ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the complex politics involved in egao phenomenon and its dialectic position between negotiation of the cultural space linking individual playfulness in virtual reality and communal transgression in social reality. It explores specific features of egao, the sociocultural condition under which it emerged, and political ramification and significance of destabilization of social structure caused by it, which coincides with the large-scale restructuring of classes taking place in postsocialist China. The official newspaper Guangming Daily Guangming ribao characterizes egao as "a popular online strategy, in the form of language, picture, and animation, which comically subverts and deconstructs the so-called normal". Egao has also attracted scholarly attention in English. For the emergence of the parodic form of egao, one important social determinant was the advent of digital technologies in China at the turn of twenty-first century. Digital technologies, especially the technologies of digital processing and the Internet, became widely accessible to common Chinese people, particularly to the young, urban generation.
