Papers by Shiqi Lin
positions politics (praxis), 2025
On January 12, 2025, just days before the short video platform TikTok was pressured to shut down ... more On January 12, 2025, just days before the short video platform TikTok was pressured to shut down in the U.S., a sensational “migration” began. Millions of American internet users flocked to the Chinese-language social media app RedNote (Xiaohongshu 小红书). This essay examines how the playful and even erotic intercultural encounters on RedNote forge a conceptual switchpoint for us to unpack the deeply structural confluence of technology, geopolitics, and trans-border agency in our contemporary global social history. If the TikTok ban and U.S.-China rivalry signify the surge of a so-called “digital Cold War,” what we archive in this piece are some alternative, transgressive moments beyond the rigid lines of macro geopolitics. As these horizons of a “global village” re-enter our realm of imagination, this essay critically reflects on the techno-political architectures of digital platforms and the structures of feeling of our time.
China Perspectives, 2023
Since the 2010s, the “Dongbei Renaissance” has emerged in China as a transmedial phenomenon drive... more Since the 2010s, the “Dongbei Renaissance” has emerged in China as a transmedial phenomenon driven by a cluster of cultural producers retelling the stories of their parents’ generation as laid-off workers during the tumultuous transition of Dongbei, or Northeast China, from a socialist industrial headquarter to a decadent urban ruin in the 1990s. With a focus on the translocal relevance of this cultural trend, this paper discusses the prominent role of literature and its synergy with digital media in transmitting repressed social memories across generations and shedding light on contemporary conditions of economic precarity. I propose the notion of “ruinated futurity” to characterise conceptual openings offered by this digitally-mediated literary boom in three dimensions: (1) a mnemonic future that resurrects the repressed memories of the silenced through transgenerational renarration; (2) a media future that reworks literature within a digital media ecology of remediation and interrelatedness, and (3) a socioeconomic future reoriented towards disposable populations beyond narratives of progress and development.
China Perspectives, 2023
Futurity saturates global imaginations of China as well as Chinese imaginations of the world. Wor... more Futurity saturates global imaginations of China as well as Chinese imaginations of the world. Working across fields including literature, anthropology, urban studies, digital media, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies, the authors in this special feature interrogate the forms that futurist imaginations take and the social conditions that give rise to them in contemporary China. In the post-Covid-19 world where alternative visions of futurity are being invoked more than ever to speak to global conditions of uncertainty and restructuring, this special feature provides a critical step forward in pluralising political imaginations from the locales of China.
Chinese Literature and Thought Today, 2022
This discussion derives from a bilingual virtual panel held at the University of California, Irvi... more This discussion derives from a bilingual virtual panel held at the University of California, Irvine on June 9, 2021. In light of the English publication of Liang Hong’s China in One Village, this roundtable is organized to discuss the significance of this work in Chinese literary, media, and social history.
positions politics (episteme), 2020
By now, an impulse to document, archive and process traces of our life has become a widely shared... more By now, an impulse to document, archive and process traces of our life has become a widely shared phenomenon across the world in the time of COVID-19. Instead of focusing my analysis on a particular form of archive, my goal here is to think broadly on the impulse behind these numerous practices of documentation: why are many of us obsessed with preserving records in this pandemic? What are we driven by?
MCLC Resource Center, 2020
This collection of short essays and Q&A series derives from an online panel in March 2020 in resp... more This collection of short essays and Q&A series derives from an online panel in March 2020 in response to the global spread of COVID-19. Drawing inspiration from “cloud clubbing,” a creative practice engaged by self-quarantined Chinese web users during the pandemic, this “cloud panel” was an experimental endeavor to discuss digital media, societal fears, and the responsibility of humanities scholars in a time of crisis.
Foundry, 2020
With the coronavirus outbreak in the beginning of 2020, the world seems to have entered an apocal... more With the coronavirus outbreak in the beginning of 2020, the world seems to have entered an apocalyptic mode of biopolitical insecurity set in zombie fictions. Attending to the synergic relationship between epidemic, media, relatedness, and biopolitics, I take “cut/cutting” as a critical concept to diagnose the splintering of relations and highlight emergent forms of togetherness in the time of coronavirus.
symplokē: a journal for the intermingling of literary, cultural and theoretical scholarship, 2020
More and more, we seem to be living in a world where excessive freedom and unchecked surveillance... more More and more, we seem to be living in a world where excessive freedom and unchecked surveillance are intertwined, where the promise of technology backfires into eternal labor and exhaustion, where time is infinitely accelerated into meaningless junktime elapsing in superficial sociality, where desires and anxieties are reaching their boiling points. This is the world that concerns the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han.
positions politics (praxis), 2021
With the rise of Chinese technology firms such as Alibaba, the past few years have witnessed the ... more With the rise of Chinese technology firms such as Alibaba, the past few years have witnessed the explosive growth of platform economies in China. However, much is still under-examined about the complexities of platform ecologies within China. In this article, Dr. Ping Sun, a leading scholar on digital labor and platform studies, offers her observations on the current digital crisis in and beyond China.
Book Reviews by Shiqi Lin
PRC History Review, 2022
Reading Harriet Evans’s Beijing from Below is a moving experience of being invited into an old Be... more Reading Harriet Evans’s Beijing from Below is a moving experience of being invited into an old Beijing neighborhood and entering a dense web of relations. By listening closely into those occluded stories in the capital’s center, the book is a wonderful addition to a growing body of site-based studies of bottom-up urban experience behind China’s global rise.
Amerasia Journal, 2020
Fong, Izumi, and Trazo’s article was a timely and heartening read when our teaching team at Irvin... more Fong, Izumi, and Trazo’s article was a timely and heartening read when our teaching team at Irvine identified a need for a student-centered pedagogy for our Fall Quarter course. Their piece serves as a critical reminder of how much educators could do in building community and connectedness in difficult times.
Conference Presentations by Shiqi Lin
Words Bridge Worlds: A Chinese Nonfiction Roundtable
Sixth Tone, 2022
An online roundtable on nonfiction storytelling about China with practitioners Chen Nianxi and Yu... more An online roundtable on nonfiction storytelling about China with practitioners Chen Nianxi and Yuan Ling, scholar Zhang Huiyu, moderated by Shiqi Lin and organized by Sixth Tone on March 6, 2022.
Podcasting about China: A Roundtable
UCI Humanities Center, 2022
A roundtable with Cindy Yu, Afra Wang, and Yangyang Cheng, co-hosted by June Wujun Ke and Shiqi L... more A roundtable with Cindy Yu, Afra Wang, and Yangyang Cheng, co-hosted by June Wujun Ke and Shiqi Lin at the University of California, Irvine on February 25, 2022, one of the first public academic events in the world featuring transcontinental podcasting about China.
Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images, 2022
Report on a hybrid symposium held by Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images at... more Report on a hybrid symposium held by Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images at Hong Kong Baptist University on May 17-18, 2021, covering my presentation "A Pandemic Music Library: Music Listening in a Time of Crisis.”
Grants by Shiqi Lin
Jiaqian Zhu, 2020
Drawing theoretical inspiration from syncopation, the musical practice of stressing weak beats an... more Drawing theoretical inspiration from syncopation, the musical practice of stressing weak beats and creating new rhythms, “Syncopating East Asia” solidifies an interdisciplinary network of engaged graduate students and scholars to study East Asia against the strong beats of colonial, imperial and national frameworks. To syncopate East Asia means to disrupt rhythms of established historiographies and put emphasis on off-beats – the region’s repressed histories – as a vital step towards post-nationalist decolonization. Given East Asia’s shifting role in the post-Cold War international system, as well as the changing relationship between East Asia and the rest of the world in a global age of triumphal capitalism and rising ultra-rightism, this project asks: how one can generate a trans-border thinking that attends to ethical forms of cohabitation at the local level? In an age in which Asia is “on the rise”, how is East Asia imagined by itself and others? To address such questions, this project revisits silenced pasts and enduring traumas of colonialism, interrogates border zones at the confluence of militarism and capitalism, and attends to post-Cold War East Asia as a post-, neo-, and anti-imperialist space of entangled desires.
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Papers by Shiqi Lin
Book Reviews by Shiqi Lin
Conference Presentations by Shiqi Lin
Grants by Shiqi Lin