A Critique of the Chinese Radical Net-Philosophy Community

Zhongkai Qian; Ngai Pun

doi:10.31269/triplec.v23i1.1531

Zhongkai Qian China Agricultural University
Ngai Pun Lingnan University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v23i1.1531

Keywords: net-philosophy communities, aestheticisation of knowledge, political engagement, intellectual hierarchy, China

Abstract

This article delves into the dynamics of the Chinese net-philosophy community, a unique digital and radical subculture where young enthusiasts engage with philosophical ideas outside of traditional academic frameworks. We examine how radical knowledge was produced, validated, and circulated within these net communities, focusing on the aestheticisation of knowledge and its impact on political engagement. This study reveals how alternative intellectual pursuit in a digitalised pile of debris, where form and style prioritise over substance, synchronising ideas and actions leads to the opposite of its progressive politics. Reviewing the aestheticisation and alienation of knowledge, we examine the recurrence of establishing authority and status and the implication of aesthetic hierarchies and performative politics on the net community’s capacity for meaningful political action. Ultimately, we argue that while the aestheticisation of knowledge acknowledged a broader post-millennial youth spiritual crisis, the net-philosophy community was marked by a depoliticisation of intellectual debates and the failure of political engagement in digital spaces.

Author Biographies

Zhongkai Qian, China Agricultural University

Zhongkai Qian is a Marxist researcher and student activist who contributes to post-Marxist theories and debates.

Ngai Pun, Lingnan University

Before joining Lingnan University as Chair Professor in 2021, Prof. PUN Ngai was a Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.
Pun Ngai received her Ph.D. from the University of London, SOAS, in 1998. She won the 2006 C. Wright Mills Award for her first book, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005). Made in China is widely used as required reading in major universities in America, Europe, and Asia. Together with Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers (co-authored with Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, 2016), these two texts have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Chinese. She is the sole author of Migrant Labor in Post-Socialist China (Polity Press, 2016). She is also the editor of seven volumes of books in both English and Chinese. Two of her Chinese books were also awarded the Hong Kong Book Prize in 2007 and 2011 as the top ten popular books widely read in Hong Kong and Mainland China. She was a Top 2 Scientist in the World ranked by Stanford University.

She has published extensively and cross-disciplinary in top-tier journals in Cultural Studies, China Studies, Labor Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology. Her articles appeared in Cultural Studies, Positions, Public Culture, Information, Communication and Society, New Media and Society, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Global Labor Studies, Work, Employment and Society, The China Quarterly, Modern China, and The China Journal, Cultural Anthropology, Dialectical Anthropology, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Sociological Review, Sociology, etc.