New Popular Literature and Art in China

Meanings, Debates, and Practices

In 2025, xin dazhong wenyi (新大众文艺) emerged as a buzzword in China’s literary and cultural field, circulating with remarkable speed across newspapers, social media platforms, conference programs, and policy documents. Like many terms that gain traction through state endorsement, its meaning remains slippery: it is difficult to disentangle whether the concept names an actually existing transformation in cultural life, a retrospective ideological capture of emergent practices, or a largely top-down attempt to promote a specific cultural vision. The fact that under Xi Jinping’s “New Era” virtually everything arrives already branded as new and, indeed also the history and meaning of the term dazhong itself, which can be variously translated as “mass” or “popular”, further compound this ambiguity. Yet, even a cursory view of recent success stories in China‘s cultural scene, ranging from Hu Anyan’s gig economy essays to Ma Boyong’s “little man” historical fiction, show that the term can also not be hastily dismissed as mere state rhetoric. Moreover, the affective and material infrastructures of cultural production have been reconfigured by new media environments, particularly through the explosive growth of internet literature, micro-dramas, short-form video, livestreaming, and influencer-driven content. These forms have generated new modes of attachment, participation, and visibility, often grounded in grassroots practices and user-based circulation rather than elite institutions and cultural authority. It is noteworthy, however, that these bottom-up phenomena have been folded into official cultural planning: state documents and five-year plans now explicitly call for the flourishing of a “new mass literature and art,” highlighting especially the role of digital media. These official discourses emphasize less the Mao-era injunction that literature must “serve the people” and center instead on an affectively appealing promise: the displacement of the singular cultural hero by the idea that everyone is a creator. This promise is not merely rhetorical, but rather functions as something that might be productively theorized, drawing on Lauren Berlant, as an infrastructure of optimism, encouraging identification, productivity, and expressive labor while remaining compatible with ideological governance.

While taking official discourses as its point of departure, this workshop approaches the idea of new mass or popular culture not exclusively as a state-defined category but as a site of ongoing negotiations. It asks how “the popular” is being produced and contested across different media forms and institutional settings in contemporary China. In doing so, we want to also attend to the cracks and frictions in contemporary popular culture, taking into account uneven access to the “means of representation” and unpacking how subversive cultural practices coexist with, and are sometimes absorbed by top-down promotion and ideological capture. Our goal is to develop a critical lens on the cultural logic of popularity in China today: not as a simple expression of mass will, but as an affective and political formation shaped by regulation, aspiration, and the ongoing struggle over what kinds of collective life can be imagined and sustained.

The workshop is organized by Shi Bingbing (Margarete von Wrangell-Fellow) and Jessica Imbach (PI of the ERC-funded SINOFANTASY project) and funded by the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of the state of Baden-Württemberg and the European Union.