Managing compassion: The affective dynamics of rural representation in the Chinese reality TV show X-Change

Abstract

Unlike Western reality shows that are often criticized as devaluing and delegitimizing lower-class people, the Chinese reality show X-Change claims to recruit social attention, compassion, and support for rural people, especially children who have been left behind. This article examines this claim by conducting a multimodal interpretative analysis of the show, focusing on the employment of narrative, discursive and audiovisual strategies that register compassion in the representations of rural identities, bodies, and rural-urban encounters. I argue that the show offers a nuanced emotional repertoire of compassion, which simultaneously empowers and disempowers rural people by integrating a humanitarian tender-hearted sympathy with a socialist positive empathy, and a neoliberal philanthropist pity. In so doing, I reveal the ways in which reality television is embroiled in the intricate interplay between state ideology, sociocultural psychology, and neoliberal logic in post-socialist China.