Beyond Positive Energy: Flat Affects among China’s Educated Youth: Panel co-organisé à la Annual Conference of the British Association for Chinese Studies

Young people in China and East Asia have often been depicted either as optimistic striving subjects involved in what Ann Anagnost called “life-making in neoliberal times”, or as disillusioned diaosi or sang youth. If such depictions do capture something of the discursive renderings of, or distancing from, life pursuits, tracking manifestations of subjectivity over time often reveals the more fluctuating affective states that make up ordinary living. Part of a broader publication project on the politics negative affects in Post-Reform China, the papers in this panel draw on careful ethnographic approaches to zero in on this ambivalence among educated urban youth. Taking the promotion of “positive energy” (zhengnengliang) as a backdrop, the papers cover affective experiences of urban redevelopment, official moral propaganda, and self-development programs. In a context where positivity has become an imperative, what is the political potential of felt indifference (lengmo, danmo), cynicism or confusion (mimang)? The contributors dwell upon what Lauren Berlant calls “flat affects” as one mode of responding to, and engaging with their everyday lifeworlds. Together, they show the potential and limits as to these non-emphatic feelings can serve as “diagnostic tools” – to borrow the words of Sianne Ngai – and subtle modes of critique, to rework dominant modes of subjectivity. The papers demonstrate how engaging with these emotional experiences might help us reach more nuanced understandings of the agency of young people in contemporary China.