Executive producers; Jean Tsien, Sally Jo Fifer, Lois Vossen. Sound by Michael Tuller. New York: Torch Films: Cinetic Media, LLC [distributor], 2018. 1 DVD resource (95 min.). 1 online resource (95 min.). US$295.00. In Chinese with English subtitles.
Set in the concrete jungles of urban China and enhanced with superimposed images of flashing computer screens and cam footage, the People’s Republic of Desire opens with an arresting scene of post-socialist China flooded with desire. Filmed between 2014 and 2016—-the heyday of live streaming—the documentary unmasks the intricate workings of the billion-dollar industry. It follows two live streaming hosts, Shen Man and “Big Li,” on a platform called YY for two years, documenting their participation in YY’s annual competitions, where fans and patrons buy votes to support their favourite hosts.
In this documentary, director Hao Wu explores the intriguing yet somewhat baffling stories of modern China, and central issues such as aspirations, dreams, and social mobility. This film maps out an economy of desire underpinned by technological advancement and informational capitalism. It showcases how different types of desire are intertwined: the materialistic desire, the libidinal and sexual desire, the desire for recognition, the desire for communion, and the desire for upward social mobility. Consumption is not only an expression of desire, but imagined as a panaceanic solution to the various struggles one encounters in daily life.
Live streaming enables one to imagine or perform a better self that is confident, capable, and desirable. It offers a temporary, if not illusory, reprieve from everyday harsh realities. Wu captures vividly how consumption on live streaming apparently affords “a sense of achievement”—as the big spender “Songge” put it—and a feeling of being respected. Neo-liberalism prevails, and accordingly, the capitalist logic encroaches on all aspects of personal and social life, including bodies and affects, intimate domains, and previously non-monetizable interactions and activities.
Desire is thus externalized and commodified in the most blatant forms; users are at once enticed and entrapped, while the platform becomes the only winner of the game. Wu astutely points to the increasing power that the platforms hold as rulemakers that circumscribe possible actions and reap the benefits. The documentary opens in an office building densely populated by attractive young female hosts, which showcases the gigantic corporate entity behind the seemingly freewheeling live streamers. It outlines the contour of a complex system undergirded by multiple players such as hosts, low-level fans, big patrons, talent managers, agencies, and the platform owners.
Another theme that the documentary lays bare is the precarity of emergent forms of digital labour. The post-industrial regime of production, coupled with the advancement of digital technologies, leads to ever more flexible and casualized work arrangements, and yet increasing instability and precarity. Such precarity, however, is glossed over by the glamorous façade of Internet fame. Wu adroitly juxtaposes the absurdly flamboyant “Super Star” gala that YY holds annually and the abject plight of live streaming hosts offline. The fame and fulfillment that the hosts, as phantom celebrities, gain from live streaming are flimsy and fleeting. Wu’s frequent deployment of lingering close-ups that focus on characters’ facial expressions capture their unstated inner emotions and their duplicity. For instance, when confronted with the question about happiness, Shen Man hesitates for a second and utters nonchalantly, “I’m happy. Compared to many others, I think I should be happy” (emphasis added).
Such duplicity speaks to a persistent undercurrent in the hosts’ self-presentation online: the blurred line between authenticity and performance. In order to stay relevant, hosts meticulously fashion and monitor their appearance and performance. Meanwhile, they paradoxically obscure the amount of work they put into preparing and staging their performance so as to appear authentic. This kind of performed authenticity pertains to the difficulty of neatly separating the online and the offline.
Last but not least, running through the documentary is a latent discourse of class. The antithetical yet symbiotic relationship between diaosi (“losers”) and tuhao (“nouveau riche”) speaks to the gap between the rich and the poor, and the difficulty of upward social mobility. Songge’s lighthearted explanation of his wealth—“I’m a profiteer”—is likely used to ridicule the opaque mechanism of social mobility.
This award-winning documentary is not without limitations. Wu’s ability to organize fragmented clips and sound bites into coherent narratives is impressive, yet the neat picture of a downward spiral that the hosts undergo seems a little artificial. Some characters such as Yong (Big Li’s fan) and Songge could have been more organically embedded in the narrative arc. There could have been a more in-depth probe into the company YY to clarify its powerful role.
Another limitation is the insufficient reference to the political-institutional environment in which live streaming operates. The expanding economy of desire should be viewed within a larger historical-political framework of the Party-state’s attempt to boost a leisure cultural economy in the post-reform era. Meanwhile, the ascendant trends of de-politicization and individualization in post-reform China have led to a shift of attention from public life towards private life. Does the popularity of live streaming have anything to do with the Party-state’s governmentality? Why was there a relative lack of regulation in the live streaming sector as compared to other sectors of information and technology from 2014 to 2016? If live streaming signifies participation in a commercial democracy, what does it mean for users to follow and vote for their own idols?
Moreover, live streaming need not be completely techno-dystopian. Wu showcases the most dramatic facets of live streaming, which should not be taken to represent all interactions online. The diaosi–tuhao dyad, if taken at face value, is more of a false dichotomy that disregards the large number of average users in the middle. It is also noteworthy that hyper-commercialized live streaming is not unique to China, but a local inflection of a global trend in post-industrial digital economies. That said, this documentary posits a trenchant critique of the neo-liberal dynamics in contemporary China, and foregrounds thought-provoking issues about technology, development, and society.
Sheng Zou
Stanford University, Stanford, USA