{"id":5246,"date":"2024-11-14T22:47:02","date_gmt":"2024-11-14T14:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acas.world\/?p=5246"},"modified":"2024-11-23T11:32:17","modified_gmt":"2024-11-23T03:32:17","slug":"animes-knowledge-cultures-from-astro-boy-to-chinas-zhai-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acas.world\/kr\/2024\/11\/14\/animes-knowledge-cultures-from-astro-boy-to-chinas-zhai-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"Anime\u2019s Knowledge Cultures: From Astro Boy<\/em> to China\u2019s Zhai<\/em> Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jinying Li<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the first two decades of the 21st<\/sup> century, we witnessed a widespread cultural movement of geekdom that went global and mainstream simultaneously. While American media were announcing \u201cit\u2019s hip to be square\u201d and \u201cgeek is chic,\u201d their East Asian counterparts were embracing otaku and zhai <\/em>as trendy labels to identify a new generation of pop culture heroes who thrived on the transmedia arenas of the digital era. In 2008, \u201czhai\u201d was chosen as the Chinese \u201cbuzz word of the year\u201d to celebrate the cultural prominence of China\u2019s zhai <\/em>generation which, according to the Chinese news media, not only defined the cultural meanings of the \u201cInternet pop\u201d (\u7f51\u7edc\u6d41\u884c) but also characterized \u201ca state of living and being\u201d (\u751f\u5b58\u72b6\u6001) in the 21st<\/sup> century.[1]<\/a> During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, zhai<\/em> as \u201ca state of living and being\u201d was further embraced in China as a crucial cultural strategy to survive the pandemic quarantines and lockdowns, displacing the fear of an infectious disease with the obsession with spreadable media.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

The worldwide rise of geek and zhai<\/em> culture points to the emergence and significance of a new demographic of transnational knowledge workers in a global economy dominated by information networks. This knowledge class functions as a crucial yet often overlooked nexus in the ongoing transformations of information society that we are still trying to understand. These so-called geeks, otaku,<\/em> and zhai<\/em> are the active agents, as both consumers and producers, connecting techno-economic developments to socio-cultural changes. Therefore, critically examining this social group and its cultural values, I believe, is the key to understanding our current information society at large.<\/p>\n

My work is about the cultural values of geeks, otaku and zhai<\/em>: how they emerged, why they matter, and what they mean. Through the lens of anime and its transnational fandom, I explore the meanings and logics of \u201cgeekdom\u201d as one of the most significant sociocultural groups of our time.  The key questions are why anime appeals to this rapidly expanding social group, and how anime constitutes a mediation environment that effectively translates between knowledge work and what Tiziana Terranova calls \u201cknowledgeable consumption of culture.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a> I study geek and zhai<\/em> as informational knowledge culture in postindustrial society and investigates how anime constitutes a powerful media environment that cultivate and sustain this knolwge culture. Studying anime as the media environment of global geekdom, I want to shift the center of knowledge culture from the computer boys in Silicon Valley to the anime fandom in East Asia, problematizing the supposed American whiteness in the popular imagination of the knowledge class. This shift from the techno-culture of computing to the transmedia system of anime also calls for a theoretical rethinking of how knowledge culture is mediated<\/em>. I argue that the culturalization of informational knowledge work needs a media form, which is animation rather than computation.<\/p>\n

I will begin by first theorizing the meanings and significance of anime geekdom as a postindustrial knowledge culture, which operates as what Benjamin calls \u201ctechnological innervation.\u201d Then, I will demonstrate how this knowledge culture emerged in a transnational context by focusing on the cultural history of China\u2019s zhai <\/em>generation, <\/em>examining the development of zhai<\/em> culture from the popular reception of Astro Boy<\/em> as the first imported TV animation to China in the 1980s to the recent anime fandom that reshaped Chinese Internet culture in the 21st<\/sup> century, which is the first chapter of the book.<\/p>\n

Theorizing Geekdom:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What exactly is geek, otaku, or zhai<\/em>? In an article published in the Science<\/em> magazine in 1998, Kevin Kelly, the founder of the Wired<\/em> magazine, claimed that after the centuries-long rivalry between the two cultures of science and art, there had emerged a third culture: \u201cIt\u2019s a pop culture based in technology, for technology. Call it nerd<\/em> culture\u2026. For this current generation of Nintendo children, their technology is their culture.\u201d[4]<\/a>  The key to Kelly\u2019s augment is the mediation process between technology and culture, the interface where geeks, otaku, and zhai<\/em> are uniquely positioned as the operators, producers, and consumers.<\/p>\n

This mediation process of technology becoming culture and vice versa, operates through what Walter Benjamin called \u201ctechnological innervation,\u201d which describe the mediation process between the external material conditions of technology and the internal neurophysiological reactions of human sensorium.[5]<\/a> For Benjamin, innervation is a transformative but non-destructive process that allows workers to internalize the physical realities of machinic encounter into their psychic and corporal behaviors as a \u201csecond nature\u201d without the damaging effects of alienation, a process that is often mediated through pop culture entities such as cinema and animation.  Geek, otaku or zhai<\/em> culture is essentially about the innervation of the technological conditions of postindustrial knowledge work \u2014the cybernetic information systems \u2014into the cognitive, affective, and corporal capacities through a set of media form and cultural obsessions. It is a process of mediation between the material conditions of knowledge work and the symbolic forms of knowledge culture with a renewed sense of pleasure, desire, and belonging. This innervation process internalizes the technological conditions of cybernetic feedback loops \u2014the machinic logic of the \u201cif-then\u201d iterations of computation\u2014into popular cultural forms and practices that are marked by the desire for endless cycles of trials and errors, the continuous search for information, and the quest for perpetual learning.<\/p>\n

This knowledge culture defines what anime geekdom means: a process of technological innervation that operates as collective cultural obsession with excessively producing, sorting, and consuming information through cybernetic systems. To study this knowledge culture is to study the innervation process, which operates through what I call the cybernetic affect<\/em>: the structure of excess feelings that are driving and driven by the endless cycles of information feedback. It is a structure of feelings caught in the tension between the increasing proliferation of informational entropy and the intensifying desire for cybernetic control. It is the ambivalent feeling that oscillates between the desire for complexity\/uncertainty and the impulse for order\/control, because it is the affective innervation of a cybernetic system that oscillates between information proliferation and systematic management. These feelings are often articulated in popular forms, patterns, and styles, such as the juxtaposition between distributive expansiveness and framing containment in anime\u2019s visual aesthetics and media mix system.<\/p>\n

In anime geekdom, the cybernetic affect arises in the mediation between anime\u2019s transmedia system and fans\u2019 cultural obsession. The affective feelings are necessary feedback signals to improve the otaku performance as knowledge work: searching for more information, consuming more media goods, and producing more derivative contents on platforms such as Bilibili. Driven by the cybernetic affect as the signaling stage of one\u2019s performance, the transmedia practices of anime geeks are operated as cycles of information feedback loops performed as perpetual learning. The cybernetic affect is characterized as the otaku\u2019s polarizing tendencies between the desire for informatic overload and the impulse for control. Positioned at the center of the cybernetic affect machine, the geek feelings are marked by the perpetual struggle, in which the polarizing impulses between entropy and control are continuously demanding but never gratified, leading to a permanent state of agony and agitation. As such, the cybernetic affect is never merely a feedback signal. It is excessive, contradictory, and interfering, marked by the often-uncontrollable level of anxiety, agitation, and anxiousness as the commonly shared feelings among geeks, otaku, and knowledge workers alike.<\/p>\n

To understand this cybernetic affect in knowledge culture, and to understand how it emerged and developed through the transnational, transmedia system of anime, I examine the historical and cultural formation of zhai<\/em> culture in China as a case study. The focus on Chinese zhai<\/em> culture is an intentional choice to move away from the assumed center of geek culture in Silicon Valley as well as from the assumed origin of otaku in Japan. Neither geek nor otaku is a native cultural term in China, but their transnational emergence, development, and flourishment under the Chinese banner of zhai<\/em> demonstrate the historical transformations of knowledge, production, and labor in both local and global terms.<\/p>\n

From Astro Boy<\/em> to China\u2019s Zhai<\/em> Generation<\/strong><\/p>\n

The word \u201czhai\u201d (\u5b85) is Chinese translation of \u201cotaku,\u201d as it takes the kanji<\/em>  \u5b85 (zhai<\/em>) from the Japanese word \u304a\u5b85 (otaku). Although derived from the transnational dissemination of otaku culture from Japan to China, the term zhai<\/em> had gained a much broader cultural currency and became a new vernacular to characterize the widespread penetration of geek cultural sensibility along with the rise of cosmopolitan knowledge workers in China\u2019s digital economy. As otaku culture centered on anime, comics, and games (labeled as \u201cACG culture\u201d in China) began to dominate China\u2019s rapidly expanding digital media sphere, the phrase \u201cwo hen zhai<\/em>\u201d\u2014 \u201cI am so otaku\u201d \u2014 had become a popular motto among China\u2019s millennial youths known as zhai<\/em> generation (\u5b85\u4e16\u4ee3). This generation marked the collective debut of China\u2019s \u201conly children\u201d (\u72ec\u751f\u5b50\u5973), born under the one-child policy launched in 1979. They were raised under China\u2019s rapid economic boom and were expected to grow to a major driving force for the nation\u2019s newly developed digital economy. Zhai<\/em> thus represents the emergence of a new generation of powerful knowledge workers and consumers who were endowed with expanded college education and a significant amount of income, media access, and consumer goods. They were also China\u2019s first digital generation, who witnessed the IT boom and went on to become avid Internet users and developers in the new millennium. For a significant period, they were China\u2019s most active netizens, organizing social relations and cultural lives almost entirely on the Internet. When the world\u2019s largest population was getting wired, it was this zhai<\/em> generation of knowledge workers and consumers who largely shaped the popular media culture in today\u2019s China.<\/p>\n

Born and raised under the nation\u2019s wholesale socio-economic reforms, the zhai<\/em> generation\u2019s coming-of-age story chronicles China\u2019s remarkable change from a socialist welfare state to a neo-liberal market economy, from industrial manufacturing to postindustrial informationalism. The zhai<\/em> generation thus must be situated under China\u2019s dramatic transformations since the 1980s, including China\u2019s embrace of free-trade policies and neo-liberal agenda, its strong belief in technocracy and techno-nationalism, its forceful entry into globalization, its rapid development of an information society, and its painful transition from the industrial to the postindustrial economy.<\/p>\n

The coming-of-age of the zhai<\/em> generation amidst the nation\u2019s profound transformations provides a case study of how a postindustrial knowledge culture emerged and evolved in a socially and historically specific context. This cultural history is marked by the changing meanings and relations of knowledge and labor along with China\u2019s renewed interest in cultivating and soliciting skilled knowledge workers. Since China\u2019s reform in the 1980s, a technocratic, developmental logic had been at the center of its economic and governing policy, in which techno-scientific advancement was believed to be the driving force for the nation\u2019s revival. Under the banner of Francis Bacon\u2019s famous saying, \u201cknowledge is power,\u201d a new generation of knowledge workers was demanded and produced in China.  This historical process was marked by the changing positions of zhai<\/em> culture in relation to the institutional and market structures of knowledge work: from Astro Boy<\/em> that started anime\u2019s popularity in China as science education programs for children to anime fandom that emerged on university campuses amidst the expansion of collection education; from anime\u2019s media mix being incorporated into popular techno-cultures of computers and software to millennial otaku being celebrated as a new breed of innovators to lead the nation\u2019s digital economy. This history illuminates the changing meanings and significance of anime geekdom in relation to knowledge work in the context of China\u2019s socio-economic transformations: from the economic reform (\u6539\u9769) in the post-socialist era of the 1980s to the structural transition (\u8f6c\u578b) in a global development toward postindustrialism in the 21st<\/sup> century<\/p>\n

This cultural history of zhai <\/em>began with Astro Boy<\/em> on Chinese national television. Astro Boy<\/em>, translated into Chinese as Tiebi Atongmu<\/em> (\u94c1\u81c2\u963f\u7ae5\u6728), was the first TV anime in Japan in the 1960s and was also the first of such in China in the 1980s. It initially aired in December 1980 on China Central Television (CCTV) and continued to be syndicated and re-broadcasted through local and provincial stations throughout the entire decade and beyond. For Chinese children born and raised in the 1980s, Astro Boy<\/em> was one of their first TV memories. As one of the most popular TV shows in China\u2019s broadcasting history, it became an omnipresent cultural icon on Chinese television and came to define this new medium that began to enter average households. Many Chinese families bought their first television set to satisfy their children\u2019s desire to watch Astro Boy<\/em>. The powerful image of Astro Boy not only captured the imagination of a whole generation of Chinese youth but also transformed the media practice of their parents, convincing them that television was a useful medium for children\u2019s education and thus should be welcomed to their households. <\/p>\n

The impact of Astro Boy<\/em> was not limited to television, and it became one of the first and most successful transmedia franchises in China. The original manga series of Astro Boy<\/em> was translated by a famous ambassador, Zhou Bin, who used to work as the interpreter for the former national leader Hua Guofeng, and was published in 1981 as science education books for children by the prestigious state-run publisher, China Popular Science Press. Meanwhile, various character goods related to Astro Boy were released to the youth market and launched the first wave of merchandising business in China. Astro Boy, a superhero for popular science education, was the first transmedia celebrity known to Chinese children who grew up in the 1980s. <\/p>\n

The extraordinary success of Astro Boy<\/em> in China underlined a series of political and economic discourses to promote the re-kindled Sino-Japan relationship. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping visited Japan as the first Chinese leader to do so since1949, publicly announcing that \u201cdeveloping a friendly relationship with Japan is China\u2019s long-term policy with strategic significance for economic modernization.\u201d[6]<\/a> Japan was the first developed country to establish an economic partnership with China through the open-door policy, providing crucial investment and technologies. China in turn offered Japan its labor, market, and energy sources.  It was in this historical context that Astro Boy<\/em> came to China, not simply as the first imported animation on TV, but as an important cultural ambassador from Japan. In 1980, months after Chinese Prime Minister, Hua Guofeng, finished his official visit to Japan, CCTV signed its first barter deal to bring Astro Boy<\/em> to the Chinese audience. In 1981, when Astro Boy<\/em> was hot on the air, its creator, Osamu Tezuka, visited China, celebrated as the father of Japanese anime and a great artist who loved Chinese culture.<\/p>\n

After the success of Astro Boy<\/em>, a flood of Japanese cultural products was introduced to China to promote Sino-Japan relationship, and television was the prime medium in such cultural exchanges. These televised images constituted a virtual imagination of Japan that was no longer associated with the painful history of Japanese invasion during WWII, but was desired as an indigenized version of modern life in Asia, a fantasy for the Chinese viewers to project their own imagined future of modernity.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s cultural obsession with a television-mediated virtual Japan was not solely due to the widely assumed geo-cultural proximity of East Asia.  Instead, it was based on a transnational myth of techno-utopia, which was shared by Japan\u2019s postwar history in the 1960s and China\u2019s post-socialist reform in the 1980s. It is this shared aspiration to build a strong nation with technological empowerment that made Japan, an Asian economic superpower rising from atomic ashes, a perfect historical model for China\u2019s own modernization project in the reform era.<\/p>\n

To understand this shared myth, we must be reminded that Astro Boy, as a transnational\/transmedial icon, was famously remembered as a nuclear-powered super robot with \u201c100,000 horsepower.\u201d As the opening theme song in the original Japanese series tells us, Astro Boy is \u201cAlmighty Atom\u201d who can \u201cpass through the sky\u201d and \u201cbeyond the stars,\u201d because he is \u201ca boy of science\u201d (\u201c\u79d1\u5b66\u306e\u5b50\u201d in Japanese), a characterization that is further specified by the Chinese version of the song as \u201ca good boy who loves science\u201d (\u7231\u79d1\u5b66\u7684\u597d\u5c11\u5e74). This boy of science (who also \u201cloves science\u201d) was celebrated as an inspiring role model not only for Chinese children but for the entire nation that was to be renewed and empowered by techno-sciences. This myth of techno-nationalism was fully embraced in the 1980s China. Led by the motto that \u201cscience and technology are the first production force,\u201d the belief in technological empowerment was taken as the guiding principle for China\u2019s overarching economic reforms. Cybernetic theory was adopted into the social and economic models, and knowledge workers were demanded and produced by expanded college education.[7]<\/a>  It is in this historical context that Astro Boy, a techno-hero who never ages, came to China as a role model for children\u2019s science education as well as an embodiment of technological superpower.<\/p>\n

 <\/em>Astro Boy<\/em> was not alone in this transnational effort advocating for a utopian myth of technological modernization. Anime as a media form, with its unique quality of mukokuseki (statelessness), had successfully put forward what Iwabuchi characterizes as an \u201codorless\u201d image of virtual Japan that is endowed with the fantasies of global modernity.[8]<\/sup><\/a> For the Chinese audience, anime presented less a national culture of Japan than a transnational imagination of a techno-future. Chinese consumers in the 1980s were experiencing the influx of anime culture as an indigenized version of modernity that had been taken as universal values \u2014 the values of technological modernization and economic prosperity to which China was aspiring.<\/p>\n

The sense of techno-modernity in anime was also articulated through a particular brand of techno-consumerism that was associated with virtual Japan. It is worth mentioning that Astro Boy<\/em> came to China through a barter deal that brought the first foreign commercials to Chinese television. The deal was signed with Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer, Casio. In 1979, Casio entered the Chinese market and actively sought advertising opportunities. Instead of directly purchasing commercial timeslots in China, Casio bought the broadcasting rights for Astro Boy<\/em> from Japan, and gave it to CCTV in exchange for commercial airtime. Therefore, along with Astro Boy<\/em> as the first anime introduced to China was the Casio advertisement as the first foreign commercial ever aired on Chinese television. The Casio commercial that was broadcasted during Astro Boy<\/em>\u2019s airtime was nicely engineered: the super robot Astro Boy, flying with his powerful engine, endorsed the \u201cscientific advancement and accuracy\u201d of Casio digital watches and calculators.<\/p>\n

Besides their own commercials, Casio also sold part of the airtime to other Japanese companies. Most of these commercials featured the image of Astro Boy, who became not only the first TV star but also the first advertising celebrity in China. After the market success of the Astro-Casio bundle, a flood of anime TV shows was brought to China through barter deals with Japanese companies such as Sony, Toshiba, and Toyota. When anime became the companion of Chinese children, these Japanese brands of techno-goods became household names in China. As one Chinese blogger put it, the most exciting moment in his childhood memory was \u201cwaiting for Astro Boy flying through the gigantic logo of Hitachi.\u201d[9]<\/a>  For Chinese youth brought up in the 1980s, the trademarks of Hitachi, Casio, and Sony were as vivid as Astro Boy in their collective memories, imaginations, and desires.<\/p>\n

In an almost uncanny fashion, the ways in which Astro Boy<\/em> pushed Chinese television and its young viewers toward a heightened state of techno-consumerism echo anime\u2019s early history in Japan. The broadcast of Astro Boy<\/em> in Japanese television in 1963 was a \u201cturning point in postwar Japanese culture,\u201d because the successful advertising and merchandising strategies launched by Astro Boy<\/em> led companies to realize that they could \u201cadvertise and sell products by overlapping the commodity image with a character image,\u201d which marked a paradigm shift in the relation among media, commodities, and advertisement.[10]<\/a>  As Marc Steinberg noted, Astro Boy<\/em> was the historical origin of anime\u2019s media mix in Japan, as the character image of Astro Boy was extremely successful in launching advertisement campaigns for candies, toys, and a vast array of commodities. The spread of the character image from anime to advertisement to merchandise translated TV viewership to transmedia consumption, which \u201cenabled a convergence of media and objects around it and contributed to the formation of a particularly systematic image-thing network around anime.\u201d[11]<\/a> This \u201cimage-thing network\u201d that ties anime with commodities and advertisement is precisely what Astro Boy<\/em> brought to China in the 1980s. Therefore, what was introduced to China from Japan was not only a new type of TV animation for children, but was \u201ca new way of advertising, a new way of selling products, and a new way of organizing media relations.\u201d[12]<\/a> In other words, what Astro Boy<\/em> represents is the Japanese brand of commodity logic and its business model of media mix. <\/p>\n

With the bundled influx of anime and its media mix, there came the Japanese version of techno-consumerism through the commodity logic of advertising and merchandising. During the 1980s, Japanese companies were the biggest spenders on advertising in China.  Consequently, Japanese manufacturers such as Casio and Sony became the best-known brand names among Chinese households, representing an alluring fantasy of cutting-edge technologies. According to audience research in the 1980s, the most desirable products for Chinese people were Japanese consumer electronics that were believed to be technologically advanced.[13]<\/a> Owning a Japanese TV set was considered an achievement to be proud of by many Chinese families.<\/p>\n

Representing a utopian myth of techno-nationalism, as well as a commodity logic of techno-consumerism, anime\u2019s historical debut in China highlights the complex social-economical situations in the pivotal moment of reform, when China set out to build its own techno-economic future. The choice of Astro Boy<\/em> as the first anime to be introduced to the Chinese audience in that moment was certainly not accidental. By the time Astro Boy<\/em> aired in China in 1980, it had been a cultural icon in Japan for almost two decades. Astro Boy\u2019s d\u00e9but on Japanese television in 1963 marked a milestone in Japan\u2019s postwar media history, introducing not only a business model of media mix but also a national myth of technological empowerment and renewal. According to Anne Allison, the popular image of Astro Boy\u2014a robotic techno-superhero endowed with boyish cuteness and innocence\u2014emerged in postwar Japan as an enchanting myth of nation building through technology and modernization.[14]<\/a> Such a techno-utopian myth celebrating a youthful superhero empowered by atomic energy put forward a much-needed national identity for postwar Japan, a nation anxious to be reborn after the defeat in WWII and to rebuild itself through economic development and technological empowerment. This national myth was further propagated through the emergence of a new medium: television. As the first animated series broadcasted on Japanese television, Astro Boy became Japan\u2019s first TV star in the 1960s.  The propagation of Astro Boy\u2019s techno-utopian myth went hand in hand with the rapid growth of television as a new mass medium in postwar Japan.<\/p>\n

As Marx told us, history often repeats itself, albeit in different forms and sometimes in different places. Anime\u2019s introduction to Chinese television in 1980 uncannily mirrored its historical origin in Japan, propagating a similar myth of techno-empowerment, though in another culture at a different historical moment of national reckoning and reconstruction. With striking resemblance to postwar Japan, China in the early reform era of the 1980s also had a desperate need to re-establish national identity after decades of social, political, and economic turmoil. In the immediate aftermath of Mao\u2019s Cultural Revolution, China\u2019s economic reform launched in 1978 was branded as a massive project of nation \u201crebuilding\u201d (\u91cd\u5efa), for the reform was considered a structural overhaul and fundamental \u201ccorrection\u201d (\u62e8\u4e71\u53cd\u6b63) of the failed socialist policies in the previous eras. The official Chinese motto at that time was \u201cwaiting to rejuvenate after hundreds of wasted failures\u201d (\u767e\u5e9f\u5f85\u5174).  Such a dramatic overturn in economic and political discourses in the post-socialist era inevitably led to a collective sense of confusion and identity crisis. The influx of Western cultures and ideologies after the introduction of the open-door policy further intensified the widespread anxiety and uncertainty regarding China\u2019s future direction. To put forward a cohesive and united national identity amid such collective anxiety, the famous propaganda of \u201cbuilding for modernization\u201d (\u5efa\u8bbe\u73b0\u4ee3\u5316), which was first raised by Mao Zedong as a manifesto to propagate techno-nationalism in the 1950s, was revived by the Chinese leaders in the reform era as a blueprint for developing modern China through technological advancement.<\/p>\n

This techno-utopian myth of nation building was not different from that of postwar Japan. To build this techno-future for the nation, it is crucial to educate a new generation of knowledge labor toward science and technology. China\u2019s top leader, Deng Xiaoping, strongly advocated a new national policy to \u201crevive the nation through science and education\u201d (\u79d1\u6559\u5174\u56fd). In 1985, Deng made a famous speech at a national conference for science education. He said: \u201cFor our country, the strength of national power and the force of economic development increasingly depend on the education level of labor, that is, the quantity and quality of intellectuals.\u201d[15]<\/a> By \u201cintellectuals,\u201d Deng referred to a burgeoning class of knowledge workers, because the Chinese word for \u201cintellectuals\u201d \u2014zhishi fenzi<\/em> (\u77e5\u8bc6\u5206\u5b50)\u2014literally means \u201cknowledge members.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this historical context of a massive modernization project under the national policy to strengthen science and technology through education, the techno-utopian myth of a robotic superhero Astro Boy came to China. Sold as a science-education program by a popular science publisher, Astro Boy<\/em>, like many anime and manga afterward, took the role to cultivate children\u2019s passion in techno-science by serving as an animated mediation between the popular fantasy of children and the popularization of science.  For Chinese viewers, what came to represent a future of technological modernization was not simply Astro Boy, but was the re-imagined national identity of Japan as a successful economic superpower, as well as the trendy consumer electronics of Japanese brands such as Casio, Toshiba, and Hitachi, which were all advertised to Chinese children \u2014via the character image of Astro Boy \u2014as the symbols of technological strength, precision, and innovation. To the nation that was expected to be rebuilt, as well as to the young viewers who were educated to become a new generation of \u201cknowledge members,\u201d the imagination of techno-Japan in anime represented an alluring techno-future that China could identify with and aspire to. While Chinese children were desiring to become Astro Boy, China was longing to become the next Japan, an economic superpower rebuilt from ashes with modern technologies. Behind the enchanting images of anime was the utopian imagination of a technologically empowered future for China.<\/p>\n

The historical conditions that gave rise to the popularity of Astro Boy<\/em> began to change after the 1980s with the end of the \u201choneymoon period\u201d of Sino-Japan relationship. Television as the major distribution channel for anime began to close after the 1990s, but the development of new media technologies such as computers and the Internet allowed anime culture to continue flourishing through digital networks. China\u2019s anime culture transformed from televised children\u2019s entertainment to an Internet-based, peer-to-peer community generated by fans. It became a networked, transnational, transmedial movement under the name of zhai. <\/em><\/p>\n

This transformation went hand in hand with the coming of age of the zhai<\/em> generation, who watched Astro Boy<\/em> on television as science education in the 1980s and went on to become college-educated knowledge workers in the new millennium. In tandem with China\u2019s national policy to produce a massive amount of college-educated knowledge workers, the historical development of zhai<\/em> culture was situated in China\u2019s effort to pull through a difficult transition, from the industrial economy of manufacturing based on manual labor to the postindustrial economy of information based on knowledge labor.  The move from \u201creform\u201d in the 1980s to \u201ctransition\u201d in the 21st century paved the way for the changing perception of zhai<\/em> culture in relation to the market and institutions of knowledge work. Situated in this process of China\u2019s economic transition, zhai<\/em> culture is marked by the post-industrial, post-Fordist logics that are structured by the interplay between knowledge work and play. The development of zhai<\/em> culture was propagating and propagated by an emerging popular culture of computer technologies, and the transmedia system of ACG thus became a crucial element in shaping the techno-culture for a new generation of knowledge workers. <\/p>\n

Conclusion: The Cybernetic Affect of Kong<\/em> (<\/strong>\u63a7)<\/p>\n

In this transmedia zhai<\/em> culture that thrives on China\u2019s cyberspace, one of the most popular terms is kong<\/em> (\u63a7), a widespread and influential concept that captures the essence of cybernetic affect in anime geekdom. The word\u2019s original Chinese meaning is \u201ccontrol,\u201d which quickly changed when it was reintroduced through zhai<\/em> culture. In its new life, kong<\/em> became a homophone for the Japanese word \u30b3\u30f3 that itself is a katakana for the English loanword, \u201ccomplex,\u201d a psychoanalytical term which refers to obsessive psychological emotions around a certain theme.  In Japan, \u30b3\u30f3 (cong) is used as a suffix, and x-cong means a person who has a complex or obsession with something. \u201cLoli-cong,\u201d for instance, refers to Lolita complex. When the word \u30b3\u30f3 (cong) was introduced to China via zhai<\/em> culture, it was assigned to kong<\/em> (\u63a7) due to the same pronunciation, and this common Chinese word had since been loaded with a new meaning that refers to a person who has obsessive complex with certain things or subjects. For instance, a computer-kong<\/em> or a technology-kong<\/em> means a person obsessed with computers or technologies. This new meaning had become so popular that it both displaced and overlapped with the original meaning of kong<\/em> (\u63a7) as control. Therefore, being a kong<\/em>, that is, having an obsessive complex with something, also expresses a subtle feeling of control and being controlled.<\/p>\n

This overlap between complex and control represents the cultural sensibilities of zhai<\/em> that have shaped Chinese information culture in the postmillennial eras. The Chinese zhai<\/em> generation likes to express themselves as some kinds of kong<\/em> (e.g., game-kong<\/em>, sound-kong<\/em>, tech-kong<\/em>, car-kong<\/em>, cat-kong<\/em>, and so on). The sense of psychological complex is associated with compulsive informational behaviors that have become common in the digital age. When a Chinese zhai<\/em> becomes a kong<\/em> of something, he\/she has the urge to search for almost every information about it, and this obsessive informational behavior probably best characterizes the meaning of kong<\/em>. The proliferation and wide spread of the kong<\/em> phenomenon not only testifies the tremendous influence and popularity of zhai<\/em> culture, but also points to the collective cultural sensibility of China\u2019s post-80\u2019s zhai<\/em> generation that was brought up with the rise of information technologies. Being a kong<\/em>, which often involves obsessively searching, navigating, and collecting informational knowledge about something, gives a feeling of both power and powerlessness. To be kong<\/em> is to be controlled and in control at the same time, and this ambivalence is precisely where the pleasure and obsession of the psychological complex come from. There is something deeply affective in the ambivalent oscillation between control and being controlled. Because being a kong<\/em> (having a complex), which is to control and being controlled by something, is also a gesture of commitment, attachment, and intimacy, which is a structure of feelings that oscillate between power and powerlessness, between disjunction and assimilation. Kong<\/em> (complex\/control), therefore, is the affective economy of postindustrial knowledge work. The distributive networks, as well as the decentering intrasubjectivity of knowledge work, evoke affective desire for re-unification, the desire to be focused on, to be committed to, and even to be controlled by something (e.g., media contents, anime characters, information\u2026 or anything). This sense of kong<\/em> points to the psychological and medial complex not only of anime culture but also of the postindustrial knowledge work that bounds both control and complexity in the same networks of affective economy. That is the key lesson we learn by mapping the cybernetic affect of anime\u2019s knowledge cultures.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

*Parts of the essay are edited from the excerpts of my book, Anime’s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai<\/em> (University of Minnesota Press, 2024).<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> \u201c2008 wangluo ‘reci’ xin bianhua: you shehui hanyi de ci jiancheng zhuliu\u201d (New changes in the Internet buzz words of 2008: Words with social meanings become the mainstream), Wenhui Daily<\/em>, December 9, 2008.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Wu Xiaohui. \u201cQiantan Yiqing Zhixia de \u2018zhai Wenhua\u2019 Chuanbo\u201d (On the Spread of \u2018Zhai Culture\u2019 in the Pandemic). Xinwen Chuanbo<\/em>, no. 07 (2020): 837\u201340.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for The Information Age<\/em>. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Kevin Kelly. \u201cThe Third Culture.\u201d Science<\/em> 279, no. 5353 (February 13, 1998): 992\u201393.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Walter Benjamin, \u201cOne-Way Street.\u201d In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913-1926<\/em>, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 444\u201388. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004; Benjamin, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.\u201d In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938<\/em>, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 101\u201333. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006; Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno<\/em> (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 132\u201346.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Huang Dahui. \u201cZhong ri guanxi fazhan 30 nian\u201d (Thirty Years of Development in the Sino-Japan Relationship). Jiaoyu yu Yanjiu<\/em>, no. 11 (2008).<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Liu Xiao. Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China<\/em>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Iwabuchi K\u014dichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism<\/em>. Duke University Press, 2002.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Fang Yimin, \u201cJiyi suipian: yu Atongmu yiqi chengzhang\u201d (Fragments of Memory: Growing Up with Astro Boy). Nanfang Dushi Bao<\/em> [Southern Metropolis Daily], October 25, 2009, sec. RB05.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Kusakawa, Sho. Terebi anime 20 nen shi <\/em>[A Twenty-Year History of Television Anime]. (Tokyo: Rippu Shobo, 1981), 30\u201332.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Marc Steinberg, Anime\u2019s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan<\/em> (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 39.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Steinberg, Anime\u2019s Media Mix<\/em>, ix.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> James Lull, China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1991), 152.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Anne. Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination<\/em> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 51\u201362.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Deng Xiaoping, Selected Writings of Deng Xiaoping<\/em>. Vol. 3. (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1993), 120.<\/p>\n

Bio: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Jinying Li is an assistant professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, where she teaches media theory, animation, and digital culture in East Asia. Her essays have been published in Film International<\/em>, Mecha\u00addemia<\/em>, the International Journal of Communication<\/em>, Journal of Chinese Cine\u00admas<\/em>, Asiascape<\/em>, differences<\/em>, and Camera Obscura<\/em>. Her first book, Anime\u2019s Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai <\/em>was published by University of Minnesota Press (2024). <\/em>She is currently working on her second book, Walled Media and Mediating Walls<\/em>.<\/p>\n\r\n\t\t