Locating negative affects in post-reform China: Panel organisé à la Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies

If there is such a thing as a dominant public sphere in post-reform China, its emotional tonality has often been described as overwhelmingly positive, as evidenced by the recent “happiness” campaigns or state-promoted “positive energy”. This panel takes this prevalence of positivity as an invitation to investigate its opposites: the expression and performativity of negative affects and emotions in everyday life and public culture. Here, negative affects are not only defined by their attendant dysphoric or unpleasant quality. Crucially, negativity derives from state-shaped emotional regimes, produced through explicit definitional acts or staged atmospheres that promote certain affects and dismiss or condemn others. What kind of cultural repertoires are available and appropriated for people to make sense of their emotional experiences? How do cultural artifacts contribute to shaping social imaginaries of stranger sociability centered around collective emotional experiences? How are affective publics formed, sustained, and (de)politicized in the Chinese authoritarian context? Beyond obvious forms of control over technologies of social connections, are there any mechanisms through which the Party-state may restrict the possibility to identify oneself as member of larger (counter) affective publics? Despite its pervasive use of positivity, does the party-state capitalize on negative affects to reproduce its legitimacy? The panel will attend to a variety of contexts, ranging from the negative affects ensuing from state-induced “situations of restricted agency”, the lingering traumas and fears of the Mao era, to the ways in which the party-state continues to govern (through) negative affects.