we, like all the other WoW lovers, have earnestly taken public transportation to work, earnestly consumed all kinds of goods, no matter whether they contain unknown chemicals. We didn’t complain because of our low wages, didn’t complain because you took taxes out of our meager earnings, we lived in these cramped apartments despite our feelings of despair.

Kan Ni Mei notes that Chinese citizens put up with their daily grind without complaint. They obediently go to work for low wages; they accept high rents; they put up with the corruption and malfeasance of corporations—“unknown chemicals” here clearly alludes to the scandal of tainted milk powder in 2008.24 He goes on to stress that gamers are also good citizens, no different from other Chinese; they too cried for the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and South China floods, they too cheered for the Beijing Olympics. In exchange for their compliance and participation in the project of state-led modernity, sharing in both its disasters and its triumphs, all that they ask is a leisure space of their own. They have been denied even this small pleasure. As Kan’s speech suggests, gamers feel that the restrictions placed on WoW represent a breach of the state’s social contract with the citizenry. Having put up with so much hardship on a day-to-day basis, this denial of leisure space presents the greatest affront to their freedom.25

Sideways Mobility and Nostalgic Longing It is of central importance that the protagonist in War of Internet Addiction is resigned to the drudgery of his everyday life, despite a low salary and cramped living conditions. From this notion of restricted physical mobility, we can make a connection to the issue of social mobility. Cara Wallis asserts that mobile phones provide migrant women with a kind of immobile mobility.26 By this she means that mobile phones permit migrant women to “overcome limited and limiting economic, social and spatial conditions,” but that the people these women interact with via cell phone are generally “like them.”27 They connect primarily with migrants from the same village, classmates, and family members—the same people they likely would have been in contact with had they stayed at home in their villages. Before the widespread use of the cell phone, such local ties would probably have been

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severed when the migrant women left home. Through this discussion, Wallis draws our attention to a different type of mobility—social mobility—and points out that cell phones, while overcoming physical distance, do not help young women to bridge socioeconomic gaps. Instead, this communication technology reinforces their social position as migrants. The relationship of games to social mobility is similarly complicated. As discussed earlier, one contributing factor has to do with rising expectations of and for young urbanites. China’s only-children face intense pressure to achieve a narrowly defined version of success. Anthropologists have documented these pressures, with regard to education and to career and lifestyle aspirations.28 In particular, Vanessa Fong reveals that young people are trained by parents to think of themselves as an upand-coming generation of CEOs and CFOs. Fong notes that the young people she worked with “found incongruities between the status they expected and the status they attained as a major source of stress.” She continues: As their parents’ only hope, singletons were socialized to become part of the elite. Work in construction, sanitation, housekeeping, and the bottom rungs of factories and the military could not offer enough income, security, and promotion opportunities to enable youth to attain respectable living standards, be competitive on the marriage market, save money to purchase marital housing, provide their own children with expensive education, or support their retired, unemployed parents and grandparents. Therefore, most singletons refused to work at such jobs, even if the alternative was unemployment.29

Disillusioned by these offerings and faced with housing costs that exceed their incomes, many young urbanites recognize and chafe at the inequalities of the market system. Within the fields of new media and games studies, scholars have long noted that games provide a virtual space for youth disappointed with Real Life. Sherry Turkle, one of the pioneers in the field, offers the following illustration of how an early version of an online game, the MUD (multiuser dungeon), allowed one of her informants to achieve some sense of success: In contrast to his life in RL [real life], which he sees as boring and without prospects, Josh’s life inside MUDs seems rich and filled with promise. It has friends, safety, and space. ‘I live in a terrible part of town. I see a rat hole of an apartment, I see a dead-end job, I see AIDS. Down here [in the MUD]

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I see friends, I have something to offer, I see safe sex.’…Josh has worked on three MUDs, building large, elaborate living quarters in each. In addition, he has become a specialist at building virtual cafés in which bots serve as waiters and bartenders…He dreams that such virtual commerce will someday lead to more—that someday, as MUDs become commercial enterprises, he will build them for a living. MUDs offer Josh a sense of participation in the American dream.30

In similar vein, Turkle cites the work of Henry Jenkins and Janice Radway as demonstrating that television and romance novels can offer forms of resistance whereby people can build alternative realities and cultures that offer more opportunities for fulfillment than physical reality.31 Here, I see the mobility offered by games such as World of Warcraft as a form of sideways mobility. I introduce this concept in order to counterbalance the discussions of upward mobility by young gamers like Xiaomei and her friends, who consider the game just another stepping stone on their path to a successful life and career. By contrast, young gamers like Bao and Xiaolong see the game as an alternative means of acting out the desire for mobility, a desire they find difficult to fulfill in their everyday lives. The concept of sideways mobility draws upon the analyses of a number of different scholars, not least of which is Wallis’ concept of immobile mobility discussed above. But I also wish to stress that sideways mobility is propelled by a sense of disillusionment with one’s surroundings and a longing for an alternative utopia. In this regard, I build on the work of Svetlana Boym, who discusses sideways nostalgia. Boym argues: Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes nostalgia is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space…In fact nostalgics from all over the world would find it difficult to say what exactly they yearn for—St. Elsewhere, another time, a better life. The alluring object of nostalgia is notoriously elusive. The ambivalent sentiment permeates twentieth century popular culture, where technological advances and special effects are frequently used to recreate visions of the past, from the sinking Titanic to dying gladiators and extinct dinosaurs.32

MMORPGs are nostalgic in that they conjure this notion of a St. Elsewhere often vaguely modeled on images of the past. Be it Fantasy Westward Journey, which re-creates the legendary travels of the Monkey King, or

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World of Warcraft, which builds upon Norse mythology, many game lands hark back to another time, fantastical though it may be. Boym argues that this sideways nostalgia can emerge as a “defense mechanism” during times of rapid change, a description that fits the situation faced by young people in China today. The games seem to offer a relatively straightforward narrative and a sense of continuity and mobility in an otherwise fragmented and immobile existence. Other scholars have discussed the subject of disillusioned youth vis-à-­ vis transitions in contemporary East Asia. Anne Allison writes about the precarious sociality of Japanese youth as the country moves from the corporate family model (emphasizing a worker’s stable, secure position in company) to a neoliberal emphasis on the responsibility of the individual, in which workers are encouraged to be flexible but are also increasingly disposable.33 This transition has effectively shifted to young people the risk once shouldered by corporations. It has thereby hampered young people’s achievement of the stability necessary to fulfill the expectations of the heteronormative family lifestyle. Consequently, contemporary Japanese youth lack a feeling of home and affiliation; they have become “de-social.” She explains: “This means not that they protest against society but, rather, that they view themselves, and their place in society, as somehow outside, distant, apart, and unstitched.”34 The unstitching happens not on a physical register but rather on a psychological one. This would seem an apt description of Chinese gamers’ disavowal of physical reality in favor of the spiritual homeland of the game world. Robin Visser writes of the melancholic subject in urban China as seen in the protagonists of four contemporary Chinese novels.35 She finds that most of the protagonists withdraw into insularity in an attempt to dissociate themselves from the crowded city and others in it. In these novels, she argues, “characters regularly construct their own private utopias in order to offset the exterior chaos of the metropolis and regain an integrated, autonomous sense of self.”36 She goes on to state that the novels reveal the “melancholy” of contemporary urban subjects. Invoking melancholy as Freud used it to mean a “disavowed loss,” she argues that people in postsocialist China have not yet been permitted to mourn the loss of their revolutionary past. Instead, a rapid succession of market reforms bulldozed over any sense of grief for the past. Consequently, young people in contemporary China have never come to terms with the loss of “collective, utopian and rural-based longings” that dominated the Chinese mindset prior to the death of Mao.37

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Visser’s argument that the protagonists in these novels exhibit alienation from the city is not unlike my own description of the wangluo gamers who have retreated to the space of the game in response to alienating conditions in their Real Life. Ironically, however, the “collective, utopian, rural-based longings” that Visser sees as lost seem to be found in the context of the game. Rather than championing the private, these young gamers long for collective belonging and equality. While it may seem to outsiders that young gamers are withdrawing into themselves, the accounts of the young people who play games and socialize through them refute this notion. Months after the release of War of Internet Addiction, Xiaolong contacted me with an odd request. He asked me to help him locate the sheet music to an American folk song about the 1989 Tiananmen Square tragedy. He wanted to learn to play the song on his guitar. I suspected that the young American Fulbright student living upstairs from him had been talking with him about Tiananmen—something Chinese students do not learn about in school. His eagerness to latch onto such political materials seemed to me then to be an indication of a deeper dissatisfaction with the system and with the government, already apparent from his interest in videos like War of Internet Addiction and his motivation to evade Chinese censors and play games on a Taiwanese server. In retrospect, Xiaolong’s longing to understand an event which he never experienced, like the place-based longings of many of the wangluo gamers whose voices animate this chapter, might serve as both an answer to and affirmation of filmmaker Feng Mengbo’s critique, introduced in Chap. 2, that contemporary Chinese society is “memory-less” and rooted in “virtual reality.”38 In comparison to the reflective nostalgia exhibited by college students who fondly recall high-school days spent sneaking into Internet cafés, these gamers are engaging in the active process of recreating the “lost home.” Theirs is a project in which tradition is reinvented in the context of the game. This type of nostalgia, to return to the work of Svetlana Boym, “builds on a sense of community and cohesion and offers a comforting collective script for individual longing,” a longing not for a real place or time, but rather for an alternate reality. Xiaolong’s longing for knowledge of Tiananmen, like the longing for a spiritual homeland in World of Warcraft, emerged through the realization that “a certain void of social and spiritual meaning had opened up.”39 In the next chapter, I further explore the affective chasm between young gamers and the state, as I take up memes and slang terms that have leapt from within the confines of the game space into the realm of China’s everyday culture of contentious parody and play.

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Notes 1. See Chap. 3 for a discussion of the World of Warcraft regulatory battle between the Ministry of Culture and the General Administration of Press and Publication. 2. Boellstorff, Coming of Age; Hine, Virtual Ethnography, 9. 3. Yang, Power of the Internet, 159. 4. Consalvo, Cheating, 9. 5. He, Wo jiao MT. 6. Yang, Power of the Internet. 7. Yumi, dir. Wangyin zhanzheng. 8. Azeroth is the name of the fictional world in which most of World of Warcraft takes place. Battles take place between two main factions, Alliance and Horde. For more on the Green Dam software, see Chap. 3. 9. See https://bbs.nga.cn [in Chinese]. NGA began as a BBS devoted to World of Warcraft. Today, it is a more generic forum devoted to discussions of all things game related. 10. Recall that Yang Yongxin, discussed in Chap. 3, is notorious for administering electroshock therapy to treat Internet addiction. 11. Cao, Wang, and Lan, “Moshou shijie de mohuan xianshi.” 12. The “Golden Tuduo” was given out by the video-sharing website Tudou. com 13. In China, watching the CCTV Spring Festival Gala is ritual. According to China Daily, in 2019 aggregate viewership was 1.173 billion. As such, the decision to celebrate the New Year in the game instead of watching the broadcast is a significant indicator of how important the game space had become. 14. Lu, “Fenghuang weishi zhangfang.” 15. Cosplay, short for “costume play,” is a popular phenomenon among game enthusiasts. As a tribute to the games they love, people dress up in costume as their favorite characters and reinvent key scenes from the games. There are also competitions where people are judged with regard to how accurate their portrayals of these characters are. 16. Massey, “Global Sense of Place,” 154. 17. Each new expansion of World of Warcraft introduces players to a new continent on the World of Warcraft map. At the time War of Internet Addiction was released, Chinese government ministries had delayed the release of the new installment, entitled Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK). In the case of the WotLK expansion, this new land is a frozen one called Northrend, one that members of the Horde are able to access via zeppelin. However, zeppelin towers are only located in specific areas, one of which is Under City. 18. See Chap. 1, note 7.

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19. Chan, “Chinese Hukou System,” 198. 20. Massey, “Global Sense of Place,” 150. 21. Cartier, “Regional Formations and Transnational Urbanism,” 69, emphasis in original. 22. Cartier, 69. 23. Cartier, 67. 24. See Chap. 1, note 5. 25. War of Internet Addiction is not  the only instance of gamers protesting unfair treatment. For further discussion of Chinese gamers and their protests over game-related policies and injustices, see Chan, “Beyond the ‘Great Firewall.’” 26. Wallis, Technomobility in China. 27. Wallis, “Immobile Mobility,” 73. 28. See Fong, Only Hope, Hoffman, Patriotic Professionalism, and Kipnis, Governing Educational Desire. 29. Fong, Only Hope, 99. 30. Turkle, Life on the Screen, 239, emphasis in original. 31. See Jenkins, Textual Poachers; Radway, Reading the Romance. 32. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 33. Allison, “Precarious Sociality.” 34. Allison, “Precarious Sociality,” 3. 35. Visser, Cities Surround the Countryside. 36. Visser, 227. 37. Visser, 229. 38. Feng quoted in Braester, “Real Time to Virtual Reality,” 89. 39. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, 42.

CHAPTER 6

“Losers” “Acting Gay”: Internet Slang, Memes, and Affective Intensities

This chapter moves beyond the realm of digital games to investigate the larger affective sphere cultivated by the social relations surrounding digital gaming culture in urban China. Through a consideration of various elements of digital leisure culture on display at ChinaJoy, China’s largest digital gaming and entertainment expo, I show how memes, Internet slang, and other artifacts of digital leisure culture serve as outlets for affective intensities—shared, embodied, and actively felt states of being that thrive on the Internet, but that nonetheless defy articulation and fixed interpretation. In particular, I focus upon memes and slang terms that playfully challenge the heteronormative model of ideal citizenship and patriotic leisure discussed in Chap. 4.

Affective Intensities In the summers of 2012, 2014, and 2015, I returned to China to conduct follow-up fieldwork. Each time, I felt that I had been tossed back into an unfamiliar environment, adrift in a sea of change. My connections with research assistants Mike and Liang had blossomed into everyday friendships, and our conversations rarely touched upon the topic of games. Both men, now married and beginning families, had largely moved on from that phase of their lives. Though Liang still played games himself, he no longer

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conducted market research on digital games. The students I had known at ECNU, Tongji University, and Caijing University had now either graduated or dropped out, and were building careers with varying degrees of success. I, too, felt that my sweaty summers spent observing life in Internet cafés and grungy apartments belonged to another time and place. Over the course of my decade of traveling to and from China to conduct research, mobile phones had come to dominate the market. Now, everywhere I looked—from subway escalators to crowded shopping malls, from college campuses to Lanzhou noodle stalls—people were playing games on their phones. Digital culture was no longer closely moored to physical spaces like dormitories, internet cafés, or esports arenas. It had merged into the ether; it was the air we all breathed. It seemed now to be both everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Enter ChinaJoy, one of the few locations where digital culture still musters a corporeal presence. ChinaJoy takes place once a year over four days at the end of July and beginning of August at the Shanghai New International Expo Center in Pudong. I visited this annual expo six times, twice in 2010, twice in 2012, and twice in 2015. In addition to attending the event in 2010 with my assistant Liang, I also had the opportunity to trail two gamer guilds as they made their rounds in 2010 and 2012.1 I can attest to the intensity of the experience. Seemingly without fail, the event occurs in sweltering heat (my phone reported a heat index of 117 Fahrenheit in 2015), making the crowds and treeless concrete paths between exhibition halls all the more unbearable. In 2010, attendance at the event was estimated at close to 170,000, and by 2015 this number had skyrocketed to a reported 272,900, though it is worth noting that this number reflects overall entries, and not unique visitors.2 The crowds at the entrance are so large that, rather than creating entry lines, guards herd attendees into large pens, like cattle, releasing them at timed intervals. ChinaJoy presents itself as a candy-land catering to young male gamers’ material and sexual desires. Aside from the excitement of the games, there are opportunities to ogle and pose with scantily clad “booth babes,” and each game company lures new followers by giving away free swag. A sensory overload of flashing lights, neon colors, and booming music spills out of each hall, promising excitement and adventure. In this carnival atmosphere, young people are encouraged to give in to desire and forget responsibility. The language used to promote the games emphasizes dreams, fantasy, and pleasure, thus marking ChinaJoy and the games it

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promotes as spaces that exist separate from the confines of Real Life. ChinaJoy is the perfect field site for investigating affect. It is no accident that the entry hall is devoted to selling every manner of digital game and Internet culture-themed merchandise. Attendees are encouraged to deck themselves out with kitschy and irreverent symbols of digital leisure culture. In 2015, one noticeable fad involved clipping plastic bean sprouts to one’s hair. Many young people also paid 10 RMB to tag themselves with self-deprecatory labels. Numerous vendors hawked hundreds of cheap styrofoam arrows emblazoned with popular Internet slang phrases, most of which were characterized by an identifiable brand of Chinese self-mocking humor (zichao). For example, one awkward young man had adorned himself with the phrases “loser” (diaosi), “every inch a piece of scum” (yibiao renzha), and “FFF Group” (FFF tuan), an obscure reference to a popular Japanese anime.3 Others chose to don masks, known on the Internet as “rage faces.” The masks for sale at ChinaJoy referenced a global mélange of Internet memes and celebrities, including images of the actor Bruno Ganz in his role as Adolf Hitler (known in China as “Head of State”), Gerard Butler as King Leonidas (a meme known as “This is Sparta!”), and the Korean actor Choi Seong-guk (known in China as Jin Guanzhang), an image that has become the Chinese version of the LULZ face.4 Despite the popularity of these items, few could fully articulate the reasons they chose to buy them. When I asked the young man sporting the three hair tags why he wore them, he shrugged and offered a simple explanation of “it’s fun” (haowan). This is undoubtedly one of the primary difficulties of studying digital leisure culture, particularly memes and Internet slang. Often, the activities that we engage in online seem like the most meaningless and wasteful activities, those to which we devote little thought or effort. But while digital leisure culture seems irreverent and uncalculated, it may in fact be one of the most candid expressions of our subconscious desires and anxieties. As Chris Rojek notes, leisure has to do with “what people plan and do when they believe themselves to be free.”5 Play and humor are, by their very nature, political. As George Orwell famously states, “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”6 But while humor has always had political implications, never has it had such an expansive stage on which to operate as it does in the digital age. The Internet acts as a megaphone through which particu-

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larly incisive and biting pieces of humor morph into viral Internet memes that garner the attention of millions. In her book Affective Publics, Zizi Papacharissi devotes a chapter to exploring “everyday disruptions of the political” on Twitter. Concerning herself with mundane expressions of identity as opposed to overtly political statements about news or current events, she zeroes in on play as a useful strategy by which individuals deal with the “fixity of norms” while simultaneously insulating themselves against any “incoherence or misunderstandings that may ensue as a result of it.”7 This aspect of play has been a central feature of Chinese political critique for decades: humorous and playful banter deftly attacks the establishment while veiling criticisms in order to evade censors and avoid repercussions. Lisa Rofel, for example, notes that the 1990s Chinese television drama Yearnings included subtle jabs at the political system despite being produced under the auspices of the Chinese government. She argues that Chinese audiences, long accustomed to censorship, have become skilled decoders attuned to ferreting out hidden messages in seemingly straightforward narratives.8 While the political potential of double-voiced humor and play have long been discussed in criticism of the Chinese media, scholars rarely probe the emotional and psychological mechanisms by which such tactics amass the power to effect change. What is the efficacy of humor and play as a political tool, especially when it comes to the Internet? Not all online jokes gain footing in a viral media environment. Those that do often do so because they resonate with people on a gut level. A joke may elicit a momentary chuckle, but some forms of play and humor stick with us to conjure feelings we have a hard time articulating. It is at this moment— when play and humor resonate in an embodied, emotional way—that humor sparks forward movement. Humor’s affective dimension is crucial to the transformation of passive critique into radical change. As Papacharissi argues, affect: declares intensity, and expression of how intensely something is felt can be a potentially powerful act. It marks the difference between saying something and shouting it loud, crying quietly or crying violently, and in this particular context, making some private thoughts public, or reversing norms to infuse a provocative statement with intensity.9

The concept of affective intensity relates to cultural critic Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling. Structures of feeling are not fully

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developed ideologies or worldviews, but are instead “concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.”10 Williams notes that whether “emergent or pre-emergent, they do not have to await ­definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action.”11 Similarly, cultural theorist Sara Ahmed writes of the “politics of emotions,” arguing that emotions serve as forms of social power, even though they are not always recognized as such. Emotions, she tells us, align certain bodies with others, and may be the basis for collective action.12 For both theorists, affect is a politically powerful thing. This kind of affective identification is, without a doubt, present in the case of the two terms to be explored in depth in this chapter. However, Williams’ and Ahmed’s theories warrant updating to explain how affect is created and circulates in the digital age. Unsurprisingly, for today’s youth, affect often crystallizes on the Internet, a platform that allows group expression to gain visibility and volume. The memes on display at ChinaJoy are a prime example of how affective intensity is cultivated and utilized on the Internet. Taken individually, many of the memes and faces that circulate online seem anything but funny. It is quite jarring, for example, when one first encounters a young person sporting a mask with the face of what looks like a screaming Hitler. What is being portrayed by this image, and how could the perpetrator of one of the worst crimes against humanity become the stuff of a joke? To those familiar with the meme, the answer is simple. The face refers to a scene from the German film Downfall, in which Bruno Ganz, playing Hitler, learns news that displeases him and flies into a fiery rage in front of his stunned subordinates.13 The clip has become a classic source of meme humor. Throughout the world, countless Internet users have taken this particular scene and created their own subtitles, forcing “Hitler” to vent his anger over the most ridiculous things imaginable—from a late food delivery to being banned from an online game server. It is a quintessential example of what has come to be known as comic rage. Like the Hitler Downfall meme, many of the slang terms and faces on display at ChinaJoy invoke a complex web of interpretations that circulate online. Many of the terms reference tragedies, failure, and pain. Taken individually or literally, such memes are anything but humorous. But when placed in circulation and juxtaposed with the incongruous and ridiculous, these signs take on new meaning. Susanna Paasonen invokes Sara Ahmed when she argues

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that “circulation increases the affective value of objects as it accumulates and oscillates in and through acts of communication.”14 It is the emotive states that exhibit both the too-much-ness of affect and the incapacity fully to articulate it that are expressed by rage face masks: the defiant roar in the face of certain defeat, the grimace that hovers between laughter and tears, the wide toothy smile in which extreme pleasure teeters on the edge of insanity. These are states that lie in between humor and tragedy. When symbols of them are affixed to people’s hair and clothing, they shout for attention. The masks simply demand that we look, and the labels and tags such as diaosi declare loser status with gusto. While being single, being poor, or being a gamer geek might once have caused a privately felt sense of defeat, these private losses are now playfully flipped and made public with a humorous vengeance. However, the loser walks a fine line between empowering humor and pathetic tragedy; the memes sit precariously between these two states. The individual with the tags declaring himself a loser, a piece of scum, and a member of a couple-hating FFF Group may be empowering himself through humor, but he also makes himself vulnerable to ridicule and pity. In this chapter, I probe the complex meanings of two related Internet memes and slang terms: diaosi (loser) and jiyou (gay friend). These labels call attention to the topic of normative social and sexual relationships, a cornerstone of many young people’s perception of self-worth and belonging. I show how young people, by invoking these terms, subtly voice anxieties about their inability to cultivate prescribed heteronormative relationships. By claiming these labels at ChinaJoy and on the Internet en masse, young people allay their fears of isolation and find collective belonging in their weirdness, thus potentially opening new avenues for queer identities to emerge.

Glossing the Terms: Diaosi and Jiyou Diaosi (Loser; Literally: Penis Hair) Diaosi ranked as the most popular Chinese Internet term of 2012. Although the term has been loosely translated as loser in English, the literal meaning in Chinese is quite different. Broken into its component parts, the Chinese word diao is a crude term used to describe the male genitalia. Si is literally translated as threads, although in this context it is linked to the Chinese transliteration of the English word “fans” (fensi).

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Like many popular Internet memes, diaosi has a complicated genealogy. Its origin story has been amply debated on the Chinese Internet. In 2013, the popular online video series Feidie shuo released a video about diaosi, while the online encyclopedia Baidu baike has a growing d ­ escription of the meme and its evolution. The meme has also been discussed extensively in the Chinese press. As can be parsed from these sources, the term originated from multiple iterations of name-calling on an online forum. Diaosi reportedly came into being in early 2012 as a result of trash talking between members of the Baidu Li Yi BBS and the members of the Leiting Sanjutou BBS.15 Fans of the Chinese footballer Li Yi became the target of ridicule, and they mockingly called themselves yi si bu gua (“stark naked”). This eventually morphed from yi si bu gua into Yi si, meaning fans of Yi, and, finally, into the nickname diaosi.16 The evolution of the derogatory nickname is not as surprising as what happened next. Rather than take offense at the name-calling, the young diaosi seized hold of the nickname and self-mockingly adopted the label. Suddenly, young people declared their status as diaosi on webpages and SinaWeibo accounts, while news stories about diaosi flourished. As the popularity of the term began to peak in 2014, a search for it yielded over 100 million results on Baidu. Since becoming popular on the Internet BBSs, the term diaosi has been appropriated by numerous sources. It has even been used for a series called Diors Man (Diaosi Nanshi), the Chinese translation of a German television comedy, Knallerfrauen (Diaosi Nüshi), and, as will be discussed later, in an advertising campaign for an online game. Despite, or more likely because of, the varied places the term appears, the definition of diaosi culture continues to evolve. Depending on the source, diaosi may embody some or all of the following traits: they may be poor, short, and ugly; may be of rural origin; may have a low educational level, low income, blue-collar job; and may have no house, no car, and no girlfriend. Their leisure activities are said to include playing video games, spending a lot of time online, and masturbating excessively. They are also sometimes loosely conflated with nerds who rarely leave the house (zhainan). As described on the talk show Qiangqiang san ren xing (English title: Behind the Headlines), the diaosi male: 1. Does not have more than RMB 1000 on his person. 2. Wears knock-off brand shoes or shoes that cost less than RMB 800. 3. Has not had more than three girlfriends before marrying. 4. Smokes cigarettes that cost less than RMB 20.

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5. Only drinks beer or cheap liquor. 6. Has benefits amounting to less than RMB 10,000. 7. Does not have a car or, if he does, it cost less than RMB 100,000. 8. Rarely takes long-distance trips. 9. Has no one of wealth and influence in his social circle. 10. Spends less than RMB 2000 on his cell phone and spends a lot of time on microblogs. Tries to act “cool” with his phone.17 There is also a female version of the diaosi, a woman described almost entirely in terms of superficial appearances and fashion. The list for the female diaosi is as follows: . Has never bought a bikini. 1 2. Does not wear brightly colored nail polish. 3. Has never worn heels higher than 5 cm. 4. Does not have matching sets of lingerie. 5. Spends five or more months dieting in one year. 6. Does not dare to show her teeth when she laughs or smiles in public. 7. Likes to walk behind men. 8. Does not like to look in the mirror or looks in the mirror too much. 9. Has not changed her hairstyle in more than six months. Another popular representation of the diaosi, as seen on Baidu Baike, describes them in the following manner: They have no money, no background, no future. They love DOTA [the RTS game Defense of the Ancients], they love the Li Yi BBS, and they love their menial jobs. They are fated to kneel before the tall-rich-and-handsome. When the diaosi muster the courage to strike up a conversation with a “goddess,” the only response they receive is a chuckle. They worship their god, Li Yi; they are diaosi.

While the list of possible descriptors varies from source to source, one consistent element, and by that logic the most important aspect of the meme, is the definition of the diaosi in relation to what he is not: he is not “tall-rich-and-handsome” (gaofushuai); he is not the second-generation-­ of-wealthy-families (fuerdai); he does not enjoy the privileges of the second-­generation-of-officials’-families (guanerdai). He lusts after sexually attractive women, the so-called goddesses, but he does not date and

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cannot even successfully converse with them. Simply put, the diaosi are at odds with popular representations of the successful heteronormative male. Gaoji/Jiyou (to Act Gay/Gaming Buddy; Literally: Gay Friend) The term gaoji originates from Cantonese, in which the character for ji is pronounced “gei,” as a phonetic translation of the English word “gay.” Although the term has multiple usages, it retains its original connotation of homosexuality; sites and message boards devoted solely to the subject of jiqing or gay love often contain homosexual content. The term is also used to refer to Japanese manga in which homosexuality between young male characters is an acknowledged theme. Indeed, an image search for the term gaoji or jiyou on Baidu’s search engine unearths many references to Japanese Yaoi culture.18 But jiyou has since been adopted as a form of Internet slang for young men who form close bonds through digital games. The vast majority of these young men still identify as heterosexual, despite claiming that they are “gay friends.” According to the definition of gaoji on Baidu baike, the term may be used to connote homosexuality, but it is also used as a form of self-mocking and Internet slang: Gaoji can also be used to refer to two men who exhibit excessively intimate behaviors and mannerisms, as a form of ridicule or mocking. Nowadays, due to the penetration of digital gaming and expansion of IM sociality (“gaoji” has gradually emerged from the concept of “jiyou” to become a new word), the term is used to refer to those who become well acquainted through the Internet, and who, through conversation, discover similar hobbies, for example Internet games. There are also a large percentage of young people, especially teenagers, who like to use the term “gaoji” as an alternate name for “playing digital games.” “Gaoji” is generally used more as a form of address among gaming teammates, for example “searching for ‘jiqing’ teammates to ‘gaoji,’” etc., and is used to express “closeness,” and the idea of a harmonious match.19

This definition is accompanied by an image depicting the logo of the game DOTA, thus making clear the link between game culture and this particular form of slang. In this regard, the terms gaoji or jiyou are commonly employed in game-related message boards, for example as follows: Everyone can become good friends together, create a custom game lobby together, act gay together…(cough, cough).20

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Indeed, the terms gaoji or jiyou are often used by individuals attempting to find a guild or team of gamers to play with. In this sense, it can often depict the loneliness felt by gamers who have few friends. At ChinaJoy, one of the tags being sold read zhijin danshen qiu jiyou (“I’ve been single until today…looking for jiyou”). While jiyou has become a common part of gamer parlance, attitudes about the term and its meaning vary. Wei Wei, who conducted a preliminary sociological study of the term’s usage by Shanghai college students, argues that “On the one hand, it creates culturally-recognized space for straight men to engage more intimate and tactile heteromasculine behaviors with each other; on the other hand, it serves to reiterate their heteromasculine identity against the background of growing public awareness of homosexuality.”21 This bifurcated understanding of the slang term was indeed borne out by my own informants. According to two 22-year-old men I met at ChinaJoy, jiyou is a synonym for zhanyou (literally, “comrades in battle”). While acknowledging that the term can also connote gay, they did not identify their use of jiyou in that manner and seemed comfortable using it when among gamer friends. By contrast, a younger teenager I met on the same day seemed hesitant to employ the term, claiming that some see it as a derogatory (bianyi) name that refers to people with an “irregular sexual orientation” (xingquxiang bu zhengchang). While he thought it okay to use the term among friends who “knew [he] was joking,” he worried about the possibility of a misunderstanding if it was used among strangers. These differing interpretations suggest that jiyou, like other slang terms, retains a semiotic openness and flexibility. Like diaosi, jiyou has been incorporated into various aspects of popular culture. A web search unearths sites such as www.jiyou.tv, which hosts replay videos of popular digital games like League of Legends (LOL) and Dungeons and Fighters (DNF). The site’s logo depicts two male-gender symbols and a partially covered female-gender symbol. In the “About Us” section of the website, there is no mention of the term jiyou or its gendered logo. Instead, the site claims to “welcome all game lovers” and invites visitors to “upload their favorite collections of gaming replays to show everyone, while also developing new friendships and enjoying a common recreation.” Ironically, jiyou.tv, like many other gaming websites, is marked as a stereotypically male heteronormative space. Aside from posting replay videos of popular games, most of the homepage is taken up by videos of scantily clad beautiful girls (meinü). Visitors to the

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site are also greeted with pop-up ads for phone and video sex services. Thus, it seems clear that spaces like jiyou.tv reinforce the trope of the lonely, sexually unsatisfied male gamer. While the site keys into the ­popularity of the term jiyou, any reference to homosexuality or relationships that challenge the heteronormative is overwritten by the intensely [hetero]sexualized nature of the content on the homepage.

Toying with the Heteronormative in Game-Related Web Series While the terms diaosi and jiyou draw explicit attention to the subject of male gamers’ sexuality and heteronormativity, subtler references to these themes pervade digital leisure culture and the paratexts that surround digital games. For example, the web series Luyoupai (which might be loosely translated as LOL Friend’s Clique) is produced by Tencent for fans of the RTS game LOL.22 The show focuses on game-related content and storylines; it also frequently features guest appearances by famous LOL esports athletes. It continually pokes fun at gender norms and sexuality. For example, the opening skit of the web series depicts three young friends, one female and two males, each engrossed in a game of LOL on an individual laptop. The girl is the first to look up, exclaiming in frustration, “I hate people who are better at LOL then I am!” The chubby young man next to her looks up and states, “I hate people who are better looking than I am.” Finally, the third friend, a skinny and slightly effeminate young man, looks up and exclaims, “I hate people who have boy… I mean, I hate people who have girlfriends!”23 Diors Man (Diaosi Nanshi), an even more popular web series featuring comedian Da Peng, deals with similar subject matter. Although it is not about digital game culture, the show focuses on issues of gender and sexuality. One representative skit deals with the topic of “naked marriage” (luohun), that is, a couple who marry for love despite having no car, no house, and no steady income. The skit interprets the term “naked marriage” literally, and the audience laughs at the humiliation of the naked bride and groom as they try futilely to hide their nudity from the wedding guests. Here, once again, the man’s masculinity is called into question, not only because he is unable to provide house, car, or income, but also because Da Peng sheepishly hides his naked chest and jockeys to hide behind his wife rather than shielding her, thus offering a caricature of the emasculated loser.24

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One last, prominent example of the diaosi and jiyou phenomenon as illustrated through web-based series is the comedic duo Chopsticks Brothers (Kuaizi Xiongdi). The duo are well known for their successful micro-films such as Old Boys (Lao Nanhai), discussed in Chap. 2, and, its feature film sequel Old Boys: Way of the Dragon, which in 2014 spawned the viral video sensation “Little Apple.”25 The micro-films of the Chopsticks Brothers convey a sense of melancholy and nostalgia for seemingly carefree childhood and teenage years. They often depict adult life, by contrast, as alienating and unfulfilling, thus resonating with the affective dimensions of the diaosi and jiyou phenomenon. Though the Chopsticks Brothers have no direct connection to digital gaming culture, their films often focus on the same kind of close, homosocial relations developed among gamers who refer to themselves as diaosi and jiyou. In an interview published online by Tencent Entertainment, the duo self-identify as diaosi and note that they have received multiple invitations to gay film festivals. Despite maintaining that they are not gay lovers, the two do admit that they at times act like a “husband and wife” who bicker but also share a familial love and affection for one another.26 As evidenced by the conflicting explanations offered by my informants, diaosi and jiyou retain a semiotic flexibility that allows them to be interpreted in many different ways. In some cases, the usage of the terms has become so divorced from their initial connotations that those who employ them in their everyday language struggle to explain why. But regardless of exactly what these terms do represent, the one constant is that both terms are loosely linked by their playful emphasis on young men’s heteronormative failures, in particular their inability to find mates of the opposite sex. But while the lack of girlfriends is a symbolic thread that ties these identities together, it would be misguided to suggest that all these young men have bonded together simply because they can’t find a girl. I have met those who are in heterosexual relationships and yet still label themselves diaosi or jiyou. Instead, diaosi and jiyou play upon common Chinese cultural expectations, particularly the heavy emphasis placed upon marriage and family. Young men and women are expected to find suitable partners, and each couple, to produce a child. But the ability to fulfill such expectations in contemporary urban China has been complicated by a number of factors, alluded to in earlier chapters. The demographic reality is grim: China is burdened with a gender imbalance brought about by decades of the one-­ child policy in a culture that heavily favors male children. Stories abound

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about picky females who, given the population imbalance, “wouldn’t even go out with a guy who didn’t own a house, let alone marry him.”27 Among scholars and media alike, there is also broad consensus that the loser phenomenon indicates a new kind of class consciousness among urban Chinese youth.28 Indeed, Peidong Yang, Lijun Tang, and Xuan Wang have gone so far as to theorize that diaosi is a prime example of James C. Scott’s concept of infrapolitics, or tactics of low-level resistance adopted by subordinate groups.29 Yet, as will be established in the next section, the trope of the male loser is neither new nor unique to the Chinese media context. Instead, the unique potential of the diaosi and jiyou memes is realized through the affordances of the digital media platforms on which these terms circulate and amass influence.

Heteronormative Failure and the Crisis of Masculinity The construction of the male loser is not a new category, nor is it exclusively Chinese. Rather, it reflects historic shifts in men’s status and what has been termed the crisis of masculinity. In Western sitcoms, cartoons, and advertisements, the male loser is a recurrent figure. Take, for example, characters such as The Simpsons’ Homer Simpson, Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, and Married With Children’s Al Bundy—exaggerated caricatures of the traditional male head-of-­ household figure who seem to fail spectacularly at every attempt to protect and provide for their families. The comedic value of such shows clearly lies in making fun of these male buffoons and their lower-middle-class status. These figures are closely sutured to the pernicious myth of the American Dream and the associated assumption that those who fail to become rich fail through some defect of their own, be it shiftlessness, laziness, or sheer stupidity. Audiences are conditioned to see working-class men as losers who deserve our ridicule. Working-class figures like Homer Simpson are the comedic antithesis of the upper-middle-class head-of-household as depicted by 1950s sitcoms such as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, in which men are the source of moral order and discipline. It has been argued that the popularity of the male loser figure in American television is closely tied to moments of cultural anxiety in which the heteronormative is in crisis. For example, in their exploration of sports commercials in the United States, Michael A. Messner and Jeffrey Montez de Oca note that those advertisements often portray the white male as

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loser. They tie this to anxieties surrounding the destabilization of hegemonic masculinity: To the extent that these themes find resonance with young men of today, it is likely because they speak to basic insecurities that are grounded in a combination of historic shifts: deindustrialization, the declining real value of wages and the male breadwinner role, significant shifts brought about by more than three decades of struggle by feminists and sexual minorities, and challenges to white male supremacy by people of color and by immigrants.30

The male loser trope has carried over, too, into digital media content. In her analysis of YouTube memes, Limor Shifman notes that one recurrent theme of such videos is “flawed masculinity.” The memes she investigates feature male characters who “fail to meet prevalent expectations of masculinity either in appearance or behavior.”31 While the crisis of masculinity in the West is linked to domestic issues such as deindustrialization and the feminist movement, the modern crisis of masculinity in China is often discussed vis-à-vis the Chinese nation-state and its position in the world. We might, for example, begin with Lu Xun’s classic tale of the Chinese loser Ah Q. “The True Story of Ah Q” is set amid the tumultuous years of the downfall of the Qing Dynasty and China’s Republican revolution. Ah Q knows little about government or the radical changes affecting China at the turn of the twentieth century, but he idly believes that by changing his hairstyle he will join the ranks of the revolutionaries and prosper. He inwardly transforms his repeated failures into “spiritual victories.” Ah Q’s bumbling masculinity becomes Lu Xun’s national allegory for the decline of the Manchu government, which, until the very end, refused to embrace the reality of its imminent demise.32 In a July 2012 cover article written for the Chinese New Weekly (Xin Zhoukan), author Tan Shanshan compares Lu Xun’s legendary loser, Ah Q, to the figure of the diaosi. Argues Tan, “Ah Q had ‘spiritual victories’ (jingshen shenglifa), diaosi seem to instead use a method of ‘self-belittling’ (ziwo aihua) in order to come to terms with reality. Instead of sinking into despair, they use this new method in order to reconcile social reality and their own place within it.”33 This comparison was also echoed by Chinese television personality Xu Zidong. Like Tan, Xu also argued that the diaosi have some of the “Ah Q spirit.”34 More recently, anthropologist TianTian Zheng has zeroed in on a controversy surrounding “effeminate men” in contemporary Chinese

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media culture, arguing that there is an “inextricably intertwined” relationship between a perceived “lack of manhood and the strength of the state in the globalizing era of China.”35 Much like the story of Ah Q, in the Chinese collective memory the image of the feminized male recalls the damaging legacy of colonialism, both the Orientalist gaze through which the Chinese male was construed as weak and feminine and the image of the Chinese nation itself as the “sick man” of East Asia.36 This argument resonates with the media discourse associating Internet cafés and Internet addiction with the rhetoric of opium and opium dens, portraying Internet technology as yet another foreign substance posing a threat to the health of the nation’s young men (see Chap. 3). In order to resist the sick-man image, contemporary ideology emphasizes what Zheng terms “entrepreneurial masculinity.” Indeed, Harriet Evans ties the rise of images of the sexed body in contemporary China to the rise of the market system and the emphasis on an “ideology of individual desire and fulfillment.”37 Here, it is not difficult to draw a connection between the ideal of entrepreneurial masculinity and the male breadwinner in Western media culture. While perhaps focusing less on the role of head-of-household than Western sitcoms and cartoons, the figure of the tall-rich-and-handsome undeniably reflects an increased emphasis on capitalism and material desires; the gaofushuai is a man known for his financial as well as physical prowess. The diaosi and jiyou, by contrast, embody the anxieties and failures of this system. While scholars link contemporary Chinese masculinity to the market system, this emphasis on entrepreneurship seems to reflect a break with the past. Cultural studies scholar Kam Louie argues that, historically, Chinese masculinity can be examined through the dyad of wen-wu or “cultural attainment-martial valour.”38 The cultural attainment side of this dichotomy emphasizes the importance of the scholar, a vaunted position in Chinese culture, reinforced through China’s long history of the imperial exams as the gateway to bureaucratic office. By contrast, wu masculinity emphasizes traits such as bravery and physical strength, as epitomized by the figure of the hero (yingxiong) in classic martial-arts novels. Both of these models, says Louie, stress the ideals of self-control and restraint, especially with regard to men’s sexual appetite for women. Indeed, Louie argues that men who indulged their sexual desire for women were often seen as weak and incapable of achieving life’s higher purpose. While the emphasis on physical prowess continues to this day, the ideal of the scholar seems to have yielded place to the ideal of the businessman. Regardless of

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this change, if we are to take Louie’s proposed wen-wu model at face value, we can see how the Chinese loser figure fails to measure up to the ideal models of masculinity on all counts. Many of the self-proclaimed diaosi have failed to perform to expectations in school and are stuck in menial jobs. What is more, the “short, fat, and ugly” diaosi is also the antithesis of the physically fit martial-arts hero. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the diaosi seem to be rendered utterly helpless by their sexual desire for the female “goddess.”

The Loser Transformed? While the male losers being mocked in American television commercials and on shows such as The Simpsons are passive butts of the joke—figures to be laughed at—the loser figure in China is an active agent who writes his own story. While the American example may reinforce the normative by mocking the loser as outlier, the Chinese example empowers the loser, who in solidarity with his jiyou actively claims his status and deflects criticism onto the real target: the tall-rich-and-handsome. This transformation of the loser—from passive object of others’ mocking laughter to active agent of satiric humor—is facilitated by the Internet’s participatory media environment. On the Internet, people have seized upon failure as a mode of cultural expression. The Internet is full of #fail memes in which all manners of mistake become fodder for jokes. Whitney Phillips characterizes trolling culture as a reincarnation of the age-old sentiment of schadenfreude, or finding joy in others’ pain.39 Often, trolls purposely create chaos in order to elicit strong negative reactions from other netizens, deriving humor from the breakdown of cultural norms and values. Nick Douglas examines memes as a visual expression of what he calls “Internet Ugly.” With Internet Ugly (interpreted by Douglas as including such things as the badly drawn rage face comics, “Nailed It” memes, and “shitty watercolors”) participants bask in the glory of their amateurish and “loser-y” productions. Douglas ultimately argues that such viral fail compilations have the effect of normalizing imperfection.40 Indeed, finding humor in others’ failure serves a social function. As Richard Smith argues, cultural practices such as schadenfreude cultivate a social emotion that is tied to our need for social comparison.41 Put simply, we laugh at those who fail because it makes us feel comparatively better about our own position in the social order.

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Despite featuring individuals who do not conform to dominant expectations, this kind of humor holds the potential to be profoundly normative. Take, for example, the mean-spirited laughter aimed at Antoine Dodson and Michelle Dobyne, two black Americans whose local news channel interviews went viral because of their exaggerated gestures and vocal expressions. These videos, which were transformed into auto-tuned memes, leave the viewer wondering what, exactly, it is that we are invited to laugh at. If, as seems to be the case, the humor derives from these individuals’ seemingly buffoonish, exaggerated, and (in the case of Antoine Dodson) effeminate responses, then these videos are doing nothing more than reviving age-old stereotypes that harken back to the days of slavery and have their roots in systems of hegemonic masculinity, classism, and racism. Within China, a similar story is that of Furong Jiejie, or Sister Lotus. Furong Jiejie, now known as one of China’s first Internet celebrities, notoriously bragged about her beauty and talent on Tsinghua and Beijing University BBSes, despite the fact that she was generally considered unattractive and had failed to gain admission to Beijing University or Tsinghua University on numerous occasions. Sister Lotus’ posts quickly went viral. She was funny not only because of her overblown claims and outrageous poses, but also because of her brazen attitude, flying in the face of the traditional Chinese emphasis on modesty.42 Like the story of Antoine Dodson, however, the tale of Furong Jiejie leads the viewer to ponder the target of laughter. Are audiences laughing at outdated cultural norms that emphasize feminine beauty and modesty, or are they laughing at Furong Jiejie precisely because she so spectacularly fails to adhere to these unwritten societal rules? Regardless of the answer, it must be acknowledged that the Internet, in feeding our desire for social comparison, paradoxically transforms losers and outliers into successful figures. Those whose #fail videos garner interest are able to monetize the videos and transform their failure into a lucrative business. Personalities like Antoine Dodson and Furong Jiejie may go on to become star performers. Both of them underwent transformations in the wake of their initial fame. Furong Jiejie, once referred to as a female loser, was given the celebrity makeover treatment, and has, according to reports on the Internet, now become a baifumei (fair-skinned-rich-andbeautiful-­ woman). Importantly, with her transformation, Furong Jiejie also adopted more mainstream celebrity mannerisms. As Shaohua Guo argues, her once-reckless body and mind were “disciplined” in accordance with the traditional markers of upward mobility.43 Antoine Dodson was

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similarly transformed, cleaning up his look and appearing on a multitude of commercials, talk shows, and comedy shows. In a bizarre twist, Dodson publicly renounced his homosexuality and has become a proponent of gay conversion therapy, reportedly pledging to “fix” his son should he turn out to be gay. Alice Marwick refers to this as the rise of the “micro-celebrity.”44 While the fan base for such micro-celebrities is fickle at best, the phenomenon does create a culture in which being a loser seems to open a legitimate path to fame and fortune. In its description of Furong Jiejie, the China Daily quipped, “It is a comedy not without precedent—self-humiliation— but one of some subtle confusion: Is the joke on her or us?”45 Essentially, regardless of what one is doing, the main goal is to be seen doing it; viewer counts are what matter. While Furong Jiejie and Antoine Dodson are but two examples in a sea of micro-celebrities and viral loser videos, they should emphasize the pitfalls of assuming that these types of viral media celebrate diversity and empower deviations from the norm. While queerness garners attention, it is not so much a prideful identity as an attention-getting device used to facilitate one’s path to more legitimate success.

The Internet and the Circulation of Affective Intensity The diaosi and jiyou both capitalize on and depart from previous viral #fail memes as they have existed on the Internet. The many labels on display at ChinaJoy feed upon this viral #fail culture, while also mobilizing the loser figure in new and interesting ways. While viral sensations like Furong Jiejie and Antoine Dodson embody unique personas, the diaosi and jiyou are part of a collective and anonymous mass. Like notorious Internet-based activist groups such as Anonymous, diaosi and jiyou are simultaneously everyone and no one—an amorphous group that weaponizes society’s normative tendencies. Given that Chinese masculinity has traditionally been associated with the moral and physical strength of the Chinese nation, the popularity of the diaosi male poses a threat to the nation in more ways than one. While iconic male figures from the Confucian gentleman to the Maoist revolutionary soldier sacrificed personal gain for the good of the nation, the young diaosi male is entirely hedonistic, driven by personal desires for sex, entertainment, and material goods. The diaosi male lusts after goddesses,

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fills his days with video games, and, though he can’t afford luxury items, adorns himself with knock-off brands and goods. In many ways, this hedonism is reflective of the charge leveled at all post-1980 and post-1990 children, who are excoriated for being China’s first “me generation.” Beyond simply ignoring the traditional Chinese emphasis on filial piety and duty to one’s family and country, this generation is seen as undermining the health of the nation. However, the opposite of the diaosi—the tall-rich-and-handsome—is an even more loathsome figure. While the hedonism of the diaosi, who have no power or influence, might be excused as an idle tendency of the disenfranchised, the tall-rich-and-handsome—the children of government officials and wealthy individuals, poised to lead the country—are equally if not more frivolous. The Chinese elite who, according to tradition, should be the most selfless and self-sacrificing are nothing but self-interested and corrupt.46 While politicians preach sacrifice and hard work for the betterment of the country, they privately line their pockets with bribes.47 Ultimately, the tall-rich-and-handsome figure reveals the hypocrisy of China’s governing elite. While he is cast as the supposed winner to the diaosi’s loser, the not-so-subtle message seems to be that this kind of victory is not only undesirable but abhorrent. By embracing their status as diaosi, young people explicitly acknowledge the unfair and sometimes impossible standards of success by which they are judged. While working within the confines of a dominant ideology that would frame them as losers, young people who adopt the diaosi label are in effect challenging the notion that their lifestyle is something to be ashamed of. Implicit in the trending diaosi culture is a rejection of the heteronormative notion of upward mobility outlined by neoliberal models of patriotic professionalism (see Chap. 4), educational aspiration, and Chinese ideal citizenship. These diaosi are calling attention to the number of young people whose lifestyles are characterized by mediocre incomes, lack of marital status, and immersion in digital leisure culture, and signaling that the lifestyle of the tall-rich-and-handsome is neither fully desirable nor generally achievable in the contemporary urban landscape.

The Semiotic Openness of Diaosi and Jiyou Aside from the diaosi meme’s explicit critique of socioeconomic inequality, slang terms like diaosi and jiyou also hold the potential to empower queer identities. It is not unreasonable to question whether the male who

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identifies as a diaosi or jiyou desires a girlfriend or whether he may, in fact, be sexually attracted to other men. This is but one of many ambiguities facilitated by the semiotic openness of these terms, a subject that warrants careful attention if we are to arrive at a nuanced understanding of how such memes and slang phrases operate within digital culture. Feminist games studies scholars such as Nick Taylor note that digital gaming fosters “homosocial spaces” that are nonetheless often “strongly ‘policed’ in order to maintain and re-affirm participants’ heterosexual identities.”48 Similarly, game scholars Jenny Sundén and Malin Sveningsson draw upon Eve Kofosky Sedgwick’s concept of homosociality in which the aim is to “create an intimacy between men by excluding that which is not defined as manly.”49 In observing the actions of a guild of digital gamers, Malin Sveningsson remarks on the abundance of “jokes and make-believe performances that make fun of homosexual desires and actions.” Through joking banter, male gamers call each other “bitch” and pretend to “pimp” each other out for (homo)sexual favors. Writes Sveningsson, “neither the woman nor the fag fits into the collective, and so they are symbolically disarmed and made innocuous so that the men can create a phallic domination which cannot be questioned by the new sexual practices.”50 One of the few papers to address gender and sexuality in Chinese digital gaming culture is the work of Weihua Wu et al. Their research focuses on the subject of in-game marriage between avatars in digital games. As we saw in Chap. 5, in many role-playing games, players create a vibrant social world in which they celebrate other’s birthdays, go on dates, and become engaged. Not part of the original game design, such creative player actions are a common feature of gaming communities. While arguing that these virtual partnerships reinforced gender stereotypes, Wu and coauthors acknowledge that many young men posed as female characters, and that marriage between a male and a female avatar was often in fact a male-male partnership behind the screen. As explained by the authors, this phenomenon, known by the derogatory name of renyao (literally “human monster,” a term often used to disparage transgender people), has little to do with queer identity, as many male players assumed a female avatar for strategic advantage. They conclude that gameplay in Chinese MMORPGs tends to reinforce gender stereotypes and heteronormativity. Their findings are largely consistent with those of their Western peers.51 At first glance, it is easy to argue that diaosi culture similarly reinforces hegemonic masculinity. In particular, the use of terms like jiyou may seem

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derogatory to gay culture, applied in a fashion similar to the English derogatory usage of terms like “gay” and “fag” to describe an action or person who is effeminate and therefore stupid. For example, one of my informants expressed his hesitation to use the term jiyou, fearing that it was a “bad word.” Others who adamantly denied a connection between the term jiyou and gay culture asserted that the term was essentially a joke, echoing the description offered by Sveningsson, who suggests that such joking banter facilitates hegemonic masculinity by “disarm[ing]” and dominating the queer. While the queer becomes the butt of a joke, women are reduced to the status of sexual objects. Within the games, buxom female avatars in bikinis battle monsters, while game advertisements and expos like ChinaJoy use women as props, attracting large crowds of young men who attend merely to photograph scantily clad young women. One cannot log onto Chinese gaming websites without being assaulted by pop-up ads for female sex workers. With regard to diaosi culture in particular, an essay on a Fudan University anthropology blog calls attention to a number of offensive labels that have been used in conjunction with the meme. According to Huang He, the terms “pink wood ear” (fen muer) and “black wood ear” (hei muer) have been used to describe a woman’s sexual experience, with a pink wood ear referring to a virgin’s genitalia and black wood ear to the genitalia of a woman who has had numerous sexual partners.52 It is presumed that the women whom diaosi marry have often been previously used and discarded by the tall-rich-and-handsome. But while a surface analysis of these terms seems to plant them firmly within a tradition of heterosexist digital game culture, a deeper analysis reveals a more complex truth. Whether or not they do so out of a sense of genuine identification, young men actively adorn themselves with labels that publicly proclaim their disempowerment. There is a distinct difference between other-directed name-calling within the context of private game play and publicly labeling oneself with these terms in contexts that extend beyond the game. It is one thing to abusively call someone else a “fag” in order to assert dominance during an intense in-game battle; it is quite another to apply the label to oneself publicly in a self-deprecating manner. While much of the in-game homosociality described in previous scholarship has had the effect of reinforcing male dominance, the use of diaosi and jiyou seems to do the opposite. As previously discussed, the so-­ called diaosi, lacking the magical trinity of job, house, and car, often cannot find a girlfriend. Here, socioeconomic disempowerment becomes

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conflated with (hetero)sexual disempowerment. With heterosexual relationships unobtainable, young men thus seek intimacy in homosocial relationships, and the use of terminology such as diaosi and jiyou bolsters solidarity among young men who feel themselves to be powerless and marginalized. While acknowledging the ways in which homosociality can be employed to reinforce hegemonic masculinity, Sundén and Sveningsson also suggest that homosociality and homosexuality may exist on a continuum. This problematizes simple distinctions between straight and nonstraight, and opens an avenue for discussions of queer desire and intimacy within the game space. Other scholars have since suggested that homosocial relationships need not always reinforce hegemonic masculinity. Nils Hammaren and Thomas Johansson theorize that a form of “horizontal homosociality” can be more inclusive and refer to relations between men that are based on “emotional closeness, intimacy, and a nonprofitable form of friendship.”53 What is more, the aspects of diaosi culture that reinforce hegemonic masculinity are offset by a certain degree of hesitancy and ambiguity pervading the popular and media usage of the terms. As evidenced by the articulation of the nervous cough that follows the invitation to play games and “act gay” or the Freudian slip of the young man who hates people who have “boy—I mean…girlfriends,” the possibility of being sexually gay always seems to hover on the horizon. In the Chinese cultural context, which remains resolutely hostile to openly gay relationships, such playful ambiguity creates a tentative space in which to experiment with new possibilities and identities.

The Potential/Danger of Loser Affect Game expos like ChinaJoy offer a media ethnographer the rare opportunity to physically visit digital leisure culture. Here, the affective intensity shared by gamers who sport diaosi and jiyou labels is palpable. But it doesn’t last. The frenzied excitement with which young game aficionados pour into ChinaJoy dissipates by the afternoon. The expo is not designed for attendees’ comfort; there are few places to sit down, and refreshment options are limited. By lunchtime, exhausted and overheated expo-goers are unceremoniously splayed out along swathes of the concrete floor in large clumps of sweaty, fast-food-eating squatters. The garbage that litters the floor—discarded McDonald’s food wrappers, neon

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game advertisements, and all manner of glittery and gaudy merchandise—is the capitalistic confetti left over after the extreme debauchery of the event. Having detached from their computer screens and experienced their online ­fantasies and friendships in embodied form, most young gamers are now ready to return to the digital world equipped with a list of new games and websites to visit. Other scholars have examined diaosi as a form of Scott’s infrapolitics: disguised language, jokes, and humor that the powerless use as a form of resistance.54 Like Orwell’s observation that “every joke is a tiny revolution,” concepts like infrapolitics recognize that humor is an age-old form of political critique, and one that is particularly accessible to the powerless. However, a simple application of these interpretations fails to account for the unique contribution of digital culture. Such concepts do not explain why such large numbers of young people at ChinaJoy felt the need to adorn themselves physically with rage face masks and labels like diaosi. The participants found these jokes undeniably fun and funny, but the jokes eluded careful and articulate explanation. Herein lies the significance of a theory of affective intensity, which captures the potential of digital culture to facilitate the public circulation and expression of nascent and ambiguous emotions that might otherwise remain internal to individual experience. Digital media add a new layer of complexity to discussions of infrapolitics and structures of feeling by providing the platform on which affect can accrue intensity and find public expression. The Internet provides the space in which “saying” becomes “shouting,” to recall the argument made by Papacharissi.55 The ambiguity of these Internet memes and terms further compounds the radical potential of digital culture to shine light upon societal tensions and anxieties that lie beneath the surface of everyday life. Affective intensities are born in these gaps: locations of uncertainty where even the individual claiming the label is unable to pinpoint exactly what it means but nonetheless feels it to be true. Trying too hard to fix the meaning of these terms undermines their very purpose, or, as self-proclaimed diaosi have argued: “If you take it seriously, you lose” (renzhen jiu shule). Despite this difficulty, we may still recognize the possibilities unlocked by these ambiguous fragments of digital culture. Internet humor and memes key into gut-level emotions. LOLcats, rage faces, and slang terms like diaosi hang suspended in the Internet ether, there to be claimed, circulated, and transformed as the mood strikes. Unlike previous forms of media, the Internet makes such experimentation

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both accessible and public in a way never before possible. An individual’s feeling of helplessness or despair may be transformed on the Internet; when we create or discover the meme or label that perfectly expresses our current state, our confidence is bolstered by the knowledge that we are not alone in our feelings. What once seemed interior to our individual experience becomes a collectively felt public expression that demands attention. In other words, as memes and slang phrases go viral, affect accrues power. The affective experience of the diaosi has much in common with the notion of the spiritual homeland discussed in Chap. 5. Indeed, here it is important to note that the diaosi also partake in a form of sideways mobility. Queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton, writes, for example, of the queer child and the concept of sideways growth. Stockton notes that a child’s growth has been relentlessly figured as vertical movement upward (hence, “growing up”) toward full stature, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness. Delay, we will see, is tremendously tricky as a conception, as is growth. Both more appropriately call us into notions of the horizontal— what spreads sideways—or sideways and backwards—more than a simple thrust toward height and forward time.56

Stockton’s discussion of growth seems here equally suited to a discussion of young men in China who find themselves in a state of suspended animation (delay) when confronted with realities such as the lack of job prospects, and hence, the lack of marriage prospects. They are, in essence, not allowed to grow up in the heteronormative sense of the word. Similarly, Jack Halberstam writes about “heteronormative common sense,” the kind that “leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct and hope.”57 By contrast, “subordinate, queer, or counterhegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive lifestyles, negativity, and critique,” all of which seem to align well with the lifestyle choices of the loser who chooses to act gay. Conceiving of sideways growth and failure as viable ways of life empowers those who are otherwise disempowered by dominant conceptions of success. By actively choosing to identify themselves as losers and gay friends, male gamers may reclaim a sense of agency and identity. Though marginalized within dominant Chinese culture, they effectively carve out a niche in which their way of life is both acceptable and common.

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The labels and masks so vividly displayed at ChinaJoy tangibly manifest the sideways mobilities enabled by the digital. In this carnival atmosphere, young people unabashedly displayed their weirdness and pursued their personal desires. Duty to family and country receded into the background. Such individualistic pleasure seeking may seem apolitical, but in a country in which individual citizens are tasked with displaying spiritual civilization, it is not a stretch to view it as a tacit form of rebellion. In Chap. 4, I demonstrated how digital leisure culture may serve as a location in which notions of ideal citizenship and patriotic professionalism are cultivated and reinforced. Here, I have highlighted slang terms like diaosi and jiyou in order to show how young people challenge these conventional and socially sanctioned models of success, questioning in particular the extent to which such models are achievable in the context of contemporary China. Their digital symbols and tags, which proudly proclaim failure, ridiculousness, and comic rage, stand in stark contrast to the meticulous efforts of other young people to justify their leisure choices according to standards of productivity and success set forth by the state. Indeed, the reactions of press and government bodies to those practices constitute one of the supreme signals of their importance. Beyond the media panic over Internet addiction discussed in Chap. 3, trending terms such as diaosi have also attracted the attention of the government. In 2012, even so august an organ as the Party’s mouthpiece newspaper People’s Daily warned of the problem of the diaosi mentality (diaosi xintai). On June 2, 2015, the State Internet Information Office convened a conference about the need to “Clean Up Internet Language” and released the “Survey Report on Vulgar Internet Language.”58 The report was published the next day by People’s Daily. The report claims that these words are not “symbols of freedom of expression” but rather tools of harassment, linking the selected vulgar language to an environment of cyberbullying that led to a number of violent incidents and suicides. Unsurprisingly, diaosi was on the list of 25 blacklisted words accused of “violent social endangerment.”59 Ironically, as state media push to eradicate labels like diaosi, corporate entities have embraced them. In early 2013, a Chinese company promoting a new MMORPG unfurled a new advertisement in New York City’s Times Square with the characters for diaosi featured prominently in the center of the billboard. Giant Interactive, the maker of the game, has proclaimed that theirs is the game of diaosi. This same company also claimed to have funded a study of diaosi culture, finding that 526 million people,

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over one-third of the Chinese population, identified themselves as diaosi. This report, which can be read in full online, was an elaborate April Fool’s joke.60 In his classic explanation of subcultures, Dick Hebdige notes that mass culture co-opts many subcultural signs and turns them into mass-­produced objects. He cites the example of punk fashion, where the originally subversive use of ripped clothing held together by safety pins ultimately slid into adoption by high-end fashion houses. Hebdige observes, “youth cultural styles may begin by issuing symbolic challenges, but they must inevitably end by establishing new sets of conventions.”61 It should not surprise us, then, that the once alternative diaosi have, in their popularity, become the new normal. An article entitled “Are China’s ‘losers’ really winning?” suggests that the popularity of luxury goods such as high-end watches and designer clothing may be waning in contemporary China.62 Some suggest that the popularity of the diaosi meme may be attributed to a more traditional cultural emphasis on modesty and maintaining a self-effacing attitude toward personal success. Xu Zidong argues that China’s recent communist past has left a legacy of hating wealth: “Even though everyone wants wealth in real life, in public they all pretend to be poor.”63 Few Chinese wish to admit to being tall-rich-and-­ handsome. In keeping with Hebdige’s description of mass cultural appropriation of subcultures, the popularity of the diaosi meme has made it an attractive device through which to market more modestly priced products and brands. The stark contrast between the state’s efforts to quash these viral terms and the corporations’ eagerness to embrace them provides yet another intriguing glimpse into the tensions that plague contemporary Chinese society. Such tensions help to account for the ambiguity reflected in the viral labels themselves. In interpreting diaosi, the observer is always left wondering whether the loser secretly desires the moneyed lifestyle of the tall-rich-and-handsome that he mocks. Do the self-proclaimed jiyou embrace queer identities and reject heteronormativity, or do they merely contribute to a culture that stigmatizes those who truly identify with the non-normative? These are questions that hit at the heart of conundrums faced by urban youth. As with the young man who could only offer the explanation of “fun” when questioned about the meaning of the tags he wore in his hair, many of the young people I interviewed seemed equally unsure about how to grapple with the contradictions posed by their contemporary lifestyles.

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In 2018, a new word rose to prominence on the English-speaking Internet: “incel,” the involuntary celibate. On April 25, 2018, a 25-year-­old man killed ten people in a van attack on the busy streets of Toronto. In a Facebook post, he claimed allegiance to the “Incel Rebellion.” According to the news outlet Vox, the rise of the so-called incel culture is “a testament to the power of online communities to radicalize frustrated young men based on their most personal and painful grievances.”64 While reading about the “incel rebellion,” I could not help but think back to the young man I met at ChinaJoy in 2015. The tags he sported in his hair—diaosi, a piece of scum, and FFF Group—seemed to embody many of the traits associated with the incel identity. At that time and for some time thereafter, I was puzzled by the FFF group and its meaning. The FFF group, also known as the FFF inquisition, derives its name from a popular Japanese anime: Baka and Test. The series itself revolves around a group of student misfits assigned to class 2-F (the lowest-ranking class in the school). The FFF group emerges in nightmarish fantasy sequences, dressed in black hoods, to mete out corporal punishment on unsuspecting students. According to the English-language wiki devoted to the topic, the FFF inquisition “punishes those with attention from girls due to the fact that they are all without this attention…due to their own curse of having no one…[they] attempt to punish those who aren’t cursed to make things fair.”65 On August 8, 2014, Sohu News picked up a story about the arrest of two young men in Henan province, China, who were wearing black hoods and carrying scythes. According to the story, they were mistaken for terrorists, when in fact they were harmless cosplayers, dressed to imitate members of the FFF group.66 While it may be true that most of the young men who identify with the FFF group are as harmless as cosplayers, the ideological similarities between the FFF group and those calling themselves incels are striking. The incels emerge from the dark corners of internet sites like reddit and 4chan, which are notorious for their lax policies about hate speech and other forms of legally questionable behavior. While most of those identifying with this label lurk in online forums and pose little threat to the average citizen, the most radicalized of the bunch have transformed the verbal abuse and invectives of trolling culture into real-world physical violence. I sincerely hope that there is no such radical arm of the FFF group, but I feel it necessary to acknowledge the similar affective state that undergirds the emergence of these two online identities.

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It must be pointed out that the incels, like the diaosi and those who identify with labels such as FFF group, are hardly the world’s greatest losers. While some individuals who identify with these labels may be better off than others, most of them occupy positions of relative privilege in the world. Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in California in 2014 and is revered by incels as the “supreme gentleman,” was the son of a Hollywood filmmaker and drove a BMW.67 If the incels represent the dangerous extremes of white male privilege—those who feel so entitled to sexual attention from women that they commit heinous acts of violence when their desires go unfulfilled—then labels like diaosi, jiyou, and FFF group represent the fallout of China’s one-child policy, which left male only-­ children faced with a severe gender imbalance and the burden of parental expectations but without the material means to realize their dreams. In both cases, these are not individuals who are even marginally poor, let alone living in extreme poverty. These people are middle and upper-­middle class, and often well educated. Their embodiment of the loser identity signals an affective deficit more than a material one. Indeed, it is easy to see how both the incels and those embracing labels such as diaosi, jiyou, and FFF group emerge from the crisis of masculinity discussed earlier. While many digital media optimists suggest that the Internet is a panacea that may cure the world of inequality in all its forms, the pessimists insist that it may very well do the opposite: exacerbate and magnify difference. Though hoping that the affective intensity shared by diaosi could open up radical new possibilities for those who disavow the heteronormative model of success, I must acknowledge that the opposite possibility exists: that it will magnify societal problems and lead to the violent radicalization of those who perceive themselves to be losers. One of the limitations of this study is that it cannot fully resolve such issues. In this chapter, I have instead focused on understanding the mechanisms by which such tensions find expression in Chinese popular culture. I have shown how young people in China have remixed and reclaimed the perennial loser trope, weaponizing it in a way that provokes questions about dominant constructions of heteronormative success. Terms such as diaosi and jiyou, inward-directed forms of self-mocking, are in fact mechanisms by which young people cleverly turn the spotlight outward at the corrupt elite who have profited at the expense of the common citizen. Affective intensities enable this delicate maneuvering. These loosely articulated but intensely felt states of being thrive in a digital environment in which emotions can circulate freely, defying fixed interpretation and becoming public through the power of the collective.

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Henry Jenkins promotes the idea that youth throughout the globe are engaged in new forms of “participatory politics” that take place through online activity, including the making and sharing of memes. Jenkins sees such participatory politics as “politics that often stretch beyond our institutional understanding of what constitutes the political, that involve kinds of cultural activities that invoke the production and sharing of media.”68 The case study of the diaosi and jiyou offers but one culturally specific example of such participatory politics. But the concept of affective intensity works to orient a mapping of the complex process by which not only these but also other new forms of politics may find expression via digital leisure culture.

Notes 1. For an explanation of economic function of gamer guilds, see Zhang and Fung, “Working as Playing?”; At ChinaJoy, gamer guilds visit different game stalls to promote new game titles to their members. 2. See Niko Partners, “ChinaJoy 2015 Recap” and Niko Partners, “ChinaJoy 2019”; in 2019, ChinaJoy boasted 364,700 entries. 3. The FFF Group, an online collective inspired by a storyline in the popular anime Baka and Test, has been described as a group of “couple haters” who police and punish those in successful heteronormative relationships. 4. See Phillips, Can’t Have Nice Things; LULZ is a bastardization of the acronym LOL, or laugh out loud. Unlike LOL, LULZ usually refer to a particular kind of cynical or mean-spirited laughter, often at someone else’s expense. LULZ is the calling card of trolls. 5. Rojek, Labour of Leisure, 1, emphasis in original. 6. Orwell, “Funny, but not Vulgar.” 7. Papacharissi, Affective Publics, 95, 107. 8. Rofel, “Yearnings,” 705. 9. Papacharissi, Affective Publics, 114. 10. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132. 11. Williams, 132. 12. Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotions, 4. 13. See “Hitler’s ‘Downfall’ Parodies.” 14. Paasonen, “A Midsummer’s Bonfire,” 28. 15. Xu, “Diaosi shenshang.” 16. Diaosi nadian shi. 17. Xu, “Diaosi shenshang.” 18. Yaoi, also known as “Boys’ Love,” is a particular subgenre of Japanese manga that features romantic relationships between two young male protagonists. Notably, in many of these tales, the two men do not overtly

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identify as homosexual. This subgenre has gained limited popularity in China, and is often read by females, who are known as “Rotten Girls” or funü. 19. “Gaoji,” Baidu Baike. 20. There is no direct English translation for the Chinese term kaihei but, according to gamer forums, the phrase refers to the process of creating a team of players who are closely connected through either physical location (playing in the same Internet café, for example) or voice chat platforms such as YY. This custom-built team maintains close contact among members and generally has an advantage over teams that were randomly selected or matched up by the computer. Most specifically, the phrase may be a reference to the black lobby window that appears when players attempt to create a custom team/game. 21. Wei Wei, “Good Gay Buddies,” 24. 22. Tencent Global Esports Arena, Lu you Pai; It is worth noting that the Chinese nickname for the real-time strategy game League of Legends is LOL, also rendered as lu a lu. In Chinese, the term lu means to “tug” or “pull,” but it has become a slang reference to the act of masturbation. As such, the act of playing the game itself is equated with loser culture and its emphasis on young men’s inability to find a sexual partner. 23. “Zhei bo zhen bu kui,” Lu you Pai. 24. Peng, “Luohun.” 25. Silbert, “China Ditty ‘Little Apple.’” 26. Tengxun yule, “Jiemi Kuaizi Xiongdi.” 27. Powell, “Gender Imbalance.” 28. See Jin, “Cong zhongchan dao diaosi”; Li and Tang, “Zoujin ‘diaosi’”; Yang et al., “Diaosi as Infrapolitics.” 29. Yang et al., “Diaosi as Infrapolitics.” 30. Messner and de Oca, “Male Consumer as Loser,” 1882. 31. Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 77. 32. Lu, True Story of Ah-Q. 33. Tan, “Diaosi chuan.” 34. Xu, “Diaosi shenshang.” 35. Zheng, “Masculinity in Crisis,” 347. 36. Zheng, 347. 37. Evans, “Sexed Bodies,” 361. 38. Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity, 4. 39. Phillips, Can’t Have Nice Things. 40. Douglas, “Internet Ugly Aesthetic.” 41. Smith, The Joy of Pain. 42. For a full discussion of Furong Jiejie and her rise to fame, see Guo, “Eyes of the Internet.”

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43. Guo, “Eyes of the Internet,” 160. 44. Marwick, Status Update. 45. Liu, “Hush! BBStar Sister Furong.” 46. On the Chinese Internet, stories of corrupt officials and their children abound. Many of these, like the story of one spoiled young man who struck and killed a woman on a college campus only to claim that he was above the law because his dad worked for the police force, have become the source of viral memes (My dad is Li Gang!). 47. One notable scandal making headlines around the same time as the diaosi was the investigation of Zhou Yongkang, then a senior leader in the CCP. Zhou and his family were accused and later found guilty of taking millions in bribes. Chinese netizens discussed the disgraced leader, whose name was promptly censored, using the instant noodle brand Master Kang (Kang Shifu) and later simply “instant noodles” (fangbian mian). 48. Taylor, “Play Globally, Act Locally,” 236. 49. Sudén and Sveningsson, Passionate Play, 48. 50. Sudén and Sveningsson, 49. 51. Wu, Fore, Wang, and Ho, “Beyond Virtual Carnival and Masquerade.” 52. Huang, “Qianxi ‘diaosi wenhua’”; wood ear is a type of edible fungus common in Chinese cuisine. 53. Hammaren and Johanssen, “Homosociality,” 1; Sedgwick, Between Men. 54. Yang et al., “Diaosi as Infrapolitics.” 55. Papacharissi, “Affective Publics.” 56. Stockton, The Queer Child, 4. 57. Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 89. 58. The creation of the State Internet Information Office was announced in May 2011. Seen as indicative of Xi Jinping’s desire to crack down on Internet expression, the Internet Information office’s role is to “coordinate and supervise online content management” (Xinhua, May 4, 2011). 59. Chen, “‘Wangluo disu yuyan diaocha.’” 60. “Shi Yuzhu tuandui fa leiren baogao.” 61. Hebdige, Subculture, 96. 62. Zhang and Barreda, “Are China’s Losers.” 63. Xu, “Diaosi shenshang.” 64. Beauchamp, “Incel.” 65. “FFF Inquisition,” Baka to Test Shoukanjuu Wiki [in English]; “FFF tuan,” Baidu Baike [in Chinese]. 66. Chen, “FFF tuan beyi.” 67. BBC News, “Elliot Rodger.” 68. Jenkins, “Counterpublics.”

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Mainstreaming and Marginalizing Digital Games

The most popular Chinese television drama of 2016 was a series called Love O2O.1 The show depicts a couple whose partnership in an online game turns into a real-life romance. The script could easily have been penned by the CEO of an Internet game company, so concerted is its effort to counteract negative stereotypes about gamers and online game culture. One of the opening scenes of the show presents the male protagonist, Xiao Nai, playing a traditional game of Go (weiqi) with his uncle (who, coincidentally, owns a chain of impeccably clean Internet cafés). In the adjoining room, the heroine, Bei Weiwei, who has been forced to visit the Internet café after her laptop malfunctions, logs onto an online game for a scheduled battle (PK) with an in-game nemesis. The scene juxtaposes Xiao Nai’s carefully calculated moves in the board game with Weiwei’s martial-arts-inspired fighting in the online game. Throughout the series, the two protagonists straddle the desirable qualities of China’s past and present. On one hand, they are the opposite of antisocial losers; they are good-looking, smart, and, in Xiao Nai’s case, exceedingly wealthy—all the ideals of the cosmopolitan present. They are the envy of their peers, who repeatedly refer to them as the campus god and goddess. At the same time, they exhibit all the most prized qualities of Confucian morality: both of them are filial, modest, and studious.

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Xiao Nai and Weiwei are both computer science majors who aspire to becoming game designers. This plot device allows the series creators to stress that games are sites of productivity, not merely a pastime but also a future career path. Weiwei, for example, approaches her game play as subject of study, keeping a dedicated notebook in which she logs observations. Her methodical approach to gaming prompts her exasperated roommate to remark, “other people play games to pass the time, but you plan out your entire life when you play…a bookworm’s brain is sure different from a normal person’s!” The message conveyed by the series could not be more explicit: used by the right people, under the right circumstances, online games cultivate skill and strategic thinking. The success of Love O2O is but one of many manifestations of the mainstreaming of digital gaming culture in contemporary China. As Christina Xu observes, the popularization of game-related slang is another signal that gaming culture has permeated society. Terms such as “PK,” referring to in-game battles, have crept in as common parlance even among adults who do not play games themselves.2 Digital game culture has become a part of everyday life. But it has also been subject to intense rebranding efforts, as the government, the media, and game companies try to create distance between the so-called healthy digital gaming habits and those behaviors seen as harmful and addictive.

Protests of the Imagination As mentioned in the introduction, this book is about the social relations, imaginaries, and discourses that flow through and around digital games, not about the games themselves. I have intentionally avoided a deep dive into the games in favor of a situational analysis mapping technique that invites a breadth of perspective. This approach allows a bird’s-eye view of the topography of digital gaming culture as it is constantly molded and reshaped by the push and pull of discourse and affect. Some of the topics covered in this book, such as youth experiences in Internet cafés and the machinima War of Internet Addiction, admittedly belong to an earlier era of digital media use, but they provide the context necessary for understanding how and why the loser has become a figure of affective identification for youth today. Even as young people nostalgically reminisce about carefree and rebellious days in the Internet café, their early encounters with technology and sites of technological access also served as stepping stones on their path of upward socioeconomic

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mobility; internet cafés are relegated to a lower position, and provide the foundation upon which they first began to draw distinctions between productive and unproductive forms of leisure. As digital media use became more entrenched in the everyday lives of youth, so too did the dividing practices used to separate the so-called healthy media use from online behaviors seen as wasteful and addictive. These divisions were reinforced by the media moral panic over Internet addiction, as well as by college students’ own narratives about the difference between esports and Internet games. Such media and student narratives take a technologically determinist stance and cast blame on digital games and locations of game play such as the Internet café. By contrast, those who find affective identification in games contend that game playing is not the cause of failure; for them, their infatuation with games is a symptom of a broken system in which failure is fated for all but a few. Those who actively adopt the loser label turn the lens outward, shining a light on problems like stalled socioeconomic mobility and the corruption of China’s governing elite. Digital media may provide a platform for the airing of these grievances, but games and the culture that springs up around them may also exacerbate the problems. In response to my concept of sideways mobility, one scholar posed the question of “whether sideways mobility into/by gaming tends to make gamers more complacent or more angry in their present socioeconomic circumstances.” This is indeed a compelling question. Sideways mobility may provide youth with a sense of positive movement when other, more traditional paths to vertical mobility are restricted, but it also encourages young people to fantasize about modes of life that are largely unachievable. Like the nostalgia for Internet cafés, sideways mobility is also in part a kind of nostalgia. It is, as Svetlana Boym articulates, the manifestation of a longing for a “St. Elsewhere, another time, a better life.”3 This kind of longing is evident in the post–1980 generation nostalgia films, in which the characters seem to desire a mythic return to their golden childhood. It is a kind of “restorative nostalgia” that seeks the impossible: the rebuilding of an idealized past.4 For some gamers, disillusioned by the inequalities wrought by the market system and feeling hopeless about the future, this may be exactly what they desire. But, since the time and place they long for never existed as such in the first place, a true return is impossible, and they instead achieve time travel through the game, where beautiful worlds of collective equality and belonging await them.

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Such discrepancies between expectations and reality have been addressed in previous chapters and by reference to the work of Vanessa Fong. We may also recall the discussion of social precarity in Japan offered by Anne Allison, who notes that although Japan once had a burgeoning middle class, it is now an increasingly polarized society of winners and losers. Furthermore, this divide exists at the psychological level, among those young people who have hope and those who do not: “For it would seem that hope is what precarity,…,has endangered.”5 Other scholars have interrogated the realm of the everyday and its political possibilities. Michel de Certeau theorizes the ways people can subvert the system through tactical means without leaving it. He describes, for example, how people can “poach” upon “the property of others” or “divert” the time on the job to serve personal ends.6 By contrast, many of the most devoted Internet gamers appear to submit to the system, making long commutes to work and putting up with cramped and expensive apartments. They seem the epitome of what Foucault terms “docile bodies.”7 But while their bodies submit, their minds are detached. The city may be the site of their physical presence, but their spiritual presence is located in the digital world. This too, I would argue, may be seen as a tactical approach, one that undermines the dominant order without fully leaving it. It may be an important act of protest in an age in which “it is not docile bodies but active citizens that are the desired end products.”8 In heralding the rise of the active citizen, Nikolas Rose describes the manner in which “the individual was to conduct his or her life, and that of his or her family, as a kind of enterprise, seeking to enhance and capitalize on existence itself through calculated acts and investments.”9 For Xiaomei and her friends in financial studies, the exceptional few, dreams of real-­ world entrepreneurial success still seemed plausible. But many gamers exhibited deep cynicism about the Real World’s ever fulfilling their dreams and desires. Instead, they became entrepreneurs in the game. Some went so far as to sell game currency for real cash value; others remained content to level-up with friends, adorn their avatars, or even go on a virtual sightseeing excursion. Theirs was a kind of enterprise that took place within the virtual world, one as yet lacking mainstream legitimacy. In this sense, many of the most devoted Internet gamers were engaged in a protest of the imagination. To the American ear, the loser phenomenon may call to mind the complaints made by members of Occupy Wall Street’s “99%.” Like diaosi, the phrase “we are the 99%” was polysemic and open to interpretation. As Zizi

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Papacharissi notes, the “openness of the 99% refrain was meant to resonate with a variety of diverse publics and reinforce a call to solidarity and awareness.”10 To this I might add that another strength of the 99% refrain, like that of the diaosi, was its ability to define by negation. Both the 99% and diaosi identities brought people together in solidarity against that which they were not—the wealthy and corrupt 1%—more than they brought individuals together over any precise sense of collective identity. Despite the fact that the diaosi have not engaged in large-scale on-the-­ ground protests, both groups harnessed the affective potential of the Internet to give voice to a disenfranchised majority. One of the most persuasive elements of the Occupy Wall Street movement was its “We are the 99%” tumblr, in which thousands of individuals posted photos of handwritten placards that shared their stories of economic hardship.11 While the tumblr offered no prescription for addressing these problems, the stories themselves were personal and emotional, and, in combination with hundreds of other stories on the site, they created a mosaic of deeply felt, embodied despair. What also becomes clear in the comparison of the 99% and the diaosi is that the target is the sense that the dream of upward socioeconomic mobility is increasingly out of reach for the majority of people. Wealth itself is not the target. In the cases of both the 99% and diaosi, celebrities and other wealthy individuals have pledged their support and allegiance for the cause. Within China, post-1980 generation poster boy and racing-driver-­ turned-author Han Han made headlines for declaring that he too was diaosi. He may be what many would consider tall, rich, and handsome, but Han Han’s declaration was acceptable because of his rural origins and the fact that he was a self-made man. The enemy for both the 99% and the diaosi is the wealthy few who aggrandize themselves at the expense of the average citizen. Yet both the 99% and the diaosi leave us with questions, chief of which is whether such expansive and amorphous affective intensities are capable of spurring meaningful political change. In the wake of Occupy Wall Street, many critics were quick to argue that the “movement” (if it could even be termed such a thing) had “spiraled into irrelevance and relative obscurity.”12 On the other hand, Zizi Papacharissi holds fast to the idea that “change is gradual” and that these kinds of viral media messages constitute “soft structures of meaning-making practices” that may ultimately lay the groundwork for more systemic change.13 I understand why some might argue that these collective affective intensities have little immediate

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impact. But I hold out hope that, like the slow process of water weathering stone as it reshapes earth’s topography, the flow of affect via social media will eventually help to reshape the system.

Precarity, Privilege, and Affective Deficit Another lingering issue has to do with the fact that such movements, while taking up the mantle of the underprivileged loser, often operate from spaces of relative privilege. By this I do not mean to suggest that those who took part in Occupy Wall Street and/or those who claim the diaosi label are disingenuous. It is nevertheless striking that the loser is a figure of such universal appeal that even celebrities can identify with it. We must also keep in mind that those who posted to the 99% tumblr, like those youth sporting diaosi labels in online forums or in places like ChinaJoy, are part of a technologically skilled community. These youths have access to technology, and they know how to harness the affordances of technology in such a way as to make their voices heard. Here, I find it necessary to draw a distinction between those whose lives are truly precarious—those who cannot maintain a home and put food on the table, for example—and those for whom precarity is an affective state, a felt but not fully materialized reality. For it seems that longing for a St. Elsewhere is not confined to the lower class. Young people who hold down steady jobs and who are, for the most part, settled and comfortable in life, also seem overcome by a sense of dissatisfaction. We have seen how even privileged children of China’s middle and upper classes—like Xiaolong and his friends—exhibit this same sense of dissatisfaction and restlessness. The Chinese state, while working to expand the market and develop the nation’s image, has failed to engage the people’s imagination. This, as I have noted in Chap. 6, is the very essence of affective deficit. During the summer of 2017, a number of news outlets reported on the newest trend to sweep Chinese social media: sang culture. Sang, which refers to loss, discouragement, and bereavement, is the latest iteration of loser culture in China. According to Chinese media site Sixth Tone, sang culture is about “idleness” characterized by a “reduced work ethic, a lack of self-motivation, and an apathetic demeanor.”14 The term is noticeably popular among middle-class Chinese youth. The relative privilege of those identifying with sang culture is illustrated by one popular sang trend, the proliferation of kitschy tea shops selling drinks with names such as “wasting my life” green tea or “I can’t afford a house” macchiato for 18–23

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RMB (approximately US$3–4). Like the term diaosi and the culture of Internet gaming before it, sang culture drew the ire of People’s Daily Online, which issued a scathing editorial warning youth not to drink the “spiritual opium” of sang tea.15 As noted in the previous chapter, social media and the Internet have become bastions of loser culture, locations where failure and cultural commentary about failure proliferate. But in all its forms, from the nostalgia that surrounds carefree days in the Internet café to disavowals of heteronormative success via the figure of the diaosi, the loser culture has invariably been repackaged in commoditized form. Corporations have even started to manufacture and market their own “loser” trends. For example, the Shanghai-based sang pop-up shop was sponsored by none-other than Internet tech giant NetEase and the online food delivery service, Eleme. This prompts one to question whether sang culture was a spontaneous subcultural phenomenon in the first place. While luxury brands continue to push products on the basis of aspirational wealth, social media companies seem to have embraced a marketing strategy that does the opposite. They have, paradoxically, found a way to profit from youths’ self-perceived lack of wealth. In essence, social media companies are selling young people’s own dissatisfaction back to them. The evolution of sang culture follows a pattern that should by now be familiar: the circulation of memes and cultural content online becomes a source of collective affective identification for youth; this spontaneous cultural content is then co-opted and resold by corporate media companies, resulting in the growing visibility of a once-underground cultural phenomenon; finally, government and/or official media organizations, perceiving threat in the power of this new phenomenon, react with panic and/or censure. The repetitive and cyclical nature of this memetic content prompts one to wonder: what is the ultimate outcome of all of this? Does the push and pull of mediated affect and dominant discourse result in nothing more than dynamic equilibrium, in which small changes have little overall effect? The preoccupation with the loser emerges at a time when most of the world is coping with increasing economic stratification and ideological division. The Internet has a way of magnifying these divisions; the minute details of the lifestyles of the world’s rich and famous were never so accessible as they are today online. Images of the glorious excesses of capitalism sit one click away from images documenting its catastrophic consequences: natural disasters, forced human migration, and political upheaval. The

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images we see may cultivate a never-ending sense of malaise, of longing for lifestyles, places, and collective experiences that are unachievable outside of the space of the virtual. They may even cultivate despair and disillusionment. It may well be that the culture of information overload on the Internet has heightened our sense of our collective precarity, even when it does not affect us on an individual level.

Problematizing Escape This book has said a great deal about the significance of having a space of one’s own. For Virginia Woolf, personal space is a necessity for a woman in order to conduct work free of the confines of a male-dominated society. Personal leisure space is also of enormous importance. Such personal space is intimately connected to power, but in what way? Rojek reminds us, “the analysis of free time practice always poses the subsidiary questions, freedom from what? And freedom from whom?”16 Gamer narratives such as those encountered in Chap. 5 cast the game space as a location of complete freedom, of release, or of escape from immobilization within the market economy and the restrictive confines of state-led society. Gamers’ descriptions make World of Warcraft and other games seem virtual utopias. But to what extent is the game space indeed a source of freedom or escape from the confines of the “real” world? There is something problematic in positioning one world as real and another as entirely detached from reality. Society always requires fantasy to operate; fantasy is what makes reality work and it is also what makes exploitation tolerable.17 We should therefore ask whether digital games, no matter how seemingly idyllic, can ever really be just an escape. In their book Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter paint quite the opposite picture of games. Analyzing two MMORPGs, Second Life and America’s Army, they talk not of escape but of the ways in which these games serve to “reassert, rehearse, and reinforce Empire’s twin vital subjectivities of worker-consumer and soldier-citizen.”18 In other words, they argue that games serve as a form of interpellation, a means by which gamers are initiated as subjects of the dominant ideology. Similar processes occur in the games Chinese students were playing, though I have only touched upon them in passing. Certainly, the scene at the games expo ChinaJoy, introduced in Chap. 6, shows that games are firmly in the grip of the capitalist market economy. Within the games, the black market

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trading of goods and charge cards can be seen as training young people in the art of the market. Furthermore, government efforts to promote red net games and games with Chinese cultural content reveal that even the government is aware of and aims to use games’ ideological power. These examples suggest that such virtual worlds are indeed more closely tied to the dominant ideology and to the capitalist market economy than gamers themselves care to believe. Ultimately, I must concede that the alternative reality of the game is not necessarily diametrically opposed to the system that diaosi seek to critique. Although I have discussed only a few of their details, it should be readily apparent that the content of many of these games does force young people to deal with themes of capitalism, risk, competition, gender norms, and so on. The crucial difference, for games, is that all of that is slightly distorted by a magical element that removes all true consequences and inequalities: if you die, you can come back; if you work hard enough, put in enough time, you will become rich; if you are a female avatar, you can switch to male when you feel like reversing gender roles. This distortion of reality is the space in which affect bubbles up. The space feels like an imagined utopia, when it is actually a reflection of society, minus irrevocable consequences. This reading fits with the concept of sideways mobility, suggesting that games offer horizontal movement to a parallel universe, one that mirrors present society while also somehow distorting and erasing the constraints and injustices found therein. We might note that fantasy literature has arguably played a similar role in years past. I was reminded of this when hearing an author of contemporary fantasy fiction, Lev Grossman, talk about the function of fantasy. Grossman theorized that the great fantasy fiction that emerged in the late 1920s and 1930s, like that of C.S.  Lewis and J.R.R.  Tolkien, was the product of historical trauma: the end of Victorian society and the emergence of radically new things such as mass media, electricity, automobiles, psychoanalysis, and mechanized warfare. He argued that fantasy literature became a way for the authors “to express their sense of longing for a lost world, an idyllic, more grounded, more organic, more connected world that they would never see again.”19 With regard to China, Perry Link discusses a type of early twentieth-century pulp fiction known as the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction. According to Link, although more serious authors looked down upon this kind of fiction as poorly written, it served an important function by introducing new themes, such as technological innovations and Western cultural trends, to an audience who would

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­ therwise have shunned them as foreign. Because these new ideas came o packaged in a familiar narrative form, readers could digest them and experiment with them without feeling that they were taking any real risks.20 Here again, we see how so-called fantasy and reality bleed together. I must therefore agree with Lev Grossman’s statement in his 2011 interview: “Great fantasy is not pure escapism, where characters can wish their problems away. It’s a way of re-encountering the same problems we face in the real world, but in a stranger, more vivid form.”21

Finding Space Through various ethnographic vignettes, I have mentioned the limitations of the physical spaces in which many young people live. From austere dorm rooms to sprawling but desolate suburban campuses, young people’s everyday surroundings in urban China are notable for their lack of imagination and inspiration. By contrast, the vivid fantasy worlds of digital games offer a plethora of visual stimuli and creative possibilities. In the words of my interlocutors, games furnish “spiritual homelands” that encourage desires and the imagination to thrive. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, digital leisure culture can permit a kind of virtual mobility in cases where physical or socioeconomic mobility is impossible. The effects of the residential permit system (hukou) and monetary constraints on one’s ability to travel are juxtaposed in gamer narratives with the excitement of exploring new lands in the game world. For young people who cannot afford to travel to faraway or exotic locations, games simulate travel. Yet even this virtual mobility is increasingly policed. In the game space, government restrictions and censorship disrupt players’ mobility. The physical locations where games are played, such as Internet cafés, are stigmatized by the media and by strict regulations that portray those cafés as something from which youth must be protected. These kinds of spatial restrictions must be considered against the backdrop of the space of the city and the restricted mobility of many young urban citizens. As the machinima War of Internet Addiction demonstrates, the government’s attempts to intervene in the space of the game are seen as infringing upon gamer rights, and may be a potential point of political mobilization for young gamers who feel that games are a spiritual homeland, existing separate from the confines of the Real World.

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Over the course of my research, I grew quite close to Xiaomei and her friends, attending esports competitions with them and visiting their homes. Their story is illustrative of the experience of many college students in China. Gaming was for them both a pastime and a source of new friendships and sociality, but they remained wary of spending too much time on an activity that could distract them from their schoolwork and career goals. They were substantially in agreement with the government and media position that gaming held the potential to become a harmful and addictive activity. Not surprisingly, therefore, they found ways to frame their own gaming activities in terms of skill building and competition. The growing acceptance of professional esports provided them with the justification they needed in order to position their leisure activities as both patriotic and professionally minded, standing in sharp contrast to the addicted losers who, they felt, used games to compensate for unfulfilling careers. This outlook was very much rooted in class identities, and is indicative of Xiaomei’s and her friends’ view of themselves as upwardly mobile young professionals. By contrast, although Xiaolong and his friends, among all the students I met, were in the most privileged position in terms of financial security, they seemed the most clearly disillusioned by their available choices. Meeting up with Xiaolong a few years into our acquaintance, I heard from him about his thankless job working as a manager for a clothing manufacturer, a job he described as involving nothing more than pai mapi (ass-­ kissing) in order to cultivate other business contacts. Unlike Xiaomei and her friends, who spoke of games as they spoke of schoolwork, Xiaolong and his group used gaming to rebel against parental and societal expectations. The members of this clique offered a glimpse into the style of gaming decried by the press and parents for its supposedly addictive effects; these young people were also the most openly critical of the Chinese state’s attempts to control the leisure choices of its citizenry. Their ability to circumnavigate government censors and their interest in controversial films such as War of Internet Addiction seemed to signal a nascent kind of political identity. And although my contact with Xiaolong and his friends predates the emergence of the viral term diaosi or loser, it is this same spirit of rebelliousness and rejection that animates loser culture. Among all of them, we may see a nascent politics rooted in the desire for lifestyles and identities that do not align with the goals of the Chinese state and its narrow definition of what constitutes ideal citizenship. These examples help

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to highlight the political potential embedded within digital leisure culture in urban China. Finally, the experience of Jordan calls attention to the contradictory nature of dominant discourse about gaming in urban China. While the press frames Internet gaming as a dangerous form of spiritual opium, it also simultaneously promotes professional competitive gaming as a source of national pride and patriotic leisure. Yet the coverage of gaming in the media does not capture the individual experiences and struggles of young people who grapple with the stigma of Internet addiction and the volatility of the Chinese gaming market. While the most successful esports athletes may land lucrative sponsorships and future careers as announcers and spokesmen, the vast majority of esports pros find themselves without a job after just a few years of competition. At first glance the esports athlete— adored by thousands of fans, performing in confetti-filled arenas, and featured in numerous media interviews and advertising campaigns—seems the polar opposite of the laughed-at loser figure. Yet, for most of these athletes, success is at best fleeting and at worst completely illusory. Despite hailing from different circumstances and facing different futures, the youth featured in the book’s vignettes share a similar affective attachment to digital games. The characterization of digital games as a spiritual homeland highlights the important role that affect plays in digital gaming and leisure culture, a theme that I have explored throughout this book. These spiritual homelands are not only locations of sociality and solace, but also sites around which collectively felt nostalgia, anxieties about the future, and political awareness pool and grow in volume.

A Changing China and the Enduring Panic Much has changed since I began research for this study in 2009. This book does not examine some of the latest developments in Chinese digital game culture, such as the popularity of online streaming sites and the meteoric rise of the esports industry. It is telling, that, in the years since Xiaomei first asserted that she played esports, but not Internet games, the Chinese media interest in esports has skyrocketed. According to my review of newspaper headlines in the China Core Newspapers Database, between 2016 and 2018, headlines about esports have overtaken headlines about Internet games. In 2018 alone, 158 headlines mentioned dianzi jingji, while only 115 mentioned wangluo youxi. It is also interesting to note that, while esports mentions have been steadily increasing since 2012

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(when there were only two headlines all year that mentioned the term dianzi jingji), Internet game coverage was on the wane until 2017 (when there were only 35 headlines as compared to the high of 451 in 2009). As I note in Chap. 3, in late 2017 the World Health Organization publicly announced its plans to include gaming disorder in the ICD-11. It is therefore no coincidence that the Chinese government is also now demonstrating a renewed interest in the issue of Internet addiction and Internet games. Finally, mobile gaming has taken the country by storm, meaning that the experience of playing digital games is even more widespread than before. China itself is also undergoing rapid transformation. In the era of Xi Jinping, China has tightened its grip on the Internet within its borders, and many scholars note that digital media have enabled new modes of surveillance and sousveillance, to the point that they may now benefit corporations and authoritarian regimes more so than they do democratic change. The institution of the universal two-child policy, which replaced the one-child policy in January of 2016, means that youth of the future will confront different challenges from those faced by the only-children in my study. All of these changes raise new questions for scholars interested in researching the topography of digital gaming culture in China. But having observed the evolution of Chinese Internet cafés and digital gaming over the course of nearly two decades, I have found most noteworthy the persistence of the panic that surrounds this cultural phenomenon. Despite advances, the discussion of policy and media coverage in Chap. 3 should make it clear that China still struggles to reconcile its stance on Internet addiction with its desire to promote the digital game industry. The debate about how to treat the so-called addicts continues to affect the leisure choices and subjectivities of youth. This book has mapped shifts in the topography of digital gaming culture, but the media headlines about the subject demonstrate how much remains the same. Indeed, media headlines throughout the globe make clear that China is not alone in this addiction panic. Ultimately, the global concern about digital gaming addiction reflects a fear that we are losing control—of our youth, our minds, our future. Those who advocate for the medicalization of Internet addiction or Internet gaming disorder argue that technology is to blame for this loss of control, but casting the blame on technology distracts us from examining the human impulses that undergird our decisions to create and adopt new media.

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I must admit that my conclusion shares with many of the works cited in this book a profound ambivalence about our technological future. I am both optimistic and pessimistic. I remain optimistic, in that digital media undeniably provide platforms that permit youth to become more aware of their subject positions and the shortcomings of the society in which they live. I am pessimistic, in that digital media also enable modes of fantasy and longing that create inflated expectations about the lifestyles that are desirable and attainable in our contemporary world. The diaosi seem to critique this kind of excess, but, as I note in Chap. 6, they may also be engaged in what Slavoj Žižek calls “cynical ideology,” secretly longing for the very thing they denounce. Papacharissi notes that part of the problem with linking social media to political change is that we suffer from our own misperceptions about how quickly or easily change happens.22 Just because a tweet overcomes the barriers of time and space, it does not mean that systemic change can happen in the same instantaneous way. The challenge is to find a way to harness the imaginative possibilities of digital gaming culture, without giving in to panic or despair when we invariably find that our everyday life cannot match the idyll of the game world.

Notes 1. Lin, dir. Weiwei Yixiao. The show is based on a successful novel of the same name. 2. Xu, “Lingo of Games.” 3. Boym, Future of Nostalgia, xiv. 4. Boym, 42. 5. Allison, “Precarious Sociality,” 5. 6. de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xii. 7. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139. 8. Campbell, “Technologies of Suspicion,” 80–81. 9. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 164. 10. Papacharissi, Affective Publics, 87. 11. See the archived tumblr posts online at http://wearethe99percent.tumblr. com/ 12. Ostroy, “Failure of Occupy.” 13. Papacharissi, “Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling.” 14. Zeng, “Turn Off, Drop Out.” 15. He, “Jiale jingshen yapian de ‘sang cha.’” 16. Rojek, Labour of Leisure, 1. 17. See Žižek, “How did Marx Invent,” in particular, see his concept of ideological fantasy.

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18. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire, xiv. 19. Grossman, “Grossman on Fantasy.” 20. Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies. 21. Grossman, “Grossman on Fantasy.” 22. Papacharissi, Affective Publics.

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Glossary of Chinese Terms with English Equivalents

baling hou  post-1980 danji  single computer or single device danji youxi  single-computer games danwei  work unit dianzi jingji  esports diaosi  loser, literally penis hair dubo  gambling faxie  release FFF tuan  FFF Group fuerdai  the second generation of wealthy families gaofushuai  Tall-rich-and-handsome gaoji  act gay gaokao  college entrance exam guanerdai  the second generation of officials’ families guanxi  connections haowan  it’s fun heiwangba  black Internet café hukou  population registration jingshen  spirit jingshen jiayuan  spiritual homeland jingshen yapian  spiritual opium jiuling hou  post-1990

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GLOSSARY OF CHINESE TERMS WITH ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS

jiyou  gay friend Lüba huaji huhang  Green Dam Youth Escort lüse wangba  green Internet café Menghuan Xiyou  Fantasy Westward Journey (an MMORPG) Moshou Shijie  World of Warcraft (an MMORPG) Moshou Zhengba  Warcraft III (an RTS game) Qifen  atmosphere Qiji  MU Online (an MMORPG) renminbi zhanshi  RMB soldiers renrou sousuo  “human flesh hunt,” equivalent to doxxing renzhen jiu shule  If you take it seriously, you lose sang  loss, discouragement, bereavement shehui qingnian  society youth, equivalent in meaning to townie shuangren jian  double-edged sword suzhi  quality, used to refer to quality of persons wangba  Internet café wangluo  Internet, literally network wangluo youxi  Internet games wangyin  Internet addiction wei dianying  micro-film xidu  drug use xiu  slang for “show” yi si bu gua  stark naked yibiao renzha  every inch a piece of scum yin  addiction youxi  games zhainan  nerds who rarely leave the house zichao  self-mocking humor

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Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #Fail memes, 150, 152 A Abu-Lughod, Lila, 14, 15, 17 Affect capitalizing on, 46, 104–105, 173 ChinaJoy and, 22, 136, 139 circulation of, 140, 152–153, 157 definition of, 9 digital games and, 7, 10, 23, 25, 120, 124, 135 digital media and, 9, 16, 25, 105, 157 discourse and, 9, 17, 114, 168 humor and, 138 Internet cafés and, 23, 32 news media and, 54 politics and, 9, 139 as prefiguring conscious thought, 16

too-much-ness of, 140 Affective deficit, 162, 172–174 Affective intensities, 24, 25, 135–140, 157, 162, 171 Agency Chinese people’s choices of, 8 discourse and, 9–10, 17 discourse of Internet addiction as robbing youth of, 63, 64, 76 identification as losers and gay friends as reclamation of, 158 moral panic theory and, 74 post-Tiananmen writers and artists, of, 30 situational analysis as study of, 17 tactics and, 10 texture and, 9, 10 Ahmed, Sara, 139 Ah Q, 148, 149 Allison, Anne, 130, 170

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Szablewicz, Mapping Digital Game Culture in China, East Asian Popular Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36111-2

205

206 

INDEX

American Psychological Association, see Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) Appadurai, Arjun, 15 B Baka and Test, 161, 163n3 Beijing Military General Hospital, 58, 59 Ben-Yehuda, Nachman, 74 Blizzard Entertainment, 59, 87, 101, 108n7 boyd, danah, 43 Boym, Svetlana, 32, 129–131, 169 Braester, Yomi, 30 Bulletin board systems (BBSs), 3, 31, 74, 132n9, 141 Burrell, Jenna, 35 C Campbell, Nancy Duff, 53 Cang Tiange, 116, 117 Cartier, Carolyn, 126 Censorship Green Dam software and, 59, 118 humor and evasion of, 119, 138 Internet addiction as pretext for, 75 Internet slang for, 8, 75, 80n85 playing games on foreign servers to avoid, 113, 131, 177 scholarship on Chinese Internet, 8 War of Internet Addiction and, 119 Chan, Kam Wing, 125 China gender imbalance in, 77n1, 146, 162 late socialist, 84, 89 modernization of, 124 Opium Wars and defeat of, 67 as “sick man” of Asia, 149

spatial concerns and, 44 as world’s factory, 11, 27n7 China Central Television (CCTV) ban on esports, 100 coverage of Internet addiction, 54, 58, 60, 64, 73 documentary Battling the Net Monster, 58 program Economic Half Hour, 73 Spring Festival Gala, 121, 132n13 China Core Newspapers Database, 55, 178 China Internet Civilization Project, 68 China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), 6, 27n8, 27n9, 71 ChinaJoy attendance, 136, 163n2 description of, 136–137, 156–157 as field site for investigation of affect, 137 gamer guilds at, 136, 163n1 merchandise for sale at, 137, 144 as physical representation of digital culture, 136, 156 sexualization of women at, 22, 136, 155 China Youth Daily, 60 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 58, 61, 68, 165n47 Chinese Government, see Individual names of administrations, ministries, and offices Chopsticks Brothers (Kuaizi Xiongdi), 45, 46, 146 See also under Homosociality Chuanqi, 122 Clarke, Adele, 17, 18 Cohen, Stanley, 52, 62, 77 Coleman, E. Gabriella, 15, 20 College entrance exam, the (gao kao) establishment of, 11

 INDEX 

extra college admissions fees for low scores on, 111 inequalities of, 27n26 Internet café and, 36, 37 preparation for, 12 pressures of, 11, 36 as primary factor determining college admission, 12 Columbine school shootings, 58, 76 Comic rage, 139, 159 Condry, Ian, 14 Confucian morality, 167 Consalvo, Mia, 115 Corruption corporate, 46, 127 government, 75, 153, 165n46, 165n47, 169 Counterstrike (CS), v, 29, 39, 86, 87, 96, 97 Crossfire (CF), 39 Cultural Revolution, the, 30, 32, 48, 67, 70, 89 Culture anthropological debates about, 14–15 Chinese Internet, playful and contentious nature of, 74, 117 digital, complexities of studying, 15–17 digital games as both place and artifact of, 18, 114 foreign, 68 ideograph as bound to, 67 Internet cafés as a symbol of, 32, 36 leisure campaigns, 83 and moral panic, 68, 74, 75 official versus unofficial, 8 opium smoking as a symbol of, 71 tactical humanism and study of, 22 World of Warcraft and Chinese, 69 World of Warcraft as its own, 124 Culture, Ministry of (MOC), 59, 78n29, 118

207

Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), 61, 78n29 Cynical ideology, 180 D Danji youxi, see Single-computer games (danji youxi) de Certeau, Michel, 10, 170 Defense of the Ancients (DOTA), 43, 49n27, 109n29, 142, 143 Deng Senshan, 60, 61 des Forges, Alexander, 66 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), 53 Dianzi Jingji, see Esports Diaosi affective deficit and, 162, 172 Ah Q spirit and, 148 as the antithesis of Chinese ideal of masculinity, 148–150 as challenge to heteronormative common sense, 25, 140, 153, 158 at ChinaJoy, 161, 172 as collective, 152 as confronting Chinese cultural expectations about marriage and family, 146–147, 153 connections to trolling culture, 17 corporate co-optation of, 159–160 description of, 140–143 failure of the market system, and, 149 government attention to, 159 Han Han as, 171 hedonism of, 153 hegemonic masculinity and, 148, 154–156 incels, comparison to, 161–162 as infrapolitics, 147, 157 Occupy Wall Street’s 99%, comparison to, 170–171

208 

INDEX

Diaosi (cont.) as participatory politics, 163 pink wood ear and black wood ear (slang) and, 155 political potential of, 180–181 sang culture and, 172, 173 semiotic flexibility of, 146, 153–156, 160 sideways mobility of, 158 as threat to the nation, 152 web series about, 145 See also under Heteronormative relationships Digital dualism, 15 Digital games Chinese government selective promotion of, 8, 73, 99, 102 definition of, 87–88 developments in, 178–179 discrepancy between expectations and reality, 12 effects on eyesight, 62 as escape, 174–176 mainstreaming of, 25, 167–168 market for, 53, 72–73 soft power, as form of, 8, 94 space and, 10, 24 study of, vi, viii, 6–7, 15, 21–22 See also Esports; First person shooter (FPS) games; Internet games (wangluo youxi); Massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs); Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games; RTS games; Single-­ computer games (danji youxi); titles of individual games Dikotter, Frank, 70, 71 Diors Man (television show), 141, 145 Discourse addiction as, 24, 51, 53–54, 66, 107

affect and, 9–11, 24, 105, 114, 173 agency and, 9–10, 17 approach of the book and, 7, 9–11, 17–18, 177 comparison of Internet and opium, 54, 66–73 concept of culture and, 14 healthy versus unhealthy games, 83–84, 93–97 internet addiction, 9, 16, 24, 51, 66, 107, 149 neoliberal, 84, 102 study of digital culture and, 15, 17, 21 Dividing practices, 11, 169 Dobyne, Michelle, 151 Dodson, Antoine, 151, 152 Dormitories, 3, 35, 37, 42–43, 48, 86, 111 Douglas, Nick, 150 Downfall meme, 139 Dragon’s Nest, 121 Dungeons and Fighters (DNF), 144 E East China Normal University (ECNU), vi, vii, 19, 39, 40, 87, 136 Education, Ministry of, viii, 62 Elementary school stabbings, 5, 26n6 Escape games as, 120, 124, 127, 174–176 magazines and television shows as, 126 problematizing, 174–176 Esports Asian Games, inclusion of, 100 athlete compensation, 83 CCTV broadcast ban, 100 compared to Internet games, 82, 94–95, 98, 100–104

 INDEX 

Esports Champion League (ECL), 94–95, 98, 99 as global diplomacy, 93 history of, 93 King of Esports (Fly to Sky) (film), 98 lack of infrastructural support for, 99 LOL Friends Clique (show), 145 media coverage of, 19, 20, 178–179 nostalgia for, 104–105 as official professional sport, viii, 93 parental opposition to, 98–99 revenue, 101, 104 skill and, 82, 93, 95, 97, 102 as soft power, 94 South Korean, 93, 99–100 vocational high school elective, 20, 52, 98 World Cyber Games (WCG), 93, 104, 108n27, 109n28 See also specific game titles F Facebook, 44, 161 Failure digital game culture as challenging dominant perceptions of, 7 finding humor in others, 150 heteronormative, 146–150 Internet and, 150, 151, 173 as lucrative business, 151 market system, of the, 172 as spiritual victory (Ah Q), 148 staying in the Internet café as, 23, 32 as symptom of a broken system, 169 as viable way of life, 158 Fantasy about China, Western, 8 childhood and, 46 function of, 175–176 games and, 97, 102, 136, 176

209

ideological, 174, 180n17 inflated expectations resulting from, 180 literature, 175 Fantasy Westward Journey (Menghuan Xiyou), 43, 70, 88, 129 Feng Mengbo, 30, 131 Ferguson, James, 14 FFF group (FFF tuan), 137, 140, 161, 162, 163n3 First person shooter (FPS) games, 30, 86, 88, 93 Fong, Vanessa, 11, 12, 65, 128, 170 Foucault, Michel, 11, 90, 170 Fourth People’s Hospital (Linyi, Shandong), 60 Foxconn factories, 5, 26n6 Furong Jiejie, 151, 152, 164n42 G Gaofushuai, see Tall-rich-and-­ handsome (gaofushuai) Gaoji, see Jiyou Gao kao, see College entrance exam, the Gay Friend, see Jiyou General Administration of Sport, viii, 95 Giant Interactive, 45, 159 Gold farmers, 21, 102 Golub, Alex, 15, 67, 68 and Kate Lingley, 67 Governing mentalities, 8, 53 Great Firewall, 8 Green Dam Youth Escort, 59 Gregg, Melissa, 9 Grossman, Lev, 175, 176 Guilds, gamer, 97, 121, 136, 154, 163n1 Guo, Shaohua, 151 Gupta, Akhil, 14

210 

INDEX

H Habermas, Jürgen, 34 Halberstam, Jack, 158 Health, Ministry of, 60, 61 Hebdige, Dick, 160 Heteronormative common sense, 158 Heteronormative relationships diaosi, jiyou and, 140, 143, 146 FFF tuan and punishment of, 163n3 See also under Failure Heteronormative success disavowal of, 153, 160, 162, 173 growing up and, 12, 158 ideal citizenship and, 25, 135, 153 Japanese youth and, 130 marriage and children as markers of, 12 Heteronormativity, 145, 154, 160 Hitler meme, see Downfall meme Hoffman, Lisa, 24, 84, 89–91, 106 Homosociality Chopsticks Brothers and, 146 diaosi and jiyou and, 146, 155, 156 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of, 154 as existing on a continuum, 156 hegemonic masculinity and, 154–156 heterosexual identities, as reinforcing, 154–155 horizontal, 156 Honor of Kings, 75 Housing, costs of, 44–45 Huangshan (Yellow Mountain), 3–5, 26n3, 26n4 Hukou, 5, 10, 26n7, 27n26, 125, 176 Human flesh hunt (renrou sousuo), 74, 76 Hu Yong, 73 I I am MT (Wo jiao MT), 116, 117 Ideograph, 67

Incel, 161, 162 International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), 53, 62, 179 International English Language Testing System (IELTS), 112, 113 Internet democratization and the, 8 as double-edged sword, 71–72 as drug, 68 as foreign, 23, 68, 70 introduction to China, v, 55 See also Censorship Internet addiction Chinese Clinical Diagnostic Criteria for, 59 comparison to opium addiction, 54, 66–73 electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), 60, 61, 73 first Chinese treatment facility, 58 as hybrid entity, 53 media coverage of, 19, 20, 55–62 as national embarrassment, 60–61 profit from treatment of, 72–73 “sunshine therapy,” 60 treatment by education and persuasion (ganhua), 59 visual discourses of, 62–66 See also under Moral panic Internet cafés affordable, 33 age restrictions, 38–41, 58 class and, 23, 24, 32, 34, 40–45, 52, 72, 84 as collective memory for post-1980 and post-1990 youth, 30 as community of expertise, 35 crime and, vi, 36, 42, 58, 64–65 dirty, 32, 41–42, 47 esports and, vii, 95, 98 fieldwork in, vi, 19, 29, 42 healthy (green), 58, 167 illegal (black), v, 57, 58

 INDEX 

as illicit spaces, 36–40 Lanjisu, fire at, v, vi, 55, 57–58 as liminal spaces, 35–36 media coverage of, 55–58, 61–65, 179 moral panic about, 24, 42, 52, 57–58, 179 nostalgia for, 23, 29–30, 36–40, 45, 47–48, 52, 169, 173 as places of the past, 32, 35 playing games in, ii, 2, 7, 30, 82, 86, 98, 107, 167 qifen, 33, 36, 37 regulation of, vii, 33, 58, 176 release and, 14 resurgence of, viii scholarship on, 33–35 society youth in, 41, 47 as spiritual opium, 36, 66 technological expertise, 8, 34 as third place, 33–35 waning prestige of, 72 Internet games (wangluo youxi) addictive nature, of, 89, 96, 97 association with gaoji or jiyou, 143–145 compared to danji youxi, 85–89 compared to esports, 82, 94–95, 97–101, 169, 178 cultural content and ideological effects of, 69–70, 175 discursive construction of, 18 as drug, 74, 75 government regulation of, 59–62, 75 industry self-regulation, 75 investment of money and, 95–96 Love O2O and, 167–168 media coverage of, 19, 20, 55–62 paratexts of, 116, 145 patriotism (see Red net games (hongse youxi)) as place, 10, 124 profitability, 84, 102, 103 protest of the imagination, 170

211

Real Life and, 15, 97, 120, 123–124, 128, 131, 137 sideways mobility, 115, 127–131, 169, 175 skill and strategy, lack of, 98, 107 as spiritual homeland, 25, 107, 111–131, 158, 176, 178 stigmatization of, 24, 76, 84, 102–103 study of, 6–7 time investment, 96 virtual mobility, 176 See also Digital games; Massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs); World of Warcraft (WOW); under Spiritual opium; titles of individual games Internet slang affective intensities and, 24, 135–140 government efforts to control, 159, 160 labels at ChinaJoy, 140 See also under Censorship; specific slang terms J Jenkins, Henry, 58, 129, 163 Jiang Zemin, 68 Jiyou challenge to heteronormative common sense, 140, 162 Chopsticks Brothers as, 146 collective identity, 152 as confronting Chinese cultural expectations about marriage and family, 146 connection to digital game culture, 143–144 as derogatory to gay culture, 144, 155 description of, 143–145 failure of the market system, and, 149

212 

INDEX

Jiyou (cont.) game-related websites and, 144 homosociality and, 154–156 as participatory politics, 163 queer identities and, 153, 160 semiotic openness of, 144, 146, 153–156 Yaoi culture and, 143 See also under Heteronormative relationships Jurgenson, Nathan, 15 K Kelty, Christopher, 15 Koudai Xiyou, 124 L Lanjisu Internet café fire, v, vi, 55, 57–58 Law on the Protection of Minors (Wei chengnian ren baohu fa), 58 League of Legends (LOL), 144, 145, 164n22 Li Kuinan, 58 Liminality, 35, 47 Link, Perry, 175 Liu, Fengshu, 12, 31, 33–34 LOL Friends Clique (Lu you pai), 145, 164n22 Loser, see Diaosi Love O2O (Weiwei yixiao hen qingcheng), 167, 168 Lu Xun, 148 Lu, Xing, 67 M Machinima, 24, 28n55, 114, 116, 118, 168 See also I Am MT (Wo jiao MT); War of Internet Addiction

Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction, 175 Marriage Chinese cultural emphasis on, 146 gender imbalance and, 51, 77n1, 146, 162 growing up and, 12, 158 in-game, 154 market, 128 naked (luohun), 145 prospects, 158 See also under Heteronormative success Masculinity Ah Q and, 148 Chinese conception of, 148–149, 152 crisis of, 147–150, 162 diaosi as opposing Chinese ideal of, 145, 148–149, 152–153, 156 diaosi as reinforcing hegemonic, 154–155 entrepreneurial, 149 flawed, 148 hegemonic, 148, 151, 154–156 western sitcoms and portrayal of, 147 Massey, Doreen, 10, 125, 126 Massively multiplayer online role-­ playing games (MMORPGs) cultural content of, 69–70, 175 esports and, 93–95 examples of, 88 as expression of nostalgia, 130 heteronormativity and, 154 ideology and, 174 Internet addiction and, 94 marketing of, 46, 159 players as “real” Internet gamers, 88, 120 teamwork and, 121 time and monetary investment, 96 See also Internet games (wangluo youxi); titles of individual games

 INDEX 

McGee, Michael, 67 Micro-celebrities, 152 Micro-films (wei dianying), 18, 20, 45, 146 Migrant workers college entrance exam and, 27n26 floating population, 26n7 internet cafés and, 23, 44–45, 72 mobile phones and, 127 popular media as escape for, 126 restricted mobility of, 5, 125–127, 176 War of Internet Addiction, reference to, 125–126 Minor’s Rights in Cyberspace (proposed legislation), 61 Mobility freedom of, 25, 115, 126 games and, 25, 115, 120, 128–129 immobile, 127–129 physical, 10, 120, 126, 127, 176 politics of, 126 Real World, 120 restriction of, 5, 10, 26n7, 126, 176 sideways, 115, 127–131, 159, 169, 175 socioeconomic, 10, 107, 128, 169, 171, 176 as tension between state and people, 25, 115 upward, 23, 24, 115, 129, 151, 153, 168, 171 virtual, 176 and War of Internet Addiction, 119, 124–127 Moral panic China’s Internet addiction; cause of, 57, 75; comparison to opium addiction, 66–73, 149; effects of, 75–76; exaggerated media coverage and, 55–57; persistence of, 179; profit

213

motives and, 73; as red herring, 75; timeline of, 55–62; visual discourses of, 62–66 (see also Internet addiction; Internet cafés) Cohen, Stanley and criteria for, 52–53, 77 deviance and, 36, 76 fears of Westernization and, 68 folk devils and, 76 monolithic moral culture, problem of, 74 new media and, 74 retrospective recognition of, 52 Moshou shijie, see World of Warcraft (WOW) Moshou Zhengba, see Warcraft III Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games, 43 MySpace, 44 N National People’s Congress and National People’s Political Consultative Conference (lianghui), 62 National Youth Federation, 62 Neoliberalism, 89–91, 102–104 Neoliberal logic, 24, 84, 91, 102, 130, 153 NetEase, 60, 118, 173 Nostalgia acceleration of, 31 for childhood, 31, 32, 146, 169 commodity, 31 contemporary life and, 5, 23, 31, 48 corporate efforts to capitalize on, 46, 104–105, 173 as defense mechanism, 32, 130 educated youth and, 30

214 

INDEX

Nostalgia (cont.) games and, 23, 45–46, 104–105, 129–132, 178 for Internet café, 23, 30, 45–48, 52, 131, 169, 173 as longing for St. Elsewhere, 129, 169 micro-films about, 45, 146, 169 new media and, 31 post-1980 generation and, 31–32, 169 reflective vs. restorative, 131–132, 169 sideways, 129–130 Warcraft III, 104 O Occupy Wall Street, we are the 99%, 170–172 Old Boys (lao nanhai), see Chopsticks Brothers (Kuaizi Xiongdi) Oldenburg, Ray, 33, 34 One-child policy, 11, 14, 65, 146, 162, 179 Opium class and, 66, 71 control rather than suppression, 73 corruption of young men by, 66, 71 dens, 42, 67, 71, 149 double discursive construction of, 66, 70–72 as foreign cultural product, 68–69 imperial edict against, 71 medical side effects of, 70 moderate use of, 70, 72 moral order and, 71 profitability of, 70, 72–73 public vs. private consumption of, 42, 71 as replenishing the spirit, 23–24, 66 shifting social significance of, 24

smoking as social activity, 70–71 Wars, 67, 72 Western imperialism and, 66, 67 See also Spiritual opium Orwell, George, 137, 157 P Papacharissi, Zizi, 138, 157, 170–171, 180 Participatory culture, 8 Participatory politics, 163 Patriotic leisure, 24, 25, 84, 91–93, 102–104, 106–107, 178 Patriotic professionalism, 84, 89–91, 106, 153, 159 People’s Daily on diaosi mentality, 159 on Internet café governance, 58 on legislation to protect Minor’s Rights in Cyberspace, 62 as official newspaper of the CCP, 58, 159 on spiritual opium, 69, 75, 173 Phillips, Whitney, 150 Pickowicz, Paul, 68, 75 Player kill (PK), 96, 101, 167, 168 Positionality, 17, 20 Post-1980 generation description of, 12–13 diaosi and, 153, 171 Internet cafés and, 23, 30, 44, 45, 47, 48 micro-films, 45–47 nostalgia of, 31, 45–48, 169 as problematic categorization, 13 War of Internet Addiction and, 122 Post-1990 generation, 12–14, 23, 29–30, 45, 47–48, 153 Precarity as affective state, 172 of contemporary life, 12, 31, 47

 INDEX 

and hope, 170 in Japan, 130, 170 Press and Publication, General Administration of (GAPP), 59, 78n29, 118 Press and Publication, State Administration of, viii, 62 Propaganda, Ministry of, 62 Public sphere, critique of, 34 Q Qiji (Mu Online), vi, 29, 51 Qing Dynasty, 69, 70, 148 QQ compared to other chat platforms, 44 fieldwork in, 20 group chat, 3 as supplement to digital game play, 3, 97, 115 Queer child, the, 158 R Radio, Film and Television, State Administration of (SARFT), 100 Rage faces, 137, 140, 150, 157 Ragnarok Online (RO), 43, 121, 124 Raids, in-game, 121 Red net games (hongse youxi), 70, 73, 175 Renrou sousuo, see Human flesh hunt (renrou sousuo) Residence permit, see Hukou RMB soldier (renminbi zhanshi), 96, 122 Rodger, Elliot, 162 Rofel, Lisa, 107, 138 Rojek, Chris, 91, 92, 137, 174 Rose, Nikolas, 64, 90, 91, 170 RTS games

215

and diaosi, 142, 153 as esports, 93 and gaoji/jiyou, 143, 152, 153 instructional videos about, 117 Internet cafés and, 38 online game, as genre of, 88 studying, 3, 97, 106 time investment, 96 See also Warcraft III S Sang culture, 172, 173 Schadenfreude, 150 Science, 60 Secondary definer, press as, 54 Second Life, 14, 15, 174 Sedgwick, Eve Kofosky, 9, 154 Seigworth, Gregory, 9 Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), 51, 85 Shifman, Limor, 148 Sideways mobility, see under Mobility Single-computer games (danji youxi) definition of, 85 esports and, 93, 94 inexpensive to play, 96 Internet addiction discourse and, 107 Internet as platform for play of, 87 multiplayer mode, 85–87 as patriotic leisure, 106–107 semantic inaccuracies of label, 86, 87 skill and, 93, 95, 97 time investment and, 95, 96 wangluo games, blending with, 97, 101 wangluo games, distinguished from, 85, 88–89 Warcraft III as, 85, 86, 97, 98 Situational analysis, 17–18, 21, 168 Smith, Richard, 150

216 

INDEX

Spiritual opium Baidu definition of, 54 cultural products as, 54, 69 fear of foreign influence and, 67–69 as ideograph, 67 Internet as, 54, 66–68 Internet cafés as, 36, 66 Internet games as, 23, 36, 54, 69, 88, 107, 114, 178 origins of the concept of, 54, 68–69 sang culture as, 173 Western films and literature as, 69 See also Opium Starcraft (game), 38 State, Chinese centralization of space during Maoist era, 44 crisis of masculinity and the, 148–150 Hukou system as obstacle to modernization of the, 126 ideal citizenship and, 89–91, 153, 177 Internet addiction and, 75 Internet censorship, 8, 59, 80n85 late socialist neoliberalism and, 89–91 leisure choices, control of, 83, 177 mobility, control of, 5, 25, 126 modernizing logic of, 11, 24, 83 news media, control of, 55, 61, 67, 74 people’s imagination and, 172 popular culture and the, 8–9 regulation of Internet games, 61–62 resistance to the, 8 State Internet Information Office, 159, 165n58 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 158 Structures of feeling, 138, 157 Subculture, co-optation by mass culture, 160

T Tainted milk powder scandal, 5, 26n5, 127 Tall-rich-and-handsome (gaofushuai), 142, 149, 150, 153, 155, 160 Tao Hongkai, 59, 74 Tao Ran, 59 Taylor, T.L., 7, 20, 99 Tencent (Tengxun), 45, 75, 145 Texture, 9–10 The9, 116, 118 Tongji University, 1, 19, 20, 25n1, 42, 85, 95, 106, 112, 136 Topography (of digital game culture), 7, 9–11, 22, 107, 114, 168, 179 Trolling, 17, 150, 161 Turkle, Sherry, 128, 129 U Unger, Jonathan, 66 Universal two-child policy, 179 V Visser, Robin, 1, 130–131 W Wallis, Cara, 127–129 Wang, Jing, 8, 83 Wangba, see Internet cafés Wangluo youxi, see Internet games (wangluo youxi) Warcraft III as danji game, 85–86 DOTA and, 49n27 free to play, 96 LAN connections, for play of, 87 nostalgia for, 104–105 online servers, for play of, 87 patriotic leisure and, 84

 INDEX 

playing, 3, 6, 82, 97 replay videos, 82, 97, 117 skill and strategy, 97 time investment, 3, 96 in World Cyber Games (WCG), 104–105 World of Warcraft, confusion with, 85, 98, 108n7 War of Internet Addiction acclaim for, 119 affect and, 120, 168 description of, 118–119 discovery of, 114 gamer rights and, 133n23, 176 in-game mobility and, 119, 125–126, 133n17, 176 interview with director of, 122 political dissatisfaction and, 117, 131, 176, 177 restrictions on Internet games and, 127 spiritual homeland, depiction of World of Warcraft as, 25, 115, 119, 126 Web Junkie, 61 We Grew up Playing (Wan Dade), 45, 46 Wei Wei, 144 Wetherell, Margaret, 9 Williams, Raymond, 138, 139 Woolf, Virginia, 10, 11, 174 World Cyber Games (WCG), see under Esports; Warcraft III World Health Organization, see International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) World Mental Health Day, 52, 60 World of Warcraft (WoW) Azeroth, 118, 124, 127, 132n8 backstory, 116, 124 collective identity and, 121 competitive play and, 98, 101

217

equality in, 122–124 ethnographic research on Chinese version of, 21 as high quality game, 122 hourly charge for, 96, 122 I Am MT and, 116 Internet addiction and, 58, 96, 120 NGA BBS forum, 132n9 Norse mythology of, 69, 130 regulatory battles over, 59–60, 113 social events in, 121 Taiwanese server, playing on, 113 teamwork and, 121, 122 The9, 116, 118 as wangluo game, 88, 98 Warcraft III, confusion with, 85, 98, 108n7 Wrath of the Lich King expansion for, 132n17 See also War of Internet Addiction X Xi Jieying, 73 Xi Jinping, 165n58, 179 Xinggan Yumi, 118, 122 Xu Zidong, 148, 160 Y Yang, Guobin, 32, 74, 115 Yang, Mayfair, 44, 126 Yang Yongxin, 60, 61, 118, 119, 132n10 Youth Chinese conception of, 11–14, 31 conundrums faced by, 160 disillusioned, 128, 130 Internet cafés and, 23, 32, 35, 47, 168 moral panics about technology and, 58, 68, 76

218 

INDEX

Youth (cont.) nostalgia of, 23, 31, 32, 46 participatory politics and, 163 regulation of Internet as effort to regulate, 53, 67, 71 students vs. society (shehui qingnian), 41, 47

Z Zhang, Li, 44 Zhao Yongfu, 71 Zheng, Yangwen, 71 Zhengtu (game), 45, 122 Zhou, Yongming, 71 Žižek, Slavoj, 180