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Beyond Positive Energy: The Politics of Negative Affects in Post-Reform China: Panel organisé à la Annual Conference of the British Association for Chinese Studies

par Richaud-Berthoumieu, Lisa
Référence Annual Conference of the British Association for Chinese Studies (University of Birmingham)
Publication Non publié, 2021-09-10

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

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 focus on “happiness” campaigns or state-promoted “positive energy”. This panel takes this prevalence of positivity as an invitation to investigate its opposites: What spaces are left, in China’s public culture, for negativity to be expressed, circulated, cultivated, and acted upon? Despite its pervasive use of positivity and growing concern with managing negative affects, how may the party-state also capitalize on these feelings to reproduce its legitimacy? As part of a broader publication project, the papers in this panel begin to address these questions, bearing in mind the oft-depicted emotional impact brought about by political and socio-economic change. Looking at state performances, Xie’s paper uncovers the instrumental use of negative emotions associated with China’s past for China’s present. Bram examines grassroots yet market-based practices of psychological counselling. These papers recognize the emergence of spaces for expressing negative affects in public culture as one inevitable counterpart of the promotion of positivity in post-Reform China. They discuss the ambivalent political potential of negative-based sociality.