Wu Changchang on "State Involution" in China's Video Industry

Wu Changchang, “Video Sites and the ‘Involution’ of State Power”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Wu Changchang is a young professor in the Department of Journalism at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and a researcher at the ECNU-Cornell Center for Comparative Humanities Studies.  He has published any number of books and articles on various aspects of Chinese media (a partial listing of his publications is available here).  This piece caught my eye largely because of Xu Jilin’s comments about Chinese young people and their reading and thinking habits in a text he wrote discussing “Redimensioning the Enlightenment,” in which he explored his frustrations in trying to communicate with the younger generations, including his 19 year-old son.  Jilin is a friend of mine, and I have met his son once or twice, so I was intrigued to try to find out more about the online world in which Chinese youths spend so much of their time.  Our translation of a similar text on “Little Pinks” and China’s fan culture had already revealed how little I knew about this world.   
 
Wu Changchang is clearly deeply immersed in the various worlds of China’s online entertainment.  In the text translated here, he focuses on the period between 2016 and 2020, and studies both increased state efforts to control cultural products such as reality shows and talent shows and the significant expansion of the online video sites—the very industry state authorities were trying to control—during this same period.  The expansion means that state efforts largely failed, and Wu draws on historian Prasenjit Duara’s concept of “state involution” to explain the failure.  Duara was studying tax collection in North China during part of the Republican period, and found that as the state expanded its efforts to collect taxes, “brokers” appeared in great numbers, offering to mediate between state authorities and tax-payers, but actually lining their own pockets. 
 
Wu’s argument about China’s online video sites is similar.  State authorities have some ideas about what young people should be watching (and perhaps more ideas about what they should not be watching), but the industry they are trying to regulate is huge, private, and extremely profitable and popular.  Video producers pretend to follow what Wu calls the “public script”—i.e., some version of what authorities would like for young people to watch—but in fact craft their message in such a way as to appeal to their audience, which is what any good capitalist would do.  The result is that China’s youth, many of whom complain about feeling lost and anxious, are taught to be self-centered, individualistic consumers rather than “revolutionary successors.” 
 
One might object that precisely what China’s revolution is remains up in the air, to which Wu Changchang might reply that some kind of revolution is occurring under the very noses of China’s impotent regulators.  He points the finger at the video producers and accuses them of being manipulators who are spearheading a second “New Culture Movement”—the first, associated with the May Fourth Movement, is generally depicted as an iconoclastic break with Confucian tradition—whose values are essentially ironic, individualistic, and consumerist.  Questions of manipulation and youth agency are complex—in what sense are writers of fan fiction “manipulated,” for example?—but the degree of youth involvement in this online culture is huge, and suggests that something is “working” (if perhaps in the way that global warming is “working”).
 
Above and beyond Wu’s argument, I would urge readers to sample some of the online product Wu is analyzing; links throughout the translation take you to sample episodes of various programs.  I admit to having been quite shocked.  Some of the shows look to me like 30-minute TikTok videos made up of a series of improvised pranks by influencers and invited celebrities.  The popular hip hop song WeWe is worth a listen, although I do not know how to describe it.  The aesthetic of many of the shows is garish and hyper busy, as if the video producers are trying to reproduce the effects of what they imagine teenagers’ ADHD might be.  Of course, the online world outside of China may well look like this, too.  I have not watched a reality show since the early days of American Idol, so I am no expert.  For completely different reasons, I happened onto the American reality show The Masked Singer recently, and was similarly shocked by its aesthetic (I realize that’s the point). 
 
The degree to which Chinese youth culture is part of a larger East Asian youth culture—much of which began with Japanese manga and anime but now seems to center in South Korean reality shows and other programs—is also fascinating.  There is of course a rich body of scholarship in English on this.       
 
N.B.  The translation of this text is somewhat different than other texts of this site.  I generally translate texts in full, although I allow myself to suppress obvious repetitions, and sometimes I translate what I believe the author to mean rather than the literal language they use.  Wu’s article begins with a long and dense description of state regulatory efforts and the expansion of the video industry.  I know little about the state organs involved or the laws and measures they employ, and am equally ignorant about China’s online world, including both the product it sells and the business end—mergers, acquisitions, takeovers.  I worked on it for awhile—learning new things is part of the fun of translating—but eventually realized that even if I got it right, it would mean little to most readers.  Imagine describing a cricket match to people who know neither the players, nor the rules, nor the lingo.  I eventually omitted this part.
 
The same is true for parts of Wu’s analysis of the various shows and programs he discusses.  As is of course completely proper, he cites many specific examples and furnishes rich detail concerning programs, contests, songs, etc., about which most of us know little or nothing.  I wound up omitting certain examples or paraphrasing certain arguments that Wu convincingly made through specific references in the interests of producing something more readable.  Another way to put this is that a full and literal translation of Wu’s text would be understandable only to specialists in this field, in which case they would read it in Chinese.
 
Consequently, in the unlikely event someone wants to cite this text, they should check with me to make sure they are citing my translation of Wu and not my paraphrase.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“Since 2016, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and other departments have been attempting to strengthen the management of the online audio-visual industry, resulting in the rapid propagation of ‘profit-making brokers’ in the same industry. The kind of activity these brokers engage in deals with the spiritual state of young people, but is not oriented to solving their problems; their goal is rather to gradually get the young consumers addicted to the brokers’ products through the promise of empathy and escape.”
 
“More importantly, although this behavior claims to practice a certain political correctness, in fact it does not actually achieve the micro-control and ideological guidance for young people the state envisions. In other words, teenagers appear not as communist successors but as liberal consumers in the image created by online audiovisual programs. Their subcultural practices and norms, as well as their collective psyche, have become important materials for video sites to produce programs and dramas, and thus, a ‘New Culture Movement’ for youth has been launched by the audiovisual industry since 2016.”
 
“Why hip hop or street dance? Because they are forms of youth culture with a clear ‘rebellious’ DNA. In the West, (Black) teenagers in places like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia have either adapted hip hop as a political weapon for street confrontation and conflict, or as a pragmatic expression of identity, or have used it to express views associated with misogyny and gang violence. By contrast, Chinese hip hop, which started in the 2000s, has few participants who come from the lower classes and more who come from relatively affluent middle-class or intellectual families, so its rap content, even if something of the political hard core remains, expresses middle-class anger.”
 
“In the ‘public scripts’ purveyed by these variety shows, both the subtle phrasings of the production teams and the new buzzwords coined by the directors—such as ‘The harder you work, the luckier you get’ (from the first season of ‘Idol Producer’)—are like ‘newspeak’ in Orwell's 1984, emptying out and updating the daily vocabularies of teenagers like a virus. This may be the only way to establish a broad sense of ‘empathy’ between the show and the teenagers. Emotion receives pride of place, because this is what the video sites and the producers want, and the same is true for capital.”
 
“The core operation of variety shows is precisely to intervene in the emotional and mental life of young people at an unconscious level, to shape the original self into the ego that the ‘New Culture Movement’ (dominated by capital and the ‘profit-making brokerage’ class) is  building. The contestants' acting ability, talent, and ‘natural’ appearance, along with their self-discipline and growth as stimulated by the competitive system, are woven together by the show's writers and editors to define the qualities of ‘excellence’ and ‘enterprise’ and display these to a new generation of Chinese youth:  courage, possessive individualism, an instinctive belief in progress and the future.” 
 
Translation
 
Influenced by Prasenjit Duara’s book Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China 1900-1942, this essay attempts to use Duara’s concept of the “involution of state power" to gauge the effectiveness of the state management of China’s audiovisual industry between 2016 and 2020. The object of Duara’s analysis was the effectiveness of the tax collection system in rural North China. He argued that the effectiveness of a tax collection system can be measured by the proportional growth in the amount of taxes collected from taxpayers as a percentage of total tax revenue. If this proportional increase does not occur despite increasing efforts by the government, it indicates that informal institutions at the grassroots level are a problem.
 
Thus, in his account, the involution of power refers not only to the simultaneous growth of formal and informal institutions within the fiscal system, but more importantly, to the lack of sufficient state control over the latter (e.g., what he calls "for-profit brokers"). This suggests that the expansion of state power must be based on increased efficiency, otherwise it will become what he calls "involutional," which is directly manifested by a growth of state power in which informal groups in grassroots society replace the formal regime and become an uncontrollable force.
 
My work on this topic has demonstrated that, between 2016 and 2020, state attempts to strengthen the regulation of the online audiovisual industry occurred simultaneously with the growth of private production companies in this industry.  My goal here is to illustrate how these production companies and the video sites behind them have become just such an uncontrollable force, causing state power in the audiovisual industry to suffer a serious "involution."
 
The only way to prove this is to look at the three aspects of the "producer-text-user" nexus that produces and consumes the commodities:  first, the private production companies, their social composition as actors in the audiovisual industry, and the ideology they share; second, the new discourses or ideologies contained in the variety shows and TV series the companies produce; and third, the growing number of users, and how they behave and express themselves.   
 
In this way, we can shed light on the processes by which video sites transform, distort, or circumvent the regulatory policies of the state, as well as the "hidden effects" that are actually produced by the "public script" resulting from this regulation, that is, the psychological turmoil or changes produced in the audience subjects (teenagers) by the online audiovisual industry and its variety shows and TV dramas. In so doing, video sites and private production companies, which are outside the official system, not only reap the huge dividends of the traffic created under the protection of capital, but also use the power of the market to fundamentally rebuild another kind of heterogeneous cultural politics that is well accepted by young people, and thus make up a "profit-making brokerage" class like that described by Duara, acting as intermediaries between the state and young people. These "brokers" have gradually escaped the control of state power, which is the real meaning of the "involution of state power."

Part One
 
Beginning our analysis with producers as an institution requires composing a group portrait of the heads of the production companies, together with those who have held and still hold middle- and senior-level management positions at the video sites (i.e., their professional experience and ideology) and the production teams they lead (i.e., their social/gender composition and cultural orientation).
 
First, most of the heads of these production companies or middle and senior managers of video sites were born in the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s, when local and provincial TV stations were at their height in terms of market development, and for this reason also enjoyed the "institutional dividends" of working in state-owned TV stations (provincial TV stations), meaning that they could hone their craft by developing and producing innovative programs without incurring trial and error costs. 
 
Around 2012, many provincial satellite networks and TV stations actively began to promote internal restructuring, and because this restructuring did not achieve the goal of "equal benefits" for most employees, coupled with the increasingly blurred lines between state-owned shares and private shares, these producers or program directors, who had long been recognized by the market, chose to "flee" under the inducement of attractive offers from video sites or venture capital.   Their flight led them either directly into the video sites as senior or middle management, or put them in charge of the video sites' own program teams, or they set up private production companies or studios and became freelancers, producing television variety shows, or were hired by companies and video sites to co-produce programs.
 
Video site managers or variety show directors who left under the inducement of capital have a natural sensitivity to power (otherwise they would not have left) and keep a cautious distance from it. These people come from diverse family backgrounds, but most of the programs they produce are quite close to, or sometimes line up completely with, the cultural interests and values of the (Western) urban middle classes. The managers address what they assume to be “humanity at large,” are obsessed with production values, while at the same time admiring the liberating power of market competition. Such tendencies do not produce socially critical outputs; after all, the premise of working for capital is to avoid unknown political risks as much as possible. 
 
Therefore, the contents conveyed in these audiovisual programs, in addition to various forms of market advertising, consist mainly of techniques of personal discipline that filter out state ideology. Among the earliest online programs, "I Can I BB 奇葩说"[2] has been actively playing the social role of helping young people answer their questions since its launch in 2014, but the basic messages conveyed to youth revolve around themes such as "urbanization" and the politics of daily life (love or work). Over the course of the six seasons of the show, the 195 episodes include topics such as:  love and marriage (65 episodes), the workplace (23 episodes), popular society and culture (21 episodes), family (16 episodes), relationships (11 episodes), feminism (10 episodes), friendship (9 episodes), and education (8 episodes), among others.
 
What these topics share are certain “lessons” concerning "neoliberalism as a technique of self-discipline," discussed through themes such as the spirit of possessive individualism, micropolitics, and consumer sovereignty. U can U BB lost no time in taking the pulse of teenagers in school or those just beginning their work lives, and it is natural that the show has become a “psychiatrist’s couch” for the collective mental trauma experienced by China’s youth.
 
Second, except for the position of general director, where women and men are in roughly equal proportions, more than 80% of the (non-camera) executives and post-editing staff are young women born in the 1990s. Most of them are university graduates who chose to stay in Beijing, Shanghai, Changsha and other big cities in China, and in terms of culture or values are inevitably influenced by the city-centrism of China’s huge metropoli and by middle-class culture. Their sensibilities lead them to make drastic changes to foreign variety shows whose formats may prove difficult in China, such as reality shows or talk shows.  For example, British and American reality shows like "Big Brother" are seen as too radical in highlighting the ethics and market rationality of "economic man," and to adapt such formats to Chinese tastes, they remove the blatant neoliberalism of the American and British version, and replace them with the comic elements of Korean workplace reality TV shows.  
 
These Korean shows have gradually become popular in the network audiovisual industry, and video sites are scrambling to imitate them, or directly buy the model. Tencent Video bought the rights to "Good People," broadcast on South Korea's Channel A, and broadcast the first season of the Chinese version, "A Heartwarming Offer," in the summer of 2019. Unlike the Korean version, the Chinese show does not dwell on the dilemmas of professionalism and ethics in the legal profession, much less explore the rights and wrongs of the principles of the "presumption of innocence" or the "presumption of guilt."

Instead, the production team turned the show into a "letter from Pan Xiao"[3] story revolving around personal drama and idols:  what should a young person do in the workplace when they run into a "common" dilemma that has nothing to do with the specific workplace? All of these "dilemmas" are topics that had already been addressed in U Can U BB, but the "synchronicity" of a reality show makes everything seem more “life-like,” providing a mirror-like reference for these lonely young people experiencing collective trauma.
 
These managers who have fled the television system, becoming the "revolving door" class of the Internet industry, as well as those who have moved from other Internet companies or transferred to the top management of video sites, lead production teams mainly made up of young women, and navigate nimbly between the emotional and aspirational fault lines of their young audience and the volatility and political baselines of the state management system.
 
For the same reason, this class, which is in a dominant position in a vertical power network stitched together by wealth, professional knowledge, and media/platform access, and which maintains horizontal interactions with the "different forces of globalization," is involved in cultural construction, manipulating the feelings of small town or urban youths to produce large amounts of traffic.  We might well imagine that that the gestures of deference or respect they display in the face of state power are merely submissive "performances" or mechanical exercises in "impression management."
 
Since 2016, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and other departments have been attempting to strengthen the management of the online audio-visual industry, resulting in the rapid propagation of "profit-making brokers" in the same industry. The kind of activity these brokers engage in deals with the spiritual state of young people, but is not oriented to solving their problems; their goal instead is to gradually get the young consumers addicted to the brokers’ products through the promise of empathy and escape.
 
More importantly, although this behavior claims to practice a certain political correctness, in fact it does not actually achieve the micro-control and ideological guidance for young people the state envisions. In other words, teenagers appear not as communist successors but as liberal consumers in the image created by online audiovisual programs. Their subcultural practices and norms, as well as their collective psyche, have become important materials for video sites to produce programs and dramas, and thus, a "New Culture Movement" for youth has been launched by the audiovisual industry since 2016. 

Part Two
 
The main participants in this mainly online "New Culture Movement" are teenagers and young people born after 1990. What kind of social environment do these teenagers face, and what are the collective psychic symptoms that have attracted the attention of the video sites and their profit-seeking brokers?  How do the sites and the brokers use these collective symptoms to attract young people through their online programming?   
 
Scholars have long known that the more than 40 years of reform and opening means that teenagers born after 1990 have never experienced an economy of scarcity, even if they live in an increasingly competitive, dog-eat-dog world;  at an emotional level, what they feel is a lack of social consensus and a lack of social trust. At the same time, a certain social rigidification has led to a slowdown in social mobility and the emergence of a "new poor class," and capital and markets have become obvious and effective guidelines for action and knowledge in mass society.
 
These dramatic social changes and transformations have inflicted various psychological traumas on many young people:  latent depressive or manic tendencies due to feelings of atomization or isolation, body image issues and anxieties, possible hysteria due to the huge gap between (national) macro-narratives and (personal) micro-experiences, cynicism created by the conflict between private boundaries and the demands of public life, etc. Most youths suffer from various imaginary or symbolic "traumas" without being aware of them. However, these tumultuous emotional changes and mental crises experienced by teens are quickly captured by audiovisual program directors.
 
Satisfying teenagers' desire for "gossip" (i.e., their curiosity) and their search for self-aggrandizement, or helping them to transfer or escape from their trauma, have become the basic logic of video production, which is often pushed to extremes by the demand for instant profitability. Submitting this extreme production logic to the rigid requirements of state-mandated "political correctness" will inevitably transform the "public script" (i.e., what the network audiovisual programs claim to be doing) into a "hidden script" full of various obscure discourses and cultural symbols.  Without an analysis of these "hidden scripts," it is difficult to grasp how these brokers covertly undermine the substantive political benefits state management of network audiovisual programs hopes to achieve. 
 
These hidden discourses and cultural symbols were first crafted by Tencent and Youku in 2015 and 2016 around the theme of “boredom.”  After the success of the low-cost studio talk show I Can I BB produced by iQiyi, Youku launched "Mars Intelligence Agency" in the spring of 2016, and at the same time, a raft of look-alike studio talk shows like "Go Fridge" (Tencent Video, 2015), which satisfied young people's voyeuristic desires, were mass-produced. In addition to the seven similar programs produced by the three major video sites (iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent) in 2019, nine similar programs were launched every year between 2016 and 2020. They look like the daily updates of TikTok (known as Douyin in Chinese) netizens, and are all talk shows that focus on "publicizing private experiences."
 
Instead of seeking to address the problems teens face in their daily lives, "Mars Intelligence Agency," "Go Fridge" or "Teacher Guo 郭老师," the TikTok celebrity, engage in self-deprecation or exposure of the "backstage" lives of celebrities and “influencers,” simply helping young people to "pass the time" and blunt the negative emotions in their lives. These variety shows, with their precise grasp of the grammar of boredom, have all the addictive appeal of  "snack food" because of the unique way they combine the public exposure of private rituals with "collective delusion.”
 
The practice of exposing private sexuality on the shows or in front of a camera produces a nervous “transgressive” pleasure in teens, and the guilt and sense of destructiveness that might have originally been associated with sexuality disappears under the feeling of collective self-deprecation, providing teens with a kind of unconscious sense of satisfaction.  This kind of satisfaction is a "drive" that is manufactured to be outside of the individual will of young people, ensuring that teens are "sanctified" by the spiritual crisis of the show's actors or the "TikTok celebrities" who mock themselves or others; watching this can be pleasurable. However, while teenagers always assume that this drive is theirs, in fact it is being manipulated by the "hidden script" fashioned by the video sites, part of their efforts to cater to the more or less traumatized youth. 
 
However, the online audiovisual programs that better reflect this kind of manipulation are the talent shows that became popular in 2017.  In the summer of 2017, the widespread Internet success of "China has Hip Hop 中国有嘻哈," produced by iQiyi, led to talent shows’[4] becoming the new mainstream genre of online audiovisual programs virtually overnight. This category is what was known as a niche, or a niche market, in the traditional television era. In the past decade or so, Chinese young people have formed a number of online self-enclosed sub-cultural tribes, which largely do not interact with one other.  Each of these tribes is a potential market for the video industry, given the number of people involved. In 2017, hip hop, a music genre that has long been underground or semi-underground, surfaced in the form of the kind of talent show most familiar to teenagers, encouraging the audiovisual industry to focus on developing talent shows featuring other teen niche cultures.
 
According to incomplete statistics, between 2017 and today, the three major video sites produced 172 talent shows. Traditional TV talent shows can result in objective increases in social mobility for some youth, and some scholars have also noted that these shows can activate "democratic" desires to participate on the part of viewers. However, does the enthusiasm for the young generation of adolescents for the new style of talent shows still grow out of this drive for social mobility or participatory democracy? The directors of these talent shows, all of whom have lived through the trials and tribulations of the TV talent show era, are by now well aware that such drives have morphed into clichés and that a new search for youth cultural expression is needed. 
 
Why hip hop or street dance? Because they are forms of youth culture with a clear "rebellious" DNA. In the West, (Black) teenagers in places like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia have either adapted hip hop as a political weapon for street confrontation and conflict, or as a pragmatic expression of identity, or have used it to express views associated with misogyny and gang violence. By contrast, Chinese hip hop, which started in the 2000s, has few participants who come from the lower classes and more who come from relatively affluent middle-class or intellectual families, so its rap content, even if something of the political hard core remains, expresses middle-class anger.
 
However, the first season of “China's Hip Hop,” produced by Che Che 车澈, focused neither on this anger nor on the politics of hip-hop, but instead turned the hostility and rebellion inherent in hip hop into a form of verbal confrontation among teenagers, and focused on amplifying the extent of this confrontation, for example, organizing “diss” sessions, where individuals or groups face off against each other in “battles.” The show’s directors boldly engaged in trial and error, hoping to see whether, if they if they presented the show in this way, they might draw apathetic youths out of their digital subcultures. To their utter delight, teens flocked to see the shows. The lyrics of some of the contestants (such as VAVA and After Journey) also referenced the hardships and dilemmas of today’s teens, creating a certain amount of short-lived buzz on social media. 
 
But the hip hop and street dance shows left out most of the original literary style and the ideological content of hip hop, in order to avoid provoking state authorities.  Moreover, in addition to feeding directly into mainstream fashion or transforming themselves into profitable commodities, as analyzed by the British School of Cultural Studies, their "avoidance" approach took another basic discursive strategy. This strategy has been to adopt the universalist slogan of "peace and love," which helps programs survive and even thrive in under conditions of increasingly rigorous "cultural selection.”
 
However, as a "mechanism of ideological adjustment," advocating "peace and love" does not address teenagers' dissatisfaction with the world they live in, or dampen their anger in the face of social inequality. Teen anger has simply been replaced and redirected; or rather, their concerns have been transformed into verbal struggles with other subcultures and intense hostility and online arguments among fans of hip hop/street dance contestants, which is the only way to generate online traffic in a short period of time. 
 
This is where the paradox lies. The concept of "peace and love" that the show's producers borrowed from the Beatles and the West Coast Flower Child Movement of the late 1960s is in fact similar to Nietzsche's master morality, that is, the logic of the strong. Does this suggest that progressive egotistical "individuals" will occupy a prominent position in a "beautiful new world" that is anti-establishment, anti-war, and is dedicated to the pursuit of collective spiritual liberation?  In any event, the programs’ self-contradictory logic matched the emotional patterns and discursive norms of most teenagers, and the programs became traffic-generating machines. Since then, "love and peace" has become the "winning formula" for talent shows like street dance, robotics, basketball, and competitive games. 
 
Two years later, when the online audio-visual industry thought that hip-hop talent shows were dying out, the video platform Bilibili invited the recently departed former chief director of Dragon Television’s "Go Fighting 极限挑战!" to produce a new hip-hop talent show, "Rap for Youth 说唱新世代” in the summer of 2020. The show’s provocative slogan, "everything can be rapped," reveals the director's ambitious vision to use hip-hop as a format to forge a cultural platform that a new generation of youth will recognize. Take "WeWe," the song with the highest number of views (6 million plays, 19,000 pop-ups, and 6,567 comments) on Bilibili, for example. The program directors chose this song, which is narrative and almost epic in its form, not to speak to teens’ libido, but to focus on what kind of cultural production the youth of the future might engage in.
 
In the vision of “Rap for Youth,” the most important thing is that young people use rap to talk about society and history from the perspective of the individual, and rarely address questions from a collective—or national—perspective.  Unlike the "utopia" of "peace and love" that the youth talk about, "Rap for Youth" plays on youths’ sense of autonomy, invoking the language of free personal development and the sensual experiences that accompany this development, thus creating a safe "heterotopia." It is safe in the sense that the song and its visuals suggest a certain closeness and friendliness to the Chineseness of the country and culture in which it is embedded.
 
One cannot arbitrarily argue that this is merely a matter of the show’s directors’ doing their job, because if they do not succeed here, they, and the capital they represent, will not be able to shape the image of Chinese youth or to mobilize them emotionally as individuals and liberals.  Even if we leave out the sordid side of hip hop music, the ideology that can exist in this illusionary space does not obviously express any natural or self-made emotional connection with state ideology. It is this invisible but ever present sense of distance and alienation that exposes the illusion of the space, as well as the resistance and indifference to—and avoidance of—this illusory intentionality by the producers and the rap performers.
 
Here, we see the power of the state as having suffered a genuine "involution." Bilibili, the show’s producers, and the contestants are subtly asking the youth audience several questions, the answers to which are in fact obvious and have been refined into "tacit knowledge:" Is socialism an ideology that gives priority to "equality of opportunity"? Do Marxists endorse or criticize the existence of the law of the jungle and social Darwinism? 
 
Another genre that cannot be ignored in the field of talent shows is the series of male and female talent shows derived and adapted from shows like "Produce 101" produced by the Korean commercial channel Mnet. One of the core elements that distinguishes this from other TV talent shows such as the "Super Girl 超女" series or "Sing! China 中国好声音" is that the participants are no longer ordinary people ("semi-finished products"), but “practitioners” ("half-finished products") who have already entered the “idol commodity production chain.”  Since the practitioners are self-funded, most of them come from the urban middle classes or even the upper classes, and therefore this kind of group talent show fundamentally deviates from the spirit of "grassroots rebellion" that TV talent shows pride themselves on. In the three years from 2018 to the present day, the three major video sites have produced a total of 12 seasons of programs, with total costs estimated to be upwards of 2 billion RMB.
 
Existing studies look at the profitability or marketing models of such programs, but rarely touch on what kind of "psychological techniques or spiritual power" such shows convey to young people. For example, in the Chinese shows, which are transplants from the Korean idol culture industry, men (or boys) are pressured to converge with (or even cross over to) a self-presentation closer to traditional femininity (women do not self-present as men), and the sexualized features femininity that fit the "otaku/anime 御宅族" aesthetic (e.g., sexually provocative dance moves), are deliberately magnified in group talent shows settings.
 
Even though the mainstream media, represented by Xinhua and People's Daily, kicked off a wave of public opinion "sissy shaming 娘炮羞辱" in 2019 that led to the issuance of what the General Administration of Radio, Film and Television or self-published media called “sissy restrictions 限娘令" (such as the on-screen blurring the earrings worn by male stars), shows like "Produce Camp 2019 创造营2019" or "Youth With You 青春有你" continued to resist the incursions of "body nationalists" and in pre-casting still insisted that contestants be "tall and thin, with white skin and narrow eyebrows.” This body aesthetic, with it traces of “assembly line production,” has the last word.
 
The collective presence of fresh bodies (commonly known as "fresh meat") wastes no time in implanting a sense of the primacy of appearance in teenagers, prompting them to transform a self-care ethic into a psychological technique of self-discipline. This self-discipline makes adolescents anxious because they are trapped in their innate deficiencies in terms of physical appearance, and the collective expression of anxiety is madness—the uncontrolled madness created as the shows selects their idols:  some people turn to plastic surgery or medical cosmetology to achieve the goals they have set (since 2018, people born since 1995 make up 25% of those having had plastic surgery in China, and it is hard to believe that it is not related to the emergence of these shows), while others become fans, who project themselves onto their idols, creating a kind of immoderate empathy. Data illustrates the potential for this paranoid empathy to be transformed into cash flow: over the course of the 2018 season "Produce 101," fans spent more than 40 million RMB promoting their idols.  The figure for the 2021 season of Produce Camp was  146 million RMB, and for the Youth with You 2021 season, fans' crowdfunding reached 89.312 million RMB. 
 
In the “public scripts” purveyed by these variety shows, both the subtle phrasings of the production teams and the new buzzwords coined by the directors—such as "The harder you work, the luckier you get" (from the first season of "Idol Producer")—are like “newspeak” in Orwell's 1984, emptying out and updating the daily vocabularies of teenagers like a virus. This may be the only way to establish a broad sense of "empathy" between the show and the teenagers. Emotion receives pride of place, because this is what the video sites and the producers want, and the same is true for capital.
 
The core operation of variety shows is precisely to intervene in the emotional and mental life of young people at an unconscious level, to shape the original self into the ego that the "New Culture Movement" (dominated by capital and the "profit-making brokerage" class) is building. The contestants' acting ability, talent, and "natural" appearance, along with their self-discipline and growth as stimulated by the competitive system, are woven together by the shows' writers and editors to define the qualities of "excellence" and "enterprise” and display these to a new generation of Chinese youth:  courage, possessive individualism, an instinctive belief in progress and the future. 

Part Three
 
The preceding two sections have illustrated how the "profit-making brokers" who left the system to become the network audiovisual industry, after acutely grasping the spiritual demands of the new generation of youth, have skillfully transformed these demands into the hidden discourse of the variety shows which serve as "public scripts.” On this basis, the final section of my study will go one step further and analyze the collective expressions of teenagers as users or fans who are mobilized and influenced by these hidden micro-discourses. This is the only way to determine accurately the extent to which online audiovisual programs intervene through consumption behaviors to guide youths' cultural choices and ideological identities, and at the same time arrive at a more precise interpretation of the possible cultural and political influence of the "for-profit brokerage" class as an increasingly out-of-control force. 
 
I first used three indicators—Baidu search, Weibo topics, and Souhu topics[5]—to determine the popularity of the shows we have been discussing.  The data show that the number of topics and the total number of searches for talent shows on Weibo have been increasing year by year, with "Production Camp 2021" receiving the most searches ever. Most of these data can be seen as the result of fans' "emotional labor" and are evidence of the ability of talent shows to attract the interest and enthusiasm of teenagers in a substantial way. These online activities contained a certain amount of criticism, but most of the criticism is drowned out by the collective voting actions of users and fans. 
 
One year after the online debate about subject of overly feminized males, Tencent Video and iQiyi launched the first seasons of "Production Camp 2019" and "Youth With You," and many fans voted in such a way to oppose the voices on social media that uphold hegemonic masculinity. On June 2, 2020, I logged onto Sina Weibo topic and searched for "Production Camp 2019."  The topic had been consulted 23.31 billion times and commented on 140 million times.  There was some support for the state campaign, but the campaign attracted far less interest than the competition and the idols. 
 
Compared with variety shows, TV dramas broadcast on video sites attract more female fans who like to watch films about male couples 男男CP (the fans are sometimes called “rotten women 腐女”). Since 2016, when the General Administration of Radio, Film and Television tightened the regulations on online TV series (e.g., increasing control on themes related criminal investigations, supernatural occurrences, violence or homosexuality, establishing a 24-hour monitoring mechanism, etc.), video websites have catered to the needs of young female users, beginning by developing a wide range of online material which now is gradually coming to focus on three major genres: romance, suspense (such as tomb raiding, fantasy, mystery, horror, etc.), and danmei adaptations 耽改剧.[6] 
 
At present, romance and same-sex couple films are the first choices of female users. In 2016, the show "Addicted 上瘾" was downgraded due to its homosexual themes,[7] and the General Administration of Radio, Film and Television subsequently tightened the censorship standards for same-sex couple materials, and 2017 saw a sudden reduction in the production of same-sex couple dramas. The following year, such dramas took one of two paths:  either replacing the two male protagonists by one male and one female protagonist, at which point it enters the safer “romance” category, or replacing male-male romances with "socialist brotherhood" dramas.  Fewer same-sex couple dramas are made than romance and action-adventure pictures, but they often trigger a lot of internet buzz.  
 
On July 2, 2020, I logged onto Sina Weibo and searched for "The Untamed 陈情令" and "Word of Honor 山河令,"[8] and found that the former had 42.57 billion hits and 4.3032 million comments, and the latter 18.67 billion hits and 16.22 million comments). The main targets of these films are teenage girls born since 1995 or even since 2000. They call themselves "CP fans" or "rotten women," and as a whole, they are "unconcerned with marriage or family.” They often draw criticism from mainstream media because their online discussions acknowledge the existence of sex and the relationship between ethnicity and masculinity, but such criticism has little impact, and pales in comparison to the online discussion about such themes, characters, and films. 
 
Let's compare this with the online popularity of two TV series that aired this year, "Minning Town"[9] and "The Awakening Age 觉醒年代." I chose these two for comparison because they are completely different from the topics of the dramas currently broadcast on video sites: "Minning Town" is a realistic drama about China's poverty alleviation project, while " The Awakening Age" is a historical drama commemorating the centennial of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Yet whatever the public praise for "Minning Town," hits on Beidu or Weibo do not even approach those of "Production Camp 2021," broadcast on Tencent in the first half of 2021.  More noteworthy is the fact that most popular parts of “Minning Town” are not those dealing with poverty alleviation, but instead those dealing with the male and female protagonists' "couple."  This indicates that topics related to "male-male couples" or "rotten culture" easily continue to dominate social media. 
 
The gradual development of sexual awareness or sexual behavior in the daily lives of teenage girls and young women has, to a certain extent, led them to a greater understanding of their own sexual needs in a more direct and practical sense. However, they still face the reality that sex is rarely discussed at home or at school, and patriarchy remains the dominant message with which they are inculcated. As a result, this sexual need, or the natural experience of pleasure, is often dysfunctional in reality, and the resulting resentment and repression may even build up or turn into genuine anxiety. In the eyes of the "profit-making broker" class, these (repressed) sexual neuroses are a resource that can be fully exploited. The fact that male-male couple dramas are still around in 2021 is enough to show that video sites and the capital behind them remain fully confident that such sexual themes can be translated into profits. 
 
But the crux of the matter is that the ultimate object of the sexual energy of this kind of fan is directed not at the "couple," but at the self. Male-male drama constitutes a specific and powerful process that allows fans to withdraw their long-stagnant attention from themselves and to confront their own desires in the intimate interactions of male idols, while their identity as bystanders allows them to return to themselves at any time and indulge their own needs.  In essence, it is a narcissistic self-involvement that, in the end, produces a sense of emptiness and a constant reproduction of this emptiness. This is a pathological addiction, the traces of a sexual colonization created by the manipulation of the ego world of the male-male fans by the video producers.
 
Conclusion
 
As noted in the introduction, my goal in this essay has been to evaluate the effects of state management of the audiovisual industry in the period from 2016 to 2020. Borrowing a concept from Prasenjit Duara, the article attempts to use the idea of the “involution of state power" to examine the gaps and uneven relationships between the expansion and extension of state power and the actual effects of the use of this power in the audiovisual industry.
 
First, the increase in the sums devoted to state management, and the broadening of the scope and depth of this management, occurred simultaneously with the growth of a large number of private program production companies and the development of video platforms. We can only understand the possible political influence of this simultaneity through a deep analysis of the process by which the video sites carry out their cultural guidance and agenda setting.   This influence has produced the "involution" of state power in the online audiovisual industry.
 
This "involution" is reflected at two levels in the relationship between the producers and the audience:  first, the middle and senior management of video sites constitute a solid class of "for-profit brokers," and direct the labor of production teams of mainly young women.  They have cleverly transformed the requirements of the state authorities under the protection of the "public script" they claim to be following, using the hidden discourses and symbols of liberalism, consumerism, and the “natural humanity” of youth to establish a heterogeneous cultural leadership, thus becoming a group with "uncontrollable informal power." 
 
Second, the online buzz generated by teenage users and followers on social media illustrates the effectiveness of this cultural leadership, particularly in the fierce, immediate online pushback against attempts to modify this culture. 
 
As I approach the end of this essay, I need to clarify a few points regarding the use of Duara’s concept of "involution."  First, I use the concept of the "involution of state power" to describe certain political processes and outcomes, not the cultural-economic phenomena discussed by Clifford Geertz.
 
Second, the "involution of state power" discussed here, and the differences we observe in the production of variety shows in the traditional broadcasting industry are two distinct situations that inevitably emerge as a result of the same administration's enhanced management of video sites outside its jurisdiction and state-owned media within its administrative jurisdiction, but both point to the same fundamental political issue of the cultural leadership of popular literary forms such as variety shows and TV dramas.
 
Third, the issue of building cultural leadership for youth is closely related to the cultural and political influence of variety shows and TV dramas on youth, and more importantly, to the degree of youth's love for and sense of identity with these cultural products. On the one hand, the management of the audiovisual industry by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and other departments is merely a continuation of the old management style; on the other hand, private enterprises or private enterprises are not the same as state-owned media, and their profit-seeking nature means that they will inevitably turn into brokers. 
 
Ironically, most members of this class come from state-owned media, especially provincial TV stations. Variety shows and TV dramas both capture and cater to the cultural and spiritual needs of youth, meaning that that video sites have forged a hegemony—superior to that of the state's cultural and propaganda departments—over the topics, social capital, and grammatical norms of youth culture and entertainment, so that the practical impacts of state power over the management of the online audiovisual industry have hardly changed, or in fact are losing ground.
 
Eventually, the regulatory capacity of formal state/local institutions and these video sites, which have grown wildly, and are gradually approaching monopoly status, building on the loyalty of teen users, (i.e., platform capitalism), thus creating an involutionary force, forming an intertwined relationship of checks and balances between state authorities and the industry. This relationship will produce substantial obstacles as state power attempts to manage the online audiovisual industry, and moreover, will inevitably lead to renewed efforts to strengthen of state management efforts. 
 
As expected, since May 2021, the state administration, represented by the State Internet Information Office and the General Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, have taken serious actions against fan culture, variety shows and male-male drama. In August, iQiyi announced that it would produce no talent shows next year, and that several male-male dramas planned for summer broadcast in 2021 were all on hold or would no longer be broadcast. Then, in late August, the State Internet Information Office issued ten remedial measures against fan clubs.
 
This series of measures is aimed directly at the video websites and the fan economy that is perfectly in sync with it. The latter is the core mechanism for controlling the buzz/traffic economy of the Chinese entertainment industry. Video sites have not only taken the core manpower from traditional broadcasters, but have also quietly seized the "political" task of building cultural leadership for youth from the Communist Youth League through their variety shows and TV series. This is both a manifestation and a consequence of the "involution" of state power in the network audiovisual industry. If we do not sort this out, it will be difficult to achieve a scholarly understanding of the true intentions behind state efforts to exercise control over fan culture and online audiovisual programs, and to strictly control the production and circulation of male-male dramas.
 
Notes

[1]吴畅畅, “视频网站与国家权力的’内卷化,’” originally published in the print version of the 开放时代 (Open Times) journal in June, 2021, and on the online version of the same journal on December 4, 2021. 

[2]Translator’s note:  Also known as “You Can You BB” and “Oddball,” this is an extremely popular show in China, available on many different media platforms, a kind of debate/reality show where the best talker wins and stays on to debate again.  The Wikipedia description is quite helpful; scroll down to see the kinds of questions they debate.  Episodes are available on YouTube.

[3]Translator’s note:  The reference here is to a letter supposedly sent from Pan Xiao, a young woman who had just entered the workplace, to the editors of China Youth magazine in 1980, on the subject of conflicts between collectivism and individualism in the workplace.  Although it was later revealed that the letter was in fact composed by the editors, the discussion it sparked, carried out through letters to China Youth, seems to have been real.  The basic question addressed was:  what values should inspire us in the era of reform and opening?  Should I be working for myself, simply trying to get ahead, or are there other values I should be respecting?  That the letter and discussion are still mentioned today suggests the importance of the debate.

[4]Translator’s note:  Literally, “vertical talent and variety shows 垂直类选秀综艺节目.”  The meaning of “vertical” is unclear to me.

[5]Translator’s note:  These are popular search engines in China.

[6]Translator’s note:  Danmei, or tanbi in Japanese, is a male same-sex romance genre, also known as BL (“boys love”) which traces its roots to Japanese manga in the 1970s.  Much of danmei literature in China is written by female fans and posted online.  Danmei “adaptations” can refer to this.  

[7]Translator’s note:  Some of the material cut by censors can be seen here, which is some evidence of how far China’s video producers dare to go.

[8]Translator’s note:  Both of these are period piece youxia dramas whose main characters are handsome young men.  The films have homoerotic overtones. 

[9]Translator’s note:  The Chinese title is 山海情, which is set in the town of Minning, whence the English name of the series.