Against the background of the media commercialization reform since the 1990s in China and
drawing on the case of »X-Change« (2006-2019) Wei Dong investigates the affective
meaning-making mechanism in the multimodal text of Chinese reality TV. The focus lies on the
ways in which emotions are appropriated and disciplined by regimes of power and identity and
the ways in which affect - in this case primarily kuqing (bitter emotions) communicated by the
material and the body - have the potential to challenge or exceed existing relations of power
in the mediascape. Wei Dong shows how Chinese reality TV provides a historical and theoretical
opportunity for understanding the affective structures of contemporary China in the dynamic
process of fracture and integration.
