Weaving the network of collectivism – Kuqing as affective glue in China: Analyzing the reality show X-Change

This article examines the ways in which kuqing – bitter emotions – are performed, amplified and circulated in the Chinese reality show X-Change (2006–2008). Taking a social relational approach to affect, we understand kuqing as an embodied, socially informed and relationally inscribed affective response to suffering and pain. Building on the historical roots of kuqing, textual and audiovisual analysis is applied to capture its expressions and affective registers in the program. The analysis reveals that, while claiming to reduce the alarming urban–rural divide, the program engages in two juxtaposed and competing affective arrangements. The first recruits kuqing into neoliberal logics and individualistic subjectivity, but is counterproductive in that it reproduces structural class inequalities. The second results in a rearrangement in which kuqing circulates relationally and articulates with Confucian filiality and family ethics, weaving both the rural bitter underclass and the urban middle class into an intersubjective collectivist identity and relationship, thereby strengthening social cohesion and managing social division. Based on the analysis, we offer new insights into relationships between reality TV, power structures and the complex ‘emotional regime’ in a contemporary China challenged by its social ruptures.