“Do you trust a can of fish without an expiration date?”
—Jaime, Chairperson, Chaoyang Trap

Krish: An ending, like time, is a scam.

We started Chaoyang Trap with an expiration date in mind (“two seasons”). We’ve been putting off calling any episode our “finale”, reluctant to run up against this self-imposed doom. Our wild run, once exhilarating, now feels exhausting. Season 1 had 10 published editions. Season 2 has 21.

It’s devastating to call time on a project we love, but some kind of ending is inevitable. Is this permanent? Who knows. 

In some ways, we’re not needed anymore. The Chinese web has morphed beyond what our specific format is able to capture, and many of our members have adapted—writing, editing, explaining, curating elsewhere. We gave serious critical consideration to subcultures that the broader China media landscape either ignored or covered in shallow ways, and much of what we wrote has now (re)appeared in major publications. We always wanted to be a complement to existing China coverage, and in that we succeeded. 

We also failed. Chaoyang Trap was an exercise in discernment, in close attention. An invocation, paraphrasing Katherine Yang, for a softer Internet against “unfeeling logic, thoughtless utility, and stratified competition.” Very little of the broader discourse around China fits that description, somehow more cursed than when we began. 

The chances of us coming back are…unknown, but Chaoyang Trap even existing was a miracle. Thank you for reading, and for being part of it. The site’s archives will remain online here and at chaoyangtrap.house, and we’ll keep our Twitter active to promote the work of friends and lovers.

For now, as Jack Halberstam reminds us, we “quietly lose,” and “in losing imagine other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”

Tianyu: After several attempts at drafting a Chaoyang Resuscitation Plan, my mind kept going back to Chris Xu’s 2015 essay, “Your Product Deserves a Good Death.” All good things come to an end; our group is scattered throughout different time zones, and our old editorial process (meeting late night for natural wine in Beijing) was no longer sustainable. Maybe the real plan we needed was a do-not-resuscitate: 

The end of something, when unrushed and deliberate, is a time for celebration as well as closure. It’s an opportunity to reflect back on everything that’s happened, good and bad, and how it’s affected you. The end is a chance to tell the project’s whole story, a chance for the community you built to celebrate how they came together in the first place, and for everyone to exchange contact information and pack up their things. It’s a time to say goodbye and thank you, and then look ahead.

Chaoyang Trap’s success was somewhat unexpected; so will be, I hope, its legacy.

Both pro- and anti-government writings on contemporary China fall into the trap of Chinese exceptionalism—that China is either exceptionally good, or exceptionally bad. What we believe is that the everyday realities in China—online and offline—are manifestations of global systems and trends. They should be neither observed in an ahistorical vacuum, nor divorced from the political economy and ideologies that are inherently transnational. Instead of writing about contemporary China as a static object to be watched from afar, we wanted our readers to examine the shared structures of oppression, alienation, and techno-solutionism in the Global South and North—along with them, the chasm on the marginal and the possibilities for subversiveness. The wanghong doesn’t have to be Chinese; neijuan is everywhere; to quit quietly is to lie flat. What happens in Chaoyang doesn’t stay in Chaoyang; if you look closely enough, there’s always a Chaoyang Trap near you.

Yan: As per usual, all my complicated feelings captured in one WeChat sticker:

Still hoping one day, somewhere, we will organize Chaoyang Con! 

Krish: In the meantime, we do plan on making Chaoyang Trap zines and haunting some art book fairs! 

Simon: Mentally I’m here (Chaoyang), but are any of us still physically in Chaoyang?

████: I may not be physically in Chaoyang any more, but I will definitely remain in Chaoyang forever metaphysically (along with plenty of my blood, sweat and tears.) And so can you: if you liked the mission of Chaoyang Trap and wanted to do something like it, or were thinking about submitting something (anything!) then you should still do it! The world deserves it.

Emily: (^I am! But leaving very soon…) It’s fucking lonely to write about a neglected subculture and believe in the significance of it all. Discovering and becoming a part of CTH was like befriending someone I didn’t know I needed, or hearing a voice chime in on my feeble murmurs. I’m forever thankful for that. Here’s to more adventures ahead!

Caiwei: We will always have Chaoyang!! Writing for Chaoyang Trap feels like entering a room of concerned friends, where any esoteric interests are always greeted with passionate comments.  It’s a time of life as much as a state of mind, a source of endless inspiration and joy. 

Ting: I will always associate Chaoyang & Chaoyang Trap with a period of my life where I found a voice, a (even if small) sense of meaning, and a group of people that I dearly, dearly cherish. 

CX: Nope, I’m not letting y’all close this out with any amount of maudlin emo sentiment no matter who you paraphrase. Not this time, Krish!! For its whole existence, Chaoyang Trap was everything you all set out to create and more—an outlet that wasn't afraid to get weird or specific or unsparingly shady, a project that respected and paid its creators, the rare club that balanced having open arms for kindred spirits with good discernment. A mfing treasure trove of mindblowing content for its intended audience.

Any project that manages to make something good and true (in this economy????) is already a miracle. Any project that does so while being a good time and knitting together thoughtful people in a way that will outlast it? At the very least, the start of many beautiful and yet unpredictable things to come. If you helped make this thing happen and don't feel immensely proud of yourselves, I'm coming to wherever you moved to after Chaoyang and kicking your ass personally 😤

Simon: I’ve been a bit curious about different temporalities of the pandemic recently. Which is to say, in 2022, if you were lucky enough to not be in Shanghai or somewhere else that went through an extreme lockdown, your experience was perhaps more similar to 2020 in the rest of the world than the preceding years—the uncertainty, the closure of “non-essential” spaces, and finally, everyone getting Covid. I hesitate to say that China felt more optimistic two years ago when Krish sat me down to show me his Powerpoint pitch for Chaoyang Trap, but it seemed like the world had not curdled into its current shape. It should be interesting to see how these two timelines synchronize—or don’t—in the coming years. On one hand, increasing antagonism between China and the West means the two sides feel culturally farther apart than ever, though in terms of online life there might actually be a kind of convergence. The spread of TikTok and people engaging with livestreams and gaming more while being stuck at home has maybe led Americans to be more immersed in Chinese ways of being online, if not necessarily Chinese content. It should be interesting to see how this develops going forward, but at the same time, I’m sick of the line “this is the most interesting time to be in China.” To borrow Geremie R. Barmé’s coinage, it can really feel like an “empire of tedium.” In some ways, life is getting better, and every month it seems like there’s a new museum, independent bookstore, or record label. Yet most of the time these are showcasing work from the same limited cast of people, who can’t or, more sympathetically, are blocked from expressing anything with real bite. Here’s hoping this year brings more organic cultural exchange and things get better!

Yi-Ling: I’m sad. I’ll miss being in the same space, with fellow CTHers, talking about CTH, over a bottles of tsingtao and giant lamb leg roasted on a spit. There’s nothing like debriefing the group chat in person. At the same time, this feels nothing like goodbye. I feel like I still carry the Chaoyang Trap ethos in everything I do today: its commitment to experimental collaboration, its love of the niche and marginal, it’s refusal to be reduced into simple narratives. I’ll be looking for that spirit wherever I go: be it Chaoyang, Haidian, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei, Amsterdam. Chaoyang seeds blooming all over. 

Steven: I’ve been a fan of Chaoyang Trap for much longer than I have been an actual member, and I guess my thoughts reflect that. First reading Chaoyang Trap was like bringing an everyday object under a microscope: the subcultures examined were vaguely familiar, but upon zooming in, they appeared so much more fascinating and complex than their flattened forms that had diffused to the Chinese mainstream. Chaoyang Trap’s work inspired me to write a piece myself, and while I was never able to meet everyone else at CTH in person, working with the team online was a wonderful experience. (Communicating digitally was also befitting of a publication about, well, digital subcultures.) Although CTH is drawing to a close, I hope our readers will also feel motivated to explore the online subcultures that they find interesting. All online ecosystems are constantly in flux, with new communities constantly forming and fading away. This is doubly true in the Chinese Internet, where grassroots vitality chafes against state censorship, and subcultures continuously morph—or disintegrate—in response to regulation. Subcultures are dynamic, and there is always something new to write about. 

Aaron: As someone who was always a Dongcheng guy, I can testify that Chaoyang really is a state of mind. It’s sad to see Chaoyang Trap go, but ultimately I just have to trust everyone who contributed or read it to carry on the ethos and keep digging deep into systems and subcultures the world over.

Henry: I loved these little comment section exchanges where a passing observation or wry joke got nods and laughs from three people—as far as I was concerned, that was more than enough.

Krish: Outro music is Goodbye, by Chinese Football. Goodbye. 

Tianyu has left the group chat. He was Chaoyang Trap’s first and last intern.

Yan is FAR away from Chaoyang, but it is always NEAR to her heart. This is not subliminal advertising. 

Simon lives and works between Changning, Jing’an, and Pudong, lol. Despite the negativity of his comment, he really appreciates all the hard work everyone put into Chaoyang Trap and misses them all!

Caiwei is in the Upper East Side’s Chaoyang enclave, where she recreates Beijing street food with ingredients bought from Morton Williams.

Ting is in California missing beer at Jing-A, burgers at Slow Boat, brunch at friends and that one afternoon we watched Leto.  

Yi-Ling loves sowing and cultivating seeds. Especially Chaoyang seeds. 

Krish is in Amsterdam, where he misses all the Chaoyang exiles.

C(hris) X(u) has enjoyed being Chaoyang Trap’s aggressively supportive tiger parent and #1 fan (in terms of both chronology and enthusiasm).

Emily will be sulking about Chaoyang Trap’s closure in London’s endless rain. 

████ is in Shanghai, but will never be able to stop talking compulsively about Chaoyang.  

Steven is looking for baodu in the Bay Area, but will be back home in Chaoyang over summer. If you know of any nearby Beijing restaurants, please reach out to him.

Aaron may now live far from Chaoyang in Brooklyn, but at least he’s still only a few blocks away from a Shaxian Delicacies.

Henry misses biking to Chaoyang from his apartment on Sundays.

Write to us: hello [at] chaoya.ng.

Krish: Hello. Welcome to the second-to-last episode of Chaoyang Trap. 

This episode is about the basketball fandom app Hupu, a festering sore of a platform that has become the most reviled corner of the Chinese internet. Its user base—aggressively sexist, desperately horny—is like a Rat King mind-meld of 4chan, Gamergate and incel culture. 

Last year, we did a manthropology on the state of Chinese dudes, profiling three public figures who gave us a glimpse into how “masculinity” was being constructed in China. This episode returns to the question of how men find and define themselves online, this time going down the most cursed rabbit hole in existence. 

Our guide is Steven Zhao, who asks the biggest question haunting the Chinese web: how did a basketball commentary app end up as a radicalization machine for the worst kind of raging misogyny and homophobia?

[Content Warning: Homophobia, Sexism, Violence]

World’s End No Girlfriend

By Steven Zhao

Steven: I first used Hupu in 2015, the same year I started following the NBA. It seemed that every NBA fan I knew had the app installed, and for good reason: Hupu’s quality of basketball content was unparalleled in China. I spent much of middle school on Hupu memorizing player measurables, reading translated draft analyses and watching play-by-play text updates of games.

Hupu’s play-by-play updates, called wenzizhibo (文字直播) or “text livestreams,” are a thing of beauty. Livestream operators, typing at blindingly fast speeds, infuse a lot of personality into their commentary, peppering them with excessive exclamations and colorful hyperboles. They can be as exciting as actually watching games, especially given how dull Chinese TV commentators tend to be (barring this king).

One of my fondest middle school memories (there are not many) is of huddling with others around someone who had discreetly opened Hupu on his phone. As we shielded him from the prying eyes of our teachers, he relayed to us—via the magic of text livestreams—the latest heroics of LeBron’s Game 7 comeback against the Warriors. 

Today, Hupu is no longer an online basketball utopia. A simple search on Baidu or WeChat will reveal how universally reviled it is across the Chinese Internet. It's now famous for coddling a male chauvinist, incel user base. Many of its heaviest detractors are former users who, besides taking issue with the forum’s misogyny, also bemoan Hupu’s drop in quality basketball content.

When did this shift occur? For me, I first noticed the change in 2019, when the then-general manager of Houston Rockets Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protests. Hupu’s shift away from sports started much earlier, but nationalism, in particular, made the app pretty intolerable.  Basketball had become subsumed, even secondary, under the larger social platform the app’s founders were building: one centered on open, toxic misogyny.

Hupu was first founded in 2004 under the name hoopCHINA, an NBA forum and news platform for Chinese basketball fans. At the time, Chinese basketball fans were primarily concentrated on NBA-ba (NBA吧), the NBA message board on Baidu Tieba. To differentiate itself, hoopCHINA carved out a niche by translating American sports articles available nowhere else, with founder Cheng Hang reportedly sifting through around sixty or seventy news outlets a day for content. The strategy worked, and hoopCHINA quickly built a reputation for quality content, supplanting NBA-ba as China’s premier basketball forum. As hoopCHINA soared in popularity, the website contracted its name to the nonsensical Hupu, while also expanding to include other sports (including e-sports). In 2012, Hupu also released its mobile app, which today is its primary interface. 

Alongside all this was the growth of Buxingjie (步行街), or “Pedestrian Street,” the most popular subforum on Hupu. Originally, Buxingjie was simply the largest component of Ganbiya Dalu (甘比亚大陆), literally “The Gambian Continent,” a Hupu section for all things unrelated to sports. Ganbiya Dalu is also a homonym for “The Fucking Pussy Continent,” and in 2017, Hupu rebranded Ganbiya Dalu as Buxingjie, renaming the original Buxingjie to Buxingjie Zhugandao (步行街主干道), or “Pedestrian Street Main Artery.” This is now the most popular section of Hupu, boasting over 3.5 million posts and 11 million followers. In comparison, Shihuhudehuati (湿乎乎的话题, literally “wet topics”), Hupu’s main basketball discussion area, contains less than 1.5 million posts and around 8 million followers.

As Hupu’s non-sports material eclipsed its sports content, the app transformed into a hybrid general social media/forum platform geared towards zhinan (直男), or “straight men”.

Hupu is today mainly known for being a zhinan safe haven, which is not too surprising: Chinese basketball fandom, like most sports fandom, is dominantly male, and was especially so in the early years of Hupu’s founding, when the NBA had much less mainstream popularity. But despite the importance of basketball towards attracting Hupu’s current community, it is no longer central.

A lot of oxygen is consumed by dumb arguments, most notably from LeBron fans (詹蜜) and LeBron haters (詹黑). Buttons are clunky, loading is slow and the UI feels outdated. It is a lot harder than before to find high quality articles. Team subforums lack the interesting discussions, shitposts or meme stashes that make a good online community. Fantasy (范特西), a simple but still enjoyable version of American fantasy sports, has been removed as a minigame from Hupu to become its own app. The matchday text livestreams, unchanged since my school days, remain the app’s best surviving corner.

While basketball regressed, Hupu as a safe space for zhinan flourished, which means it slowly became unusable to anyone outside of this core demographic. Essentially, the app LARPs as a boys college dorm (this is literally how it is advertised) where zhinan are free to be zhinan, post on whatever topic they desire and shoot the shit with each other. In practice, this means that vile homophobia, nationalism, racism and other right-wing isms often appear on the app unmoderated and upvoted:

(content warning: homophobia)

Yan: Just want to point out here that the NBA gained major popularity in China in the 2000s after Yao Ming was drafted as No.1 Pick by the Houston Rockets. The sports channel of the Central Television Station prioritized all Rockets games, and people watched them with a sense of national pride. It’s ironic that the same team that helped the NBA expand into China also led to its downfall in 2019.

Yi-Ling: I feel like the mainstreamification of the nationalist stan (and the first appearance of the so-called “Little Pink”) began in 2016, so it took a bit of a lag period for them to wind their way into sports. Like Steven says, the 2019 Hong Kong protests seem to be the nationalist turning point for a lot of more benign cultural spheres. (i.e. hip-hop). 

Steven: Yes, and it’s especially strange in Hupu, considering that the forum revolves around a foreign sports league. Anecdotally, nationalism appears more in the form of deriding other countries rather than explicit flag-waving. It also tends to peak in spurts, like during the Hong Kong protests or the Olympics, but the misogyny is constant.

While many Chinese online spaces are  hate-ridden cesspools, what differentiates Hupu is its overwhelming “incel vibes.” The app is full of misogynists, horny desperate nice guys, and misogynistic horny desperate nice guys. To use Hupu is to feel that women are somehow simultaneously absent yet omnipresent. Of Hupu’s 70 million users, only around 10% are women, yet a disproportionate number of the forum’s posts are celebrity photos or thirst traps, feeding a voyeuristic obsession with women’s bodies: 

Sometimes, just numbers are enough for horny Hupu men:

Hupu posts featuring women are subject to obsequious simping, accusations of Photoshop, body shaming, slut shaming and sexual innuendos, sometimes all at once. Perhaps the best example of the mercurial nature of JRs is in the rise and fall of “Ice Cream Sister.” Ice Cream Sister shot to fame in August 2020 after posting pictures of herself on Hupu’s Buxingjie, and soon started using Hupu’s now-defunct video livestream function to receive gifts from her new fans. In September 2020 however, a user posted a photo of what they claimed to be Ice Cream Sister in real life.

Infuriated over the difference in appearance and the presence of another man, JRs began harassing Ice Cream Sister, ridiculing her physique and questioning if the man was her husband or boyfriend. By September 20, less than two months after she first went viral, Ice Cream Sister had sent her last post on Hupu.

A major reason behind Hupu’s unfettered objectification of women is the negligence of its struggling parent company, which has been reluctant to alienate its zhinan demographic. Despite investment from ByteDance in 2019, Hupu failed to IPO in 2021—the second time in 5 years—and laid off 40% of its workforce. The startup has no video broadcasting rights over any of the sports it covers, and its zhinan user base is seen as having little purchasing power. As such, investors have repeatedly questioned Hupu’s ability to capitalize on its large number of users and turn a profit.

In response, Hupu has doubled down on catering to zhinan in the most direct of ways: online shopping for dudes. Of the five buttons on Hupu’s bottom navigation bar, one is entirely reserved for accessing e-commerce. Major categories include men’s athletic wear, men’s skincare, anime figurines and alcohol. The success of Hupu’s e-commerce endeavor hinges upon keeping their zhinan JRs, and unsurprisingly, the company has barely bothered to moderate its community.

If anything, Hupu actively contributes to the hyper-objectification of women on its app. Until recently, text livestreams used to send “benefits”, or images of scantily-clad women, during game breaks. More infamously, the company also holds an annual “Goddess Tournament”, where JRs vote and campaign for their favorite Chinese female celebrities in a Word Cup-style competition.

Hupu just wrapped up its seventh Goddess Tournament, with actress Liu Yifei (in her role as Zhao Lingr) declared victor. Over its duration, the contest was easily the app’s most popular topic—even the death of the Queen couldn’t elicit as much discussion. (The company may have artificially propped up the tournament’s popularity with bots.) Again, women were absent yet omnipresent on the website: as far as I know, none of the “participating” celebrities have collaborations with Hupu or consented to the Goddess Tournament, and yet their images have dominated Hupu’s feed over the past weeks. 

The Goddess Tournament is especially interesting (and grotesque) because it embodies a corporate-propelled fusion of two polar opposites of the Chinese Internet: zhinan and fanquan (“fan circles”, covered in a previous Chaoyang Trap episode here).

The Hupu community’s various flame wars with Chinese celebrity fandoms are extremely well-documented at this point—see Emily’s comment below—but in the Goddess Tournament, the two subcultures collide to form something completely new.

There is a lot of fandom-like behavior in how users champion for their favorites while attacking rival celebrities, and while this is no doubt in part due to slick, non-Hupu fanquan operations infiltrating to influence polls, many of the most active users have had their accounts for years. Unlike fandom circles however, Goddess Tournament campaigning is conducted in accordance with patriarchal morals. Detractors slam rival contestants for being ugly, fat, old, plastic, etc. but also judge celebrities for their purity: Are they kind, sweet, loyal, untainted, without tattoos and without scandal? The categories that JRs use will become clearer in the coming days when celebrities are forced to face off each other 1v1, but you probably already get the idea: the tournament is a total misogynistic shitshow, combining zhinan morals with fanquan strategies.

Underpinning all of this is capital: the tournament is sponsored by Lynk & Co., a new Chinese-Swedish car brand run by the same company that owns Volvo. Their ads litter the page for the contest—in fact, the full name of this year’s competition is the “Lynk & Co. 7th Goddess Tournament.” Hupu also boosts user engagement (and therefore ad revenue) by allowing JRs to receive an extra vote by making new posts in the tournament’s subforums. Quite explicitly, the company is borrowing a page from entertainment companies. Which makes sense, because ultimately, Hupu is attempting to do the same thing: monetize an online community it has nourished, for better or for worse.

What is different, however, is that the Hupu zhinan community does not revolve around a single marketable, company-controlled entity. In fandoms, the idol or the group reigns supreme. But this is not the case for Hupu, where the only consistent “product” is misogyny. Chinese investors have blamed Hupu’s unprofitability on the stinginess of its demographic, but loser Chinese guys have paid for anime idols and cam girls before. Rather, the larger issue is that there is no singular icon that JRs fawn over. Sure, sports stars like LeBron and celebrities like Wang Xinling have fans on Hupu, but they also have haters, and Hupu cannot control public figures the way entertainment labels puppeteer their artists.

Emily: Imagine Chinese cyberspace as if it’s Westeros in Game of Thrones. Proud JRs from The House of Hupu would hold up banners that read “benefits are coming” and across the field from them there’d be The House of Douban, led by who JRs call “fan circle bitches” (饭圈母狗) following the motto of “a fan always pays”. With over 76% female users (stats from 2021) and known for housing prominent feminist discussion groups, China’s Reddit-meets-Letterboxd is often viewed by JRs as Hupu’s antithesis. It’s the homebase of everything JRs detest:

• Young women not giving a fuck about them, and;

• Young women adoring (and spending money on) better-looking, talented and successful young men who they will never be. 

Fangirls and JRs scream at each other from their respective platform enclaves whenever the opportunity rises. The former is fully aware of and enraged by the misogynistic slandering of them as irrational, “braindead” lunatics (脑残粉). The latter hides their toxicity by branding themselves as “sports fans” who are of course superior to (male) celebrity fans. Hence JRs are referred to as “Kneeling Basketboys” (跪族篮孩) on Douban and later elsewhere, an elaborate play on words that swaps the character for nobility with a homophone, kneel (贵/跪) and the character for boys with the similar sounding character for basketball (男/篮). This is an especially clever retort in response to “fan circle bitches,” turning the tables by calling JRs out on their equally braindead fanaticism,  “kneeling” before prominent NBA players like LeBron James. 

In Douban’s daily vernacular, the term is far more loaded. Many have used it to condemn how some JRs continue to “kneel” and support the games after the Morey incident, while fangirls themselves are adamant to boycott idol groups like BTS when similar political controversies occur. Nationalism is leveraged by fangirls to one-up the JRs, but victory cannot be called. Douban experienced the most brutal purification campaign in its history last April, with hundreds of feminist discussion groups disbanded and thousands of posts deleted. Hupu celebrated its 18th birthday with a commemorative article written as if it’s a coming-of-age novel three months ago, detailing milestones of the platform such as “battling fans of Kris Wu (a Chinese rapper and idol).”

Chaoyang Trap

S02 Episode 8: Jokerfied on Literary Pornhub

In the house this week: Emily, Yan, Krish, Yi-Ling, Simon, Aaron, and Jaime…

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4 years ago · 14 likes · Chaoyang Trap

Tianyu: 1Point3Acres (一亩三分地), a web forum popular among Chinese immigrant tech workers in America, provides a more frightening parallel to Hupu’s incel culture. Initially started as a discussion board for Chinese STEM graduates to find jobs and secure visas in the US, it later expanded into a Chinese expatriate forum that’s similar to the earlier, now defunct MITBBS; the website’s user base is mostly college-educated men working or looking to work in high-paying tech jobs. 1P3A users are often associated with the stereotype of xiaozhen zuotijia (小镇做题家), or “small town test-takers.” They became good students and got into top colleges—and in this case, immigrated to the US—but test-taking is the only thing they’re good at; coming from humble family backgrounds, the small town test-taker—goes the stereotype—lacks personality, hobbies, or basic social skills.

Similar to Hupu, US-based men on 1P3A embraced incel culture; many began posting about their experiences dating women back in China by leveraging their high income and immigration status. This eventually evolved into the misogynistic discussion of banyun (搬运)—literally “transporting”—women to the US (most often the SF Bay Area) and marrying them by manipulation. On 1P3A, incels—if they can be called that—wrote “tutorials” on how to “filter” women from abroad, get married quickly, and manipulate women to not divorce them after moving to the US. Here’s a rather disturbing example of one of these posts (all of the trigger warnings apply).

Steven: To bring this all together, there is only one entity that Hupu folks all care about: themselves. That is, despite all the bickering on the app, JRs are usually big fans of JRs, and this is what truly drives the Hupu community’s staying power. Much of the app’s most popular content is simply JRs sharing shitty things happening in their lives, with comments a mix of witty wisecracks and sincere empathy, just like any proper group chat with the boys. These viral posts generally relate to romance—unrequited love, not getting over your ex, and most commonly, being cheated on—and are usually written in a stream-of-consciousness, first person narrative format that allows writers to wring out every last drop of angst from their heart. 

This genre of posting was first kickstarted in 2012 by a despondent JR named Hu Tingfei, who simply titled his piece “Girlfriend Cheats.” OP begins by talking about his girlfriend, who is vacationing in Qinghai and has been failing to return his calls. One day, she forgets to hang up after talking with him, and OP keeps the call going. He hears her enter a car with a man, and they ask the driver to take them to a hotel. After arriving at the hotel, OP’s girlfriend discovers the call hasn’t ended and hangs up. OP calls her back, but she soon hangs up again and shuts her phone down, refusing to receive any of his calls for the rest of the night. The whole piece is a bit long to translate, but OP’s heartbreaking soliloquy is worth reading:

Hu Tingfei’s prose garnered widespread acclaim and sympathy on Hupu, spurring other JRs to spill their worst romantic misfortunes. You can read a lot of them in this Zhihu thread, although it is by no means comprehensive.

From these melancholic posts, it’s easy to tell that there is real camaraderie among JRs, a sense that if you, as a zhinan, are struggling in life, the other Hupu guys will have your back, because dudes understand dudes like no one else. But more than that, I think that the preponderance of sang (funereal) user-generated content hints at a fundamental truth about Hupu: a lot of users really fucking hate themselves, driving both the chauvinism and comradeship of Hupu. When I first browsed through the Goddess Tournament, it felt to me that a lot of users were spewing abuse to assert a sense of superiority over women that they could never find in their incel realities—a suspicion confirmed by sifting through countless, hugely popular, stories of JRs failing to find love.

By and large, it feels like JRs are dominantly young, depressed, self-loathing, lonely and unloved Chinese men who are acutely aware of their beleaguered status. This doesn’t excuse Hupu users’ misogyny—many depressed men are not raging sexists—but neither is it surprising that they would congregate to form a reactionary community where all mens’ prejudices and struggles are validated. A Hupu post from the aforementioned Zhihu thread perhaps best encapsulates the struggles and beliefs of the average JR:

This kind of bleak, masochistic self-hate is rare among incels, where sex is more often seen as a “right.” It stems from the unique conditions of China’s crisis of social reproduction, in which state and cultural expectations of procreation collide with a massive gender imbalance and neoliberal decay. The three-child policy, familial hope for grandchildren, a lack of women and stagnant wages on 996 hours all collapse onto each other to mold the defeatist psyche of JRs. In a sense then, despite being reviled by much of the Chinese internet, Hupu is very similar to many other Chinese digital communities. Like other subcultures, members flock together because it’s a hell a lot better than facing modern society all alone, and I’d much rather post my misery for others instead of wallowing in it by myself.

What differentiates Hupu, however, is that its users are uninterested in creating a utopia where these societal burdens do not exist. JR escapism is not about constructing a heaven where people are free from bride prices, overtime, and astronomical rent, but is rather about building a hell where only cishet Han Chinese mens’ grievances matter and are amplified.

In the world of Hupu, all zhinan are valid and deserve to be respected, cherished and empathized with, while women are decidedly submissive, existing only abstractly as objects of lust or shame. The days of Hupu the basketball forum are long gone, with only its mutated remains persisting to this day.

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Emily: I want to name-drop a few of JRs’ favorite goddesses in the past years. Gao Yuanyuan, an actress famous for her sweet and benign appearance who hasn’t ended her marriage despite her husband’s cheating scandals; Tong Liya, another stunning actress with a possibly abusive, emotionally unstable and unsurprisingly disloyal husband; and Li Qin as well as Liu Yifei, both actresses with well-known looks of “purity” and absences from tabloid gossips because they never (publicly) date. An arch-enemy of JRs, Yang Li (who JRs used fandom tactics to attack online, by the way), is a smart, educated female stand-up comedian, making jokes about mansplaining and receiving death threats because of it. 

JRs only like women they can imaginatively control. Tolerant, chaste, quiet, and desirable. Women have to make every loser feel like they can win through controlling her. As Steven said, JRs only care about themselves and an individual sense of control. The singular icon that all Hupu folks fawn over is patriarchal power. It would be hard to sell electric cars to men who are already grieving their lack of power and control over others or their own lives. Goddesses only remind them that God is dead and they might die on a treadmill too. 

Krish: Outro Music this week is the new album from electro pop group Aero-Boat (空气船). It’s the latest vibes delivery service for veteran indie vocalist Zhan Pan, best known for fronting a beloved noise pop band called The Gar.

I’m fascinated by Zhan Pan’s legacy and influence as an indie vocalist. He was the rare melodic singer within a scene of shout-speak post-punk, and manages to conjure this mood that I call “nostalgia for the present,” a precarious here-and-now suspended like dust motes in a sunbeam. That signature drawn-out affect, where he elongates and drawls a single phrase as a launchpad into shaky falsettos, is a sonic element that has always screamed “Beijing indie” to me. 

Tianyu: Thanks for reading, and see you next time for our final episode. 

BIOS

Steven is desperately searching for fellow Atlanta Hawks fans in the Bay Area, the non-JR kind preferably.

Emily can't wait to share this piece on all her socials to see who the JRs are in her friend circles.  

Slowork is a Beijing observer and an oddity illustrator.

Krish now works in Rotterdam, which is basically Wangjing with better fonts. 

Yi-Ling is a writer once based in Chaoyang, now in Hong Kong.

Yan has seen Chaoyang at 4AM.

Tianyu still doesn’t understand sports.

Krish: Welcome back to Chaoyang Trap, the newsletter that separates the Group from the Chat in a new story form we call the Trap. We’re back from our “summer” “break” to wrap up Season 2 and 摆烂 for good.  

This is the closing edition of Rewilding, our series of explorations into the language of the Chinese internet.

In each issue, we pick a word from the labyrinthine swamp of online life in China, lay it on the table, scrutinize it and take it apart in the form of a mini-essay, then replant the pieces, sowing seeds for further conversation. Rewilding queen Yi-Ling is on book leave, so this might be more…free-form than usual.

Previous editions of Rewilding have looked at boundary balls, cut chives, and flying pigs. For this final trip, we’re grabbing some tickets. 

抢: “Qiang” Culture, or Why Meritocracy is a Scam

Krish: It's 2015. Spring Festival is approaching and you need to buy train tickets to go home. New browsers come bundled with a plugin that lets you cut the “queue” when booking online. The plugin causes Github servers to crash globally.  

It’s 2018. The Beijing Film Festival opens next week and you want to watch the special midnight screening of Titanic. Tickets are sold out in seconds, then resold by scalpers for 10x the price.  

It's 2020. You want one of the 2000 daily slots allowing you to cross the border into Hong Kong. You pay for a service on Taobao that will qiang slots the second they're available, and hand them over to you. 

It's 2021. You need to take the TOEFL exam to be able to go to university in the fall. Competition to book exam timings is fierce. You’ve got plugins, fixers and scalpers on call. But so does everyone else. 

What connects these situations is “qiang” (抢) culture, a pervasive organising principle of the Chinese web. 

The word “qiang” means "to grab" or "to seize." It’s about optimally getting in early on something, to be first in line. It’s a mental state of permanent readiness. A mindset, to borrow a recent Douglas Rushkoff phrase. Perhaps THE Mindset of the terminally online in China. 

Yan: Qiang is a social act. It does not exist in the singular, it only exists in the social. One “qiangs” to compete against imagined others. Without a…mobilised mob, there’s no need for qiang. However, sometimes it is precisely the collective enactment of qiang that creates the mob: think about the crazy long lines outside a wanghong milk tea shop. 

Krish: To qiang something—tickets, slots, deals, seats—is to lay the groundwork to be first in line, the accrual of small advantages and beneficial knowledge to give you an edge. It’s to steel oneself for a gold rush, but also to disavow any moral quandaries about getting ahead.  

Plugins to cut queues, scrapers to find openings—that’s allowed, even expected. Qiang culture normalises behaviours such as writing code to surveill, DDoS, and grab first-come-first-serve digital listings, or creating ghost accounts to increase chances in online lotteries.  

To qiang isn’t to steal or pirate, though. The scarcity that makes this mindset necessary is usually not directly challenged. Qiang undermines the queue while simultaneously defending its existence. To paraphrase Rushkoff, It allows for a kind of “externalisation of harm” to others, sometimes enabling an ease of distance from the people and places that are compromised. 

We make a lot of videogame speedrunning references here on Chaoyang Trap, and it comes from a genuine belief that speedrun culture offers some pretty insightful lenses to look at online life in China. Qiang culture is pure speedrunning: an attempt to optimise routes through bureaucracy that nonetheless respects its boundaries. If you’ll excuse the analogy, qiang is an “Any% No Major Skips” run through life, one that’s okay with tool-assists and sequence breaking, but not with going out-of-bounds. 

████: I think the Shanghai lockdown earlier this year really drove home the realities of artificial scarcity and online qiang culture for a lot of people, especially those that found themselves unable to compete for food effectively (like my elderly neighbors.) I know some people can find it exciting when it’s for film festival tickets, but it is pretty fucking miserable to wake up and unsuccessfully qiang for food every day. I was heartened to see people challenge it over time, and begin to exploit qiang strategies for the benefit of their neighbors—Rushkoff is right in a lot of ways, but it gets a lot harder when you’re externalising to somebody you share a stairwell with. 

Krish: Also, an *expectation* that people will qiang any scarce goods on the Chinese web colours how many platforms and processes work here. It’s why friction is common in Chinese UX practices, why inconvenience is imposed on everyone as defence against qiang-like behaviours by the few. Keller Easterling calls this a “chemistry of causation”, and qiang culture permeates how systems are designed, how scarcity is always baked in, how shortcut-seeking networked habits are formed.  

Caiwei: As the dread of Zero Covid is prolonged, are we going to see more acts of "qiang" both in the way of getting ahead against manufactured friction, and the mob-like acts of complete chaos that we saw in quarantine zones? Behind qiang is a sense of deprivation and lack of security, and in this sense qiang mentality could both be the source and the result of precarious living conditions.

Krish: Exactly. Qiang is one reason why policies of artificial scarcity in China are politically possible. The response to designed inequality isn't questioning the lack, but rather a readiness to qiang.

Yi-Ling: Curious about how marketing tactics & user behaviour during, say, Black Friday might differ from that during Singles’ Day. What are the different cultural triggers that might induce a scarcity mindset in two of the most aggressively consumption-driven marketplaces in the world? To what extent is a “scarcity” mindset more present in the mindset of Chinese consumers, simply because that experience was a part of recent history? 

Simon: In terms of its more cultural/entertainment-based applications, I guess qiang is one of a number of interfaces between online culture and IRL, a moment of frenzied online activity that may translate into an exclusive offline experience that once again translates into online social capital, like the charged energy of a wanghong site in the wild. To put it another way, I’ve never even tried to qiang Beijing Film Festival tickets, but I certainly have seen a lot of people sharing screenshots of their tickets! 

This article in the Atlantic about the craze for restaurant reservations in America quotes cultural critic W. David Marx to discuss how, when access to the accoutrements of a hip, cultured lifestyle has become more accessible than ever before, the ability to grab a finite resource (i.e. seats in a restaurant) can become an increasingly important symbol of status and cool. I feel like in China right now, status symbol restaurants are more likely to be accessed through queuing than months-ahead reservations (perhaps this is different in loftier reaches of the upper class), but this did strike me as a case where Chinese and Western online cultures are spinning out in occasionally intersecting loops, perhaps more in sync than is commonly thought.

Yan: Yes, “qiang” is not created by or limited to the online. Before we could make online doctor appointments, people had to go to hospitals early in the morning (I’m talking 4 or 5 AM) to stand in line so they could qiang an appointment when the hospitals opened at 8AM. This may be the origin of scalper/huangniu culture, where people hoard scarce appointments with popular doctors and resell them for a higher price. 

Tianyu: In a way, qiang culture emerges from this question of “how do you distribute resources that are so scarce to a population of so many people?” Before Dengism, the solution was some form of hierarchy-enabled egalitarianism, where everyone supposedly received their shares through work units—the danwei gave you canteen access, housing options, and film tickets, and rice packets. The message of neoliberalism in the PRC was that if you worked hard enough, you’d eventually climb up the ladders—getting into a college, buying a house, and visiting parents in the countryside during the Spring Festival. But the problem with scarcity remains: demand is now higher, and supply hasn’t kept up. We came up with new forms of distribution, but all seem unfair and arbitrary; even university slots, for instance, are assigned by provinces.

[Content Warning: blood, violence] 

Krish: Even when these underlying interplays move online, this perception of scarcity persists.

Yan: Yes, though “qiang” online is completely different from offline. To qiang online is to compete with an invisible crowd (maybe this is also why people don’t have moral burdens as Krish mentioned above). It seems to me that “first come first serve” is the basis for everything that can be qiang-ed. Many online qiang scenarios come with interfaces, visual elements and effects that reinforce the symbols of scarcity: countdowns, stock numbers going down fast, being stuck between the product page and the purchase page… They induce the adrenaline rush that comes with being competitive, but there’s also uncertainty: you don’t know how many people you’re competing against, and therefore can’t even evaluate your chances, which justifies the over-aggressiveness in qiang. 

Krish: An aggression that’s so normalized that it can even be reliably deployed in service of more progressive ends. In January 2020, A group of music fans used a “buy now” qiang spectacle to generate interest for their mutual aid campaign to source PPEs for people in Wuhan: 

Henry: The example above is so interesting, and feels like it overlaps with Gofundme in that particular, socialize-risk-but-through-entrepreneurial-self-marketing-campaign, way. Trying to think of other ways that egoism is strategically deployed to get the Chinese population to do...progressive (?) things; reappropriating "qiang" in the way that "we don't take too kindly to———bigotry in these parts" reappropriates xenophobia. Is there a form or even formality of qiang that can be separated from its (ostensibly neoliberal) content?

Yan: For the most part though, Qiang is also the reason for manufactured scarcity, which is used to create far more cynical marketing campaigns or shopping sprees. I’m thinking of designer sneakers, or Li Jiaqi’s live streaming show. Manufactured scarcity makes “qiang” a spectacle to draw more people in, turning spectators into consumers. 

Yi-Ling: I wonder to what extent the virtual qiang is the successor of virtual weiguan. Back in the heady optimistic days of the Wenzhou train accident in 2011, the talk of the town was that weiguan—or collective observing—would change China. (Change meaning liberalization.) One could say now that instead, qiang has changed the Chinese internet. (Change meaning commodification.) Instead of serving as a digital town square where one could freely participate in all kinds of different ideas in the public discourse—the louder your voice the better—it’s become more of a digital hawker’s market, where one can freely consume all kinds of goods available in the public marketplace—the faster your wallet hands the better. 

Tianyu: This reminds me of qiang shafa as an early form of online engagement in China. The phrase, which literally translates to “grab the sofa,” means to leave the first comment—usually just the word “sofa,” without additional context—under a new post on an online message board. (This was common in the 2000s; nobody does it anymore.) Shaohua Guo traces the lineage from qiang shafa, in which she observes “an inclination toward voyeurism and exhibitionism,” to weiguan—the overarching idea is what Guo calls “digital witnessing.” To bear witness online might be performative activism at best; but the costs of change are just too high, its prospects too distant. 

Emily: Qiang spectacles occur on a daily basis in media and entertainment. Like Yan said, nowadays M&E giants manufacture scarcity of concert or event tickets by “locking” seats to create a false sense of popularity. Sometimes, this pseudo-hype is slapped on the celebrity as a badge of honour, so that the company can boast about their artist’s clout. At other times, qiang spectacles can be manufactured to directly generate profit. The most extreme case is probably Time Fengjun Entertainment and their boy group TNT. 

TF Ent hosted an auction in 2020 where they’d only sell concert tickets to the top 100 highest bidding fans. The winner purchased the ticket at the price of 21,312 RMB. That’s almost the price of a can of Coca Cola (not Pepsi) during the Shanghai lockdown.  It is also alleged that M&E companies hire scalpers to work for them. Scalpers then qiang seats using bots and algorithms, resell to fans at a higher price and perhaps split the earnings with the company. In both scenarios, fans often willingly collude with this kind of corporate manipulation because they either buy their way in and proudly display their loyalty (affluence), or sulk (brag) about how their idol is too popular for them to reach. Fans feel like they must participate in qiang, because everyone else is doing it and if I need to be approved as an authentic fan, I must be a winner amongst them. 

The tension that lies behind qiang is this bizarre push-pull of conformity and self-centeredness: I must qiang like everybody else and yet be ahead of everybody else. 

████: My suspicion is that there’s more questioning of the underlying conditions that lead to this competition than you might guess, but with so few avenues to address them, there’s little else for most people to do than qiang themselves.

Krish: Just wanted to remind everyone that this legendary headline exists, and was caused by qiang culture.  

Tianyu: That’s it for this episode. Thanks for reading, and for bearing with us through our summer break. We’re going to keep paid subscriptions paused while we figure out a more regular schedule. 

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Krish: Outro music this week is “Agora Bar” by Beijing (but not Chaoyang) band Sleeping Dogs. Agora is a dive-bar-cum-Indian-restaurant that was a regular haunt for at least one Chaoyang Trap member. They make good mixtapes. 

For more China music in this vein, remember to subscribe to Chaoyang Trap friend Jake Newby’s Concrete Avalanche. We have two episodes left before the end of Season 2. See you all next time! 

Tianyu: Bye!

Krish collects business cards from scalpers. He tries to qiang ideas from his own mind before they disappear.  

Yan is plotting the start of the academic discipline of qiang studies.

Tianyu thanks qiang culture for teaching him how to make Chrome extensions.

Caiwei recently enjoys qianging pre-owned clothing and accessories on Ebay. 

Emily was lowkey hooked on Li Jiaqi because one of the models he hired to hype up his qiang-driven live streams is insanely good-looking. 

Simon convinced himself early on that many qiang systems would not work without a Chinese ID, and therefore tries to lead a qiangnostic lifestyle. 

Henry has never successfully qiang’ed a ticket; he also gets cut in line a lot.

████ became an expert on grocery delivery platform qiang strategies the hard way.

Yi-Ling is writing a book. She’s also down with a fever & unsure if it’s an allergic reaction to antibiotics of the new standing committee line-up. 

Hi all, we’re taking a few months off this summer.

Paid subscriptions on Chaoyang Trap will be paused while we’re away.

It’s been an exhausting couple of months for the Chaoyang Trap group. Some of us are (still) in lockdown, some of us are on the 润, others figuring out major life changes or scary new circumstances.

We’ve been thinking about direction, about where this newsletter is going, and we don’t have good answers yet to the why and how of writing about the Chinese web in *this* moment. We haven’t had the time or space to talk it through between ourselves, and we don’t want to barrel forward just to keep the content gods happy.

And so, a break. There’ll be a Review drop soon, a special collab on Chinese comics and then…well, we’ll see. We’d love to organize an IRL event outside China (ChaoyangCon 2022!), and we’d love to hear from you all about what you’d like to see.

Our emails/DMs remain open.

Until then, take care of each other, be excellent, and send a heart emoji to your favourite group chat. ❤️

I
Close Reading: Emily compares bookstores in Beijing

II
Chinese Rock on Chinese Rocks: Jake Newby on the new FAZI (法兹) album

III
Contemporary Memes for Sad Comicbook Teens: Krish Raghav on WeChat stickers 

I
Close Reading 

Emily reviews Beijing's remaining indie-ish bookstores (as people in your English class). Tag yourself. 

PAGEONE

“Trilingual influencer expat with a Nietzsche quote on his IG bio. Overdressed for school. Research interest is something niche af, like napkin-folding in the Early Renaissance or Victorian pornography.”

Emily: Once owned by the Singaporeans, PAGEONE was the coolest kid around the block. Large portions of my teenage years were spent in its double-storied landmark branch in Sanlitun, where shelves used to be packed with crisp “original editions” (原版书), meaning English books. PAGEONE also perfected the art of selling those decorative hardback interior design portfolios that plague every liminal coffee table in Beijing. It was The Bookworm’s stylish cousin from across the street (have you heard that it’s closed?). 

PAGEONE Sanlitun has shrunk to half its size. The rest is an ARKET store. Original editions (or what’s left of it) occupy an inconspicuous corner.  Young fashionistas coming for a night out would stroll in while they wait for their Didi pickup and leave upon the beckoning of a brave new world.  

Rating: 7/10

3 for nostalgia, 3 for its current reserve of Chinese books, 1 for having my back when I run out of things to do in Sanlitun, waiting for my non-INFJ friends who are always late. 

One Way Street 单向街

“Feminist NB cynic because they read too much. Have 4 different side projects outside of school including an avant-garde zine that has better print quality than professional magazines. Likes: 16th century satirists; Hosting dinners with friends from carefully curated backgrounds for intellectual exchange.”

During one of my visits to OWS I found myself in a high-brow literary salon…situation, and overheard some classic waffling about “hermeneutics”, “abstractism” and “disenchantment”. But, my newfound respect for them comes from their curation, in their Hangzhou branch, of a special stand for feminist books in support of The Chained Woman two months ago. The display reads “If we can’t remember everything, we should at least remember what we’ve forgotten”. 

Rumour has it that the store got a call from the local police “inquiring” about the display after it went viral online. The next day, a new sign went up that said: “her story is inaccessible”. The pun was brilliant, because “inaccessible” (无限) also meant “unlimited”. There are countless Chinese women out there who fell victim to trafficking, forced marriages and rape, walking on a one-way street towards a set of chains. This store’s attempt at amplifying female voices for the sake of those women won me over. 

Rating: 8

Mostly for being a staunch feminist, but also their merch——saving that for another episode.

All Sages Books 万圣书园

“Regular attendee of One Way Street’s dinners. Quiet, likes to keep a low-profile, but secretly leads protests. Probably decolonizing the curriculum. Doesn’t text you back. Occasionally sends you links to journal articles on Foucault.” 

I once spent an unproductive afternoon of dissertation writing in their cosy cafe, where One Way Street founder and host of renowned talk-show series “Thirteen Invitations” (十三邀) once interviewed Chaoyang Trap fave Luo Xiang. Drinks on the menu are named after book titles and (of course) I went for the “Submarine at Night” (an absolute must-read). 

But All Sages is one of the few bookstores where the “cafe” isn’t the focus. It's a true book lovers’ mecca, with everything ranging from mainstream classics to the most obscure, undiscovered gems. Books are shoved together so tightly that it’s impossible to pull something out. It reminds me of my vintage bookstore hopping days in London and I physically couldn’t bring myself away from the shelves to sit down and write. 

I later read that the founder of All Sages was an icon during the Tiananmen protest. That would explain the ever sobering and truly soul-striking slogan painted over the cashier: “Acquire liberation through reading.” 

And thus I forgive their inadequate service and repeated hollering at customers for not wearing a mask. Government rules have to be followed, obviously. It’s the price to pay for liberation.

Rating: 10/10 for the spirit. 

6.4/10 for service. (get it?)

Yanjiyou 言几又

“Double majoring in English and Visual Arts but gives zero shits about either. Only here for hook ups. Wears too much cologne, claims to like the Romantics, and steals pick-up lines from Shelley.” 

This bizarre name comes from dissembling the Chinese character “设”, meaning “design”, and it’s apparent that their book selection process is a similar kind of mangling. The end result is an illogical mish-mash of a limited number of titles, often outdated and barely readable. The store, particularly its Guanshe branch, is (ironically) poorly designed, unevenly lit and has a confusing layout where the walkway cuts through a no-talking cafe area, and the children’s books section is also their…warehouse, with half-opened cardboard boxes. 

As I write this review I wasn’t surprised to come across a Zhihu thread written by a former staff at Yanjiyou, criticising the chain’s lack of management and mistreatment of workers. Despite the ambition to open 100 branches across China, Yanjiyou was forced to close down many of its so-called “cultural lifespaces” in recent years due to its broken supply chain. Yet again I sigh at a cursed trope in contemporary China: a dying industry wears a facade of wanghong extravagance only to be pierced through by business basics, accelerating its own demise. 

Rating: Compared to the first three bookstores in this review, 3/10.
Compared to Xinhua Bookstore, I’m willing to raise it to a 4, tops. 

Sisyphe 西西弗书店

“Too optimistic about life to be studying English. Hates it when it’s too “gloomy” and prefers the jolly stuff, such as the idylls. Loves to share quirky facts: did you know the majority of Shakepseare’s sonnets are addressed to men?” 

The store has nothing to do with the tragic figure it’s named after. It’s more of a Nickelodeon riff remotely inspired by Camus, mostly stuffed with benign gardening guides and a huge self-help section. More importantly, it sells the most original danmei—male-male romances—out of all the stores in this guide. I was surprised to find that a lot of the steamiest of these romances I first read online were vanilla-ed into “clean” versions for “commercialized copies” (商志), where homosexuality is toned down into homosociality. They’re shelved proudly next to The English Patient and Orlando and it’s always difficult to know how to react. I’m thrilled to see that an internet subculture can appear in a tangible form alongside canonical works, but I lament their unwilling collusion. They have come so very far to be visible, and yet what’s seen is not even what’s intended to be seen in the first place. 

Also the coffee is decent. 

Rating: 5/10. 

11/10 for having danmei, -7 for mutilating it. +1 for the decent latte I had while I sulked about the mutilation.

Yan: If I continue the English classmates comparison, all of the above (except for All Sages) are trust fund kids living rent-free in serviced apartments. They’re chains that have a parasitic relationship with shopping malls in exchange for favorable rent rates. Think Fangsuo Bookstore in Taikooli in Chengdu, and the wanghong Tsutaya bookstore in OōEli (天目里) in Hangzhou.

Krish: Many of these bookstore images also circulate frequently on Twitter on account of their flashy designs:  

Yan: The codependency of book stores and shopping malls in Chinese cities is so common that it’s hard for me to think of a book store, besides All Sages, that’s not in a mall. But when I think about it, I’m actually less bothered by the malls than the chain. Living in a big city in China you unavoidably have to go to malls… a lot. 

When bookstores become chains it takes away their personality and renders their curation less interesting. When it’s so easy to find and buy books online, I go to bookstores to browse, to be surprised, and to look for books that won’t be recommended by algorithms. Many chain bookstores have the vibe of an IRL online bookstore with a cafe and a stationary shop attached—everything is sleek and clean, yet predictable. On the other side of the spectrum, All Sages may have stuffed too many books on their shelves, but when certain books are presented at prime spots, you know you need to read it. I guess OWS’ chained woman curation was an exception, but we also have to take into account that the chain started as an indie bookstore, and its brand was closely connected to its founder Xu Zhiyuan, an influential “public intellectual.”

Caiwei: The growth of mall and CBD office building bookstores in China is not organic. It’s engineered to offer a “cultural experience” tied to corporate mission statements. The books are secondary. This is evident in how overpowering the gift and stationery sections always feel in a regular mall bookstore. Thanks to Fangsuo and Citic Securities (who own the Citic bookstore chain), every real estate giant feels compelled to create their own bookstore chain, or at least include a “cultural space” when mapping out their new developments. These bookstores sometimes feel closer to wanghong pseudo-exhibitions, co-opted by entrepreneurs and real-estate tycoons willing to pay lip service to the “culture scene”.

SKP, the luxury mall in Beijing created its own bookstore line Rendez-Vous in 2017, aiming to “provide new urban hybrid spaces in which all kinds of cultural business intermingle.” The mall, at the same time, is known for denying a delivery driver entry for wearing the yellow uniform that signifies his blue-collar status.

On the other hand, book stores like All Sages that put books and curation first, including my favorite Douban (no relation to the website) and now-defunct Yecao, usually live off a symbiosis with nearby universities. With online shopping eating into their popularity, a lot of them operate community WeChat groups to try new ways to shift inventory—I’ve found so many rare second-hand gems from Douban’s Wechat posts on my feed. Truly one of things I miss the most about living in Beijing.

Krish: Just going to drop this here for anyone asking about Beijing’s zine-centric Jet Lag Books or Post Post (I still love you): 

Krish: Alright, Jake. Over to you! 

Jake: There were a few recent records that came to mind when I was asked to write a Chaoyang review. Wu Zhuoling’s down tempo electronica release Another Shore was one, Old Heaven Books’ experimental folk and rock compilation Encore 72 Hours was another. But FAZI’s Folding Story was ultimately the one I lumped for, partly because it’s so unexpected. It’s a fascinating, confident departure for the band. (Alas, it’s not, as I thought for a brief moment when I saw the title, a concept album based on Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing.) 

II
Chinese Rock on Chinese Rocks

Jake Newby reviews the jagged, icy new album from Xi’an post-punk band FAZI 

Jake: I like the matter of fact quote that FAZI frontman and chief songwriter Liu Peng issued as part of the promo for this new record’s release: “We’ve created a different self, a fresh FAZI. It’s worth listening to.” That’s maybe not the most inspirational of sales pitches (largely why I love it), but he’s right—it is worth listening to. 

It's also worth watching. Emphasising that this is FAZI’s most ambitious effort to date, the band released the album in tandem with a short film directed by Jin Shien that runs for the record’s full length. Shot in Qinghai, southern Gansu and in the Qilian Mountains, it features some spectacular imagery. You should go watch it:

Formed in Xi’an in 2010, FAZI made their name with a post-punk sound laced with krautrock, best encapsulated on their 2017 album Heart of Desire. It was a no nonsense post-punk album, with bright guitar melodies layered over Cure-like basslines and some very Maybe Mars production: slightly rough and reverby, with a purposeful DIY edge. Folding Story is a very different proposition.

With the new album, FAZI have embraced clean and clear production. They’ve swapped Maybe Mars for Space Circle and the guiding hand of ‘godfather of Chinese post-punk’ Yang Haisong for that of Chinese post-rock pioneers Wang Wen (惘闻). Folding Story was recorded at Wang Wen’s studio, with members of the band contributing instrumentation; Wouter Vlaeminck, producer on Wang Wen’s most recent records, mastered the album. (Between Heart of Desire and this latest effort, there was even a baton-passing Fazi record: the instrumental Dead Sea featured Wang Wen leader Xie Yugang and was based on a Yang Haisong story.)  

The shift to a more expansive, crisper sound—that ‘fresh FAZI’—is on display immediately. Album opener ‘Invisible Water’ begins with Liu’s sparse vocals over trickling water and piano parts. It’s a hint of what’s to come, a signal that a band once known as The Fuzz have jettisoned their fuzziness, even if it’s quickly followed by the ‘don’t worry we still make post-punk’ of lively second track ‘Eye in the Sky’.   

The next section is where Folding Story falters slightly. ‘Beautiful Teeth’ returns the album to ballad territory, then ‘Never Say Forever,’ a sprawling lullaby, is followed by another slow number in ‘Silence’. The tracks are fine in and of themselves but the record hasn’t built a consistent atmosphere at that point and their combined effect is to suck some of the air out, or make you wonder if it’s on shuffle. ‘Never Say Forever’ in particular feels like an alternative album closer that they couldn’t quite let go of. The clarity of production also reveals its downsides here, bringing Liu’s lyrics into sharper relief, a scrutiny they don’t always withstand. 

But then the album surges back into life for a rousing second half. ‘Body / Mind / Soul’ is a classic burst of post-punk and ‘Vigil’ strikes a darker chord while continuing to build momentum, before the final three tracks find FAZI at their best. The jagged guitars and shouted chorus of ‘Delingha’—a track that feels especially primed for live shows—lead into the driving ‘Died in the Wind’ and then ‘Way to Atman’, the album’s swelling closing track that comes awash with triumphant trumpets.

This last trio of tracks is also where the accompanying visual narrative feels most cohesive, helped not insignificantly by the sheer beauty of Qinghai and the Qilian Mountains. The central lyric in ‘Delingha’ about facing a cold mountain is inevitably portrayed literally, ‘Died in the Wind’ sparks a snow-top freak out and the end credits feel of ‘Way to Atman’ is complemented by the protagonist progressing to empty roads and open skies.

Folding Story is not without its flaws, but taken as a whole, it’s a bold move. After their (slightly awkward) appearance on the second series of iQIYI’s heavily commercialised The Big Band (乐队的夏天), it would’ve been easy for FAZI to capitalise on their new-found fame by rushing out a by-the-numbers album and agreeing to every festival booking that came their way (they would not have been the first of the bands who took part in the show to do so). Yet instead of choosing the 乐夏 formula they’ve taken the Bildungsroman route, following their independent-minded friends and occasional collaborators Hiperson in attempting an ambitious concept album. It doesn’t consistently hit the heights of that record but, in line with the theme at the heart of the album, FAZI have opted to try and take their own path.   

RATING: 7.5 out of 10.

P.S.: If Chinese rock bands amid…Chinese rocks is something you’re into, here are a couple more options to cue up in YouTube: Stolen playing 3,500 metres above sea level in the Si Guniang Mountains and Tation undertaking a fascinating art project in their native Qinghai. 

Simon: We’re far enough into the evolution of the music referred to as “Chinese post punk” that it is no longer as much of a matter of Chinese musicians taking inspiration from Joy Division and Sonic Youth, as the next generation of musicians trying to create new versions of P.K.14 and Carsick Cars. As Jake points out, you could chart FAZI’s journey as a movement from the lodestar of P.K.14 to that of Wang Wen. The aforementioned Chinese bands make wonderful music, and I don’t mean to imply that musicians need to have foreign influences, but I do wonder if there’s been an “involution” of inspiration in this particular scene, a gradual limiting of the palette available to artists. To my ears this album sounds like FAZI experimenting with some intriguing new textures and approaches, but then bolting these back onto the same template. 

For example, the lumbering bass and spoken word-like vocals of “Vigil” caught my attention, reminding me of a certain sort of film or theater score. I found myself wondering if the track would defy expectations and continue as a dirge—it would be an interesting left turn to revel in amorphousness and make it compelling. But then, sure enough, the song locked into a drum pattern descended from the high hat-focused beat of mid-00s dance punk.

Post punk has already gone through enough revivals all around the world to be basically meaningless as a term, but I still love it, perhaps because of all the possibilities its legacy offers. Post punk isn’t reducible to just one particular streamlined form of guitar rock, but also warped dub, sedated psychedelic chanson, and grimy proto-techno…  “Chinese post punk” feels increasingly cut off from other “post-punks” in terms of its reference points, production style, and the way in which bands are managed and operate as units. This relative isolation could be positive, leading things to evolve into a unique new direction in a few years, but right now the style feels very much like a given format, which to me FAZI push against but don’t quite manage to transcend in Folding Story.

III
Contemporary Memes for Sad Comicbook Teens

Krish Raghav reviews a new WeChat sticker pack that’s more picture book than reaction GIF

Krish: WeChat stickers are in the midst of an interesting evolution.

Their role has mutated beyond reaction GIFs and emojis. Like second-wave memes, they’ve become self-contained pleasures, conspiratorial coded archives of shared meaning. Stickers aren’t just simple pop culture reacts or conversational gambits anymore but…repositories. They’re a cultural archive. On Chaoyang Trap we called them a "Moodboard Industrial Complex."

Stickers are topical, reflecting controversies and serving as records of online wordplay, such as this recent example:

They can be showcases, portable portfolios of an illustrator’s style, often as complex as an animated short:

 They can be bonding moments for fandoms, like this example featuring a chibi-fied music idol.

What I personally find most fascinating though is that they’re becoming storytelling devices, and a recent favorite is illustrator 拔丝拟泥’s (Nini) “阿猪阿兔一起玩” (“A-Zhu and A-Tu Play Together”), which uses the sticker form as a picture book.   

Nini is a Chinese comic book artist whose work is a common fixture at art book fairs. The images in this sticker pack, like much of her WeChat work, are “repurposed” panels from a comic zine. Her work is best described as “cute tragicomic”—the titular pig A-Zhu, an omelet-flipping champion and returning character in her work, cries in almost every story, a victim of late-capitalist shenanigans like real-estate scams and game show disqualifications. Her style is a languid daydream, all mellow gradients and slapdash (yet somehow perfect) linework.   

This source zine is titled Growing Up is Like Falling Ill, where A-Zhu and their rabbit friend A-Tu reminisce about childhood memories and compare adulting to a disease. The cultural touchstones here are familiar: a numb, “funereal” (丧) outlook on the future, and an involuted life experienced as permanent tiredness.  

The sticker pack takes panels from the zine and remixes them with new captions. This new form lives solely on the WeChat platform, downloadable as a collection of 16 captioned images. It’s possible to read this merely as a “brand extension exercise,” an illustrator trying to maximize presence across different social media platforms. But the sticker pack makes no mention of the source zine, and is clearly meant to circulate independently of its source—a parallel version of the same images, functioning as fragmented stories in your own conversations. 

Sticker / meme captioning is a uniquely recognized skill on the Chinese web, one often noticed as a "talent" just like drawing or longform writing. Sticker makers have to both capture a prevailing mood and offer expressive range, something this pack does particularly well. Note the combination of stickers below that allows for "progression" in mood or situation, a potent property in sticker packs that allows for sophisticated callbacks in conversations:

Others (like the snowman below) are harder to shoehorn into casual conversation, and function merely as a recognizable "Nini" image, an inside joke, a piece of affective flair. 

A good sticker pack, then, needs to be "usable" as conversational fodder, AND foster a kind of micro-community, with the art style (and voice) signaling a mutual recognition of subcultural knowledge. This comes to the forefront in interest-based WeChat communities or company-wide work groups, where sticker choice and profile pictures stand in for the entirety of one's persona. The right sticker, deployed at the right time, functions akin to spotting a good band t-shirt or a tote bag joke.

As online phenomenon, it's a bit like feeling connected to diffuse communities around specialized meme pages like Classical Memes for Hellenistic Teens (appreciation of which signals your knowledge of The Classics) or the sadly defunct Facebook group Tractor Loverzz (appreciation of which signals your knowledge of tractors in Punjab). 

This is one possible approach to a question I hope is asked more: how do you evaluate a WeChat sticker pack? "Craft" is far too subjective, as my favourites span everything from lo-fi scribbles to slick animations. Instead, I want to consider what you might call "circulatability"—how the give-and-take of particular sticker packs adds to what can be expressed on WeChat, and what can be expressed about us. 

In Nini's case, it is our granular sadness, each of us unhappy in our own way, that finds endless resonance in her crying pig and lonely rabbit. 

Rating: 6 out of 5 cry-laugh emojis.

████: I agree that the key, or really only, criteria for good stickers is circulatability. No matter how artfully produced, a sticker isn’t any good if nobody uses it. I think the most circulatable stickers, at least among my friends, tend to be a particular kind of cultural remix that takes some visual content and applies it in a new way - not just a reference or clever meme (though these are good too), nor like the overplayed reaction GIFs favored by boomers on Twitter that can be used for almost any scenario, but illustrations of a very specific feeling or concept in a fresh way. (This is an absurdly under-discussed topic worth addressing in much greater depth than a comment in an online newsletter but anyways here’s a sticker favored by my own micro-community: 

Henry: I think it’s also worth disambiguating circulation’s quantity from its quality. How many people find joy in discovering 小众, unpopular stickers, the ones whose WeChat storefronts show a few dozen downloads or donations? Who doesn’t like swapping these with just two or three friends, with the “personal touch” of barter, where the sticker itself, its use value, has not totally been subsumed by its function as a token of exchange? Of course, one of advertising’s triumphs is its ability to endow corporate mascots with the intimacy of a close friend—cf the “You look like a good Joe” scene in Blade Runner 2049, in which the protagonist's seemingly one-of-a-kind virtual girlfriend turns out to be mass-produced—so maybe the feeling remains, even among company-wide chat groups. Like Ryan Gosling’s replicant character, I’d probably feel a jolt of pain and betrayal if I saw A’Tu and A’Zhu on the phone screen of someone I disliked. 

Yan: I just learned about the concept of idiotism today, and I would like to think A-Zhu as the accidental 笨蛋-ism philosopher of our generation (see exhibits A and B below).

In one Nini comic, A-Zhu fails to win an egg frying competition because they believe the merits of a “sunny-side up” have nothing to do with elaborate performative cooking and styling, which I interpret as the refusal to turn a simple dish into a readily consumable commodity on social media. An intentional decision to withdraw from the game of late capitalism.

The underlying meaning of the stickers defines the affinity among sticker users. I’d be angry if not-good-at-capitalism A-Zhu stickers are used by… say, crypto bros.

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Krish: That’s it for this crisp, short, 4600 word reviews piece! A reminder that we are open to pitches—send us your review ideas. Bye!

Jake is planning a 1,000-mile round-trip to go to a gig in a couple of weeks. It better be good.

Krish has a five-star rating on Goodreads despite publishing zero books. 

Emily is heading to All Sages once the restrictions are lifted. 

████ is a ███████ and ██████████ at ███████ in ████, and has a disturbing volume of stickers that he can’t share in this newsletter.

Simon is dealing with Beijing lockdown-not-lockdown by listening to Bourbonese Qualk mp3s

Henry is looking across the Yellow Sea at China. 

Caiwei is happy that she made friends with Pig, the black cat in her neighborhood bookstore.

Yan would like to summarize the inaugural issue of Chaoyang Review with three WeChat stickers:

Krish: Hello. This is an announcement. 

Tianyu: We’re starting a regular series of reviews here on Chaoyang Trap. It’s called The Chaoyang Review of Books. Or for short, just The Chaoyang Review. Of Everything. 

The format is simple: Three 600-word reviews per episode, covering anything worth consideration and critique in Chinese contemporary culture. From apps, comics, beers, exhibitions and escape rooms to films, video games, and wanghong restaurants. 

We’re open to submissions. We pay 75 USD (500 CNY) on acceptance. 

Krish: The “review” is an exercise in paying attention. If there’s something (anything) that ties our chaotic newsletter together, it is this discernment towards what feels under-explored in English writing about China. Cultural critique—rigorous, reflective, current—felt like a big one.  

WHY REVIEWS?

Krish: It’s a specific lack we’ve all observed from our various perches within Chinese subcultures. The ground for independent critique in China has largely been ceded to platforms and gatekeepers. Tied permanently to ratings-based platforms like Dianping or Douban, the “review,” such as it is, often fails to distinguish between “i don’t like this” and “this is not good.”   

More seriously, what passes as common knowledge within scenes, be it toxic masculinity inside Chinese indie music, or complicity/disavowal in Chinese art museums, stays silo-ed and rarely brought up in public-facing critical evaluations.

Sometimes it feels like the Chinese web is structured to feed desires, creating fandoms that become fiefdoms, paranoid and sensitive to evaluation.    

Criticality itself is thriving, but the too-online in China (i.e. us) learn to read it in absence, in shifting incompleteness and skepticism. You learn to “feel” a lack of response as a stand-in for critique, reading silence as a scream. What our new senpai Margaret Hillenbrand calls “looming at the edge of outcry.” 

Emily: With increasingly rampant ads and sponsored content on Xiaohongshu/Douyin there's hardly ever "genuine" reviews anymore. No one even remembers that XHS started as a “Yelp mixed with Tripadvisor” platform for reviews. 

Krish: This, then, is our attempt at putting it all on some kind of record on the blockchain? The hope is that our choice of review subjects (and our multi-voiced perspective) can highlight the overlooked, analyze the popular, and reflect unfolding reactions. At the very least, maybe we can help create a more info-rich, expansive idea of where the actual cultural conversation on the Chinese web is. Maybe we can stop people from recommending the same dad-rock band everytime the music scene comes up. Maybe we can stop celebrating the mere existence of culture in China, and demand more.      

“HOW 2 PITCH??”

Send us reviews! Review everything! 

Jaime: NO MORE "here are six Fujianese underground acts you should know about." ONLY "this band sucks and this is why."

Simon: Chaoyang Trap reviews other traps, i.e. Thucydides Trap.

Krish: Just email us with your idea and a few lines about your approach. We’ll aim to reply to everyone but we’re slow and sad. =( :( 

If you’ve read us regularly, you know that we love the niche, the underground, and the obscure. But not all review subjects have to be! Each contribution will receive the full group chat treatment, with tangents and love and sidenotes. If it works, every episode will look something like 4Columns. 

To recap: 

• To pitch reviews, please email us at hello@chaoya.ng with a few lines on what you intend to review and how.

• Read past issues to get a sense of how we write, or 4Columns for how we wish we wrote. We pay 500 RMB (75 USD) for a 600-word review. This is paid on acceptance of pitch. The bulk of editing and conversation will happen post-payment!

• You own all rights to anything you produce. 

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Reviews are going to be a big part of how we move forward. 

Krish: Our mainstay is still the sprawling deep-dive, but it’s been a struggle for us to keep them going. We’re now scattered across seven time zones, making our usual “2am text rant” and “see you in maizidian in 20 mins” methods unfeasible. Writing in self-contained “seasons” was our way of recognizing our transient, precarious lives, and Season 3, if we get there, will have to look different.   

We’ve got a few more regular novella-sized episodes on the way, including a season two finale in June. After that, who knows. It’s all murky. As my favourite Youtuber puts it: “you give the Internet your soul, it gives you back an abyss.” 

At least this way, we get to rate the abyss.  

Tianyu: The first Chaoyang Review drops next week. See you then!

Krish: Hello. This episode of Chaoyang Trap is a little bit different. 

Far & Near, our favourite Substack, put together a roundup of stories, artwork, and photojournalism emerging in response to the Shanghai lockdown, and we felt it was important to amplify and co-promote. 

The COVID control measures adopted in Shanghai have resulted in tragedy, rage, confusion, and anxiety. Here, Beimeng, Charlotte, and Yan bring us a cross-section of dispatches from the city: photo essays, performance art, video collages, and howls of anguish from residents seemingly stuck in an endless present.   

Beimeng: It’s Beimeng writing from Shānghài.

I’m counting my 28th 29th day of home quarantine, after three rounds of government food supplies, one delivery of Lianhua Qingwen, four rounds of PCR tests and dozens of rapid tests. The city of 25 million residents is under strict lockdown amid China’s latest COVID outbreak, with no end in sight.

Two years after Wuhan’s re-opening, a historic moment that I witnessed in person, the once unprecedented is becoming normalized: according to Caixin, at least 22 cities in China are currently under some form of lockdown. In some cases, one local infection is enough to guarantee citywide closures.  

What’s different about the 2022 lockdowns is that, rather than COVID itself, people fear food shortages, centralized quarantine facilities, family separations and non-COVID medical emergencies. Social media posts that carry direct, raw audiovisual evidence documented by patients, protesters and homebound residents play a key role in questioning China’s zero-COVID policy. The panic has a ripple effect: as Beijing reported its own community transmissions this week, residents jumped into action, clearing supermarket shelves despite government assurances of abundant supply.

If there’s one thing people in Beijing have learned from Shanghai’s 4-day-turned-indefinite lockdown, it is this: be self-reliant and don’t trust what the authorities say.

In this special issue, Charlotte, Yan and I would like to compare mainstream and social media coverage of the lockdown, and highlight some of the most memorable sounds and images that made the rounds before censors zeroed in. 

Our work is sustained by reader donations. If you like this newsletter, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and telling your friends about it. 

Charlotte: There have been a few good works that cover the chaotic logistics of lockdown and how residents are being affected. For example, this video about truck drivers stuck in Shanghai after delivering goods to the city highlights how the suppliers were themselves undersupplied, and had to live in their trucks for weeks, running low on food. Another story is this beautifully photographed visual diary of Zhou Xin, a Shanghai photojournalist who documented her quarantine time spent stocking up food, cooking for her two children, and growing her own scallions in flower pots. 

China’s mainstream media has focused on softer, less critical stories. Take, for instance, the coverage of Fangcang—mass quarantine centers for people who test positive but display mild or no symptoms. Stories from official and mainstream media are in stark contrast to what people have been saying on social media. 

Beimeng: Written stories and uploaded videos from patients revealed difficult living conditions: constant noise, 24/7 lights, a lack of privacy and access to medical care. In some cases, patients in some of the hastily built structures have used tarps, cardboard boxes, washbowls, and anything else they can find as makeshift shelters under leaky roofs. The centers are rife with irony: in one widely shared video clip, a group of patients who seem perfectly healthy rescue a doctor passed out from overwork. These images reach a panicked, social media-addicted population in lockdown, their authenticity rarely commented on by mainstream media.

Access, Witness, Coverage

Charlotte: Lai Xinlin, a photographer working for Jiefang Daily, the official newspaper of the Shanghai Communist Party, received rare media access to Fangcang. The photographs he later published showed a much more organized, calmer side of the quarantine centers, contrary to patient accounts. Lai acknowledges the difficulties patients encountered in the article, such as the lack of showers, and the fact that thousands of people had to share a small number of toilets that were often clogged. But we don’t find these scenes in the final, published story. What he shows is rather routine and even encouraging—young children quarantining together with parents, students prepping for exams, and medical workers exercising with patients. 

Some Chinese artists and critics lambasted Lai’s coverage as propaganda, arguing that he had deliberately focused on showing the positive. But many photographers came to Lai’s defense, making the case for his photos as objective and his work as valuable. Some called for understanding and tolerance, speculating that he took more photos but could (of course) only publish the less critical ones due to censorship in state media. Lai himself said he’d rather not respond to the controversy but just continue to focus on his work, and let it speak for itself. The discourse around Lai’s photos raise interesting questions for visual journalists operating in restricted media environments—should one take advantage of rare access in exchange for positive coverage, because otherwise, no one will bear witness? How far can one compromise before the work is no longer journalism but something else entirely? 

Beimeng: I’m reminded of the late Cultural Revolution photographer Li Zhensheng, who was assigned to capture propaganda imagery of official events but for years secretly kept undeveloped negatives of the political campaign’s dark side. Li’s works wouldn’t have been recognized in the same way should he not have taken risks: pointing the camera at the sufferings, making public the fuller collection of his photographs. He could have remained another propaganda photographer.

Xuandi: I was especially saddened by photos that captured the “delights” of Fangcang, such as children and seniors exercising with smiles on their faces. It just shows how easily we can compromise and settle when faced with grief and quickly move on from contemplating what got us there—how absurd the political system and bureaucracy are. 

Krish: I’ve been struck by how local comic book artists have become “diarists” of sorts during this lockdown: bearing witness, capturing details, and as the web learned with the example below, helping beat algorithmic censorship. 

████: On that point, while I definitely think both sides of this debate are totally valid, I’m inclined to agree with some of Lai’s supporters. Obviously there are major compromises to be made and he’s operating in a heavily restricted environment, but like Krish and Charlotte said, I still think it’s incredibly important to bear witness, and to me at least, the absurdity illustrates itself—they’re probably the best journalism to come out of the state media system since lockdown began. (Looking at you, Andy Boreham.)

Yi-Ling: At the end of the day, it’s The Old Question in a new bottle: compromise for access? Self-censorship for reach? Everyone has their own barometer to gauge integrity, safety, risk. 

Voices of April | 四月之声

Yan: In the absence of reliable media coverage, many people, especially those outside Shanghai, learned about the bleak situation through recordings shared on social media. Some of them revealed residents desperately seeking food supplies and medical care; others showed the helplessness of exhausted neighborhood committee workers. WeChat user 永远的草莓园 made a compilation of these fragmented recordings (many of which had been censored) and amplified the effect. The video, titled “Voices of April”, offered a clear timeline of events and reflected the anger, frustration and moments of hope that people in Shanghai experienced throughout the lockdown.

It’s been arguably the most widely shared video from the Shanghai lockdown so far. When the initial video was taken down from WeChat on April 22, people resisted by sharing other versions that momentarily bypassed censorship. This was not dissimilar to the effort to keep the article “The Whistle Giver” alive in March 2020. At least 33 different versions and remixes were widely circulated before they were all taken down, one after another. Some of the remixes reversed, mirrored or blurred the original video, in an attempt to bypass automated visual-based censorship technology. Others edited in excerpts from the party’s “Core Socialist Values” or the song “Do you hear the people sing” from Les Mis to ridicule the government and show defiance. This day of run and catch was emotional for many. It was powerful to see mass mobilized resistance against censorship on WeChat, and some are already calling this “WeChat Spring.” It is not clear though, if this is just a form of slacktivism, or if it will lead to something else. 

Yi-Ling: When I saw the surge of dissent on WeChat being called the “WeChat Spring,” my first feeling was sadness, my first thought: this spring will go quickly. I guess anybody who has lived and worked and has believed in online life in China will notice that the “springs” just keep getting shorter and shorter: before the WeChat spring, there was the Clubhouse spring in 2020, the Weibo spring in 2013, the BBS spring in 2003, and of course the original Beijing spring, that we know too well. The changing climate of the Chinese web.  (As a side note, I do wonder whether the video-maker read/was inspired at all by T.S. Eliot, April being the cruelest month and all.)

████: While I don’t have a great answer for why this video in particular became THE one other than decent production and luck of the draw, I think Yan makes a really important point—for a lot of people, the media has become almost entirely displaced by WeChat logs and random leaks that fly around for a few hours before censors catch up. Obviously this reliance on social media happens a lot in times of crisis and social upheaval around the world, but it feels especially remarkable in the current context, where the gap between official portrayals and reality is just staggering—that’s fueling the fire as much as the actual policy issues, I think.

Henry: I wondered the same thing with the “Whistle Giver" piece—whose content is a somewhat corny, civil libertarian riff on "teaching someone to fish..." But at some point, scrolling through my WeChat moments and seeing Sindarin, Hex Code, braille, and emoji translations of that particular post, I realized that the initial urgency of content had yielded to a playfully formalist, almost Dada fuck you. What mattered was no longer decoding the message (come on, no one's going to learn the Elvish language just to read an internet rant), but the stylism and materiality of the cipher. To adapt Ennio Flaiano's phrase to these games of censorship and anti-censorship, "in China, the shortest point between two lines is an arabesque."

Tianyu: Perhaps a curious coincidence, the month of April was once associated with the anti-CNN movement in 2008, when young, tech-savvy Chinese youths protested CNN and other international news organizations for their criticism of the Chinese government in months leading up to the Beijing Olympics. The Tsinghua graduate Rao Jin founded anti-CNN.com—which at first consisted of one HTML file listing evidence of Western media “distorting facts”—in late March. Young nationalists who were involved in the movement called themselves “April Youths” (四月青年), and Rao’s website eventually transformed into April Media (四月网), a current affairs news portal. While the rebranded April Media wasn’t much of a success, the legacy of the April Youths lived on. Today, Rao is behind the social media accounts of China’s most vocal nationalist pundits like Li Yi (李毅) and Jin Canrong (金灿荣). Their followers, too, retain fond memories of the moment when young Chinese nationalists “stood up” to the West. 

The voice of some Aprils ago: “2008 China Stand-Up!” first published on Sina on April 15, 2008 by Tang Jie, then a Fudan graduate student and later editor of April Media. 

Emily: The VoA night was a sleepless one for me, as for many others I’m sure. I kept thinking how the video itself is precisely like the virus: warping and growing and evolving, spreading and infecting and engulfing, gripping and striking and persisting until it is “zero-ed” out. I’ve always been a pessimist when it comes to contemporary Chinese dissent but I do get the feeling that this time is going to be different. Voices of April, or “lirpA fo secioV” as some netizens call it to avoid censorship, is a complete inversion of government-constructed reality. It’s flipping the banquet table over to reveal the faceless bodies underneath, all choking on a PCR swab and moldy braised duck. Millions in and out of Shanghai resonated with it and, more importantly, millions fear the same will dawn upon them. And fear forces out screams. 

Goodbye Language / “再见语言”

Yan: One impressive performance art piece was a randomly generated PSA, by artist and filmmaker Yang Xiao. It randomly stitched together 600 frequently used bureaucratic words from government and official media and was broadcasted to the compound where the artist lives. An authoritative male news presenter’s voice reads out incoherent messages without any substantial information, but it’s hard to tell it apart from real announcements. (None of the passersby in the video seem to notice any inconsistencies in the message.) The art piece calls to mind Newspeak in George Orwell’s dystopian 1984, and questions the language used to justify the government’s totalitarian and rigid measures—an accurate reflection of many people’s feelings about the situation in Shanghai now. 

Henry: Not to be a broken record, but I feel like the gut punch delivered by the piece is the belated realization (or maybe I'm just dumb) that the messages are incoherent; what I'm reminded of, rather than Orwellian doublespeak (whose grammar resembles Opposite Day more than the random word generation here), is Xu Bing's Book from the Sky, another artwork which draws power from viewers' trust in the authority of appearances (this is not necessarily an endorsement of Xu—you hardly see him making a fuss about the violence of lockdown); as before with script before, so now with sound.

Emily: Parallel with the bureaucracy’s complete annihilation of the meanings behind words, COVID and COVID-related censorship is forcing Chinese folks to dehumanize as they speak. People are hollowed out and taxidermized. In everyday conversations nowadays, community volunteers, medical staff and policemen blend into one as “the Big White” (大白, referring to authorities wearing white COVID coverall suits). COVID positive patients are “sheep” because the Chinese word for “positive” is a homophone with the word for “sheep”, e.g. “a sheep was taken away today from my building.” Female positive patients are “ewes”. Apartment blocks or compounds with positive patients are “herds”. Of course many warn against this kind of discourse. This is also why, I think, Voices of April gained so much momentum as it did, because it counteracts this emergent and extremely disturbing trend of dehumanization with real voices from real people.

Siyuan Zhuji’s Nucleic Acid Test

Yan: Nanjing-based performance artist Siyuan Zhuji put a micro-camera in his mouth and documented 24 PCR tests he took in the span of about two months this year. The assembled video collage captures the sensations of going through mass testing and repetitive tests, a ubiquitous and essential preventative approach against COVID outbreaks in China. In the video frames, we see the artist taking off his mask, opening his mouth and letting a doctor take samples with a swab. The unusual perspective transforms the experience of taking a seemingly banal PCR test into surreal body horror. 

Shanghai 2022 Belated Spring (上海晚春)

Emily: Another video circulating alongside Voices of April on the same night was this montage of various clips uploaded by Shanghainese documenting the lockdown, accompanied by the track “Cheer Up London” by UK band Slaves. It pieces together footage of Big White violence, stockpiling madness and balcony music performances of locked down residents as means of keeping sane. The content of the video is truly indescribable-in-a-Samuel-Beckett-way, not to mention the lyrics of the song that go “Cheer up London (Shanghai), you’re already dead so it’s not that bad.” The comments section under this song on NetEase Music were flooded with references to this video. People were vehemently mourning, relentlessly venting, scathingly satirizing and above all, engraving this spring in their memories because, I quote, “memory is the one thing they can’t erase.” I would show you those powerful words if they weren’t all taken down at 2am for “violating relevant laws and regulations.”

Simon: Typing this from inside Chaoyang, my emotions are an unquantifiable mixture of shock, sadness, sympathy, and anxiety. It’s maybe hard to extract the nuance of how—although there is a risk of overstating the differences between Shanghai and the rest of China—the city is precisely the place where you would expect life to continue somewhat normally as the rest of the country went into rolling lockdowns. It’s impossible to predict how things will go in Beijing, but I find myself hoping for a more positive outcome (either cases illogically going down, or a lockdown with better logistics) while also worrying that such a result will be used to browbeat Shanghai, as if the city brought this situation upon itself through its relative level of openness and the comparative strength of its civil society. 

Epilogue: Saved by the Bell (Pepper) 

Krish: One tiny source of joy for me in the midst of all this has been the Instagram account @shanghaihotel1927, a “quarantine fine dining popup” that takes the ubiquitous boxed meals delivered to quarantine hotels and converts them into gourmet dishes, using only basic tableware and material provided in the room. 

Some of the transformations are just incredible, and it’s no surprise that the person behind it, Camden Hauge, is a seasoned (sorry) Shanghai restaurateur. I caught up with her to learn a bit more about the “project.” Hi Camden!

Camden: Hi! So I’d gone home to visit family + friends during CNY this year and I knew that the return quarantine would be rough so I started gathering tips from previous quarantine survivors about what snacks, tricks, etc they recommend to make 2 weeks of 套餐 food palatable. Someone had mentioned to bring your own serviceware to make mealtimes seem less soulless and the kernel of the idea was planted then—how could I re-plate this very average-looking food to make it look more edible, or perhaps even silly-fancy? (I am also incapable of downtime. I needed a project).

 The sum total of my “tools” are: 1 bowl + 3 plates from Target (Kids picnic range – one is now a cutting board), 1x $3.50 knife (also from Target), 1x Thermos foldable spoon (came inside my Thermos mug), plastic fork from the airplane meal, and tweezers from my dopp kit. In terms of garnishes, both for this ‘project’ but also as a general top tip for those entering quarantine, go for simple sauces + seasoning powders (smaller, lighter for packing), plus grab handfuls of condiment packs from the airport deli before you fly. I’m not using any ingenious techniques (a sliced plastic cup as a ring mold was a high point) but just trying to think smartly about all of the component pieces and how I can put them back together in a less obvious way.

 I think every sane person in F&B is simultaneously aware of the silly pretentions we tend to slip into and loves being a part of the world because of them. The dish descriptions are a nod to the ridiculous ways we have fallen into writing menus—usually either stark minimalism like “component, component, component” (what the hell will this look like when it hits the table?!) or painfully retro like “Chez Hotel Nonsense a la King”. The ‘ambiance’ captions are little jabs at the other self-referential restaurant traps we fall into e.g. collaborations with artisans on serviceware that cracks when washed the first time or niche art that no diner will notice. Some of that humor was so dry I think some followers didn’t really get it…

Krish: Do you have a favourite “rework” that you’ve done so far?

Camden: In terms of sheer deliciousness (not all are…), the pulled BBQ pork bun (pictured at the beginning) was likely a highlight. I was getting the same components for most mealtimes (breakfast = 包子 + egg + pickle + yogurt / porridge; lunch + dinner = 2x proteins + 2x veggies), and so I realized I needed to mix it up a bit, so one morning I saved my breakfast 包子 and pickles until lunchtime and was lucky enough to get 红烧肉 in the lunch set. 

I immediately saw I could cut open the bao to make a ‘sandwich’ format and then the pork reminded me of American southern-style BBQ so I leaned into that flavor profile—I pulled the pork and then added some braised cabbage, carrots (picked out from a sautéed potato dish), and then added the green bean pickle on top; I threw the potatoes on the side like home fries and added some chili seasoning.

Krish: The Shanghai Hotel 1927 is now in residence at the…*checks notes* Campanile Hotel 325. Follow them here. Thank you so much, Camden! 

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Yan: I decided on this week’s outro music before we even started working on this issue. Shanghai-based Beijing rapper 小老虎 J-Fever dropped some verses on April 9, during the 2nd week of lockdown. More freestyle poetry than rap, it is at the same time imaginative (“work laptops are closed like pearl clams”) and political (references to the dead corgi and the separation of parents and babies). Check out his Weibo post to read some comments applauding J-Fever for being the only rapper in Shanghai “keeping it real” during the lockdown.

Krish: That’s it for this episode. Stay safe out there. 

You can download and read Lisha Jiang’s comic 日常 here: 

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Bios

Beimeng Fu made a wild bet that her housewarming party could happen by April 15, which she naively invited ████ and other friends to. She says gutting a whole chicken without blinking in the lockdown is her coming of age. 

Ye Charlotte Ming is in Berlin and suspects she has COVID for the nth time. Still negative though. 

Yan Cong is based in Amsterdam. Her city has given up on contact tracing.

Camden Hauge is the owner + operator behind Happy Place Hospitality Group, as well as the co-founder and creative director of SOCIAL SUPPLY, a food-focused experiences agency. 

Tianyu Fang is looking for a summer sublet in San Francisco or Oakland. Please write to tianyu AT chaoya.ng if interested. 

████ is a ███████ and ██████████ at ███████ in Shanghai , and he’s pretty fucking tired of not being able to buy food normally.

Krish is tired. 

Simon has been stocking up on Portuguese canned fish in honor of April 25th. 

Yi-Ling is a writer who was based in Chaoyang but 润’d from Chaoyang.

Emily’s current ringtone is “Cheer Up London”, and it makes her jump every time a call comes in because the bass is too lit. 

Henry wonders when he’ll be able to visit Chaoyang again.

Xuandi Wang is a writer who grew up in Zhejiang. His spiritual animal is Sufjan Stevens. 

Krish: Hello. Chinese videogames are having a global moment, and we’ve written two episodes trying to figure out where their quirky sensibilities might come from. 

Our answers: Flash games, emulation, console meal replacements, and the liminal space offered by Steam, are all key pieces, but it’s the subject of this episode that really completes the picture.  

In the 90s and 2000s, English language learning was a huge fengkou, the site of an insane commercial and VC scramble. At the heart of it were electronic dictionaries (电子词典), singularly Chinese computing devices ostensibly meant for language acquisition. In reality, they became so much more: the repository for a whole generation’s private world of notes, virtual pets, sprawling RPGs and coding experiments. Somewhere between a Nintendo DS, Chromebook, Ti-83 Calculator, and a Tamagotchi, electronic dictionaries were wildly popular, extremely customizable, and gleefully modded to support dizzying possibilities.

Their interlaced worlds were foundational to many strands of gaming and game development in China, prefiguring the global rise of smartphones.

Emily: Also, games on electronic dictionaries, which were sold to parents as purely educational devices, represented a really important lure to kids beyond the promise of private worlds: that of  transgression, trespass, secrets and provocations. 

Krish: Our guide through these nested menus is Jesse Young, a writer and translator in Beijing who has been obsessed with the devices for years. With his sprawling collection assembled through second hand resellers on Taobao, he takes us on a deep-dive through dither-punk RPGs for a look at the legacy and influence of the electronic dictionary in China. 

As always, we want to show that the history of games in China is not “partial, belated, or emerging,” but rather a specific result of complex technological trajectories. These trajectories, as Jesse shows below, aren’t just nostalgia fodder but signposts to what a better, more open, and punk af tech future might look like.     

The Decade of the Electronic Dictionary 

Words and Illustration by Jesse Young 

Jesse: Recent pieces in Polygon and Chaoyang Trap both explicated what I’d long intuited: the quiet soft power victory of Chinese video games. This got me into some speculative anthropology around the framing of gaming here—the console ban (2000-2015), games as “spiritual opium,” the current crackdown and video game licensing woes.

Wind back now to the 1980s and the homegrown NES-clone Little Tyrant (小霸王). China’s only big console success story had to position itself as educational hardware. It was a design choice with implications, arguably the start of a new, distinctly Chinese technological idiom. I’d seen a variant of this in Tom Mullaney’s work on The Chinese Typewriter (newly published in Chinese) and early personal computing, and there is a direct line here about how culture informs technology which informs design which informs aesthetics. 

In China’s case I think this interplay of technology and aesthetics, responsive to culture, is best exemplified in what I am calling “The Decade of the Electronic Dictionary: 1995-2005.” During these ten years, for a tech savvy cohort of high school and college students, “electronic dictionaries” (电子词典) were the ascendant hardware. Instead of PCs, PDAs or the like, which took off belatedly in a still-developing China, electronic dictionaries were de-facto mini-notebook computers.

Here, electronic dictionaries developed into impressive multifunction devices, sporting their own striking design sensibility and serving as a bridge to smartphones much as PDAs did in the West. 

The two leading brands Bubugao (步步高, BBK) and Wenquxing (文曲星) generate the same nostalgic fondness as Palm Pilots and Apple Newtons do (just check Bilibili or second hand platforms like Xianyu 闲鱼). Returning to video games, the most interesting facet may be the largely unexplored legacy of Chinese electronic dictionaries as gaming devices, and their influence on a whole generation of programmers and developers in China. 

Electronic dictionaries reigned supreme especially after the millenium, as network capabilities were added and technological convergence elevated the devices into capable MP3 players, e-book readers, handheld gaming machines, graphic calculators, notebooks, programming tools, virtual pets, personal organisers and more, complete with SD card support, USB connectivity and infrared data transfer. To echo educational industry analysis firm Blackboard Insight's (黑板洞察) conclusion on their significance:

“It belonged to a wave. That wave has retreated but its ripples still reverberate...it carries the special complex memories of a whole generation of students.” 

Yan: I’d like to add a bit of context here: one of the biggest anxieties over learning English in China in the late 90s and early 2000s was “Mute English,” or at least that’s what my parents projected on me. This was before pirated and subtitled American TV shows like Friends were widely available for people to watch, and you rarely had access to audio materials of conversations between native English speakers other than textbook recordings. So an electronic device that could read out all the English words for students to check their pronunciation was essential for people who wanted to be able to converse in English rather than just pass English exams, most of which didn’t have a speaking component.

That’s how revolutionary the device wanted to be for English pedagogy in China during that specific period. I had a Wenquxing but I sadly don’t have any memory of learning English with it. All I remember is a cat I raised in the Tamagotchi game that came with the device. In the game, in order to “make money” to buy cat food there’s a simple word game, where you fill in the blanks to complete words. The twist: they were Chinese 成语 (idioms), not English words! 

Emily: One of my most prized possessions growing up was this - The 2006 Barbie B-Book. It was marketed as a “learning laptop” for kids to learn 1st/2nd grade English vocabulary through a series of educational games. 

A few things to pick apart here: first, the pinkness overload. The target audience was obviously little girls who were already in the Barbie craze phase. I wonder, then, the possibly gendered nature of electronic dictionaries and these B-Book type devices. I, for one, never had any of the aforementioned devices back then. I knew of their existence but I never wanted one, nor have my parents offered to purchase one for me. I’m throwing an idea out there: since our society is inherently gendered, educational hardware is no exception. 

Other notable features include the fact that the B-Book is not internet-enabled, even though it is marketed and aesthetically designed to resemble a laptop. It is much less user-driven since the “vocabulary learning” aspect is not actualized through a dictionary function where the user looks up words, but through program-led games. As far as I remember, the B-Book did not have a calculator function, but it does have math-related games. I’m hesitant to definitively argue that these features are sexist and am well aware that previous examples of hardware might be innately different to B-Book (the latter is completely in English). But, it's worth raising here and opening it up for debate. :)

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Jesse: Okay, back to the beginning. Electronic versions of text dictionaries have existed since the early 1960s, but the proximate ancestor to the electronic dictionary, a dedicated pocket computer with word search functions, is the “enhanced” electronic calculator. Their invention is often credited to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, who made his early fortune by selling designs for an electronic translation device to Sharp (dictionary and translation functions being porous from the outset). This was in 1978, the same year top US calculator maker Texas Instruments’ Speak&Spell signaled an embryonic step into more lexicographic as opposed to numeric territory. Their ‘Language Translator/Tutor’ followed in 1979. Japan would prove the true template for subsequent Chinese forays though, sharing the same computational challenge of handling a character-based writing system and sizable segment of (mostly English) language learners. Sharp’s IQ-3000 debuted in 1979 and was soon met by Casio’s TR-2000 in 1981, coming in at a lightweight 53 grams. 

1989 is the watershed year for the Chinese electronic dictionary. Quanzhi International launches the first Chinese electronic dictionary, the EC-1000, under the name Kuaiyitong (快译通), positioning it as a Chinese-English translation tool. They began in Taiwan but by 1990 had started production in Shenzhen for the mainland market. At roughly the same time, a Taiwanese and Hong Kong technology firm joined forces to establish BESTA (好易通) and launched their own electronic dictionary.

These were bougie gadgets costing several thousand kuai, generally out of reach of the laobaixing. An entrepreneur from Taiwan, Zhou Zhiyuan, would be instrumental in changing this. He founded Golden Vision in 1993 with a view to making an affordable, truly mass-market product.

1995’s Wenquxing (文曲星) CC-100, named for a star in the big dipper constellation associated with literary success, debuted at 330 RMB cutting the price of an electronic dictionary by 80% overnight.

The first multi-function electronic dictionary would arrive shortly after in 1997 with Wenquxing’s PC-220. By 2000 Wenquxing dictionaries had accumulated sales of 20 million units and occupied a 70% market share. 

It was around this time Duan Yongping, who had invented the educational hardware market with Subor Electronics and the Little Tyrant (小霸王) left to found Bubugao/BBK (步步高) and a second era was born. Network features were added. Backgammon, Snake and Tetris gave way to sprawling RPG games. Programming and game development tools were made available. Intense competition led to a war over games, price and features. Online forums like WQXNET sprang up. Wenquxing fans began calling themselves 星迷 (star fans). And electronic dictionaries became a ubiquitous fact of campus life. By the early 2000s Noah (诺亚舟) had also entered the fray and soon found themselves second only to Wenquxing, with BBK settling into third place. Industry sales peaked at 10 million a year in 2004. 

In 2005, an abrupt industry-wide restructure shrank the sector by half. Nokia phones were IN,  and the writing was on the wall. Innovation stagnated and a prolonged period of decline had begun. Companies pivoted to hardware based around replicating the classroom experience, like point readers (点读机, basically interactive textbooks) incorporating new video and online capabilities. Bubugao was successful in navigating these winds and remained a market leader, while Wenquxing and Noah floundered and ceded their dominance to new players like Shulang (读书郎) and Best Under Heaven Studying (优学天下), which along with BBK currently control 60% of the educational hardware market. 

Electronic dictionaries shed their distinctive character and increasingly came to mimic smartphones and tablets. This culminated in the study tablet (学生平板), a learning-focused ‘distraction-free’ (no games, no browsing the internet) alternative to iPads. Unable to compete with modern multifunction devices, the “superfluous” was pared away.  The electronic dictionary became an actual electronic dictionary,  exemplified by the no-frills dictionary pen (词典笔). In a complete inversion, classic-style electronic dictionaries are still marketed, but this time the selling point is the lack of games. 

Much of what made the electronic dictionary special has been lost, so let’s take a moment to celebrate their manifold delights. 

The design of these devices deserves appreciation. They are beautiful, and as the old heuristic goes, what is beautiful is usable. You can witness the evolution of form-factor in the image below. From a flat credit-card shape with a calculator-like display to a more rounded clamshell flip-design not dissimilar to a Nintendo DS. Other models and brands experimented with a diversity of novel features including touch-screens, a second-screen on the case with music controls, handwriting input, insertable cartridge support and more. 

Their beauty lies in a delicate dance. To be easy to carry, access quickly, to hold and to use all at once.  It's fascinating how, at a UX level, these devices pull off these little clues or 'signifiers' that guide user experience. Even in 2022, cycling through nested menus and functions was immediately legible to me, articularly with my BBK Dictionary King A5—considered the pinnacle of e-dictionary design. 

Electronic dictionary keypads are informational dense sites and smart design choices around user input often pay aesthetic dividends. Below you can see the elegant combination of mathematical symbols, Korean, Chinese, English and Japanese on the same keypad. All while avoiding clutter. The menu options are also simple enough to be directly understood without reference to a manual. 

These compact machines flip open and present an air of discovery. A learning device should invite possibilities. It should feel personal, and be personalisable. A textbook isn't a dairy, but this is something you can build a connection with. There is no internet browser—the world it affords you is a private one. Navigation is enhanced by small, often cute graphic touches. Like the chinese-knot style bordering above. Then there's the quirks—separate password controls for games/personal/music / just about every function (a level of granular parental oversight that screams China). 

The dictionaries are riddled with archaic and bizzare turns of phrase, rarely marked as obsolete—for example “sucking the monkey” (Oxford: “the illicit act of using a straw to siphon off rum from its container”). More than one good chuckle was had by making the dictionaries say dirty things in an admirably passable voice. All this adds to the charm factor. There is a thriving second-hand market. The online listings show the kawaii aspects played up, and the fun people have had customising their dictionaries with stickers.

'Electronic dictionaries swept the nation's campuses. Although ostensibly for education, these palm-sized devices also held a hidden gaming function that parents rarely knew.' 

Gaming Research Society  ( 游戏研究社), in a 2020 retrospective 

The untold gaming dimension to Chinese electronic dictionaries is particularly ripe for excavation now. What is old is most definitely new with 1bit graphics. The same binary black-and-white LCD screen pixel art of electronic dictionaries is in the midst of a revival. There is even a new handheld gaming device, The Playdate, built entirely around this aesthetic. It’s enough of a trend to even have a label, ‘dither-punk,’ named for the computer graphics term of patterning pixels to give the illusion of shading or colour depth. Using emulators, I have captured footage and compiled my own top 8 list of classic Chinese electronic dictionary games below.

In many ways gaming was the real draw of these devices, as the same Gaming Research Society article put it, “Chinese children saw electronic dictionaries as gaming consoles, downloading learning software in front of their parents and lining up with classmates at stores near their schools to download the latest games.” 

Gaming helped foster committed and dedicated fanbases. One that was locked in, much like the walled gardens of today. Numerous forums sprang up offering homebrew apps and games. The official sites gave a lot of support too, actively encouraging  the community through sponsorship of development contests or else hiring talented programmers from the community pool. I was still able to effortlessly download the relevant firmware and lessons for my 17+ year old BBK dictionary on the official site, fully compatible with my Windows 10 PC. Proof of an acknowledgement of the ongoing value of these dictionaries to a subset of people. Further borne out by the fact that most of the 8 games I describe below have seen endless remakes, sequels, spin-offs and fan tributes, and new versions continue to be made. There are Wenquxing and BBK emulators for PCs, 3DSes, Androids and iPhones, among other systems.

Hobbyist programmers of electronic dictionary games have found lasting professional careers in game development. While many of the OG forums have been lost to link rot, new communities such as Edic.Club have surfaced in recent years to preserve the files and development tools for these systems. 

Top 8 Classic Chinese Electronic Dictionary Games

1/  英雄坛说 Altar of Heroes 

System: Wenquxing

Description: Wenquxing's killer app, an open-world RPG first playable on the NC1020 (2003) and preloaded on Wenquxing dictionaries thereafter. Early iterations lifted sprites from Pokémon. Presenting a complex world centred on various schools of martial arts, NPCs were based on a rogue's gallery of figures from history, comics and Wuxia novels.

2/ 伏魔记 Record of Exorcism

System: BBK

Description: Bubugao's answer to Altar of Heroes. Released in 2004, there were over 100,000 downloads on BBK's official forum and people lining up at download spots at offline stores to get the game. A free development kit, BBKRPG, was released afterwards. One of the creators continues to work in game development to this day.  

3/ 魔塔 Magic Tower

System: BBK

Description: Puzzle-action game originating in 1994 in Japan about ascending a tower with a typical ‘save the princess’ plot. A local 21-story variant took off in China and was later ported to BBK. Reaching the top requires memorisation of enemy and item positions to chart an optimal path. Countless versions exist including a 2016 remake titled Magic Tower - Never Again. 

4/  三国霸业 Three Kingdoms Supremacy

System: BBK

Description: Three Kingdoms’ based strategy games are a mainstay of Chinese gaming (right back to the Huarong Pass wooden sliding puzzle). This adopts elements from several popular Three Kingdoms turn-based titles which makes for surprising depth in such an unassuming package. 

5/  十字这门Cross Entry

System: BBK

Description:  Accessible development tools came later to BBK (with BBKRPG) and it seems less major titles were developed than for Wequxing. Most were simple student games or ports of existing games like Pokémon or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. This RPG seems to be one of more significant undertakings post-Record of Exorcism. 

6/ 神州 Shenzhou

System: Wenquxing

Description: Large-scale fantasy RPG with multiple endings and hidden easter eggs. Shenzhou was the first winner of Golden Vision’s own GVmaker programming contest, netting 5000 yuan. And the Shenzhou ‘space-time’ engine went on to become the standard development tool for later RPGs on the system.

7/  蛙蛙大富翁 Frog Monopoly

System: Wenquxing

Description: China has seen various digital adaptations and ‘sequels’ to the classic boardgame Monopoly.  Taking on local flavour with mechanics around the God of Luck, God of Fortune and such. This version by 'Lee', a prominent member in the original Wenquxing development scene, is apparently based on Monopoly 4? Great diversion that supports a map editor and decent opponent AI.

8/ 宇星外传翼剑天殇 Extraterrestrial Wing Sword Tianshang

System: Wenquxing

Description: One of the late post-Shenzhou RPGs for the Wenquxing and part of the same group of developers. Out of a myriad of community-developed RPGs this one stands out for its high production-values. Although it never became as popular as its bigger cousins. 

Jesse: Wrapping up, electronic dictionaries are unique to China’s timeline of consumer hardware, with no exact parallel anywhere else. They are beautiful to admire and still hold several lifetimes worth of linguistic knowledge. They remain usable. They are central to the birth of China's game development scene, though none of their original titles are much known outside the country. 

Now the stars seem to be aligning. The government's recent “two-reductions” 双减 policy that has gutted the private education sector has also driven serious tech-titan investment into the educational hardware space, seeing new translation devices from the likes of Baidu, iFlytek and Netease. 2020 saw the Youdao Super Dictionary, a return to a more traditional clamshell form-factor and the feature-set of a classic electronic dictionary, updated for today.  

More processing power, cloud services, shinier screens, computer vision and AI technology presents a vision of an electronic dictionary still at the cutting edge. The use case is still there—a portable, personal device with efficient learning tools. 

The private gardens and parallax worlds of learning on an electronic dictionary are far too evocative to be reduced to another iPad app. 27 years on, China is still dreaming of electric words. 

Yi-Ling: Curious to see whether or not any of the EdTech giants who got gutted after “Double Reduction” will pivot to the educational hardware space. Does it count as an afterschool tutor…if you get a hand-held, automated bot that teaches you logic 101 through a gamified lesson, instead of a New Oriental teacher who teaches you middle-school algebra? 

Tianyu: The popularization of electronic dictionaries enabled the success of Chinese consumer hardware brands. Jesse mentions that Duan Yongping left Subor in 1995 to found BBK Electronics, selling gaming handsets to Chinese children by convincing the parents that these gadgets were, in fact, for learning English. 

The Dongguan-based BBK was restructured in 1999 into three subsidiaries: BBK Education continued to make educational gadgets like electronic dictionaries and “reading machines” (点读机); BBK Audiovisual turned to making consumer-grade VCD and DVD players; BBK Communications focused on making telephones and later smartphones. Under Tony Chen (陈明永), BBK Audiovisual later became OPPO in the early 2000s, first manufacturing MP3 players before making cell phones. Shen Wei’s (沈炜) BBK Communications made BBK “music phones” (音乐手机), later rebranded as vivo. 

In 2013, former executive Peter Lau (刘作虎) left OPPO to start OnePlus as a subsidiary; in 2018 OPPO’s former VP Sky Li (李炳忠) founded realme, another smartphone brand. Both spinoffs target overseas markets and remain part of BBK’s supply chain. When added all up BBK (which claims that all these brands operate independently, despite sharing the same investors) controls a major share of the global smartphone market.

Emily: An intriguing phenomenon in the Chinese entertainment industry that speaks to this piece is the U-turn of reality shows from being purely recreational to being both fun and didactic, due to government crackdown on vices and immorality rampant in M&E industry. Entertainment has to borrow its legitimacy from some added element of public lecturing or the dissemination of correct values. The once beloved celebrity crime-solving variety program Who’s The Murderer (明星大侦探) had to recently transition to become a “law popularization” (普法) show, educating the masses on law and ethics while celebrities tackle a staged murder mystery. In some ways, the pretending-to-be-on-Wenquxing-but-actually-gaming era is never really over. 

Krish: Outro music this week is this wonderful playlist (Spotify) of early Chinese punk rock.

It’s assembled by Chaoyang Trap contributor and newsletter favourite Nathanel Amar for his new (French language) book Scream for Life, which takes an ethnographic approach to tell the story of Wuhan and Beijing’s early punk rock scenes. 

Here’s a personal favourite rescued from Douban limbo: Eat Truck, a short-lived, combustible, wildly creative “drunk punk” band in Beijing. 

TIanyu: Bye!

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Jesse Young is fool enough to sell tea in China. He’ll take writer/translator since poet doesn’t pay.

Yan can’t remember the name of her beloved tamagotchi cat =( 

Krish’s first computing device was a Sharp YO-100CP, on which he wrote (bad) flash fiction. 

Tianyu was too young to have owned an electronic dictionary. 

Emily used to carry her B-Book around as a fashion accessory.

Krish: Hello. In this episode, we’re continuing our exploration of desire on the Chinese web. 

In 2020, the fanfiction site AO3 ("Archive of Our Own") was blocked in China. Long a safe haven for the country's diverse strands of erotica, fan works and danmei literature, its disappearance behind the Firewall was devastating. The furious drama surrounding the block spilled over into mainstream culture. When the dust settled, the question on everyone's mind was: what now? 

Our focus here is on slash fiction, and the mind-bending ways in which fanfic writers and artists in China have adapted to the “post-AO3” era. In the shipyards of fandom below, you’ll learn about meal replacements, community-builder bots, and horny animal sounds. 

Yan: Back in Season 1, Ting wrote about the fandom trend of nisu—changing the gender of your favourite idols to intensify crushing on them. In this piece, we also discover gousu (your idol is now a cute dog), maosu (your ship is now two cats frolicking), and…Pixar-su?

Krish: We’re really excited that Emily—aca-fan by day and unapologetic slash reader/writer by night—is our guide on this voyage. She shows us that ships and slash and danmei erotica aren’t marginal phenomena on the Chinese web. They’re the frontlines of how we live with algorithmic censors, bend platforms to our will, and build worlds within worlds online. 

As Michel Foucault, renowned scholar of Chinese fandom, once put it: “the ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up.” 

Soy Boy Soylent: Slash in Post-AO3 China 

By Emily L

Emily: In the danmei calendar, 2022 A.D. is known as 2 P.AO3. I know that sounds like the name of Elon Musk’s third child with Grimes, but let me explain.

Early February 2020. Fans of the actor Xiao Zhan are taken aback by a piece of homoerotic fiction featuring Xiao and his male co-star in the series The Untamed (陈情令), published on the renowned fanfiction site Archive Of Our Own (AO3). It portrays Xiao as a cross-dressing, nonbinary sex worker. My beloved Alpha-Idol-God degraded to a drag-wearing prostitute? Unacceptable, they say. The retaliation starts. They collectively (and excessively) report the website as containing “pornographic” materials to China’s Cyberspace Administration Office. This is…not untrue.

On February 27th, the site joined Youtube, Google, Instagram and various other Western websites (the list goes on) in being blocked by China’s Great Firewall. “Great” in the sense that it censors the best of the best, from the Hugo Award-winning AO3 to the one who sits on the empty chair.

Thus we enter the “P.AO3” era. Of course in the wake of the ban, there was mass outrage. AO3 was one of the last remaining sites accessible to Chinese fans for reading and posting NSFW danmei male homoerotic content, and to do so alongside a global fanfic community. This “literary Pornhub”, as Ting called it, was very much idolised itself. The danmei community saw the Xiao Zhan incident as an insidious attack of their artistic freedom and their right to create. Fans from virtually every other fandom (even arch-enemies like the Otakus and the K-Poppers) rallied together to begin a universal boycott of Xiao and his supporters. People openly refused to be affiliated with them in any way, be it watching Xiao-starring entertainment programs or buying products from Xiao-endorsed brands. This series of events were coordinated under the umbrella hashtag #227Solidarity (227大团结). The spirit of #227 continues as the danmei community are still, to put it mildly, furious as fuck. 

To this day, netizens digitally re-enact ancient “fire-jumping” traditions intended for warding off bad luck, posting a GIF of a fire pit every time they see Xiao’s face offline and online, casting him as a repulsive bad omen needing to be exorcised. A quick search on Weibo reveals that “fire-jumping” posts—daily, ubiquitous—are now almost exclusively associated with Xiao, all expressing intense dislike.  

Krish: This has led, on the other side, Xiao fans to become so Jokerfied that they just want to watch the web burn. Indulging in the illusion that their innocent idol did nothing wrong in the lead up to 227, and safe in the knowledge that they will be forever alone and endlessly hated, their nihilism has gone into sicko mode. As a group, they've largely descended into picking random fandom fights and trolling everyone they come across. 

Emily: Now in 2022, I want to sketch the landscape of slash in the post-AO3 era. How does a community rebuild after the loss of their home base? I write with the intention of chronicling this new beginning, this new reality for the Chinese danmei community and their NSFW creations.

First, where have danmei writers taken their work? 

Some have explored uncharted territory, like flocking to the Chinese app “AiFaDian” (爱发电). New to the market and currently escaping the firewall radar, it brands itself as a “creator sponsored” platform that “returns freedom to creators”. Developed by a team of 5, the founder claims that it is built on the model of Patreon1 and that they do not censor homoerotic or NSFW content. The caveat: full (read: NSFW) content can often only be unlocked by readers through a donation. So it’s OnlyFans for fanfic. While AiFaDian does provide writers with the option of granting followers open access to their works without a donation, it comes with a risk, as homoerotic content can (and did) place writers in danger of serious persecution. Writing and publishing a bit of gay smut in China might leave the writer doing more time than rapists and spend a decade in jail. The OnlyFans donation-based mechanism somewhat guarantees safety for danmei writers, building a wall around evidence that could be used against them.

This AiFaDian model brings about tectonic shifts to the very meaning of artistic freedom in the fanfic community. When the sugarcoat disintegrates, the fallacy is blatant: freedom is there as long as you can afford it. You pay for your right to read freely. Likewise, your freedom to create content in safety is only guaranteed if you commercialise your work. 

Jaime: Galaxy brain but the membership-as-safety-lock-against-the-state model has also created a dynamic in indie film where film clubs are branded in a way that seems "exclusive"/high entry of barrier, in order to filter people who are actually serious enough about it to go through the process of joining after which it's…just actually super casual.

Yan: The interesting paradox here is that this kind of paywall protection against censors/regulations only works for online spaces, for now. On the other hand, profit-making is a liability in self-published physical zines. In the case of the persecuted slash writer mentioned above, it was exactly because she sold her work and earned some money. Similarly, a photographer was arrested for selling pornography after she self-published a photobook containing nudity last year. It feels like maybe the regulators haven’t caught up on what’s happening on AiFaDian. Or, like Jaime said, since the subscription works as a filter to let in only serious readers, the small crowd who’re willing to pay don’t make up a critical mass for regulators to care?

Emily: The opportunity to monetize your fanfic side hustle is, of course, welcomed by some writers. But this does not obscure the fact that AiFaDian is using its “champion of freedom” rhetoric as a smokescreen for its neoliberal consumerist platform logic. In fact, its founder has indicated in interviews that AiFaDian wants to encourage creators to “build their own brand”. Therefore the “paying fans / users,” will see the benefits and be “converted into creators themselves2.” This is the classic “assetization of data” model that drives all large platforms, with values like freedom of speech always secondary to those impulses.

On the other hand, many more have reluctantly decamped to Weibo. With some 200 million daily active users, it is one of the largest social networking sites in China containing a multitude of “dissonant shouting voices3.” Writers can publicize their works either as a long post (the character limit is no longer 140) or as a long vertical image containing the texts, before interacting with their readers in the comments. 

Writers’ reluctance to use Weibo comes from the platform’s notoriously servile and heavy-handed approach to censorship. This makes Weibo the least ideal place to post male homoerotic content, let alone making it R-rated. 

There used to be a celebrated alternative to Weibo, LOFTER, which gave writers more leeway. It's fallen out of favour after a brutal crackdown circa 2020 with government campaigns like Qinglang (清朗) that aimed to sweep the internet of “inappropriate” material. LOFTER writers were left “deleting passages until there are no words left to be censored”, as one author put it. Just last week, the few remaining LOFTER users were horrified to see how the platform is now displaying explicit ads that encourage women to sell their eggs, yet censoring all…activities between two men from their noses down. Funnily enough, the post exposing this observation is itself censored on Weibo. 

Yan: In my limited experience with reading fanfic when I was in China last year, the most ridiculous platform-hopping I did in order to read slash was: I started from a Weibo post with a link which took me to a Douban post, whose comment contained a link to a fanfic written in Chinese published on a South Korean platform. As a reader, the amount of work you had to put in to keep track of slash writers’ new work on multiple platforms was insane. Plus, platform-hopping was only fun when all links worked: you were rewarded with the joy and excitement of a new work after being redirected between apps, webpages and switching VPNs on and off. It was really tiring, and I can only imagine how tiring it was for slash writers.

Emily: As a saying in Chinese goes, “pick the tallest dwarf”, referring to the necessity of “just make do,” now, everyone just has to suck it up—Weibo is mainstream enough that all slash lovers presumably have ready access. It saves readers from the hassle of, say, downloading a whole new app like AiFaDian or having to navigate around new sites using VPNs. Frustration with censorship is therefore borne with grace, and by grace I mean the invention of astoundingly creative ways to evade censorship.

Yi-Ling: “The cute cat theory, except the cute cat is gay erotica.”

Emily: Some common evasion techniques include special characters in between words to dodge keyword filters:  “org//asm”, “pen//is, “s/e/x” etc. For a longer piece in the form of a photo, doodling, blurring, flipping the photo upside down or mirroring the image horizontally can all mess with the algorithm. 

Writers even go to extreme lengths, conducting rigorous experiments to test the effectiveness of different methods of evasion. In this one instance, the image on the right needs to be overlaid on top of the text for the best result (left), the writer concludes:

The latest development in 2 P.AO3 is the insanely innovative use of an “animal communicator site”. Writers encode their text by running it through the “translator”, basically an encryptor. The result is a series of animal sounds, WUUUs and AAAHs and AOOOOs onomatopœically representing the horniness within. The writer would post the encrypted text (right) while attaching a link to the translator in the comments section for readers to decode themselves. I mean, who says Dadaism is dead?

But what sets AiFaDian/Weibo apart from AO3 is rarely, if ever, noted. AO3 is a discussion forum that revolves around literary creations as the centrepiece. It’s in the name too: the “archive” of AO3 creates rabbit holes, connections, lineages. Its emphasis is on how fanworks speak to each other in a fandom or across fandoms, whereas social networking sites like AiFaDian and Weibo are about the connections between people. In our Post-AO3 era, the unhappy migration of danmei to spaces dominated by OnlyFans logic or a suffocating iron fist results in a serious castration and sullying of the actual writing. They are no longer protagonists on centre stage. They are mere commodities, assets, tailored to the customer’s demands. More importantly, they are the stark emblems of a policed age. Struggling to choke out words is not a pretty look and fanfic writers know it. 

They know it, they mock their knowing and they mock their comically pathetic attempts at resistance through absurdity. 

It’s clear that the prime time for danmei on the Chinese web is over. Its exile from AO3 has resulted in a brutal form of survival escapism, changes so drastic that the genre is opaque, by design, to all but the most faithful. 

Let’s talk about meal replacement.  

“Meal replacements” (代餐) culture in the danmei community are emblematic of the trend I’m describing. The phrase is used literally: replacements for “real”, forbidden food. Since any representation of gay intimacy in any form will be instantly removed on the Chinese internet, fans consume other types of content to satisfy their appetite: cute animal videos that can be imaginatively anthropomorphized to reflect gay romance. Screenshots that can stand-in for common ship tropes of yearning and desire. Footage of a tiny, benign kitten playing around with a doting Alaskan doesn’t come off as suspicious in Big Brother Weibo’s surveying eyes:

The same goes with these two images:

Popular meal replacements would often include a back story about the animal’s personality, their previous interactions leading up to this captured moment, and additional lore:

There are Weibo accounts dedicated to scavenging the internet for meal replacement content ripe for anthropomorphization and appealing if anthropomorphized, like @代餐墙 and @代餐bot. People will then use the content as the mold, swap in their favourite gay couple, fantasize, and go from there. 

Almost at any given moment, there will be someone who frequent male homoerotic content reposting videos like the one shown here with the snappy phrase “subbed subbed” (代了代了), indicating that they have substituted in whoever they were a fan of:

Yan: It seems that almost all the language around fanfic and shipping in Chinese is food related. To write fanfics is to make meals/produce food (做饭/产粮); to consume fanfics is to eat meals (吃饭); and to indulge in romantic interactions of your ship is to eat candy (磕糖). This might be how meal replacement got its name. If you’re desperate and hungry, anything will do.

Emily: Leaving aside the ethics of anthropomorphizing and subsequently sexualizing animal behaviours for a second, why is this happening in the first place?

The concept of “McDonaldization” might be useful here. I argue that Chinese danmei is becoming McDonaldized——beginning to operate on the principles of a fast-food restaurant. 

Ritzer, who first defined the concept, lists four characteristics that constitute McDonaldization4 and one of them is especially noteworthy in our context: efficiency. Ritzer has a very specific definition of efficiency. In using the word, he is referring to the mindset in which minimization of time is always prioritised. In a fast-food restaurant like McDonald’s, consumers will go from hungry to full as fast as possible.

So what’s the deal with meal replacements? My tentative answer is that they are the most efficient way of consuming danmei. As with real-life meal replacements like protein bars and bio shakes, it’d fill you up nice and fast. Animal behaviours do not have the same level of complexities compared to humans. More often than not, they are action-based, physical and therefore carnal. Easy to consume, process and almost already vaguely suggestive, meal replacements are a “quick fix” of homoeroticism on the go. It is preferred over a time-consuming, elaborate 8 course dinner where the menu is all in French——an extended body of fiction with multiple chapters, character arcs and plotlines. 

Ritzer’s 2019 article revisits this theory in the modern age. He asserts that “digitalization has served to intensify the process of McDonaldization5.” I would argue that meal replacements are, in some ways, propelled by the saturation of TikTok-ish endless information streams in recent years. We currently live in the day and age where delayed gratification is now only tolerated by a handful of people. 

Jaime: this reminds me of this analysis about the desexualization of porn, the virality of image that make erotic image-forms more widely available (than text), and sex (in every day life) becoming consumer product except China lives in the future so we are replacing "human face" with "animal face": 

"Intercourse has ceased to be sexual, and signifiers once tied to sex are now just individual pieces in the “Lego set” of one’s identity, divorced from the context of a relationship, a scene, or even desire itself...The message isn’t one of unfettered, unchecked carnal desire; it’s one of endless, aimless consumption and dopamine hits…” 

Emily: This article on TikTok and comedy makes a perceptive remark: TikTok created a new comedic genre consisting not of an incremental buildup and an explosive punchline, but only an “existential chuckle”, a “huh, that’s quite funny”-and-moving-on culture. The same goes with the consumption of danmei. Most want instant reward - instant turn-on, instant adrenaline rush, instant flash of the thoughts “that’s literally my ship” and “fuck, that’s hot and my ship is so real”. If that euphoria moment elapses, well, we can always swipe and watch the next one. The food (meal replacements) is readily accessible, easily digested and “organic” (uncensored), the preparation time (imaginative leap) is negligible, and the final sense of existential thrill is instantly evoked. 

More importantly, meal replacements are opted for by will but also by a complete lack of choice. When the sign itself can’t exist, we are left to devour the signifiers and the signified. We are cornered to the point where meal replacements are becoming staples. 

----

On 27th February 2022, a two-year old post from AO3’s now dormant Weibo account started recirculating. “We regret our inability to resolve what appears to be a sudden manual disconnection with AO3’s servers on the Chinese side,” it read. 

This is our annual “cyber tomb-sweeping”, said comments on the reposts. Behind this digital vigil was both a profound mourning of the loss of creative freedom, and a resigned acceptance of a new normal. Because alongside danmei’s (unwilling) collusion with platform consumerism and its futile micro-rebellions against authoritarian control is a growing force: a grateful, tired embrace of the less-than-real.

Simon: Some aspects of this topic reminded me of… Bandcamp. The indie-friendly Oakland-based music platform was recently purchased by Epic Games, which Tencent owns a 40% share of. This could have lasting implications for Bandcamp’s future and potential attempts to delve into the Chinese market… but that’s perhaps best talked about another time (which I hope we can do!).

What’s interesting here specifically is how critics and commentators like Mat Dryhurst have discussed how a better endgame for Bandcamp might have been “exit to community”—community ownership of the platform removing the need for growth that led to the site’s sale. It seems like there are some analogies with the platforms hosting Chinese slash fiction: a small passion project of a website cannot, or does not want to, invest in censorship, and thus builds a community. But when founders realize the project can go legit and make money, or it reaches a critical level of popularity, things get cleaned up or blocked. Could collective platform ownership work here, or might it still require a legal figurehead who could face serious fines and jail time? The closed off environment of AiFaDian is an interesting workaround, and yet kind of frustrating. It makes me think about discussions with Krish on the model for cultural events in Delhi: things are going on, but mostly confined to semi-private spaces, where you need to know someone to gain access. Though developed as a protective strategy, I think this kind of platform elitism can prevent broader, more interesting conversations from happening. 

Emily: Another Chinese slash platform that's gaining a lot of dedicated users is 废文网 (SoSad.Fun), the edgy name deriving from its self-awareness that, yes, we are living in a sad age of restricted creative freedom and the site itself may not last long before getting shut down. It’s also “censorship-free” (thanks to a server based abroad) but it is STRICTLY membership-only. The process of registering is deliberately cumbersome (it took me about a month). What makes registration easier is, as you've mentioned, through someone you know who's already on there with an invitation code. Otherwise, it's such a hassle. But fans say it's worth it, because apparently 废文 houses some of the best and most original danmei out there.

Krish: Chinese slash platforms are truly the private BitTorrent trackers of today (RIP What.cd)

Simon: Wow! Also, SoSad.Fun sounds like the name of an emo band from Hong Kong or Guangzhou.

Krish: Wayne’s SoSad.Fun

Aaron: More broadly, I think the platform elitism that we’re seeing develop with danmei communities is a mirror of how Chinese internet users engage with the global internet and open political discussion. If you’re savvy enough, accessing these with a VPN is hardly a problem, but most people probably wouldn’t even think to look for that access in the first place. And similar to the way that AiFaDian ends up gating content by your ability to pay, “savvy” VPN users are almost entirely made up of those from privileged classes – former international students, employees at multinational companies, foreigners, etc.

The insanely creative ways that shippers try to evade internet censorship also reminds me of more explicitly political attempts like the mass reposting of a censored 人物 Magazine article in different coded forms, or how demonstrators in Russia have started holding up blank signs to protest the country’s draconian post-invasion censorship. In these cases, though, I think the point of using codes is actually to draw attention to the censorship itself. With danmei, it looks like the point is to just stay under the radar and keep publishing. Learning the particular slang and codes of behavior is an integral part of joining any subculture, but this makes me wonder if there’s a point where finding danmei becomes so obtuse and involved that it walls off discovery for the next generation.

Krish: Outro music this week is also fan fiction, of sorts. 

This amazing new No Nonsense Collective (無妄合作社) cover of a Karen Mok song makes the original ballad sound like a Car Seat Headrest B-Side. 

This is part of a new 40th anniversary collection from Taiwan’s Rock Records, getting younger (cross-straits) bands like Sunset Rollercoaster, Carsick Cars, Elephant Gym, Default, Wayne’s SoSad.Fun and Mong Tong to cover old classics from their back catalogue. Worth a dive in.  

Yan: See you next time!

BIOS:

Emily is secretly spying on Chinese fandom to turn everything into an essay. An ex-fan of Chaoyang Trap, she made a conscious effort to include Ting’s nisu piece in her dissertation without knowing that one day she’d be a proud contributor.

Yan is still recovering from the discovery that Hello Kitty is a little girl, and is now processing the fact that her favourite meme character My Melody is Hello Kitty’s best friend.

Krish would like everyone to know that, in craft beer lingo, there is something called a “cool ship” that produces extra funky brews. 

Simon has a lot of music in his Bandcamp wishlist.

Aaron is having a lot of trouble imagining how the friendship between Hello Kitty and My Melody would work.

Yi-Ling is missing Chaoyang & her Chaoyang ppl. 

Jaime is still trapped in Chaoyang. 

The rest of Chaoyang Trap is on holiday. 😭 

Krish: Hello. Just a heads up before we um get into it: 🔞 everything that follows is NSFW. 

In this episode, we’re talking about pornography and desire in China. We discuss why porn matters, how sexualities are constructed, and where these conversations unfold. We try to delineate between porn culture and actual porn, to look at what that tells us about everyday life on the Chinese web. 

Tianyu: As Jiang Zemin told Mike Wallace in his famous 60 Minutes interview, the Chinese government’s initial justification of internet censorship was that they needed to ban pornography (“sometimes there is also unhealthy material [on the internet]—especially pornography on the Internet—which does great harm to our youngsters," he said).

But ironically I’ve heard many anecdotes of people having learned about censorship circumvention tools not because they were interested in dissident politics, but that they had to use a VPN to watch porn. 

Yi-Ling: The cute cat theory, except the cute cat is porn. 

Tianyu: This had the adverse effect of, well, people curiously tiptoeing around political boundaries after being introduced to the uncensored internet originally for the purpose of porn consumption. 

Krish: Porn is, to quote Richard Dyer, “too important to be ignored, or to be left to the pornographers.”

The heart of this episode is a conversation between two incredible researchers—Chong and Runze—swapping field notes, thoughts, and theories with the rest of the group. We cover everything from powerful yearning to whatever stage of horny this tweet represents: 

We’re so excited that Chong and Runze agreed to talk about their work here. Chong Liu is a sociologist who researches youth experiences with sexuality education and social stratification in China, and is also a teacher and consultant on sexuality education. She's done fieldwork among high school students around Tianjin. Runze Ding is a post-doctoral researcher whose work spans porn studies, new media, and online queer experience in China. He has done fieldwork with local gay communities in Beijing and Guangzhou, interviewing over 80 demographically diverse gay men about their lives and sexuality. 

Over to you both and, again, a reminder:

This episode is 100% NSFW.

[DOC/36K] 【CYT0207】ChaoyangTrap.avi

Chong: Let’s start with some fundamental premises. 

1: Porn is a cultural product in China. 

We can see it as the output of overlapping social, cultural, and political contexts, a means to help unpack the youth experience.

Runze: This is so true. Porn matters as a cultural phenomenon, and it especially matters to gay men. Richard Dyer defines gay porn as “a form of representation that can be the site and occasion for the production of bodily knowledge of the body.”

There is high demand for locally-produced (both amateur or semi-professional) porn videos within the Chinese gay community, which suggests that the reason for this “popularity” is not just novelty but also the big gap they fill in the market. The visibility of sexualized Chinese gay male bodies, per se, has cultural and political significance. A means of showing gay men’s “ability to do sex.” 

Chong: This leads to our next premise.

2: Porn has a long history in China, and that history informs the present. 

It’s notable that the oppressed social and political circumstances of the last half century did not reduce, well, horniness, even if porn could lead to arrests and punishment. The popularity of so-called hand-copied literature (手抄本) during and after the Cultural Revolution is revealing about how youth at the time experienced their sexuality. They would reinterpret the literature they were exposed to while copying,  adding descriptions about lesbian sex, exotic places and so on. These risky reinterpretations show how the youth, subjectively, wanted to access sexuality-related information and challenge the mainstream discourse about sexuality even during peak Maoism. 

About half a century later, when I conduct my fieldwork and interview my student participants, almost every single one of them can talk about porn. Some of them even share the names and features of their favorite porn stars with me without feeling timid. These include Chinese stars (from unlicensed porn-centric apps and websites), some Japanese ones (e.g. Sola Aoi, Yui Hatano, and Erika Momotani), and some white actors (they did not remember their names but did remember their faces). 

Runze: Yes, Chinese gay men are also certainly not shy or reticent in talking about their porn consumption. Some of them are even willing to share their experiences of producing pornographic content. In a recent co-authored study, which explores Chinese gay men's self-made sex videos on Twitter, I also found that many Chinese gay men are more open about this subject than I would have expected. Reflecting upon my experience, I believe pornography is not a taboo topic for many young Chinese (gay) individuals who were willing and happy to share their stories about this. 

Chong: That said, there is a paradox here: this “openness” is set against a reluctance, a suspicion, a kind of moral judgment, whenever porn is mentioned. This is our third premise. 

3: Porn is illegal in China, and this illegality colors the manner and texture of its consumption. 

This dynamic within the porn ecology in China is quite note-worthy. Referring to the policies and laws, such as the Criminal Law of The People’s Republic of China (1997) and the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Penalties for Administration of Public Security (2006), nobody can access porn legally as it is against the law to manufacture and disseminate porn. Watching porn, although not technically illegal, still could carry risks since “producing, transporting, duplicating, selling, and renting out” porn could be seen as breaking the law. Moreover, the definition of each is not usually clear.

Hand-in-hand with this “transgressive” reality is porn’s connection with aspiration. One of my fieldwork participants, a boy, told me he thought watching porn was like a habit to him, and it maybe even had nothing to do with his sexual desire. He had two elder sisters, and he was the little son in his family. His parents, therefore, had set a “high standard” for him and wished for him to go to one of China’s top universities. Referring to a study focusing on youth porn watching in Taiwan, the motivation behind habitual porn watching is linked to high expectations from parents and society. Porn thus becomes a shelter to youth to help them escape the pressure, frustration and boredom in the competitive circumstances brought on by the implementation of the One-Child Policy and neo-liberal demands.

A short Arrow Factory documentary about the market for high-end sex doll manufacturing in China. 

Runze: The anthropologist Lisa Rofel writes in her book Desiring China that “the specificity of neoliberalism in China lies in the production of desire”. I am in total agreement—the idea of “desire” is the key to understanding China's social transformation over the past several decades. What is more related to the idea of “desire” than porn? By understanding how porn is produced and consumed in China, the complexity of the construction of sexualities in China can be unpacked.

Chong: In the late 80s, and especially after the student movement in 1989, porn was assumed to be the result of bourgeois liberalization, a symbol of a “decadent capitalist way of life.” It was common to link porn watching to criminal activities, and to link “deviancy” in sexuality to crime. The specter of hooliganism (流氓罪), raised in the 1970s, and although retired in 1997, still has a deterrent impact on society. The word “hooligan (流氓)” is still frequently used in a school setting, and in my research amongst youth, the ones who talked about sexuality-related topics, even if just to express their confusion, told me that they would be gossiped about or publicly shamed. 

That reminds me of a very interesting thing that happened recently. I went to the pub near my university in the UK with a group of Chinese PhD students. After I introduced myself, a female PhD student slut-shamed me and asked, “how many men have you ever touched?” I was (and still am) not even close to her!

Runze: I think there are also political and technological dimensions in reading, watching (or producing) porn. We need to stress that the making and distribution of sexually explicit materials (homosexual or heterosexual) is illegal in China, and the government has increasingly tightened its control and censorship of pornography on the internet. Despite these efforts, it is not difficult for the public to access porn, particularly for those who live in more economically developed areas.

Results from the 2006 Sexuality Survey of China showed that 51.1% of participants had seen sexually explicit media content (such as images and videos) in the year before the survey was conducted. By 2010, this percentage had risen to 65.8%, of which 25.9% had actively searched for sexually explicit content, including texts, pictures and videos. VPN use is common since the Great Firewall actively blocks most porn sites or platforms where porn might be hosted.  

Tianyu: The most popular board on Caoliu (草榴社区), China’s most famous porn BBS, is a current affairs forum known as “technical discussion area” (技术讨论区). In between NSFW posts are, in fact, uncensored discussions about international politics and domestic policy, as well as reposts of censored WeChat articles.

But I think this porn-to-politics, nudes-to-news pipeline has also shifted to Twitter, where a lot of Chinese people came for the porn and stayed for the minyun keyboard warriors (mostly men) of Sinophone Twitter.

In most of these circles misinformation is rampant, and most are bad takes; still, I’d love to read a paper on this if anyone is interested in an investigation.

Chong: Despite the hard censorship, Chinese people can and always find ways to access pornography. I remember during the first day at the vocational school which was my research site, a few boys approached me during their lunch break in the playground with my research information sheets in their hands. They asked me the reason why I wanted to carry out this research. ‘You research sexuality, right? Is it not about porn and all that mature stuff?’ they giggled, and then one of the boys continued to ask, 'would you not feel shame when you talk about them?' I soon identified it as an opportunity to build rapport with them by saying that there was nothing right or wrong in talking about sexuality, and it was all about personal choice to watch and read porn. After hearing my response, these boys were no longer confrontational and showed their strong interest in my research, then asked me how they could participate in my project.

Runze: I also experienced a similar thing in my fieldwork. When I asked my participants how they “realised” their same-sex desires, many of them answered “porn”. Some individuals found that when they were watching straight porn with their mates, they were less attracted by the female actor, but rather stimulated by the male ones. Some participants also told me that it was watching gay porn that let them “confirm” their sexuality. 

Chaoyang Trap

S02 Episode 2: Press F to Review Bomb

In the house this week: Aaron, Yuxin, Jason, Christina, Simon, Krish, Tianyu, and Henry. Krish: Welcome to Episode 2. This is the first in a two-part series about video games in China…

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5 years ago · 8 likes · Tianyu M. Fang

Yi-Ling: I wonder how porn is defined and categorized, and how that definition has perhaps shifted over the last three decades (especially, when it comes to defining legality of content.) Is content that contains same-sex desire more likely to be labelled as “porn” than heterosexual content that is not? (i.e. Danmei literature?) I also wonder how porn fits in the discourse of the “vulgar,” as labeled by various state censorship organs. Is there an overlap between pornography and the “vulgar?” Or are they now kind of siloed into two wholly separate categories, in the eyes of content consumers and content regulators?

Krish: Just from my specific niche as a former social media manager for Chinese brands, most platforms just use crude, sometimes hilariously excessive, filtering for “黄” content that they see as pornographic. Images I've had to delete after being labeled porn have included, over the years, photos of crowd surfers, an illustration of a baby in a onesie, a punk band singer screaming into a mic, and a beer poster that was vaguely flesh colored. 

咸湿佬: We talk about this a little later on, but I think it’s worth emphasizing that (although I guess maybe Chong or Runze would have some actual data on this) the heavy regulation of porn in China seems like it has actually resulted in a lot more amateur porn in China than other markets. That heavy reliance on amateur porn to fill the ‘gap’ has also created huge online communities that I don’t feel like exist at the same scale elsewhere—I don’t know if there are really any sites in other places that have the level of activity or influence that Caoliu or 91porn seem to in China, especially given their specific cultural localization as compared to global sites like Pornhub.

Taiwanese porn studios are also another interesting aspect of this - I don't know anything about the history of cross-straits porn relations, but it seems like the popularity of professional Taiwanese porn producers like Madou Studios (麻豆) in recent years is an example of companies filling the gap left from censorship cutting off the supply of local, professional porn content.

Chong: During my fieldwork, many student participants told me that Japanese porn was their “enlightener.” It is worth mentioning that Japanese porn is the most common type mentioned among all my student participants. Japanese porn first entered China in the 1990s, and its popularization in China is a fascinating cultural phenomenon alongside China’s social transformation. 

In the famous online community Caoliu, there are different categories available for people to download—Asian porn censored, uncensored, European and American porn, animated porn, Chinese porn, porn with Chinese subtitles and so forth.

The popularization of Japanese porn can be seen as a kind of decentralization of Western-country-dominated discourse about globalization in East Asia. Moreover, the imagination of 'being modern,' based on China and Japan's cultural similarities, could hardly be negotiated solely by American culture.  In one of my interviews, a high school kid could not wait to tell me about his “taste” for porn. He told me he liked Japanese porn more than European and American porn. He explained that “we look more similar and it can help me imagine that I am having sex with my girlfriend”. This similarity in East Asian Countries, to some extent, also rationalizes the popularization and acceptance of Japanese porn amongst youth.

Runze: yes, Japanese porn was also very popular among Chinese gay communities. But there are also many gay indiviudals that fancy western “studio” gay porn. Facilated by the internet, some young Chinese gay men have already developed a specific taste towards western gay porn production from a very young age—a kind of transnational sexualization of culture. Within this context, a few participants reported a strong preference for Western (white) men. They jokingly use the term “western food girl” [potato queen/西餐妹] to describe themselves. Arguably, a Chinese modernity has bought into Western gay attitudes towards sex and gay (porn) aesthetics, seemingly supporting filmmaker and researcher Katrien Jacobs’ claim about ‘erotic-cultural imperialism’ in China. She points out that sexual imagination here has been hijacked by a peculiar kind of “euramerican” style and suggests “a reclaiming of Chinese sexual bodies through “home-made pornography content [that] would be important to even out dominant scripting of eroticism and perversity by overseas producers.”

Chong: Compared to boys, girls were more likely to deliberately search for (or admit that they had searched for) gay porn and Boys Love (BL) comics and literature. ​​BL and gay porn filled in an important gap in China’s inadequate sexuality education. A girl participant told me that, to a certain extent, she obtained knowledge about the existence of sexual minorities and understood civil society according to her active exploration of BL and gay porn. Due to governmental suppression of sexual minorities’ rights, knowledge about LGBT issues is often deliberately obscured and hidden. Even though, taking a long view, the situation is much better than in previous years—at least homosexuality is no longer identified as a mental health disease since the mid-2000s.

Some girls also told me that compared to heterosexual porn, they prefer to watch gay porn more than other types. 

The reason: in heterosexual porn, women are usually exploited, degraded and objectified and it made the girls feel uncomfortable. Gay porn, then, provides girls opportunities to get away from widely existing binary gender stereotypes and opt out from the manipulation and unequal power relationships (at least in personal media choices). From Japan to China, from the submissive to the grass-roots, in the trend of social transformation, porn is a double-edged sword—a battleground. It has given multiple possibilities to different people to deal with gender (in)equalities in society.

Runze: Interestingly, and more recently, there is a rise in the locally produced gay porn market that is challenging this “erotic-cultural imperialism.” Around 2010, a series of locally produced gay porn films under the brand name “Chitu” (赤兔) has gained popularity among gay men in China. Arguably Chitu can be seen as the first gay porn series in China. Following the success of Chitu, there are more and more individuals and groups take part in the local gay porn production in China. 

Although the production of Chitu has stopped, similar forms of homo-erotic media and gay porn productions are actively continuing in corners of the Chinese web. For instance, another series of locally produced gay porn films under the brand name ‘A Big Cock Man’ gained popularity in the Chinese gay community beginning in late 2016. With the popularity of Tumblr and later Twitter, more and more ordinary Chinese gay men also become DIY porn producers. 

These DIY porn creators are often referred to as wanghuang (网黄), a term derived from wanghong (网红, “internet famous”) swapping the “red” for “yellow.” A recent paper by Lin Song offers a really fascinating insight into the phenomenon, arguing that wanghuangs represent both a willing submission to, and an active negation of, commodification and state censorship. 

Chong: Wrapping up, we should talk about porn’s affects in China, and how it functions as education in the absence of comprehensive sex-ed. 

One of my student participants, a 17 year-old boy,  told me that he usually felt guilty when watching porn and swore not to watch it anymore. Part of his guilt was about morality - he felt he was breaking the law every time he watched porn. Having been identified as 'spiritual opium', 'yellow pollution' and 'spiritual poison' by the public and even the authorities, porn is usually being sold as an entirely negative thing to youth. While on the other hand, these nicknames explain why youth cannot resist porn as a transgressive pleasure.

It is actually a very tricky situation. I have multiple roles in the field of sexuality education—I research, teach, and consult. As a sociologist, I can confidently say that the youth benefit when they watch porn. To be specific, it can help them release pressures and at least have some fun and explore their identities. However, as a teacher and a consultant, when I cooperate with the authorities and schools, it becomes unrealistic to mention the positive part of watching porn to youth, because practically, it is still vital to follow the rules and the law. 

Runze: Interestingly, not many of my gay participants felt guilty when watching porn. For the majority of (young) participants, when they first started to explore their sexual identity online, they would naturally encounter pornographic content. Specifically, for many participants from post-1980s and post-1990s generations [80 后和 90 后], the Internet has become Chinese gay men’s major (if not only) information source for sexually explicit materials. In fact, when many of my younger participants accessed information on homosexuality online, they found that sexually explicit material was the first thing that turned up, which suggests that homoeroticism is inseparable in the construction of gay identity. However, this access is not free from censorship or state control. Many participants noticed the government’s tightening-up censorship on Internet (gay) pornography. They often expressed that getting access to gay porn online was much easier when they were younger. 

Chong: Porn stars are often called 'teachers' by youth in China, including by many of my student participants. Simultaneously, some of my student participants looked to porn for answers when there was no one to ask for help. For example, some of the girls I interviewed told me they did not know where to ask sex-related questions. Compared to boys, they found talking about sexuality to peers was a difficult task. 

▲ A series of hand-drawn sex-ed videos, now deleted from the Chinese web, that went viral in 2014.

Another participant of mine told me that he learned a lot about sexuality through porn. He specifically highlighted knowledge about contraception—through porn watching, he learned that ejaculating on his sex partners’ bellies could be an efficient way to avoid making girls pregnant.  Ignoring the accuracy and leap of logic in this particular instance, porn had some educational benefits to almost all of my participants, caused in part by the conservative attitude towards sexuality. “The underground circulation of pornography” functions, in a sense, as an informal educational network. In this case, calling porn stars 'teachers' and using porn as a critical learning material shows the everyday encounter with sexuality in youth’s lives.. It also expresses an attitude of resistance against 'the dominant belief that "pornography is poison"' widely advocated by China's legal system and mass media.

▲ “Why Most Women Hate Oral Sex,” from popular sex-focused video channel ChaoZhiBai (超直白)

Runze: This is so true. Like I mentioned earlier, the internet has become the major source for Chinese gay men to explore their sexualities. Digital technologies provide sorely needed alternative spaces for LGBTQ folks to acquire and practice sexual knowledge. The internet creates a relatively safe space where gay men are empowered to satisfy their curiosity, learn about sex, and talk about topics they would unlikely discuss otherwise.

Tianyu: On the subject of online communities, a few other random things about Caoliu: 

• The website never got banned banned. Their main domain has long been on the GFW blacklist, but they’ve managed to mirror the site on different servers and temporary domains. You can always find a list of their most recent mirror URLs in one way or another, somewhere on the Chinese internet.

• Caoliu had a reputation for the civility of its users. Quarrels were very rare because community rules are strictly enforced; since the site is invitation-based, and they stopped handing out new invitation codes long ago, I imagine no one is willing to get their handle permanently banned so that they could win an argument. (You need an account to add or reply to posts, but anyone can browse/download.) 

• New users on Caoliu needed to wait at least 1024 seconds between two replies. For whatever reason, people on Caoliu started writing “1024” in the comments to thank the OP. But this practice was later introduced to non-porn BBS forums, so it wasn’t uncommon to see entire threads of “1024” on SFW messaging boards.

Simon: I feel slightly awkward commenting on this as a straight white man  but in any case, porn seems like another interesting example of a cultural space in China defined by absence. I remember once hearing that sex shops used to be so ubiqituous in Beijing in part because porn was illegal, and thus “sex” had to be sold another way. 

What do people think the future of porn in China will look like? Runze mentions that it has gradually become more difficult to access gay porn online; I wonder if changing heterosexual mores might bring straight porn more into the open? If high birthrates are being encouraged these days, does that make (heteronormative) desire good in the eyes of the state? As noted above, porn is often an escape from reality rather than oriented towards real life (reproductive) sex, so perhaps the connection here is tenuous, but I wonder how attitudes and laws might change.

Krish: More a comment than an answer, but it’s fascinating to see how erotica and nudity have become such signficant presences at any art book fair in China, or at illustration fairs like Singularity Plan (奇点计划). There’s an overlap there with slash culture, which will be the subject of a future Chaoyang Trap episode [doge].   

Jaime: Lin Song put it well when he describes “illiberal homonormativity" as “a situation where consumer culture functions as one of the very few, if not only public channel for queer expressions and negotiations under illiberal rule" and “the marriage between queerness and commerciality may be at once enabling and restricting, liberating and normalizing, and apparently assimilationist and tactically oppositional." 

He speaks explicitly to the production of DIY gay porn and the consumption of homosexual culture but I think this can apply to other kinds of imported subcultures (sexual, underground, or otherwise) that are seen as threatening to the heterorthodoxy of the state. this is how we get publications like MISSIONARY—issue 3 is dedicated to porn—which, while a necessary corrective to the invisibility of gay media, aestheticizes queer and sexual culture in a way that lacks self-consciousness about the way class—and capitalist relations, and capitalist relations with Chinese feudal/hukou characteristics—functions to enable or disable sexual power. 

Mainstream society co-opts or accepts deviant sexuality in so far as it also upholds values that are in service of maintaining other categories of social hegemony—think about how MISSIONARY is bilingual, pro-VPN, and quotes no less than three European philosophers in each issue. This is, by the way, connected to the thesis of Christopher Chitty's Sexual Hegemony, which crucially (and mindbendingly) proposes a Marxist framework to account for the policing of homosexuality at various urban junctures throughout the rise of capitalism. Chitty stops at American bourgeois hegemony in the 20th century (RIP) but what I would give to read the unwritten chapter on how Chinese sexual history fits into the development of China's demented form of capitalism, common prosperity/xiaokang society policy goal, and its unique population (control) struggles outside of Western liberal order.

咸湿佬: Personally, I look forward to the evolution of porn advertising, where China is already on the bleeding edge of innovation. This randomly selected video is a great case in point:

• the actors are playing a mobile poker game being advertised in the video

• this clip is immediately followed by an actual embedded ad clip for the game

• there are printed signs in the room advertising the game

• there are digital overlays on the video repeating the same ad!

And this one isn’t even pushing the boundaries - there are also examples of native ads like the porn site being displayed in a billboard in a passing shot, context-aware bouncing ads, temporary tattoos on actors’ bodies, and more…who knows what the future holds.

(If you are the person who makes these ads and you happen to see this newsletter, please contact @ChaoyangTrap, because we have…questions.)

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Krish: Outro music this week is the lead single from the new Absolute Purity album. “Baroque sludge post-punk” is my attempt at describing the sound.  

It’s a great direction for this band. Singer Wen Jun used to front beloved short-lived noise rock outfit Guai Li, and this takes just the right amount of nostalgic inspiration from the 2010s Beijing scene and pushes it into fun, noisy, gothy, poppy territory. 

Tianyu: Bye!

Chong Liu is completely safe for work. She is also interested in the sexual abstinence culture in China.

Runze Ding is a post-doc researcher in Shenzhen where he cannot say he is studying porn out loud. He hopes to find a job position in which he can do more “sexy” research projects. 

Jen Rao aka drift & dune is an illustrator and artist based in Beijing, and the co-founder and creative director of nugget records, a DIY cassette label and venue. 

Krish Raghav is a comic-book artist now based in Amsterdam. His attempts at drawing erotica always turn into body horror :(  

咸湿佬 works 996 hours but is NSFW.

Yi-Ling Liu learned earlier this month that the first sex shop in China was called Adam & Eve. 

Simon Frank wanted to write that he lives in Beijing’s sexiest district, but then realized if he looked up “Beijing’s sexiest district” online he’d be very disturbed by the results.

Tianyu Fang is visiting Amsterdam in two weeks. He drunk-tweeted on August 19, 2021: “chaoyang trap season 2 on onlyfans.“

Jaime (bot) is still trapped in Chaoyang.

Tianyu: Happy Year of the Tiger! Let’s talk about food. 

Krish: Our two stories this week are about the everyday life of Chinese food, and how malleable, inclusive and wonderfully creative local adaptations of national food cultures can be. Too much of writing about Chinese food in English gets tangled up in issues of “authenticity,” and the subjects of both our stories resist definitions of the authentic so fiercely that the word might as well be useless. 

Jaime: Authenticity is for nerds. 

Krish: First, Yan goes into an internet rabbit hole to find Tahini-Linguine Hot Dry Noodles. 

Meanwhile Zoe writes an ode to Shaxian Delicacies—China’s best drunk food staple. 

Neither would feature in any traditional depiction of Chinese food, but I always think of this perfect parody of A Bite of China where the making of instant noodles is an epic adventure:   

Food cultures are sustained by everyday adaptation and sharing, what the writer A.K. Ramanujan calls “an infinite use of finite means.” On the social platform Xiaohongshu (小红书, also known as Red), Yan discovers sharing that resembles a form of homesickness mutual aid: 

Putting the Hack in Hakka Noodles 

By Yan Cong

Yan: It all started with pizza dough.

I was scrolling through my feed on Xiaohongshu, my go-to Chinese social platform for life hacks, or more specifically, recipes for Chinese dishes created by and for overseas Chinese. A photo of youtiao popped up. Beneath it the headline read, “Newbie friendly! Make delicious youtiao with pizza dough.” 

I was shook. I’ve never associated pizza dough with youtiao. I’ve never associated pizza dough with anything other than pizza. 

Since I moved to Amsterdam last September, I’ve been consuming Xiaohongshu as a sort-of productivity/home decor/inspiration blog. Although it is known as a platform full of fashion influencers who help sell clothes and cosmetics to a predominantly female user base, small niches have emerged in its culture that encourage all kinds of sharing: from “10 IKEA products every home should have” to “5 tricks that help you to write a literature review in an hour.” A news story pointed out that parts of Xiaohongshu resemble TripAdvisor or Wirecutter. A podcast even called Xiaohongshu the Zhihu (a male-dominated Chinese equivalent of Quora) for women. 

Using Xiaohongshu feels a bit like playing with the bastard child of Instagram and TikTok: photos and videos show up on my “Explore” feed in an endless scroll. From my experience, it seems like the Xiaohongshu algorithm is a bit smooth-brained: it just doubles down on content you’ve shown any interaction with. So my pizza dough encounter opened up an entire genre of cooking among overseas users on Xiaohongshu that had been unknown to me: Ingredient Substitution (食材平替).

My feed was never the same again. I'm now obsessed with the genre.

Imagine you’re a Chinese student living abroad. You’re on a limited budget, and your access to ingredients is limited. Pandemic and supply-chain restrictions mean care packages and trips home are impossible. The food you’re craving isn’t “restaurant food” but rather regional specialties or niche, home-cooked dishes.   

Enter 食材平替, “Ingredient Substitution.” The classics of the genre represent people’s diverse daily cravings that a regular Chinese restaurant can’t fulfill, existing at the venn diagram intersection of “cheap”, “possible” and “satisfying.”

Before we dive into its three sub-genres, follow the flowchart and see which category you fall into:

Lazy/busy cook’s compromise - Pizza dough for youtiao/baozi/xianbing

Pizza dough embodies the first school of thought behind ingredient substitution: maximizing taste with a minimum amount of time and effort. A purist may frown upon this style of cooking, but it’s the perfect solution for people who don’t want to, or don’t have the time to, get their hands dirty. Pizza dough saves you the trouble of measuring flour and water, getting all the wet bits off of your hands when mixing the dough, and hours of waiting for a dough to rise. You speedrun the process by getting it ready-made in a grocery store. 

Cooking with pizza dough also takes speedrun’s underlying logic: it requires imagination and an understanding of the object at hand in order to take advantage of it. Like speedrunners exploiting common bugs in game design, Xiaohongshu users take advantage of pizza dough as a premade mixture of flour, water and yeast, and repurpose it for making any flour-based dish.

I’ve made Beef pancakes and Shengjian Bao with pizza dough following recipes I found, and both attempts were successful. The outside was crunchy and golden, and the stuffing juicy. They weren’t perfect—I wished the dough had risen a bit more to give it a fluffy texture on top of the crunchiness, but they did the job. 8/10 would dough again. 

Caiwei: This is the same “decompose rearrange” shit Chinese cooking (especially baking) enthusiasts have been seeing for a few years—I think essentially a result of China's yet undeveloped food industry, and also caused by a disparity in shared knowledge on food, especially when it comes to pastries. A good example is using ready-to-eat shou zhua bing (手抓饼, often translated as “pancakes” but come on it’s a paratha and even Jay Chou knows) dough to make Palmiers or egg tart crust. You cannot buy puff pastry at Chinese grocery stores, but you would have better luck finding frozen shou zhua bing even at the store in the smallest Chinese town. The substitution is amazing and uniquely diasporic because it takes knowledge from both food culture and a good amount of reverse-engineering/code-cracking, and reveals this deep resonance between cultures remote to each other, which I find beautiful.

Radical substitution - Sauerkraut vs. Suancai; Tahini vs. Hot Dry Noodles

Yan: Radical substitution has the most “fusion” potential. I call it radical not because it dramatically changes the cooking process, but because it’s the most adventurous and creative sub-genre in breaking boundaries between ingredients and national borders, challenging people’s preconceived idea of cuisine-specific ingredients.

Sauerkraut can be remixed as suancai (酸菜) in dishes from northeastern China. Tahini can be appropriated as the main component for the sauce in Hot Dry Noodles (热干面), a Wuhan signature. Can’t find alkali noodles for authentic Hot Dry Noodles? Use Linguine for similar taste and texture. Miss midnight snack 烤冷面? Use Lasagna to recreate the infamous street food.

Here’s a hilarious example of the same principle applied to cooking equipment: when you have friends over to make dumplings together but have only one rolling pin, use wine bottles or bowls!

Reverse engineering - Making tudoufen from scratch

This last subgenre of cooking is the opposite of the first one: instead of taking a shortcut, it takes a detour. When ingredients hard to come by are not easily substitutable, or when a purist is craving for an authentic bite of their favorite dish, it’s possible to make some ingredients from scratch.

This accidental crossover with “slow food” does require more awareness of the ingredients themselves. It’s important to note that this kind of “first principles” thinking can be quite radical for casual cooks. Before I read the tudoufen (土豆粉, potato noodles) recipe from Xiaohongshu, it’s just a product I buy from dried food shelves in Asian groceries. I never thought about what it is made of, and how it is made: Mix potato starch with water and hit it up. Stir the mixture until it turns into a dough. The rest of the process is the same as making noodles.

Another advantage with this style of cooking is that it can be super cheap! As this recipe brags in the headline, “enjoy tudoufen at home for 75 cents!” With the global supply chain crisis, food products shipped from China are getting expensive—if you can even find them at all. If you’re a broke student who wants to save money, this is for you.

I can’t stop thinking of what Xuandi wrote in his senior fashion story in Season 1 last year. Influencers on Xiaohongshu usually want to sell you something, turning everything they touch into “derivative and banal” facsimiles. It is the opposite with Ingredient Substitution recipes: when specific products are mentioned, I never feel I was being sold something. I feel reassured that someone has tested it and successfully made a dish that I will one day make myself. Like senior fashion, they are creative yet unassuming: they aren’t monetizing their visibility or preaching shallow multiculturalism or in-your-face globalism. They’re not weaponizing nostalgia, but rather using it as an act of care, a way to feel more grounded wherever they may be.    

At the end of the day, Ingredient Substitution is about living in a foreign country—adapting and getting by. Surviving and coping with the impossibility of going home. When I see a recipe being replicated, modded, or speedrun, I don’t see them as copycats trying to capture traffic and boost follower counts on Xiaohongshu. I see them as people who, in search of the old and familiar, have created something new. 

Aaron: The exact same thing that happened to Yan has happened to me since I moved back to the US from Beijing late last year. Xiaohongshu is convinced that I’m a Chinese student living abroad instead of the 30-something white American that I actually am, and has delivered me a steady stream of Ingredient Substitution recipes since I demonstrated my interest by clicking on one of them.

Instead of Tesco tahini though, Xiaohongshu users in the US are particularly obsessed with Costco and Trader Joe’s, plus the occasional posts about Whole Foods. It’s been interesting for me to see, and has led to me using the app way more here than I ever did in China. In China, I’d find myself hate-browsing Xiaohongshu only if I was bored, but in the US I actively look forward to seeing the creative ways in which people can recreate the taste of home. It really does feel like a better, more creative version of Xiaohongshu. Now I just need to decide which one of these ten recipes for using Trader Joe’s uncured Black Forest Bacon as a Hunan la rou substitute I should actually cook…

Simon: In one sense Xiaoshongshu substitution cooking might just be the latest iteration of a longer process of the adaptation of food (foodways?) through immigration, itself speaking to the specificities of current patterns of migration. Subbing sauerkraut for suancai sounds fairly similar to the types of improvisation that created Chinese-American food. What might be different now is the class of the people doing this cooking, and, for some of them, the temporary nature of their sojourns outside of China. Will this become part of global Chinese cooking, but stay as a subculture for students, or is someone going to open a beef pancake place in Amsterdam that takes surprising cues from pizza and pide? 

As a foreigner that’s spent a significant chunk of my life in China, I can relate to Aaron’s feeling of missing the flavors of a home that is not your home. One of my favorite foreigner-oriented media outlets in China is actually the YouTube channel “Chinese Cooking Demystified,” which I admit to binge watching and cooking from when I want to do something engaged with my surroundings, but also switch off the second-language part of my brain. Yet this is also strange, because part of the channel’s allure is about teaching you how to make inaccessible regional speciality/restaurant dishes while out of China—perhaps I am mentally preparing myself for departure… Anyway, I think they do a good job breaking down some of the differences between restaurant and home cooking, and actually have a video on making Shaxian Delicacies’ iconic peanut noodles. I have crisped green onions in lard to make it, which is pretty funny considering there is a Shaxian Delicacies 50 meters from my house. Imagining cooking it outside of China speaks to the power of nostalgia and distance, where something absolutely ubiquitous and mundane becomes alluring…

Tianyu: Speaking of Shaxian, the restaurant chain that’s everywhere in Chinese cities…no one really knows who owns it or how many of them are knock-offs. I don’t remember the exact details of my first (helplessly intoxicated) visit to Shaxian in Fuzhou. I recall that the beef noodle soup that I had ordered was extraordinarily cheap, and while I struggled to actually find beef in it, I was too drunk to complain.

There is a collective diaspora craving for Shaxian Delicacies: the idea of affordable, pan-Chinese dining that opens until late night. The food doesn’t have to be good, but it would be nice to know there is one around the neighborhood. I recently encountered (with fellow Chaoyang Trap resident Henry Zhang) a Shaxian Delicacies in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We didn’t go in because we had just had lunch, and we weren’t sure if it was shanzhai. In any case, it was soothing to reunite with the red-and-green Pac-Man logo. 

For our second story this week, Zoe pays tribute to the Shaxian cult with her trademark combination of gonzo, immersive, investigative and method journalism:

Shaxian Can’t Be Fucked With 

By Zoe Mou

Zoe: It’s 3 AM and you just came out of a live music show, craving late night comfort food to wrap up your epic night out. Chances are, you’ll see a Pac-Man like logo on the street corner and chomp your way to it. Instead of an action maze chase video game adventure, you will experience the slightly surreal essence of Han Chinese cuisine. 

沙县小吃 (“Shaxian Delicacies”) is the most culturally invasive Chinese restaurant brand in the whole world, truly the Shen Yun of snack joints. I’m telling you- there are at least three Shaxians in Brooklyn, including a knock-off. It’s not as flamboyant as Laoganma, the Chinese chili oil that has stormed American dining tables, but Shaxian Delicacies has quietly taken over countless shopping streets and urban walking routes, pervading your life by opening right next to your apartment compounds. 

1873 results for Shaxian locations on Dianping, and this is just Beijing. 

Shaxian Delicacies started out in Shaxian, aka Sha County, a district of Sanming in Fujian province. While a mostly typical southern cuisine, Shaxian food features surprising fusion with northern flavors. This is part of the reason why Shaxian Delicacies have become so popular all over the country, unintentionally creating a pan-Chinese palate. The food culture of Shaxian and other places in Fujian benefited from the two waves of migrations from the Zhongyuan region (roughly Henan, Shaanxi, and Hebei) down south, during which a large number of northern Han Chinese poured into Fujian, bringing the food culture of the north to Shaxian and other places in the South.To a lot of Chinese, it tracks as vaguely “representative”—capturing a kind of essence, the profundity of Chinese food culture (but not entirely). 

Shaxian is my favorite drunk food—very much like dollar pizza on 6th Ave, mostly because they both open after midnight and serve tasty carbs to drunk people. Another virtue of Shaxian (and dollar pizzas) that I highly appreciate is that they are truly hospitable dining spaces where everyone is welcomed - Shaxian is probably the most affordable restaurant food that you can buy. A warm bowl of wontons at Shaxian after work is the best treat for an Ele.me delivery driver. A broke college student struggling to support themselves can always get a sumptuous dinner at Shaxian Delicacies. And you can also spot well-dressed salarymen sitting at a dining table in Shaxian slurping their piaoxiang noodles. 

I remember reading a Douban post in which the OP only had three kuai left in their pocket. Cold and starving, not knowing where to go, they decided to go to a Shaxian. The owner of that Shaxian near their university generously offered to serve them more steamed dumplings for free and asked if they had enough money to make their trip back to campus. Shaxian to me is a hodgepodge that mixes social classes. 

In front of a bowl of Shaxian dumplings, everyone is equal. Alright, I might have gone too far…

Shaxian Delicacies is key among the many things Mr. Xi has looked at, often during his tenure in Fujian. According to a Xinhua report, “Mr. Xi Jinping's care and support during his tenure in Fujian was the key to Shaxian Delicacies evolving into a worldwide industry coming from a tiny backwater town.” Apparently the then-vice party secretary of Fujian noticed the potential of the local food industry when he was visiting in 1999 and suggested the major attraction of Shaxian was cheap and cheerful, spotting the “lower consumption market.” 

In the early 1990s, thousands of people left their hometowns to make a living in the catering industry. This coincided with the wave of ‘Xiahai’ 下海, which led to a surge in the urban migrant population and its demand for food, accommodation and travel. The affordable price of Shaxian Delicacies grasped the hearts and tummies of the low consumption residents.

This is on-point. Apart from this apt analysis, I also want to share this hot take from Shaxian locals:

In the eyes of Shaxian people, Bianrou 扁肉 (a type of Fujianese dumplings) are ‘bricks’, and Ban Mian 拌面 (Fujian-style stirred noodles) are ‘steels.’ The local street food has been built into the skyscrapers of Shaxian.

This description of Shaxian food somehow sounds very earthy and “industrialized,” but I assure you the food served at Shaxian Delicacies is generally quite excellent. My favorite is “Fragrant Stirred Noodles 飘香拌面.” It comes coated with soy sauce and peanut butter (unsweetened), sprinkled with a bit of salt and sugar, and garnished with a pinch of chopped spring onions. Give it a solid stir to evenly mix the seasonings with the boiled noodles, and our taste buds will be completely captured by this simple carb bomb. 

As a curious human being, I assume that people must be very curious about the ownership of this restaurant brand. Owning thousands of branches in China and abroad, Shaxian’s owner must be a millionaire. I tried to do some research about this mysterious brand, not expecting to hit the wall at the first step—even the official website of Shaxian Delicacies doesn’t work. Typical Shaxian style. But deep diving into all public records about the brand, finally something much clearer has emerged.

Shaxian was initially a collective run by locals from Shaxian. During the early 90s, Shaxian locals flocked to southern coastal cities to sell street food. Seeing their peers raking in money in the big cities, fellow villagers smelled the profits from the burgeoning catering industry and followed the army of Shaxian street food vendors, starting to open more restaurants selling Shaxian food in the cities. Everyone just unconsciously adopted the name Shaxian Delicacies. As its reputation grew, non-Shaxian locals also began to emulate their recipes and further expanded the brand's influence all over China and even abroad. This also explains why originally Shaxian Delicacies were only managed by Shaxian locals, but nowadays we do see quite a lot of non-locals running them. 

Please don’t ask me how they came up with the Pac-Man like logo. I have not yet gotten to the end of that investigation.

Simon: I had heard previously that there were a lot of Henanese migrants in Fujian, but I hadn’t really thought about that in terms of it creating a kind of north-south fusion cuisine in Shaxian, which is super interesting. Zoe, recently you mentioned to me that you’re starting to notice less Shaxian Delicacies, which makes me wonder if it’s a sign of China growing out of the “lower consumption market” that creates the need for it. I remember reading an article a few years ago about how growing prosperity (as well as delivery services) were killing off instant noodle sales in China. What might replace Shaxian’s supremacy at home? Maybe the much discussed luosifen fad of the past few years might demonstrate more cosmopolitan palettes, a search for the exotic and new (within national borders) rather than the comforting? 

Also, as a *闽 Appreciator* I’d be remiss to not mention my minor beef with Shaxian Delicacies: by completely cornering the lower end market, it makes it very hard to find Fujianese food around China that isn’t either dirt cheap or in a super expensive seafood restaurant. In Beijing at least, it’s only been in the past few years that mid-range restaurants offering (excellent) food from Xiamen and Quanzhou have opened up. 

Krish: Outro music this week is the double bill of:

1/ Simon’s ‘What’s the Point?’ show on BAIHUI, followed by;

2/ This hour-long “GO GO ROUND THE FISHMANS” mix by friend of the newsletter Hayley, featuring everyone’s favorite Japanese psych rocksteady trio.  

Tianyu: Thank you for reading! Please share, subscribe, and tell us about your ingredient substitution ideas via email (hello AT chaoya.ng) or Twitter @ChaoyangTrap. 

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Yan Cong experiments with Ingredient Substitution recipes from her home kitchen in Amsterdam. 

Zoe Mou is trying to create a Shaxian-Guizhou fusion cuisine.

Jason Li is an artist who noodles and doodles.

Krish Raghav is no longer based in Chaoyang =( 

Caiwei Chen misses her friends badly and wants to cook for them.

Aaron Fox-Lerner should stop compulsively saving recipes on Xiaohongshu and start actually cooking them.

Simon Frank believes that Lanzhou beef noodle restaurants are China’s Greek diners.

Tianyu Fang is an intern.

Yi-Ling: Rewilding is an exploration into the language of the Chinese internet.

In each issue, I pick a word from the labyrinthine swamp of online life in China, lay it on the table, scrutinize it and take it apart in the form of a mini-essay, then replant the pieces, sowing seeds for further conversation.

This week: the waves.

In May 2020, to celebrate China’s Youth Day, Bilibili released a video called “Rear Waves, Speech for a New Generation.” Opening with a dramatic montage—an astronaut landing and a glorious sunrise over a snow-flecked mountaintop—the video unfolds into a three-minute reel of Chinese twenty-somethings doing exciting things. It is a visual orgy of Positive Energy. They are hot, young and confident. They dance in hanfu, play Chinese instruments, try out VR glasses, practice calligraphy, skydive, scuba-dive, lift weights, and pose in front of the Eiffel Tower. “I look at you filled with envy,” says celebrity actor He Bing, who narrates the video in a paternalistic, sonorous tenor, filled with what netizens called diewei or “daddy vibes.” “A nation’s most beautiful scenery is its youth. Kind, brave, selfless, fearless…Surge ahead, rear waves!”

The video went viral—amassing more than 6 million views, airing on CCTV—thrust into the national limelight, alongside the phrase “rear waves.” To those who loved it, both the video and the term “rear waves" (后浪), which comes from the proverb “as the rear waves of the Yangtze River drive on the waves in front, so the new replaces the old,” captured the sense of pride and confidence that many Chinese youth feel, or at least some imagine that many feel, living in today’s China. Reaping the riches sowed by their predecessors, they are wealthier, more powerful and more patriotic than ever before. 

But many more responded to the video with cynicism, riffing on the image of the wave. “Young people have to change their lyrics to sing on a program. Young people want to create and discuss but are silenced. Flow swiftly? More like drift along in a canal that you’ve carved,” one netizen commented. “How about cutting housing prices and raising salaries for the rear waves? The rear waves are drying out,” another comment read. “Only those with financial means can have dreams,” a user posted on Weibo. “We are more of a “chive wave” jiulang, than a rear wave.”  

Chive wave, jiulang, is a compound of rear wave and another viral phrase—cut chives, or gejiucai 割韭菜. Once a stock market metaphor, to describe how inexperienced investors reinvest in the stock market after loss, then a corruption metaphor, to capture how corrupt officials spring back in spite of regulation, “cut chives” is now mostly deployed in reference to young people, who stubbornly grow upwards, only to be cut down, again and again, from burnout, competition and disillusionment with the system. Unlike the rolling waves of the Yangtze, a symbol of continuous progress, cut chives embody the opposite, a symbol of despair and futile growth.   

The disparity is jarring. Where is the divide? Down the lines of socio-economic class, geographic location, or political positioning? Who sincerely perceives the next generation as powerful rear waves, surging forward to assert itself? Who, in contrast, believes that growth is cyclical and futile, like frail weeds sprouting on barren land? Where does the true source of energy lie—in the aggressive power of the nation state, or in the hard-headed resilience of the people themselves? To what extent are they at odds, and to what extent do they fuel each other, entangled in mutual embrace?

Yan: “Rear Waves” was Bilibili’s clumsy attempt to define their user base as a “young generation full of positive energy.” The company successfully got several official media houses on board to circulate the video, including a 2-minute version aired at the primetime slot just before the 7pm news (新闻联播) on CCTV-1. It backfired partly because it completely turned a blind eye to the bleak reality young people actually live in. But such a video with high production quality and self-righteousness was destined to face pushback, because it just wouldn’t vibe with the user base on Bilibili, the platform that popularized playful 鬼畜 and danmu bantering. Ultimately, it’s more of a feel-good video for Bilibili Corporate to present itself as a platform that’s cultivating a new generation that is creative, driven and full of ambition.

Kuaishou does this too—despite constantly being made fun of as a 土 (“low”) platform, it tries very hard to brand itself as a short video app that “gives voice” to people who live in rural areas and offers economic opportunities previously inaccessible to farmers and migrant workers. So I wonder, what was the target audience Bilibili had in mind when they produced it? Regulators? Investors? Parents??

GenZ didn’t need to be told by a boomer who they really are.

Krish: Rear Waves is a good example of how so much of what we find interesting on the Chinese web happens at the level of the 'reply.' A meme culture sustained, somehow, by both paranoid and reparative readings. Which I guess is why concepts like positive energy (正能量) encompass not just what is created, but also responses to them.   

Simon: It does definitely feel like today’s “rear waves” are having some trouble pushing to the front. Despite younger generations growing up with more opportunities than their predecessors, chances to jump a social class or reinvent yourself completely by hook or crook seem to be  scarce. There’s more of a script to follow to be a white-collar, middle class professional (which in a way is good), but it seems nearly impossible to somersault out of that cycle, which might have been doable in the heady days of the 80s or 90s. 

To use contemporary art as a slightly abstracted example, most major Chinese artists are pushing 50. While there are a handful of artists in their early 40s that have just about reached the same status, below that there’s a gap—an artist in their mid-30s might still be considered “up and coming” even though their predecessors were participating in major international shows at the same age. The “secret sauce” that made established stars—participation in quasi-dissident activities in the 90s and a more open attitude towards China in the West leading to cosigns from foreign tastemakers with a knock-effect at home; enough time having passed for these dalliances to not be a liability now; and strong relationships with major art academies in China—seems hard to replicate in this day and age.

While people today are growing up in a time of unprecedented prosperity, the ladder that leads to the heights of that prosperity seems to have been kicked out of the way.

Perhaps this explains in part the obsession with 风口 (fengkou) which Yi-Ling explored in an earlier Rewilding: it takes a freak accident of the zeitgeist to bust out of the status quo.

Chaoyang Trap

Rewilding #2: Wind Vents & Flying Pigs

In the house this week: Yi-Ling, Even, Yan, ████, Krish, Yuyang, and Simon. Yi-Ling: Rewilding is an exploration into the language of the Chinese internet. In each issue, I pick a word from the labyrinthine swamp of online life in China, lay it on the table, scrutinize it and take it apart in the form of a mini-essay, then re…

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4 years ago · 4 likes · Chaoyang Trap

Krish: Outro music this week is an overlooked album from last summer that I’ve taken to describing as “lo-fi math rock to chill out to.” This is Chengdu band FAYZZ with the appropriately titled “Freedom is Worthless:” 

Tianyu: Happy Spring Festival, and see you in the Year of the Tiger! 

Krish: Bye! 

Yi-Ling is an aspiring gardener trying to re-grow her own glass jar chives.

Simon is (not) “hot, young and confident.”

Krish is a comic book artist in Chaoyang. He prefers No Wave to Rear Waves.  

Yan dreams of chive pockets 韭菜盒子, not chive waves.

Krish: Hello, we’d like to report some murders. 

Welcome to Episode 5. You might be surprised to see us covering Jubensha now. 

China’s murder mystery escape room werewolf LARPs were top of the trend charts in 2021. They’re already the third biggest form of offline entertainment behind films and sport. Pandemic prevention notices mention them specifically whenever there’s an outbreak. The New York Times has written about them.  

But now that they’ve moved from the peak of inflated expectations (i.e. a fengkou) to the plateau of managing Dianping ratings, it’s time to look at the medium’s formal properties. 

For one, intertextuality of kaleidoscopic dimensions is the lifeblood of the Jubensha scene. Scripts and scenarios in the scene are wild with citation, pastiche, imitation and “heavy” “inspiration,” drawing from video games, c-dramas, horror, sci-fi, revolutionary history, internet novels, and fan-fiction. These crash into a decade of obsession with escape rooms and immersive theater (Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More is still sold out every night in Shanghai), making the medium both thematically and mechanically worth examining.

In 2022’s first Chaoyang Trap, Henry threads the pins on the cork board to solve the Jubensha mystery. How did a curious mix of subgenres morph into a privileged Chinese medium “on par with bar-hopping or moviegoing?”

On Jubensha

By Henry Zhang

Henry: “No hookups; yes Jubensha”: this strange sentence abounds on China’s Tinder profiles—and unlike dubious declarations of penta-lingualism or offensive sub-saharan selfies, the enthusiasm that the country’s millennials and zoomers express for the medium seems genuine.

What is Jubensha? It’s the Sinicization of an early-20th-century American game, the Murder Mystery Party, which consists of an impromptu and imperfect homicide trial for which players act as both jury and accused. Impromptu, since the actual institutional powers that be are often too distant or incompetent to reach the crime scene, giving deliberations an element of vigilante justice—and imperfect because each player harbors their own motives for wanting the victim dead. If there were a Jubensha made about Chaoyang Trap, for example, and I were the deceased, I might’ve tried to sell the platform to a venture capitalist or plagiarized from another member’s piece—enough to get you all fantasizing about my convenient exit from the scene.

This might sound like interesting but hopelessly dorky marginalia (which I’d still love!)—just think about the pejorative English word LARP—but in China, Jubensha has quickly become the “third most popular form of offline entertainment, behind movies and sports.”

In our 2nd episode, Ting noted the phenomenon by which a Western medium shrinks into a Chinese genre, as the monopoly of HBO or Netflix falters, in its transnational journey, to become one more Euro-American import, on par with jazz dance or pilates. With Jubensha, we are witnessing the reverse: an expansion of a largely-forgotten American subgenre into a privileged Chinese medium for social interaction, on par with barhopping or moviegoing. 

Jubensha entered the popular consciousness through a 2016 show, Who’s the Murderer (明星大侦探), was was intended capture part of the market share for previous crazes like Escape Room and Werewolf Game（狼人杀). It had to wait until the post-Covid world to find true popularity, going from about 7000 brick-and-mortar venues across the country last year to over 30,000 this summer. The variety of settings in which Jubensha happens, and the differences in players’ social backgrounds, attest to its penetration into Chinese life: there’s a live-action version, popular with a growing class of young professionals willing to pay premiums for set design and drinks; a couch-friendly board game version, which budget-conscious creatives can buy used, then resell on Xianyu; and finally, mobile apps, like I’m A Mystery (我是谜), which cater to the compulsorily transient and or the internationally mobile—out-of-province youths in first-tier cities or affluent students studying abroad.

Yi-Ling: One thing I was struck by was cost and how much it seemed like yuppies were willing to shell out for a Jubensha session, way outside of their typical spending capacity. (And a good portion on drinks–one Jubensha I participated in was insanely boozed-up.) I'm wondering what people feel like they are paying for–the novelty of the experience? The creativity of the script?

Henry: My first round of Jubensha took place in one of Beijing’s air-raid shelters, of which there are thousands, built in case of nuclear war (not just with the US, but the USSR). In stark contrast to the dingy staircase and dark corridor we passed through, the actual store—announced by a metal sign of Sherlock Holmes in profile—was newly-furnished and brightly-lit. On the ground, yellow tape delineated the crime scene: a set of rooms in medieval European style, in which we got on our knees to fish for murder implements beneath beds, or stepped on chairs to reach for suspicious letters above tall drawers. Afterwards, we retreated to a conference area, to reconstruct the crime, pin clues to people, and think up alibis—even if you aren’t the murderer, remember, you probably wanted the dead person dead.

The title of our scenario was “The Valentine Estate,” whose duke is the victim in question. (I haven’t been able to find the description online, because brick-and-mortar joints often buy up the exclusive rights to certain scripts, or write proprietary ones). I played the duke’s son, the heir presumptive; after getting into my frilly, epauletted costume, I read the script and discovered that, though I hadn’t killed my father, I had found his body, and, in a fit of despair and selfishness, stolen his seal ring to authorize a large transfer of money to my creditors. The young scion was a gambling addict, and if the others discovered his secret, I would lose my chance of victory.

Ultimately, the script’s lack of historical texture—Valentine feels vaguely Roman, but where, and when, were we, exactly?—detracted from the experience, but it was enough to get me hooked. I pleaded with my friends to play more Jubensha. Wanting to save money, we sprung for several of the board-game scenarios. You might be tempted to compare my journey from live-action to couch-co-op Jubensha with an addict’s transition from bordeaux to franzia, but in fact, couch co-op must compensate for its immateriality—a lack of set and stage—with great worldbuilding. 

Henry: My favorite was Pagoda of Madness (疯人塔), a historical melodrama involving a sinister secret society, formed in the Zhou Dynasty, that is bent on infiltrating royal families across the ages, and the counter-society formed to hunt it down. Agents from both have appeared at the pagoda—a kind of ancient sanitarium—whose monk-physician has been killed, mysteriously, in a room that was locked from inside. Disfigured beauties, blind scholar-students, knights errant gather in the tower to dispense rough justice. I loved the lore: real, traditional Chinese potions, like mafeisan, act as poisons; victims are pronounced dead by checking their nostrils for breath; and a script written in quasi-classical Chinese. 

The expansive, nearly operatic scale and tone deepened our desires to intrigue and plot. I watched, transfixed, as my friends, a couple both IRL and in-game, began to bicker over whether one was really the woman she claimed to be: after all, her face was unrecognizable after an accident involving acid—could he really trust her? Nostrils flared, she berated him for his conjugal skepticism—only to laugh, after he refrained from accusing her during the finale, at how stupid he’d been: she’d been an imposter after all. 

Quality, of course, comes at a price. Jubensha’s rapid expansion is causing growing pains: involution, as increased competition and readerly demand have sunk many operations; censorship, as the government denounces the game’s “bloody and gruesome” content; and finally, the risk of a vigorous, but short lifespan—that this is the hottest thing around doesn’t mean it’s not liable to cool down faster than you can say, China speed (cf. Simon Frank, episode six, on accelerationism’s discontents). Gone are Jubensha’s early, DIY days when shops were opened and scripts written by loving amateurs, for whom turning profits was an afterthought. The industry now draws underemployed movie and TV writers (who oftentimes have far more autonomy writing murder scripts than they would in their real jobs); and studios are Taylorizing game production: one writer develops the structure, another fills in the details, and yet another polishes the style.

Zoe: I should have seen this coming, but there are already patriotism-themed Jubensha. It’s interesting how Jubensha’s “live” and “improvised” nature resists the usual modes of censorship that the authorities might employ on film and broadcast media. If anything, what’s been most successful in tempering enthusiasm for Jubensha is pointing out that it’s pandemic-unfriendly. Big Brother might find it harder to stay on track with what’s happening in this medium.   

Jaime: As someone who thinks going to her office job everyday is Jubensha enough already and thus remains an indifferent but open convert, Jubensha’s popularity seems theoretically most obvious as an event that embraces “the live” without fetishizing it and resists censorship through spontaneity like Zoe said (although I’m not sure if people consciously write or go into these games thinking, hehe they can’t stop me from what I’m about to say or do). Immersive theater like Sleep No More has been around for Chinese yuppies for a while and Jubensha also seems like a logical democratization of that—which makes me wonder if there are evil tech ways to monetize this aka what kind of data can be harvested and exploited from these activities? Or is Jubensha radical because it completely resists that?

Henry: How long will Jubensha’s career be? It all depends on how well it exceeds its generic conventions—a dead person and a hung jury—and on how many smart writers are drawn to it as a real art form. Maybe this is asking too much. As for Jubensha’s diaspora, I’ve participated first-hand—the friends who got me into Jubensha routinely schedule late-night video calls with peers in pajamas, in California, New York, Melbourne. After leaving Chaoyang, and the country, I downloaded a Jubensha mobile app, I Am A Mystery (我是迷). Technological ineptitude led me to accidentally click into a Kuaishou-style chatroom, where users belted the lyrics, Karaoke style, to corny Mainland rock songs, in between complaining about their lousy service jobs. Lying on a friend’s couch, in New York City, I wondered what it was they got from this app, from Jubensha in general. 

Might it have to do with the medium’s allowance for bad endings? Frederic Jameson, contra Adorno, has defended Hollywood films for giving play to—though ultimately neutralizing—the public’s utopian impulses. The kernel of truth is there, couched in false directives. But so many big budget Chinese crime films—from Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake to Zeng Guoxiang’s Better Days—fail even this kind of ideological management. Call this a piggy ex machina: it’s hardly a thriller when the cops always win. 

In both the Valentine estate and the pagoda of madness, the real murderer got away—and it was our fault. But there was something exciting in shouting that we’d known it all along, in portioning out the blame and responsibility for this miscarriage of justice. Much more satisfying to study from your failures than to claim a bogus victory.

Tianyu: After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, I've seen quite a few local WeChat articles recommending Jubensha game rooms, few of which had a proper Google Maps or Yelp listing beyond an address and a GPS pin. Intuitively, this was reasonable—if the targeted customers are all Chinese, why bother explaining it in another language? I’ve also seen friends visiting escape rooms in major U.S. cities that cater to Chinese audiences (they are also everywhere on Xiaohongshu); it’s fascinating to see how Chinese games that recently became popular now find themselves in diaspora communities.

While the history of Chinese jubensha ultimately traces back to murder mystery games in the U.S. (see the Savannah murder mystery in The Office), and that there are murder mystery party rooms in America, I don’t think many of my friends that are into jubensha in China notice the connection! Maybe there aren’t a lot of similarities between the two versions. I have yet to play either, but please email me (tianyu AT chaoya.ng) if you’re in the Bay Area and want to try it out. 

Simon: My main thought after discussing Jubensha in-depth for the first time with some friends was really that it filled a gap provided by the shortcomings of other media in China. If a horror film that actually gave you some psychological shocks could make its way to big screens, or if a more piquant video game could spread outside of Steam, would there really be such a need for this new format? Also, I think the activity says something about how the way people socialize and participate in leisure activities in China may be more “organized” than elsewhere. With a full awareness that what I think is “normal” is shaped by my class/cultural background, and perhaps personality, I feel like one is more likely to just casually hang out with North American friends, whereas in China, except perhaps with your closest friends, there needs to a plan: at least a dinner, or a KTV session, a tour, a class... To me, Henry stumbling upon users complaining about their jobs within I’m A Mystery encapsulates how people use these activities as a “frame” in which to create moments of vulnerability and bonding. Of course, people’s hobbies function like this anywhere in the world, but it is interesting that Jubensha harks back to party games from a time of relative scarcity in America, when you had to make your own entertainment, and someone had to sing or play an instrument if you wanted to hear music. After all, today we just need to touch a screen to be amused.

Curious if anyone knows of any anthropological or sociological work that touches upon these different ways of “hanging out.” Or am I just bad at making friends and plans? 😊

Krish: With the caveats that this research is a) from the early 2010s and b) primarily about an earlier stage of Chinese social media, I think Tricia Wang’s conception of the “elastic self” hints at some answers: 

“Under semi-anonymous, [informal] conditions, Chinese youth are able to overcome the low levels of trust that characterize authoritarian societies and adopt broader forms of social trust that characterize more participatory societies…[they] are primarily seeking to discover their own social world and to create emotional connections—not grand political change.”

Again, recognizing that sometimes a LARP murder mystery is just a LARP murder mystery, maybe Jubensha (and its attendant apps) provide a frame for these exploratory “semi-anonymous” spaces today, allowing what Tricia calls the “trying on of heterodox identities” without shame or anxiety. 

Yan: Maybe this also explains what I always think of as the unthinkable: people playing Jubensha with strangers. I’ve seen on Dianping where Jubensha studios sell individual tickets, and I always wonder if someone would just drop in and spontaneously start playing with whoever happens to be available. Maybe not knowing the people you play with makes it easier for you to immerse yourself in your role and in the story. It’s another layer of anonymity on top of the “semi-anonymous” space provided by Jubensha’s worldbuilding. 

Krish: Yes! Tricia’s work, too, talks specifically about socializing with strangers as the hallmark of the elastic self.  

Aaron: To me, it seems like Jubensha are filling a Dungeons & Dragons-sized hole in Chinese social life. Working in video games in China, it was interesting for me how few of my Chinese coworkers played D&D, even as they were often on top of the latest American or European video games and TV shows. But Jubensha provide a platform for a lot of the same aspects that have helped D&D keep rising in popularity in the US, allowing people to try on new identities and play collaboratively without needing any mediating devices.

Krish: Outro music this week is newish Beijing duo Naja Naja. They make warm, Moon Duo-adjacent minimal post punk, and just toured with newsletter faves Howie Lee and Hualun.

Here’s ‘Dong Dong’ from their debut EP, released on Bie Music on 24 December 2021. This has been 代购ed from the Chinese web with permission. An international release is scheduled for April 2022 via Wharf Cat Records.

Tianyu: That’s it for this episode! Next up: Rewilding.

Krish: Bye!

Henry Zhang doesn’t fall in love; he just plays Jubensha.

Light is a multimedia illustrator and designer based in Los Angeles.

Tianyu Fang is an intern.

Zoe has moved to Guizhou.

Yi-Ling Liu is a writer in Beijing.

Jaime Chu plays office Jubensha for rent in Chaoyang. 

Krish Raghav is a comic artist in Beijing who would kill for some good dosa. 

Yan Cong was born in Xicheng, grew up in Haidian, and is now based in Amsterdam, via New York and Chaoyang. She writes for another Substack Far & Near on visual storytelling in China. You should subscribe!

Simon Frank lives in Beijing and wonders if “the music scene” is live-action roleplay.

Aaron Fox-Lerner is a writer in New York.

Tianyu: Happy new year! By popular demand, we’ve recorded a podcast.

Krish: We recorded a lo-fi zoom call with 12 people across four time zones.

Tianyu: Yes. Things, understandably, were a bit chaotic.

Krish: So we’ve structured this like a “radio hour”—some lukewarm takes interspersed with hot new music from our favourite bands in the Beijing scene. It’s not professional or even fully coherent, but we had a lot of fun. We hope you find it interesting!

Tianyu: We’re probably never going to do this again lol. So we’re releasing this just for our paid subscribers as a premium perk, and as a small way to say thanks for all the support!

SHOW NOTES:

• Yan’s piece on idol fandom and Big Yoghurt in China.

• The 一猫人 (Yimaoren) sticker that went viral:

  

• Alibaba’s Ant Forest minigame. It’s won awards.

• Most tree-planting campaigns fail.

• Trees aren’t real.

• SHRUBS (no link needed).

• The Sanhe Youth. Their motto: “work for a day, party for three.”

• The podcast that Jaime recommends is an episode of 噪音开始了.

• Zaliva D on Bandcamp.

• Gong Gong Gong’s remix album.

• The Invisible Shore (无尽的航程).

• One of the anti-work Douban groups Zoe mentions.

• Wagas on sale.

PLAYLIST:

• Naja Naja - New Toy (forthcoming from Wharf Cat Records, Mar 2022)

• 八仙饭 Eight Immortals Restaurant - 吞吐 (Puff)

• Sourtower - dim staircase

• 退格 Backspace - 蜥蜴精灵 (Lizard Elves)

• Simon Frank - Don’t Understand

• The Claptraps - On My Surround

• 工工工 Gong Gong Gong - Inner Reaches III (Zaliva D Remix)

• Sleeping Dogs - Kweichow

Subscribe to Chaoyang Trap at chaoyang.substack.com, or follow us on Twitter @ChaoyangTrap

Krish: Happy holidays! From Christmas and the Gregorian New Year to my birthday and the Lunar New Year, we’re now officially in the gift zone stretch of the calendar. 

With our group chat now scattered across six time zones (miss you all), this Gift Guide is what the Chaoyang Trap Christmas Party would have featured if we were all together. =( 

So in no particular order, here are our favourite China-related gifts for the season. We hope you discover something interesting!     

████, Carson: Artisanal Pu’er Tea

Ships globally 

I’ve gotten alarmingly into tea over the last few years, after going with Carson to the Maliandao tea market in Beijing and getting incredibly tea drunk with high-end pu’er wholesalers. (Seriously: I never believed this before but “tea drunk” is absolutely a real thing and can hit like an indica.)

After experiencing that, I haven’t really wanted to drink much of anything else—and fortunately, good Chinese teas are also now increasingly accessible outside of the country, thanks to a handful of small-scale vendors that curate some of the best varieties and ship them abroad.

It’s easy to get into incredibly nerdy (and expensive) territory quickly though. If you’re gifting somebody that doesn’t want to get into a whole “thing” drinking endless tiny cups of tea brewed out of a gaiwan and is more likely to sip from a big mug at work, then white2tea offers some great choices. Most of the cheaper pu’er won’t get you very tea drunk, but still tastes great. They have a USD $20 cake of ripe (think: dark, rich, soft and sweet) pu’er which can be broken off into single-serving chunks without a tea knife. Or if they like something stronger, get them a cake of bitter, smoky, astringent raw pu’er. White tea, which is processed slightly differently and brews better at lower temps, offers a softer, lighter, brighter fragrance, and taste. Try a sampler from a few different regions. It’s especially good cold-brewed in a jug overnight in the summer. 

(Note: If you’re in China, their WeChat mini program is called “white2tea.”)

Simon: I sampled some white2tea ripe pu’er after seeing a draft of this gift guide, and I can confirm that it is really, really good—so good I barely slept last night.

Yan: Feminist Gifting on Taobao

China only

According to my Taobao history, I bought nine tote bags with the slogan “女权主义者长这样” (“This is what a feminist looks like”) from Xiao Meili’s Taobao shop over the span of two years. I’ve lost track of whom I gave these tote bags to, but it speaks to how good they—or literally anything from Xiao Meili’s shop—are as gifts: nicely designed, inexpensive, and you support a feminist cause.

Xiao has been a prominent figure in the feminist scene in China since 2010s. She was involved in so many campaigns that we could dedicate an entire issue just on her feminist activism and art practice. I always saw the Taobao shop as an outlet for her artistic expression, as most of the products are designed, or carefully sourced, by her. It is also how she makes a living.

In May this year, an online mob attacked Xiao for posting a video of a man who poured hot pot dipping oil on her after she confronted him about smoking inside a restaurant. This weird series of events led to a right wing mob reporting her products to the platform as being “discriminatory,” leading to most of her social media accounts being deleted. (Listen to her talking about the incident here.) People who supported Xiao, including myself, bought products from her shop to show solidarity. 

My favorites from her shop are these cute, colorful knitted items made by another feminist Zheng Churan’s mother:

The “女权主义者长这样” tote bags are no longer available in the shop, but you can buy your passionate feminist friend a t-shirt with the same message on the front. I also found a “sister shop” selling basically the same products. I can’t help but wonder if this is a back-up plan in case one day the main shop is shut down…but for now, enjoy the guilt-free, feminist-approved consumerism!

Yi-Ling: Spin Ceramics

China only

As someone who spends most of my time as a dislocated head, body and fingers typing on a keyboard, producing words on a screen, nothing gets me going than something that I can palm in my hands, and reminds me of its weight and heft. 

Spin Ceramics, based in Beijing and Shanghai, works directly with artists based in Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital (I am antsily preparing my trip there in some near or distant future) to make vases, cups, teapots, trays, and they are gorgeous. I’ve gifted family, friends, and recently, myself, two ebony-colored espresso cups, which I love to sip from, either solo after a break from writing, or with my partner by the window on a quiet Sunday morning.

Krish: Chinese comics, Anti-work Zines

China only but Paradise Systems ships some of these globally

The Beijing comic book store Wooden Bird (木鸟) is nothing less than a miracle, and I would strongly recommend any Beijinger reading this to visit, support, and buy from them. You’ll find everything from the new Michael Deforge (very good) and Breakdown Press’ manga reissues (amazing) to zines from the Beijing scene (check out 润德’s bizarro minis). They are truly among the best comic book stores anywhere in the world, and they buy direct from small presses! 

Wooden Bird has introduced me to many, many incredible Chinese indie comic books, and my gifting recommendation for this season is gantea’s 南公园 (The South Park), a quiet story about aging, urban transformation, and dislocation. It’s bilingual and comes in a gorgeous riso-printed package.

Anti-work is the mood of the season in China just like everywhere else. The zine maker 无碘盐 (Non-Iodized Salt) makes hilarious guides to slacking off on the job; the comic artist Nini (拔丝拟泥) explains why booze is so important; and Wechat sticker artist SUAN (酸球) offers an entire kit in a briefcase to prevent you from working too hard. 

Finally, if, like me, you need 22g of coffee a day to function normally, the Weidian store Sockbird (小袜鸟) offers monthly subscription boxes with beans carefully sourced from roasters around the world. They’re really nice!

Simon: Old Heaven Books (and Natural Wine) 

Mostly online

Most of my recommendations are connected to what might be my favorite store in China: Old Heaven Books in Shenzhen.

A bookstore/café with a very strong music section, Old Heaven Books offers an antidote to the dematerialization of retail in China. You could hypothetically walk in, pick up a CD edition of a 90s Chinese rock classic, a cassette by a new indie band, and a record, either a single by a club producer or a reissue of an album by a Japanese free jazz artist. None of these items are super difficult to obtain in China if you have money and a Taobao account, but to find them in the same physical shop, where a kind of dialogue or continuum between them is suggested, is sadly too rare. If you’re in Shenzhen or happen to be able to visit Southern China in the coming months, I highly recommend a visit. 

The same people behind the bookstore organize Shenzhen’s Tomorrow Festival for experimental music and run an in-house label, which is on Bandcamp. They’re notable supporters of ethnic Kazakh musician Mamer and his band IZ—so if any of your loved ones are into dark Central Asian psychedelic industrial folk…you know where to look. A recent release features Mamer’s remix of “My Skate Shoes” by Shaanxi outsider pop musician Joseeh Punmanlon. Working in a tighter rhythmic grid than his usual more organic style, Mamer creates something that sounds like an experimental synth pop jam that Mute Records would have released in the 80s. Available as a mini-cd (and possibly 7" vinyl single soon) on Old Heaven Books’ Taobao store. 

I sometimes often worry that translating and editing art texts has melted my brain, so on my most recent visit to Old Heaven Books over the summer, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how much I was enjoying flipping through a copy of Paan, a journal of “Asian history, culture and political issues.” As a well-designed art world-adjacent publication, Paan seemed to avoid the pitfalls of many of its peers by more directly exploring historical issues, rather than offering somewhat arbitrary artistic investigations of the same topics. Available through Shanghai art bookstore Bananafish’s Weidian. 

As an unrelated aside, natural wine has kind of blown up in China over the past two years, having barely existed here pre-pandemic. It’s an interesting sociological phenomenon in its own right, which I’m sure everyone here could discuss at length. 

Ignoring the broader social implications for a second, I’ve been enjoying sampling some locally grown Ningxia “glou glou” through WineWave (自然浪潮), a WeChat mini program recently launched by some familiar faces from the club scene. 

Caiwei: Customized Qipaos

Beijing only

I first came across Suyifang (素衣坊) in Beijing’s Lama Temple area, when I was on a vintage hunt in Dongcheng. My predilection for ultra-feminine form-fitting clothing drove me to 80s vintage dresses, and one day I realized qipaos share the exact same aesthetic. 

Unlike stores that oversell the traditional aspects of qipao, or those that build their brand on its exclusivity, Suyifang has an unassuming storefront and the most classic of mom-and-pop tailor store models. This type of tailor used to be common in China (my grandparents used to own one), but grew nearly extinct as I grew up.

There is an undiluted joy to be found in my childhood tailor store visits—I got to pick my favorite print fabric, and see them being transformed into garments as a sewing machine hums.

At Suyifang, you can request any imaginable adjustments to a qipao to suit the occasion you have in mind.

From the length of the skirt, length of the sleeve to how high the slit goes, the design is all up to you. You can also hand-pick a fabric of your choice and a lining to go with it, or a ready-to-wear qipao and get it alternated to your BWH. The most amazing part? All of these only cost approximately 500-800 RMB. 

I know this might not be a conventional gift choice, but it would definitely be a worthy experience for a special loved one or just to reward yourself! Also, what can be more perfect to wear during the upcoming Chinese New Year than a qipao?

Zoe: Guizhou Red Sour Broth

China only, but ask around!

I have recently developed an obsession with Guizhou food, specifically for 红酸汤 or “red sour broth.” Sour and spicy are the two signature flavors of the soup but the quintessence of this broth is its light touch of aromas from 木姜子油 (litsea oil). The fermented soup base has chopped red peppers, tomatoes, garlic, ginger, litsea oil, and a splash of Kweichow Moutai (no wonder it tastes so good!). Its taste reminds me of fresh tomatoes, pickled vegetables, the scent of lemongrass, and a slight pungency like mature cheese. If you have never tried it, think about the flavor of Tom Yum with a twist of fermentation or vodka sauce?

Guizhou sour broth is supposed to be the soup base for cooking hot pot fish, but it can be added to any kind of soup or stir fry (based on my personal cooking experience). With several spoons added in, dishes miraculously turn into delicacies. It’s irresistible. 

It’s pretty easy to purchase on Taobao—any local Guizhou brand will do. A friend from Guizhou told me that homemade sour broth is usually kept in Coca-Cola bottles, so I superstitiously believe in the authenticity of bottled ones. As an exotic seasoning, the red sour broth is extremely affordable at about USD $4 per bottle on average.

Caiwei: This is so good (I can attest), and for those in NYC you can order the red soup base through Freshgogo! 

Zoe: Apart from the gift ideas, I just want to add that…in my opinion, Guizhou food is the most underrated Chinese cuisine. Let me rephrase this bold conclusion—I believe everything in Guizhou is underrated and it is indeed THE “hidden treasure” province of China. Please visit! You will be amazed and, of course, relatively less likely to be overwhelmed by influencers and tourist groups posing for photo shoots. 

Aaron & Sasha (Open Sesame): Taobao Gift Guide

China only

Just in time for the holiday season, we here at Open Sesame took a special visit to Santa’s true workshop—Taobao, natch—to dig up some of our favorite gifts available on the world’s best and wildest shopping app.

1. These LED signs are amazing. If you happen to be in China you should absolutely snap them up because they’re way more expensive abroad. You can connect to them with your phone to set any text, color, animation or pattern you want and give your home that bank/copy shop/cheap market look.
   

2. If you’re a believer in TCM, these socks are a useful shortcut to regulating all kinds of bodily functions. f you’re not a believer, then you’ve just got a pair of socks that look fly as hell. The perfect gift for everybody!
   

3. We got this cabbage blanket as a gift years ago and have used it faithfully ever since. Who knew a vegetable could be so warm?
   

4. Need a speaker? Need a cool light? Good news, this one’s both! We brought it to every single party we threw since we got it and discovered that it can make literally any lame room seem cool.
   

5. A faithful recreation of the famous police poster found outside every third-tier city Helen’s, we don’t think any phone case has ever earned us as many compliments as this one did.
   

6. A true classic, misspelled Minutes to Midnight Linkin Park shirts are now weirdly hard to find on Taobao. Lucky for you, we did the hunting necessary to find this gem. Get one now and party like it’s 2016!

Christina: Dank Snacks

(Mostly) Global

My one and only true coping mechanism for riding the waves of the pandemic is anxious snacking, and these are the ones that feel worthy to be gifted to my dearest friends:

• Fly by Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp - I was once a Lao Gan Ma devotee, but this is superior in every dimension except price. You can even save the jar and turn it into a sichuan peppercorn candle. Ships internationally from the US.

• Yun Hai Dried Irwin Mango - Truly the most delicious dried mango I’ve ever had, and seasoned with a generous pinch of geopolitical nonsense to boot. Ships internationally from the US.

• Té Company Pineapple Linzer Cookies - I have never gifted these to someone and not seen lifelong loyalty in their eyes after the first bite.

…and Finally: The Chaoyang Trap Self Promotion Section

• Sasha & Aaron’s Open Sesame Magazine, about the weird and wonderful world of Taobao, is available to buy on Weidian.

• Yan (along with Beimeng Fu and Ye Charlotte Ming) writes Far & Near, a substack on visual storytelling in China. She also has some work in the new Tofu Collective photobook Rooms Within China.

• Chairperson Jaime interviewed artist Ho Tzu Nyen for the new issue of Spike Art Magazine. 

• Simon Frank’s latest album, on the label Absurd Trax, is available now on Bandcamp.

• Krish’s comic on the history of reggae in China is now showing at the Times Art Museum in Guangzhou, and is available to buy as a (bilingual) zine. 

Tianyu: That’s it for this episode, and for 2021! Thank you all for enduring through our…*checks notes*  85,370 words. 😳

We couldn’t have asked for better readers, and your support means the world to our little, scattered group. We have one last surprise that might come from our 年会 this weekend (yes), but more on that next time.  

We hope our gift of discourse was useful. Happy holidays, and see you in 2022! 

Jaime: Hello friends. Our two stories this week are about creative agency (or the lack thereof), translation, and why people get mad about Ideas without looking at the structures in which they’re produced.  

Last month, at the Art'n’Dior exhibition unveiled during Shanghai Art Week, photographer Chen Man's magazine work from nine years ago dredged up controversy and an onslaught of hate posts on Chinese social media.

Netizens and state media accused her of perpetuating Western stereotypes of the “Asian small eye” look in the “gloomy” portraits of Chinese women of minority ethnic groups, for which both she and the luxury brand apologized a week later. The photo was removed from the exhibition. The anti-intellectualism of this strain of nationalistic cancel culture aside, to what extent are fashion editors and artists responsible for decisions that are the results of more fundamentally problematic ways modern fashion media has been set up in China, especially in relation to the luxury and fashion industry? 

Legacy print publications everywhere in the world are haunted by the failure of the advertising business model to adapt to the compromises between capital and editorial integrity, resulting in the common scenario where if the brand asks for certain editorial content from a title and the editorial team fails to comply, the sales team would apologize to the brand and offer to compensate with even more editorial content. Coupled with the burden of representation and struggle to shape and assert some form of “Chinese” identity through beauty and style on this misappropriated stage, no wonder everyone is mad, someone is always apologizing, and no one is having fun.

Who are fashion magazines even for anymore? What gets lost when media serves brands and advertisers rather than readers? Who will decolonize fashion magazines? (Not a 27-year-old Australian-Chinese fashion blogger.) 

From one media industry worker and insider’s perspective, there are more frustrations and questions than solutions in what might be the first op-ed in Chaoyang Trap. We hope that this open letter of sorts will provide some context to how we think about the conflicting interests of globalized capital, beauty’s potential, representation, and creative agency. What if more money does not translate to more power for the individual?

What if capitalism sucks for everyone?

The Beautiful, Glossy Lies of China’s Fashion Magazines 

By Denni Hu

Denni: China’s fashion magazines are not thriving. 

They’ve ceded their power to brands and celebrities, and their sense of style is increasingly disconnected from reality. 

Fashion and power are, of course, eternal topics in this industry defined by beauty and creative forces. Yet the rise of Chinese consumer power didn't help propel established Chinese fashion media forward—their insignificance only accelerated by the increasing demands of the brands that support them and an over-reliance on the advertisement business model after the internet’s disruption. Chinese fashion magazines have peddled a narrative of a westernized ideal of womanhood—the “fiction” of an independent woman who can become a western ideal through her purchasing power. 

Only until the rise of China as a global power did magazines seek to catch up, stressing a need to express Chinese femininity and modernity. Yet, most portrayals, as in Chen Man’s case, tended to look at the Chinese woman as a symbol instead of a real person—a warrior-like figure, a guardian of Chinese heritage and culture. Coupled with blatant branded content, they created an easy target for online criticism. At the root of such misunderstandings was the clash between the westernization of the Chinese woman and real Chinese women. 

Jaime: #weareallmulan

For fashion magazines, creative freedom is often not free but handicapped by the bottom line. Before the recent crackdown on celebrity culture, fashion publications had seemingly found a way to balance monetization and localization: the “ageless cuteness” of Chinese celebrities like Angelababy, Yang Mi, Xiao Zhan, and Jing Boran drove traffic and created immediate hype, which easily converted to magazine sales. An issue of Harper’s Bazaar e-magazine featuring Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo sold over 1.26 million copies at 6 RMB per copy. You can see why magazines became so keen on chasing after celebrity culture, right up until the party came to an abrupt end.

But this is only one of the many paradoxes in the contemporary fashion media landscape.

Short Colonial History of Chinese Fashion Magazines

The first modern day fashion magazine was《时装》(Fashion), founded in 1980 and coinciding with the era of Reform and Opening Up. Almost a decade later, Elle China became the first syndicated fashion title in China. In 1992, Louis Vuitton opened its first shop at Beijing’s Imperial Palace Hotel, followed by Hermès in 1997 and Chanel in 1999. Brands entering the market further propelled the growth of magazines, since they needed a local voice to spread their savoir-faire gospel. Harper's Bazaar, Elle China, and Vogue China soon became the holy trinity of fashion magazines in China in the aughts, whilst establishing the three Devils that Wear Prada—Angelica Cheung, Xiao Xue, and Su Mang—who almost collectively came from business, rather than editorial, backgrounds.

In theory, magazines could pick their own editor-in-chief, but technically they never had true editorial power since all magazines and their ISSN numbers were owned by the Chinese government. Local fashion glossies existed as syndications, with censors having final say on all editorial content. Homegrown publications such as iLOOK, launched in 1998 by culture personality Huang Hung and dubbed “a magazine for women with brains,” also garnered attention, but major fashion advertisers still favored Western glossies in general. 《明日风尚》(Ming), launched in 2007 by Hong Kong’s Ming Pao Weekly’s EIC Jessica Wong (黄宝玉), provided “a window, a mirror” to the global cosmopolitan class, but folded in 2015.

Magazines became a fashion education for many and saving up for the latest issue of Vogue was my monthly ritual. Before the internet, magazines could afford insane ideas with overflowing budgets. Often shot by globally renowned photographers like Mario Testino, Tim Walker, with international top models on the cover, these glossies provided joyous beauty and surprise: fashion was a key source of entertainment, fashion was “literature”, fashion was digestible art. It made 10-year-old me feel alive, and for a while, I was certain that becoming a magazine editor was my true calling. I still remember marveling at a 2008 Maggie Cheung cover, where she was covered in a badminton ball dress designed by Martin Margiela, to celebrate the Beijing Olympics. Other fashion magazines fought for prime spots on the newsstand, Modern Weekly's Fashion section introduced the avant-garde to the mass, Men's Uno emerged with its ratchet sexual energy, every other cover with Zhang Ziyi or Fan Bingbing would be an event in itself.

Yan: Denni’s personal story with fashion magazines resonates with me so much. When I was a 6th grader, I’d save up pocket money to buy 瑞丽 The Ray, a Japanese syndication, which had three different magazines (服饰美容，伊人风尚，可爱先锋) targeting young women of all age groups, from office white collars to teenagers. It sounds funny to say this now, but at the time it gave me the idea that my sense of self can be constructed by how I look—even though I could not afford any fashion items recommended by the magazines (and I had to wear school uniforms everyday).

The very act of reading them helped construct my identity, in a weird way. 

There were also other Japanese syndicates such as 昕薇 (Vivi) and 米娜 (Mina) that were well-received in 2000s China. These catered more towards a so-called “East Asian aesthetic,” making them popular among Chinese readers. Maybe this was why I was drawn to them in the first place—being able to see someone who looked like me on the cover when I passed by newsstands. The Ray also cultivated a group of models who went on to become full-blown celebrities in China, like Yang Mi and Gao Yuanyuan.

Denni: Fast forward to 2020: The old guard that had crafted the fashion magazine landscape left the scene almost simultaneously. These ambitious women more or less found traditional media limiting and left at a time when ad sales numbers in the reds made exiting seem like a natural decision. (According to Statistica, annual magazine ad revenue is expected to drop almost 18% from 2020 to 2023.) They found their second life scattered across industries, be it investing, e-commerce (微商), or sustainability marketing. They also left behind a legacy and a mess.

Short Neo-colonial History of Chinese Fashion Magazines

Quickly, new syndicated titles burst onto the scene. If the established fashion publications showed us what it's like to be rich and famous, the new media company Xuxu Huasheng (栩栩华生) saw a business opportunity to fill “niche” needs of both brands and audiences, built on the nuances of local cultures instead of in-your-face glitz and glamour. Backed by CMC Capital Group, the new Devil Wears Prada is Chuxuan Feng. He knew the market wanted something new, but Western brands were hard pressed to accept anything too new, so by buying up Chinese licensing rights to maturing niche publications like T Magazine, The New York Times Travel Magazine, Wallpaper, Nylon, and WSJ Magazine, he quickly gained acceptance (and ad money) from Western brands. 

The Xuxu Huasheng business model was not that different from traditional fashion publications, but being new is certainly a virtue. T Magazine created a Chinese identity for the middle-class intellectual, whose thirst for sophistication and taste may be quenched by minimalist, moody editorials of celebrities like Li Jiaqi talking about their philosophy on life; niche young creatives, artists, and DJs belonging to the sorority of ya-subculture (the phenomenon of the lifestyle and consumption of subculture as subculture) also made their way into the magazine, signifying free spirit and alternative sass; models like Liu Wen and Ju Xiaowen often came aglazed by neo-Oriental filters, wearing Balenciaga or niche avant-garde fashion, performing Shang Chi-like feminist ideals as an otherworldly heroine. 

While it might sound like a good thing that makes room for creativity (and jobs) when smart brands actually want their paid content to look editorial, the illusion of freedom just complicates the power struggle between capital and creativity. The progressiveness of Chinese fashion magazines might have appeared like a gesture of zeitgeisty know-how, but even with a more humanistic take on the message, it still fundamentally operates from a capitalistic point of view. They still cater to the same advertisers, producing what the brands deem high-brow and artsy. It doesn’t help that the same strategy also caters to monied local brands looking for an identity revamp, propelling a certain brand of westernization. Chineseness became a “style” and a moodboard.