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This article explores the progressive potential of commercial industry-oriented channels (IoCs), an emerging form of media produced by and addressed to workers of specific industries, on China's digital platforms. Juxtaposing textual analysis with worker-audience interviews and participant observation, I found that despite the collusion of state surveillance and platform governance, IoCs prove instrumental in fostering resistive labour subjects and collectives among ordinary workers. This is due to IoCs' genre convention and discourses, but more importantly, to worker-audience's bitter and precarious structure of feeling that mediates their collective reception processes. The findings complicate our understanding of the potential of media/cultural production for labour resistance, highlighting the role of worker-audience in the circuit of progressive labour culture and the potential of commercial media in fostering radical class subjects. Drawing on the analysis, I further advance a model of worker media as double articulation, to open up more hermeneutic and action space for cultural labour activism.

AbstractThe three films discussed here are all adapted works based on real‐life incidents that have happened in China pertaining to child trafficking, drug smuggling, and kidnapping. Although the films depict the roads traveled and lives lived by the particular characters, more importantly, they enable the audience to realize that characters cannot be viewed in terms of black and white. Rather, characters should be viewed as "gray." Specifically, all characters are portrayed as both selfless and profit driven. They are forced to confront hidden pain caused by the trials and tribulations of life. That pain is coupled with a sense of helplessness and a need to face life's changes brought about by the failure of the government's social management system. Being under constant pressure, the dregs of society pursue their own selfish interests, thereby infringing on the interests of others. When criminals are at their worst, the audience is looking for their goodness amidst the opposing forces of legality and sentimentality, egoism and altruism. Audiences are hoping for some form of redemption in characters who are wrestling with responsibility and obligation. This not only gives the characters a sense of inclusiveness, but it also gives viewers comfort regarding our shared humanity. At the same time, the upsurge of public opinion triggered by these realistic films has accelerated government reform and enhancement of the social system. Thus, socially oriented movies in China have had large social value and practical significance.

AbstractJános Kornai's pioneering scholarship examined the mechanisms of the socialist system. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kornai's main focus was on the transition process in former socialist countries in central Eastern Europe. This paper builds on Kornai's work on the socialist system by analyzing horizontal bargaining within every political branch in contemporary China. I argue that this horizontal bargaining within the party is enhanced by the vertical bargaining. Incorporating Kornai's work on socialism, the "party chief and mayor" template extends the bargaining model from one key figure and one group in the "king and council" template to two key figures and their respective confidants. In addition, it incorporates institutional constraints into the graphical model. It also defines a "collective decision probability function," which shows how the party chief and mayor model reaches "checks and balances" that limit the policy space, regardless of whether the policy is exogenous or endogenous.

Worker solidarity is a recurring theme in the digital labour debate. While recent studies of the on-demand platforms contribute to highlighting digital affordances in fostering solidarity among gig workers, few have explored how this works in depth and offered a theoretically informed evaluation of this potential. This study of Didi drivers in China fills this gap by looking at how agential practices amplify or constrain the effects of digital communication. We contribute to constructing a mediated framework of affordances for association, for discourse and for mobilisation to examine the process of fostering worker solidarity. Increasingly under structural constraints of platform control and state surveillance on labour activism, this article discloses the theoretical puzzle of 'solidarity in question' by rooting the agential practices firmly in the analysis of workers' gender, migratory status, work experience and critical media literacy, and how they intersect with the tactical appropriation of social media to create potential.