Project Title 

Emotional Capitalism with Socialist Characteristics: A Study of the “Positive Energy” Culture on China’s Short Video Platforms

Research Topic

This project draws on platformization, subjectivation, and sociology of emotions to investigate the emotional governance on China’s short video platforms. Focusing on the interplay of cultural, political, economic, and technological factors on the practical level, the thesis examines the rise and normalization of a “positive energy” culture on Kuaishou, Chinas second largest short video platform. This culture features moralization of optimism, aspiration to profit from official values, and a mixed discourse containing self-help psychology, nationalism, entrepreneurialism, and algorithmic determinism; it also evolves alongside the constantly changing industry, requiring a contextualized, historical perspective.

The project is based on four years of fieldwork and over 40 in-depth interviews with short video practitioners, making it among the first to systematically unveil the short video industry’s operative mechanism from an intra-industry perspective. Starting from individual vloggers’ endeavor navigating the volatile rules to find a politically appropriate and profitable positivity in their precarious career, the study highlights their imagination of the platform’s power structure as embodied in an omnipotent “algorithm of positive energy.” By reflecting on the platformized evolution of “positive energy” from a vague political ideal to operational techniques, the research also sheds light on the interaction of state and corporations on emotional governance. Contrary to received wisdom about a top-down mechanism, I argue that the state leverages profiting motivations of business actors to induce self-governance that reinforces existing power structures while also producing unintended cultural outcomes.

Supervisors 

Professor Bingchun Meng and Professor Robin Mansell 

Biography

Zifeng Chen is currently pursuing her PhD in Political Communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before coming to LSE, she earned her PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Peking University, where she graduated with honors. Her dissertation, The Discursive Field of Modernity: The Conceptualization of “Traditional Culture” in China since the 1980s was recognized as the Best Dissertation of 2020. Zifeng holds dual Bas in Chinese Literature and Sociology from PKU, and has conducted research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Harvard University as a visiting fellow.