Yichen Rao | Utrecht University (original) (raw)

Papers by Yichen Rao

Research paper thumbnail of Discourse as infrastructure: How “New Infrastructure” policies re-infrastructure China

Global Media and China

The term “New Infrastructure” has been highlighted in China’s recent policies. It refers to a set... more The term “New Infrastructure” has been highlighted in China’s recent policies. It refers to a set of new, and expanding, policies and the discourse surrounding them which support the development of facilities, equipment, and systems derived from the latest technologies, including 5G Internet of Things, AI, cloud computing, and data centers. This article reviews China’s New Infrastructure policies, analyzing their specific discursive ontologies and how they relate to major state projects to “re-infrastructure” China’s economy. It introduces the concept of “discursive infrastructure” and argues that the policies that redefine and recategorize infrastructure themselves serve as a form of infrastructure. Key to the concept is the recognition that discursive infrastructure relies on mutually constitutive material and semiotic dimensions and dialectically reproduces both symbols of progress and positive infrastructural imaginaries. Drawing on an analysis of policy documents and other disc...

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Research paper thumbnail of Digital Distinction: Class as mediated dispositions in China s Animal Crossing fever

Chinese Journal of Communication, 2023

This paper, based on an ethnography of the new gaming culture of Animal Crossing New Horizons in ... more This paper, based on an ethnography of the new gaming culture of Animal Crossing New Horizons in China, contributes to the scholarly investigation of digital class formation. New Horizons is a Japanese console game that became popular among Chinese urban professionals during the pandemic. Following Bourdieu’s framework, we analyze the dispositions and practices of New Horizons players, using the concept of “digital distinction” to define how gamers acquire and display cultural tastes and symbolic practices through competitive and relational engagements mediated by digital devices. The paper argues that contemporary classes are ephemeral dispositions mediated by digital fields materialized through media practices. This argument challenges the “capital-centric” approach to digital divides to better reflect the dialectical value production and transferences in the process of digital class formation. Digital capitalism produces an increasing diversity of digital fields that activate people’s particular dispositions through media algorithms, content design, institutional constraints, and relational spaces.

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Research paper thumbnail of E-Sports vs. Exams: Competition Ideologies among Student Gamers in Neo-socialist China

Social Analysis, 2022

Many Chinese students dislike hyper-competitive public school exams but find competing in e-sport... more Many Chinese students dislike hyper-competitive public school exams but find competing in e-sports games enjoyable. Some students are perceived to game 'too much' by their parents, who, anxious about gaming's impact on their grades, send their children to treatment camps for 'Internet addiction'. This article documents parents' and studentgamers' experiences of competition in China's formal education system, online gaming, and professional e-sports. As student-gamers move between these competitive arenas, they develop counter-hegemonic understandings of what competition does and reconfigure their sense of self. Their movements reveal that, far from a symptom of neoliberal ideology, the prevalence of competition in China marks dialectical interactions between various ideologies and the lived experience of competitive practices. This finding contradicts simplistic confl ations of competition and neoliberal economic models.

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Research paper thumbnail of Debt at a distance: Counter-collection strategies and financial subjectivities of China's workingclass defaulters during COVID-19

Economy and Society, 2023

This paper undertakes an analysis of publicly posted videos sharing debtors’ strategies for respo... more This paper undertakes an analysis of publicly posted videos sharing debtors’ strategies for responding to overzealous credit collection agencies during the earliest stages of the pandemic lockdown. It examines how Chinese debtors and credit collection callers responded to the uncertainties surrounding the handling of personal debts when the debtors’ economic activities are heavily restricted. Both parties invoked different imagined collectivities to establish their own moral justifications with regards to debt obligations, state regulations and family values. The paper argues for a recognition of the capacity of debt to collectivize people through loose discursive formations that remoralize debt, recasting the defaulter status as morally acceptable and reshaping their defaulter identities. The imaginative and discursive space built upon debt’s collectivizing potential presents a valuable analytical tool for understanding the social dimensions of debt and the dynamic emerging of financial subjectivities in the contemporary era.

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Research paper thumbnail of Dreaming like a market: The hidden script of financial inclusion in China's P2P lending platforms

In the past ten years, Chinese people of different social strata have swarmed into the peer-to-pe... more In the past ten years, Chinese people of different social strata have swarmed into the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending industry as lenders and borrowers. Meanwhile, stories have circulated across the media about desperate investors who lost their life savings on these lending platforms, many of which turned out to be Ponzi schemes. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork, this article presents a failed yet influential social experiment of digital finance in the world's largest developing economy. This article examines the morality of the P2P market by observing how the aspirational public script of financial inclusion is maintained and experienced through a hidden technological script that alienates the notion of "peer." This article argues that the morality of the market is not only about "seeing" and judging from a distance but also about "feeling" and managing the moral boundaries and intersubjective distances between actors. These altered distances restructure interpersonal responsibilities and sustain the dreams and imagination that shape financial subjects on an unconscious level. The article expands the concept of market relationality beyond direct interactions between actors and uncovers the inherent tensions within the dream of financial inclusion. It examines the fantasy of beneficial technology in shaping market morality and the unintended consequences it produces.

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Research paper thumbnail of From Confucianism to Psychology: Rebooting Internet Addicts in China

History of Psychology, 2019

Coined in the 1990s, the term “Internet addiction” encapsulates a brief but influential human his... more Coined in the 1990s, the term “Internet addiction” encapsulates a brief but influential human history of technological advancement and psychological development. However, most studies have treated Internet addiction as a “global” concept in the realm of science without taking into consideration its sociocultural meanings and local history. In China,
obsessive online gaming behavior among youth is viewed as a national issue of public health and social control. This article examines the special development of interventions to address Internet addiction in China within a broader local history of culturally inflected social control, market reform, the one-child policy, and psychology. Based on
historical review and ethnographic data from a treatment center specializing in Internet addiction, this article presents a deep analysis of what Internet addiction means in Chinese lives. It argues that Internet addiction is, in fact, a cultural idiom of distress related to social control rather than a universal syndrome of self-control. It represents the dynamic interactions between Confucian family values and market reform, the one-child policy, and recent trends in psychology and technology.

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Research paper thumbnail of Coming of Age with Internet Addiction in China- An Ethnographic Study of Institutional Encounters and Subject Formation

With the rapid transition of social structure in China, more and more young people born in the di... more With the rapid transition of social structure in China, more and more young people born in the digital age have indulged themselves in the online world. Adult society, represented by parents, schools, experts, and the nation-state, have worried about this collective indulgence. Since 2005, Internet addiction (wangying, 网瘾) has been treated as a mental disorder in China. Though no official recognition is given to this new disorder by the Ministry of Health, there is still a nationwide campaign to “rescue” the twenty-four million youngsters in China who sit in front of computer screens for days and weeks at a time. Hundreds of institutions that treat Internet addiction are said to have been established all over China. Based on fieldwork in a treatment camp, this thesis is an ethnographic account of encounters between the institution and the young people during the treatment process. Through this study I seek to uncover the broader context of paternalistic social control in China that gives rise to the moral panic about Internet addiction and institutional intervention to treat it. I also examine the role of psychology and family therapy in shaping the individual subjectivities of the youth and their parents. These institutional mechanisms and life within the institution are analyzed in detail in order to reach a fuller understanding of power and control. Using a phenomenological approach, the study follows the trajectory along which Internet addiction is formed, experienced, and cured. Inspired by theories of cybernetics, the research questions the dualistic model that generalizes and reduces Internet addiction to either an individual disorder, a parenting mistake, or a social disruption.

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Articles by Yichen Rao

Research paper thumbnail of Deception as Investment: How to Make Digital Ponzi Schemes in China

Anthropology News, 2024

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Research paper thumbnail of Capitalism, Overwork, and Polanyi’s Dialectics of Freedom: Emerging Visions of Work-Life Balance in Contemporary Urban China

In: Hann CM (ed) Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021

We draw on and further develop Karl Polanyi's conceptualization of two different kinds of freedo... more We draw on and further develop Karl Polanyi's conceptualization of two different kinds of freedom: “personal freedom” and “social freedom.” We use this dialectical approach to make sense of contemporary Chinese moral debates on 996 work schedules as seen through the lens of two different occupational communities.

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Research paper thumbnail of Discourse as infrastructure: How “New Infrastructure” policies re-infrastructure China

Global Media and China

The term “New Infrastructure” has been highlighted in China’s recent policies. It refers to a set... more The term “New Infrastructure” has been highlighted in China’s recent policies. It refers to a set of new, and expanding, policies and the discourse surrounding them which support the development of facilities, equipment, and systems derived from the latest technologies, including 5G Internet of Things, AI, cloud computing, and data centers. This article reviews China’s New Infrastructure policies, analyzing their specific discursive ontologies and how they relate to major state projects to “re-infrastructure” China’s economy. It introduces the concept of “discursive infrastructure” and argues that the policies that redefine and recategorize infrastructure themselves serve as a form of infrastructure. Key to the concept is the recognition that discursive infrastructure relies on mutually constitutive material and semiotic dimensions and dialectically reproduces both symbols of progress and positive infrastructural imaginaries. Drawing on an analysis of policy documents and other disc...

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Research paper thumbnail of Digital Distinction: Class as mediated dispositions in China s Animal Crossing fever

Chinese Journal of Communication, 2023

This paper, based on an ethnography of the new gaming culture of Animal Crossing New Horizons in ... more This paper, based on an ethnography of the new gaming culture of Animal Crossing New Horizons in China, contributes to the scholarly investigation of digital class formation. New Horizons is a Japanese console game that became popular among Chinese urban professionals during the pandemic. Following Bourdieu’s framework, we analyze the dispositions and practices of New Horizons players, using the concept of “digital distinction” to define how gamers acquire and display cultural tastes and symbolic practices through competitive and relational engagements mediated by digital devices. The paper argues that contemporary classes are ephemeral dispositions mediated by digital fields materialized through media practices. This argument challenges the “capital-centric” approach to digital divides to better reflect the dialectical value production and transferences in the process of digital class formation. Digital capitalism produces an increasing diversity of digital fields that activate people’s particular dispositions through media algorithms, content design, institutional constraints, and relational spaces.

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Research paper thumbnail of E-Sports vs. Exams: Competition Ideologies among Student Gamers in Neo-socialist China

Social Analysis, 2022

Many Chinese students dislike hyper-competitive public school exams but find competing in e-sport... more Many Chinese students dislike hyper-competitive public school exams but find competing in e-sports games enjoyable. Some students are perceived to game 'too much' by their parents, who, anxious about gaming's impact on their grades, send their children to treatment camps for 'Internet addiction'. This article documents parents' and studentgamers' experiences of competition in China's formal education system, online gaming, and professional e-sports. As student-gamers move between these competitive arenas, they develop counter-hegemonic understandings of what competition does and reconfigure their sense of self. Their movements reveal that, far from a symptom of neoliberal ideology, the prevalence of competition in China marks dialectical interactions between various ideologies and the lived experience of competitive practices. This finding contradicts simplistic confl ations of competition and neoliberal economic models.

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Research paper thumbnail of Debt at a distance: Counter-collection strategies and financial subjectivities of China's workingclass defaulters during COVID-19

Economy and Society, 2023

This paper undertakes an analysis of publicly posted videos sharing debtors’ strategies for respo... more This paper undertakes an analysis of publicly posted videos sharing debtors’ strategies for responding to overzealous credit collection agencies during the earliest stages of the pandemic lockdown. It examines how Chinese debtors and credit collection callers responded to the uncertainties surrounding the handling of personal debts when the debtors’ economic activities are heavily restricted. Both parties invoked different imagined collectivities to establish their own moral justifications with regards to debt obligations, state regulations and family values. The paper argues for a recognition of the capacity of debt to collectivize people through loose discursive formations that remoralize debt, recasting the defaulter status as morally acceptable and reshaping their defaulter identities. The imaginative and discursive space built upon debt’s collectivizing potential presents a valuable analytical tool for understanding the social dimensions of debt and the dynamic emerging of financial subjectivities in the contemporary era.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Dreaming like a market: The hidden script of financial inclusion in China's P2P lending platforms

In the past ten years, Chinese people of different social strata have swarmed into the peer-to-pe... more In the past ten years, Chinese people of different social strata have swarmed into the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending industry as lenders and borrowers. Meanwhile, stories have circulated across the media about desperate investors who lost their life savings on these lending platforms, many of which turned out to be Ponzi schemes. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork, this article presents a failed yet influential social experiment of digital finance in the world's largest developing economy. This article examines the morality of the P2P market by observing how the aspirational public script of financial inclusion is maintained and experienced through a hidden technological script that alienates the notion of "peer." This article argues that the morality of the market is not only about "seeing" and judging from a distance but also about "feeling" and managing the moral boundaries and intersubjective distances between actors. These altered distances restructure interpersonal responsibilities and sustain the dreams and imagination that shape financial subjects on an unconscious level. The article expands the concept of market relationality beyond direct interactions between actors and uncovers the inherent tensions within the dream of financial inclusion. It examines the fantasy of beneficial technology in shaping market morality and the unintended consequences it produces.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of From Confucianism to Psychology: Rebooting Internet Addicts in China

History of Psychology, 2019

Coined in the 1990s, the term “Internet addiction” encapsulates a brief but influential human his... more Coined in the 1990s, the term “Internet addiction” encapsulates a brief but influential human history of technological advancement and psychological development. However, most studies have treated Internet addiction as a “global” concept in the realm of science without taking into consideration its sociocultural meanings and local history. In China,
obsessive online gaming behavior among youth is viewed as a national issue of public health and social control. This article examines the special development of interventions to address Internet addiction in China within a broader local history of culturally inflected social control, market reform, the one-child policy, and psychology. Based on
historical review and ethnographic data from a treatment center specializing in Internet addiction, this article presents a deep analysis of what Internet addiction means in Chinese lives. It argues that Internet addiction is, in fact, a cultural idiom of distress related to social control rather than a universal syndrome of self-control. It represents the dynamic interactions between Confucian family values and market reform, the one-child policy, and recent trends in psychology and technology.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Research paper thumbnail of Coming of Age with Internet Addiction in China- An Ethnographic Study of Institutional Encounters and Subject Formation

With the rapid transition of social structure in China, more and more young people born in the di... more With the rapid transition of social structure in China, more and more young people born in the digital age have indulged themselves in the online world. Adult society, represented by parents, schools, experts, and the nation-state, have worried about this collective indulgence. Since 2005, Internet addiction (wangying, 网瘾) has been treated as a mental disorder in China. Though no official recognition is given to this new disorder by the Ministry of Health, there is still a nationwide campaign to “rescue” the twenty-four million youngsters in China who sit in front of computer screens for days and weeks at a time. Hundreds of institutions that treat Internet addiction are said to have been established all over China. Based on fieldwork in a treatment camp, this thesis is an ethnographic account of encounters between the institution and the young people during the treatment process. Through this study I seek to uncover the broader context of paternalistic social control in China that gives rise to the moral panic about Internet addiction and institutional intervention to treat it. I also examine the role of psychology and family therapy in shaping the individual subjectivities of the youth and their parents. These institutional mechanisms and life within the institution are analyzed in detail in order to reach a fuller understanding of power and control. Using a phenomenological approach, the study follows the trajectory along which Internet addiction is formed, experienced, and cured. Inspired by theories of cybernetics, the research questions the dualistic model that generalizes and reduces Internet addiction to either an individual disorder, a parenting mistake, or a social disruption.

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Research paper thumbnail of Deception as Investment: How to Make Digital Ponzi Schemes in China

Anthropology News, 2024

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Research paper thumbnail of Capitalism, Overwork, and Polanyi’s Dialectics of Freedom: Emerging Visions of Work-Life Balance in Contemporary Urban China

In: Hann CM (ed) Work, Society, and the Ethical Self: Chimeras of Freedom in the Neoliberal Era. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021

We draw on and further develop Karl Polanyi's conceptualization of two different kinds of freedo... more We draw on and further develop Karl Polanyi's conceptualization of two different kinds of freedom: “personal freedom” and “social freedom.” We use this dialectical approach to make sense of contemporary Chinese moral debates on 996 work schedules as seen through the lens of two different occupational communities.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact