ABSTRACT
To sustain “a constant erosive force” of youth culture that weakens the centralized system, solidarity in the form of growing numbers and converging efforts across different locales, classes and media is key to making this micro-politics of oppositionality possible. As I demonstrate throughout the book, it can be observed that Chinese youths’ insistent deployment of “small” genres (e.g., light novels, short videos, shojo manga, and other youth-oriented subcultural forms) and “small” media (digital media in contrast to state-controlled and centralized mass media) leads to a reinvention of cultural forms and releases the enormous transformative power of “small” atomized individuals in reinventing a youthful coalition of silenced, belittled, and marginalized social groups. In the place of top-down ideological indoctrination, a bottom-up and multivalent network is built up to break open youth spaces for civic engagement, alternative identities, and social activism in the cracks of the web of power. Therefore, while the rise of transmedial youth economy becomes a new propulsion engine of millennial capitalism in China and across the world, the latest experiments in networked youth cultures and youth activism give birth to possible new subjects as historical agents pushing forward social and cultural changes. All these reinvented forms of cultural innovation, anti-establishment politics, and social transformations converge together to generate a new networked sociality of youth and a reinvented discourse of hope in a time of global crisis and division through younger generations’ persistent effort, agency, initiative, and creativity.
