Critical Asian Studies

Critical Asian Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcra20 Subject making with Chinese characteristics: gender, sexuality, and Chineseness in neoliberal popular and public imaginaries Televising Chineseness: gender, nation, and subjectivity, by Geng Song, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022, 252 pp., $29.95 (e-book), ISBN: 9780472220045Dreadful desires: the uses of love in neoliberal China, by Charlie Yi Zhang, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2022, 280 pp., $26.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781478017998 Jamie J. Zhao To cite this article: Jamie J. Zhao (2022): Subject making with Chinese characteristics: gender, sexuality, and Chineseness in neoliberal popular and public imaginaries, Critical Asian Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2022.2119594 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2022.2119594 Published online: 08 Sep 2022. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcra20 CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2022.2119594 REVIEW ESSAY Subject making with Chinese characteristics: gender, sexuality, and Chineseness in neoliberal popular and public imaginaries Jamie J. Zhao Center for Gender and Media Studies, Department of Journalism and Communication, NingboTech University, Ningbo, People’s Republic of China Televising Chineseness: gender, nation, and subjectivity, by Geng Song, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2022, 252 pp., $29.95 (e-book), ISBN: 9780472220045 Dreadful desires: the uses of love in neoliberal China, by Charlie Yi Zhang, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2022, 280 pp., $26.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781478017998 The post-1978 economic-political transformation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), including but not limited to the marketization, industrialization, and commercialization of Chinese society, media, and culture perpetuated by the government’s opening up, modernization, and globalization policies, has fast-forwarded the country into a neoliberal, globalist, yet still authoritarian, nation-state.1 As Michael Curtin notes, in the early 1990s, China officially entered its “socialist market economy” period.2 Marxist economic geographer David Harvey coined the term “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” to denote the nation’s “particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control.”3 This significant political, economic, and ideological shift has been described by media communication scholars Wanning Sun and Yuezhi Zhao as “an ambiguous and paradoxical process that has witnessed the progressive applications of neoliberal strategies of market rationalization on the one hand, and the continuing and indeed intensified (re)articulation of China’s socialist legacies on the other.”4 Over four decades of “economic reform and market liberalization,” abundant novel popular and public imaginaries of places, people, and cultures within and beyond a geopolitically defined China/Chineseness, especially produced by, for, or about socially and culturally disadvantaged groups, have been engendered.5 Nevertheless, these emerging desires, subjectivities, and possibilities that give mainland Chinese people enormous hope and confidence to survive and thrive in an intrinsically desperate and suffocating CONTACT Jamie J. Zhao [email protected] 1 Rofel 2007; Sun 2002. 2 Curtin 2010, 118. 3 Harvey 2005, 120. 4 Sun and Zhao 2009, 98. 5 Sun and Zhao 2009, 96; Rofel 2007. © 2022 BCAS, Inc. 2 J. J. ZHAO sociopolitical environment have always been tainted with “Chinese characteristics,” either willingly or forcibly. Since the 1990s, a fast-growing body of English-language scholarship has paid critical attention to the gendered, sexual, racial, ethnic, and transnational dimensions of Chinese media, popular cultural, and public discourses that have been heavily shaped by the PRC’s expanding market-reformist economy and its hasty joining of global neoliberal capitalism. For example, some Chinese gender studies and women’s studies scholars have explored the political generational gap between the Maoist and post-Mao eras, which simultaneously has produced and subscribed Chinese female gender subject positions, differences, and ideals in local and transnational public spaces.6 Field-defining studies have examined the performances and sociocultural norms of Chinese male masculinities concerning the nation-state’s modernity and globality in digital and inter-Asian contexts.7 In addition to academic attention to the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and class in prostitution in post-socialist China,8 in-depth research on mainland Chinese people’s rural to urban migration and cross-border mobilities (in the forms of real-world practices, transcultural imaginations, cyber communication, and media representations) has proliferated.9 In addition, feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics, activism, media practices, and cultural productions have been thoroughly investigated in the expanding academic literature produced over the past decade.10 Entering the post-2010 years, the gender, sexual, class-related and ethnic aspects of China’s media cultures and public spaces have been further complicated, if not frustrated, by the joint work of inter-Asian and transcultural media and human flows, the quick development and wide availability of digital technologies, the dominance of global capitalism, and the intense international relations within the masculinist-nationalistic selfmodernizing and globalizing discourses of the party-state. Norm-defying, counter-hegemonic imaginaries of Chinese identity and desire can be easily identified through and encouraged by China’s creative industries, online communicative venues, social media platforms, and urban public and private spaces. Notable cases include the global circulation and wide popularity of Chinese television programs (especially those featuring nonconforming identities, personalities, and appearances), cyber fiction writing and its crossmedia, transcultural adaptions, global fan cultures (particularly those dedicated to media featuring male homoeroticism), and the fast-developing housing and educational markets. What kinds of possibilities or constraints do these newly developed spaces, cultural forms, and images create for subject formation and knowledge production concerning subaltern groups and minorities in post-2010 China? How do innovative popular cultural productions and new ways of mass communication inflect and reflect on the contemporary Chinese government’s increasingly misogynistic, racially discriminatory, and gentrifying policies? What are the relationships between these public and popular cultural manifestations of the country’s neoliberal consumerist mechanisms and local histories 6 See Evans 1997, 2008; Farrer 2002; Gilmartin et al. 1994; Hershatter 2007; Hong Fincher 2014; Jeffreys 2006; Yang 1999. See Hird and Song 2018; Louie 2002, 2014, 2016; Louie and Low 2003; Song and Hird 2014; Zhong 2000. See Hershatter 1997; Jeffreys 2004, 2007, 2012; Liu 2011; Zheng 2009, 2010. 9 See Fong 2011; Martin 2009, 2014, 2022; Sun 2002, 2010, 2014; Yang 1997. 10 See Bao 2018, 2020, 2021; Engebretsen 2014; Kam 2013; Kong 2011; Lavin, Yang, and Zhao 2017; Zheng 2015. 7 8 CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 3 and global currents? How do they ultimately maintain or disrupt the state’s subjectivization of neoliberal, cosmopolitan Chinese citizens in the third decade of the twenty-first century? Two recently published English-language academic monographs, Geng Song’s Televising Chineseness (University of Michigan Press, 2022) and Charlie Yi Zhang’s Dreadful Desires (Duke University Press, 2022), are timely works that help answer these questions. Both authors explore some of the most popular theoretical concepts, academic debates, media cultures, and political–ideological discourses in the above-mentioned existing scholarship. The two books share similarities in research subjects and methodologies, yet they also diverge from each other significantly on analytical lenses and fieldwork sites. Both authors devote the major parts of their books to examining the shifting yet also interlocking discourses of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, class, and nationality in contemporary Chinese television images and audience/fan cultures. Methodologically, Song and Zhang both effectively synthesize textual and discourse analyses of media and cultural productions and sociopolitical events with an ethnographic fieldwork. Song offers a powerful, engaging televisual-cultural-industrial critique of contemporary China’s television dramas (and related celebrity-fan economy and media regulations) from a solid Chinese gender studies’ perspective. Taking a different analytical angle, Zhang draws on theories of transnational feminist studies and anthropology to present a pioneering gender-focused neoliberal critique of the contemporary Chinese government. Song conducted ethnographic research between 2015 and 2019 in two of the most urbanized, developed cities in China: Beijing (the capital as well as the political, cultural, and educational center of the country) and Zhuhai (one of the most economically dynamic coastal cities and a Special Economic Region since 1980). In contrast, Zhang’s fieldwork includes two major parts. One was conducted in 2012 and 2016, with over 120 informants, exploring the lived experiences, subjective expressions, and neoliberal struggles of “rural migrants and local farmers or workers” in two relatively less known regions, Hai‘an (a less-developed coastal city featuring “labor-sending”) and Wuxi (a prosperous city featuring “labor-receiving”), both of which are located in the Yangtze River Delta.11 The second part of his fieldwork was conducted between 2009 and 2013 with sixteen female fans of Chinese male-homoerotic fiction (also known as danmei fans) who were “recruited through snowball sampling.”12 These disparities in their focus groups and analytical emphases generate interesting yet distinct directions for and promises of post-2020 Chinese media and cultural studies in an age of (neo-)globalization and digitization. Televisual imaginaries of Chineseness As a well-established, widely cited scholar in China and Chinese studies, Song has published on many cutting-edge topics concerning media and literary representations of Chineseness and manhood, including the wen–wu (culturally refined–martial) paradigm of Chinese male masculinity and its manifestations in premodern and modern Chinese cultural productions.13 His academic writings have greatly contributed to a de-Westernization 11 Zhang 2022, 28. Zhang 2022, 29. 13 See Bai and Song 2015; Hird and Song 2018; Song 2004; Song and Hird 2014. 12 4 J. J. ZHAO of masculinity studies in Anglophone academia, paving new ways for Chinese media, literary, and popular cultural studies from a gendered perspective. As a continuing effort toward this direction, Televising Chineseness stands out as a theoretically robust, analytically nuanced, well-researched book on contemporary Chinese media studies, with an emphasis on televisual representations and discourses of China’s self-modernization, globalization, and ethno-nationalism. Song does an admirable job of analyzing diverse gendered images, formats, motifs, and genres of post-2015 Chinese dramas, particularly through an intersectional approach that highlights hierarchies, discriminations, and privileges concerning intertwined sociocultural identities, statuses, and subjectivities. The book is composed of seven chapters and a brief epilogue. In the opening chapter, Song unpacks his focus, key conceptual and theoretical frameworks, and methodologies. He explains that the too-often essentialized idea of “Chineseness” as a desirable Other imagined from an Orientalist gaze in fact dominates contemporary Chinese television dramas and plays a central role in today’s state-backed media productions and public imaginaries. As he notes, Chineseness “is closely related to the identities and subjectivities preferred by the state and produced for the nation … [, which] can be understood as cultural justification for political sovereignty.”14 Considering that television (in both traditional and digital forms) is a powerful device for cultural governance, Song strives to investigate the role of Chinese productions in gendered subject formation. Meanwhile, he also asks how Chineseness as both a form of cultural capital and an engineering technology of the government is (re)produced and negotiated through contemporary televisualization of local and global gendered dynamics, knowledge, and desires. By so doing, he unveils a “paradoxical coexistence of” both gender diversity and “a post-socialist revival of patriarchy in Chinese television.”15 Song argues that neoliberal subjectivizing techniques, such as “the self-improvement, self-discipline, and positive attitudes required by the socialist market economy,” characterize today’s Chinese television culture.16 In his second chapter, Song historicizes the cultural, economic, industrial, and technological transformation and development of Chinese television from the 1980s to the twenty-first century. The author’s demystifying of Chinese media censorship and content regulation in this chapter is especially strong and illuminating. Song’s discussion powerfully uncovers the ways in which the marketization, decentralization, and digitalization of television in the past several decades “have given rise to multiple meanings of Chineseness.”17 Meanwhile, these historical specificities and contemporary features of China and its media industry render television “an effective mediator between popular desires and the state’s agenda.”18 In each of the following chapters, Song discusses a specific televisual fantasy of Chineseness created through gender images and imaginaries in a subgenre of dramas. In Chapter Three, Song looks at anti-Japanese dramas that showcase “the inextricable relationship between patriarchy and nationalism” through the imagined gender differences in televised Japaneseness and Chineseness.19 In Chapter Four, he explores male 14 Song Song Song 17 Song 18 Song 19 Song 15 16 2022, 7. 2022, 15. 2022, 6. 2022, 24. 2022, 35. 2022, 37. CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 5 masculinity in, and audiences’ feminist responses to, dramas featuring heteropatriarchal tropes of the “bossy CEO” (badao zongcai) and the “straight-man cancer” (zhinan ai). Song critiques this genre as a “display of a ‘Chinese-style‘ sexism” and emphasizes its cultural borrowings from classic Chinese literature and contemporary Sinophone literary and popular cultural elements.20 In Chapter Five, he focuses on televisual representations of foreigners and foreign countries that contribute to China’s national pride and cosmopolitanism.21 As he shows, gendered self-Orientalist and Occidentalist imaginaries eventually “reinforce Sinocentric and phallocentric nationalist, and sometimes even chauvinist, views of China’s self-perceived increasingly dominant positionality in the world.”22 Chapter Six inspects images of beautiful, effeminate young men (also known as “little fresh meat” or xiao xianrou) and Chinese boys’ love (BL or danmei) productions. Song excavates a paradoxical situation for these dramas: their commercialized effeminate male images and stars are attacked by the government’s sissyphobia23 and censorship, but they are defended by some audiences’ feminist voices. Both sides, nevertheless, are driven by “the entangled interconnection between manhood and nationhood” in a cosmopolitan Chinese imaginary.24 In his seventh chapter, Song shifts his focus to the transformation of the ideal womanhood promoted on Chinese television over the past three decades. His critical reading interrogates the “strong women” images in more recent dramas and demonstrates that these quasi-feminist representations still indoctrinate a revised perfect imagery of Chinese women who are expected to embody an uncomfortable amalgamation of traditional female virtues and modernity. This reconstructed ideal womanhood, as Song finds, is part and parcel of the government-endorsed form of gendered Chineseness that camouflages China as an appealing, modernized nation-state both domestically and internationally. Televising Chineseness is an impressive academic text with adroitly put arguments. It not only offers meticulous analyses of the history and contemporary situations of China’s television and other media industries, Chinese audience and fan cultures, and rising issues concerning the Chinese cyber environment and offline social realities but also provides readers with rich details and useful information on Chinese popular culture and media communication in general. For example, the book includes the author’s engaging scholarly interpretations of many slang terms widely used in contemporary Chinese cyber and public communication, such as “sissy pants” (niangpao; a derogatory term denoting men with effeminate looks, behaviors, and/or aesthetics) “young sister-inlaw” (xiao saozi; married young women), “‘mythological’ anti-Japanese drama” (KangRi shenju; a parodic term describing anti-Japanese dramas with unbearable low taste and absurdly exaggerated representations and unrealistic plots), “adorkable” (dai meng; an adjective describing people who are both dorky and cute), and “mama’s boy” (mabao; a term referring to a boy or a man who is pathologically close to his mother and only does whatever his mother tells him to do). With little doubt, the valuable conceptualization of the popular terms included in the book will stimulate further interest in and critical research on related topics. Not to mention the expansive number of television 20 Song Song Song 23 Song 24 Song 21 22 2022, 85, 100. 2022, 102–103. 2022, 125. defines this as “the fear or hatred of effeminate men.” Song 2022, 126. 2022, 149. 6 J. J. ZHAO programs listed and analyzed by the author, which makes the book a practical media archive for Chinese media studies. These features come together to showcase Song’s wide knowledge and profound understandings of Chinese television and popular culture. Another noticeable merit of the book is Song’s invaluable interviews and conversations with officials, practitioners, and professionals in China’s media and creative industries. This form of dialogical inquiry, supplementing his focus group discussions with viewers of diverse identities, interests, and backgrounds, produces extremely useful and significant firsthand data and insider information on the production, regulation, and distribution of television programs in contemporary China. In contrast to most existing studies, which are political–economic analyses of the industry, deconstructive readings of the tropes in popular dramas, or textual and discourse analyses of gendered, racialized, and class-based images and related politics,25 the empirical data presented and analyzed in Televising Chineseness is especially rare and important. This effort to combine the opinions of media censors, policymakers, and production personnel with comments by audiences and fans gathered through both digital and in-person communication is creative, inspiring, crucial, and worth applauding. Furthermore, supported by empirical research, Song’s careful consideration of the “dual identity” and related dilemmas of provincial television stations as “both profit-making enterprises [qiye danwei] and state-run institutions” [shiye danwei] is particularly stimulating.26 His analysis of the rise of “IP (intellectual property) dramas” and a major shift in the audience demographics caused by the digitalization of Chinese television in the past decade, as well as his explication of China’s media censorship as being “productive” instead of repressive, are highly original and thought-provoking as well.27 Some readers might feel unsatisfied to learn that, despite Chineseness being the central theme of his book, Song does not offer any chapters dedicated to ethnic minority Chinese television stars, such as Purba Rgyal, an ethnic Tibetan who is known as a typical “little fresh meat” celebrity manufactured in a famous Chinese reality singing competition in 2006. There is also no solid discussion on how televised representations of ethnic minority-dominated places within China, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, shape the imaginary of Chineseness in the book. In addition, the question of how biracial women in Chinese diasporic communities are represented or fetishized on Chinese television in relation to the state’s recent masculinist, phallocentric discourses of patriotism and ethnonationalism also begs further investigation. This topic is particularly relevant because of the recent nationalistic commercialization and eroticization of Chinese-American female celebrities in music and sports, such as the American-born biracial ChineseAmerican athlete, Eileen Feng Gu (Gu Ailing), who won two gold medals in freestyle skiing at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Nevertheless, these omissions do not prevent Televising Chineseness from serving as a well-written, analytically compelling, theoretically rigorous, and fundamentally groundbreaking academic source. 25 See Bai 2014; Gong 2021; Gorfinkel 2018; Keane 2015; Wen 2015; Zhong 2010; Zhu 2008, 2012; Zhu and Berry 2009; Zhu, Keane, and Bai 2008. 26 Song 2022, 25. 27 Song 2022, 26–29. CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 7 Desiring love Charlie Yi Zhang’s book presents an innovative reading of love “as a social apparatus that transpires sustainably into variegated emotions and feelings with grounded effects.”28 The book contains an introduction, a conclusion, and five main chapters, each of which discusses a unique cultural manifestation resulting from both the transnational neoliberal regime’s subjectivization of minority groups and the neo-nationalist backfire against this globalist manipulation. By doing so, Zhang offers an intersectional feminist and queer examination of several seemingly disjointed subtopics: television representations, the romantic relationships and mobilities of laborers and rural migrants, and danmei fandom. What links these subtopics is the neoliberal bubbles surrounding a “borderless Loveland” in which “love is fabulated both by the Chinese state and by capital as an expansive spatiotemporal matrix . . . for serving their collective interests.”29 Zhang deems this governing mechanism of contemporary neoliberal China centering around the idea of love “the difference-making machinery.”30 Throughout the various themes he examines, Zhang identifies different ways in which this mechanism hinges on “the affective parameters of desire and intimacy in binaristic terms of gender, class, sexuality, and ethno-race.”31 These constantly produce and reconfigure “oppositional relationships and binaristic categorizations” while also “concealing the connections in between.”32 In his first two chapters, Zhang focuses on political and entertainment televised spectacles. In Chapter One, he looks at how political memories and histories, as well as future governing strategies, were fabricated into and legitimized through the official, mainstream televisualization of desire and intimacy in the October 1, 2009, ceremony that marked the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Zhang reads the gendered, classed, and ethnicized televisual performances at the ceremony as symbolic signs and visual arrangements that orchestrate historical events and political–economic reforms to produce “desiring” and “desirable” citizens who should either “succumb to an allencompassing paternalistic state power, or . . . identify with an iron-fisted patriarchal state.”33 Chapter Two moves on to explore another televisual spectacle of love in one of the most popular Chinese matchmaking reality programs, If You Are the One, adapted from the format of the Australian dating program, Taken Out (Network Ten, 2008–2009) and broadcast by Jiangsu Television. The program has been popular among both Chinese and foreign audiences since its premiere in 2010. He interprets the show’s adaptation of heterosexuality-centered reality styles and its embracing of capitalism and liberalism as a state strategy to promote “the heteroromantic relationship and possession of financial goods—private property, in particular” that underpins “the neoliberal expansion in China.”34 Zhang conceptualizes this televised and neoliberalized form of intimacy circulated through China’s integration of global reality TV culture, 28 Zhang 2022, 4. Zhang 2022, 5. 30 Zhang 2022, 6. 31 Zhang 2022, 5, 7. 32 Zhang 2022, 14. 33 Zhang 2022, 58. 34 Zhang 2022, 83–84. 29 8 J. J. ZHAO neoliberalism and cosmopolitanism, and local-specific heterosexual ideals as “homepatriarchal love.”35 In his next two chapters, Zhang looks at the hope and despair rising from the lovabilities and love-abilities of laborers and rural migrants delimited by China’s neoliberal dream. In Chapter Three, he discusses the gendered, familial, and marital relationships of migrant workers that often manifest through the conjugal market, housing and educational resources, women’s reproductive abilities, and the hukou system.36 As a result, social hierarchies and gender ideals are reformulated and even further encouraged among migrant groups who are exploited by this Chinese-specific neoliberal mechanism. In Chapter Four, countering a gloomy view of the neoliberal matrix in urban China, Zhang sheds light on its complexities to reveal the agency and resistance of women and laborers who work hard to survive and “subvert the neoliberal machinery from within.”37 Ultimately, Zhang argues, these manipulative policies serve the interests of political and capitalist power. Working together with the multiple ways and degrees of resistance by minority groups, constantly changing governing strategies divulge the nature of “the neoliberal regime as a self-regenerating system that is open to challenges and disruption.”38 Following a discussion on women’s agency in creating “a more equitable gender environment” in Chapter Four,39 Zhang shows how online danmei culture can be reconceptualized as another democratic “space of resistance and survival in the alienating affect sphere” for “well-educated professional urban Chinese women.”40 Yet, in his analysis of danmei fans and fiction, Zhang also criticizes the blatant romanticization of discriminative, escapist imaginaries of wealthy, beautiful, young gay men and their consumerist lifestyles and relationships while ignoring the pain and suffering of realworld Chinese members of LGBTQ communities living in a brutal neoliberal society. Zhang considers this unsettling logic of “men-only” homoerotic imaginaries widespread in danmei fandom as a “homopatriarchal version” of love that eventually perpetuates neoliberalization.41 Love is, no doubt, an important subject for academic research, the presence and use of which in the context of contemporary Chinese society should not be taken for granted. Like discourses on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and class, popular and public imaginaries of love have been shaped by global and local cultures and manifest in diverse media and cultural representations and performances. Closely engaging with affect studies and feminist neoliberal critique, Zhang presents research on these topics through multidisciplinary analytical angles. His writing captures the normative, manipulative logics of policies and ideals concerning social registers and offers a strong critique of the government’s cosmopolitan-cum-neoliberal mentality and its intricate ways of working in media representations and cultural consumption, people’s daily lives and social relationships, and 35 Zhang 2022, 83–84. The latter is China’s population registration system that was implemented during the Maoist era in the 1950s. This system has always been manipulated to discursively uphold urban gentrification and “stimulate and sustain the exodus of the rural population to urban and coastal areas.” Zhang 2022, 108. 37 Zhang 2022, 146. 38 Zhang 2022, 154. 39 Zhang 2022, 146. 40 Zhang 2022, 154. 41 Zhang 2022, 176. 36 CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 9 cross-gender, cross-generational, and cross-border tensions and expectations. His research findings yield valuable insights into China’s contemporary governmentality and question the celebratory scholarly stance toward the boom of the seemingly feminist-supportive, gender-nonconforming-friendly public and popular cultural domains proscribed and prescribed by an authoritarian government. From time to time, however, Zhang’s analysis tends to recharge, or at least unintentionally lean on, the deeply rooted antagonistic binaries of men versus women, heterosexuality versus homosexuality, and the local versus the global within a neoliberal social institution that he strives to debunk. This is most evident in his discussion of danmei. While seeing danmei as a class-based, digitized, women-dominated popular culture, Zhang’s selection of informants who are all educated, single, adult women is far from representative of the demographics of today’s danmei fans, many of whom are married women, teenagers, gay men, or transgender people. His limited sampling also overlooks the recent televisual adaption and global circulation of a number of highly popular cyber danmei stories that have further complicated the composition of danmei fandom, transforming it into a global, multilingual, multimedia-driven community. In addition, Zhang’s findings generated from his reading of Beijing Comrades: A Novel, a queer Chinese work of fiction originally published online in 1998, might no longer be applicable in examinations of the neoliberal and “homopatriarchal” essence of the increasingly thorny post-2010 Chinese danmei media productions and celebrityfan economy. In particular, two recent online danmei fiction-adapted dramas, The Untamed (Tencent, 2019) and Word of Honor (Youku, 2021), have achieved success on both the local and international levels, garnered large-scale fandoms in other parts of Asia and the Anglophone world, and led to an unprecedented commercialization of queer Chinese culture on a global scale.42 This recent wave of consumer-driven capitalization, mainstreaming, and globalization (involving contraflows from China to East Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas) of the “men-only” homoerotic Chinese media supported by China’s official culture and entertainment media industries needs further consideration. In addition, Zhang’s prose is filled with neologisms and long sentences, which might be, to some extent, obscurantist to general readers and limit his book’s appeal to only advanced graduate students and well-trained scholars in relevant fields. Yet, this book, with the author’s rich, interesting recounting of China’s political–economic traumas and ironies and his piercing critique of the party-state’s neoliberal mentality and capitalist exploitation, is of great significance and can spark further critical inspections of discourses on love and intimacy in post-2020 neoliberal China. Taken together, the two exceptional monographs reviewed in this essay pivot on a Chinese-specific difference-making mentality as part of the neoliberal–nationalist subjectivizing process. The authors’ informative, in-depth examinations of the various governing technologies map out a neoliberal Chinese society that manufactures desiring subjects in response to its continually evolving socialist market economy. The two 42 The Untamed was selected the Asian Drama of the Year in 2019. For more information, see: https://starmometer.com/ 2019/12/11/chinas-the-untamed-wins-2019-asian-drama-of-the-year/#:~:text=The%20winner%20of%202019%E2% 80%99s%20Asian%20Drama%20of%20the,mysteries%2C%20eventually%20finding%20and%20defeating%20the% 20true%20culprit. 10 J. J. ZHAO books complement each other in many ways. They are certainly much needed for scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines and add to the existing scholarship on Chinese television, gender cultures, and fandom. Graduate students and scholars in Chinese and Sinophone studies, media studies, LGBTQ studies, women’s studies, audience studies, cultural studies, and inter-Asian and critical Asian studies will find the books handy. Moreover, professors who teach advanced undergraduate courses on topics such as Asian media cultures and gender and sexuality studies could use the two monographs as set texts. Both works will be indispensable, exciting, and enlightening for academics who are eager to learn more about gender, sexuality, and Chineseness within and surrounding contemporary public and popular imaginaries. Their publication in the early 2020s bodes well for the continued flourishing of Chinese television, fandom, and neoliberal-cosmopolitan studies in forthcoming years. Notes on contributor Jamie J. Zhao is an honorary professor and director of the Center for Gender and Media Studies at NingboTech University, China. She holds a PhD in gender studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, HKSAR and obtained another PhD in film and TV studies from the University of Warwick, UK. Her research explores East Asian media and public discourses on female gender and sexuality in a globalist, digital age. Her academic writings have appeared in a number of journals and edited volumes. She is the editor of Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness (Hong Kong University Press, 2023), and coeditor (with Maud Lavin & Ling Yang) of Boys’ Love, Cosplay, and Androgynous Idols: Queer Fan Cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Hong Kong University Press, 2017), as well as the forthcoming Contemporary Queer Chinese Art (coedited with Hongwei Bao & Diyi Tan, Bloomsbury, 2023), and the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Gender and Sexuality (coedited with Hongwei Bao, Routledge, 2023). In addition, she is the founding coeditor of the “Queering China” book series published by Bloomsbury and the “Transdisciplinary Souths” book series published by Routledge. ORCID Jamie J. Zhao http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5106-4563 References Bai, Ruoyun. 2014. Staging Corruption: Chinese Television and Politics. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Bai, Ruoyun, and Geng Song, eds. 2015. 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