Disorienting Politics: Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (University of Michigan Press, 2024) mines twenty-first-century media artefacts to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Originating in the United States but circulating beyond national boundaries, these ‘Chimerican media’ co-create the figure of ‘rising China’ in American media life. By demonstrating the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state, the book extends a political imagination beyond the nation and into the space of transpacific media.

Louisa Schein: This book breaks ground in critiquing binary framings of China and the United States, and in advancing a concept of relationality that is too often eclipsed by prevailing ideological investments. You powerfully deconstruct the binary thinking that is frequently smuggled into critiques of Othering, arguing instead for conceptualising entanglements, however masked. You figure China and the Chinese state as having agency and challenge the overdrawn opposition of authoritarian versus democratic. Can you say more about what kind of dominant narratives or conventional thinking you hoped to impact with this book?

Fan Yang: Now that the United States has entered Donald Trump’s second presidential term, the binary framing of China’s authoritarianism and America’s democracy has arguably become more problematic than ever. Yet, for a long time, this binary formulation has been so naturalised and taken for granted in public discourses that its ideological work in shaping the political landscape (in the most recent US election, for example) is sometimes underacknowledged. In this book, I wanted to show that there are historically specific forces that inform the rhetorical pattern discernible in American media life—what I term the ‘racialisation of the Chinese state’. Calling out this under-recognised connection between race and geopolitics is important, as it highlights an affectively intensive dimension of ‘Sinophobia’—a combination of fear and hatred, akin to homophobia—that corresponds to China’s ‘rise’ in the twenty-first century.

I have made the case that this binary framing constrains our imagination of what politics can mean and become. I believe showing the entanglements of the two so-called superpowers through various media processes is one way to disrupt that binary and, in turn, open new ways to think about politics. The word ‘disorienting’ in my book’s title points to this desire to inspire political imaginations beyond the scale of the nation and into the realm of transpacific media—in this case, Chimerican media, or media artefacts that cross national borders to bring the entanglements of China and America into visibility.

LS: Are there aspects of your positionality or background that have shaped your goals for this project?

FY: This is an interesting question for me to reflect on. When I was finishing the book in 2020, I realised I had lived half my life in the United States, having moved here in 2000 to get my first graduate degree. The year 2020 was also the moment when the United States, following China, began implementing Covid-19 restrictions such as social distancing. Amid the rhetoric of the ‘China virus’ and the reality of anti-Asian and anti-Black racism—the latter manifested in the murder of George Floyd and ensuing massive protests in US cities and around the world—I felt an urgency to bring these conjuncturally unfolding events into a relational frame as I wrapped up the manuscript’s introduction and conclusion.

During this time, there were numerous online public discussions about the intensification of anti-Asian racism. Some were organised on platforms such as Clubhouse, a sound-based online platform for live discussions, by friends who share a similar trajectory to me—that is, born and raised in the People’s Republic of China during the Reform era before coming to the United States to pursue graduate studies and becoming academics. One thing that binds many of us who participated in these conversations is the fact that we all inhabit this space created by media that is best described as ‘Chimerica’: living in the United States physically while scrolling through the dominant Chinese and American social media platforms—often encountering competing narratives in Chinese and English at the same time. This is a very privileged diasporic subject position—one we might call Chimerican—compared with many immigrants from China in previous decades who endured much more hardship back home as well as in their new country. Our relative privilege was in part attributable to China’s post-Mao integration into the global capitalist system. My previous work, such as my first book, Faked in China (Indiana University Press, 2016), was an attempt to examine the contradictions that emerged in what we now call ‘Global China’ as the nation became a key part of the US-dominated world economy (via the globalising workings of the intellectual property rights regime, in that case).

I also consider myself fortunate to have found an interdisciplinary Cultural Studies PhD program with little connection to the paradigm of Area Studies (typically reinforced through degrees in East Asian Studies and history), even though I have always enjoyed learning from my peers who have come out of these traditions, especially historians of modern China. The Cultural Studies approach gives me a heightened sense of ‘in-betweenness’ when it comes to my scholarship and positionality, and it informs my attention to those media objects and economic processes that transcend national borders and challenge many of our nation-based assumptions about culture, politics, etcetera. Thorough Cultural Studies’ unpacking of those processes demands drawing on multiple disciplinary perspectives as well as consistent attunement to regimes of global capitalism.

This brings me back to the object of ‘China’ in contemporary America, which to me was inadequately addressed in many of those online discussions held during Covid. Common research questions asked in Cultural Studies are ‘Why this? Why now?’. In the Covid moment, the intensified anti-Asian racism extended the longstanding ‘yellow peril’ narratives about people of Asian descent, which are distinguishable from Sinophobia as a descriptor of the hatred of China, the nation. But the rhetorical strategies that Other the Chinese state require a different level of analytical precision even as it has been impossible to disassociate them from racism against Asian people. The aspiration to lend more insights into these historically specific linkages between anti-China rhetoric and anti-Asian racism stems from my ‘Chimerican’ positionality as a China-born immigrant becoming an Asian American, not just by way of naturalised citizenship but also by learning from the field of Asian American Studies, an activist formation born of the global 1960s.

LS: As I have suggested, this is a paradigm-breaking book. You push beyond transnational/transpacific studies to a theorisation of relational politics and you do so through media analysis. People will look to this book as modelling an interpretative method that is also a political intervention. Since you deploy a Cultural Studies analysis, interpreting the effects of cultural and media products on popular consciousness and geopolitics, can you talk about your method for choosing the cultural products and processes that you analysed? Do they form a set in some way or are they discrete examples? Were there other examples you would have liked to include if you had more space or if the project had continued into the present? Say more about the impacts on perception, policy, or dominant narratives that you would wish for as outcomes of your analysis of these products.

FY: The media and cultural products and processes I’ve chosen are all quite ‘popular’ in the sense that they are consumed and often liked by many people in the United States and beyond, whether it is the Hollywood blockbuster film The Martian (2015), various YouTube campaign ads (such as the ‘Chinese Professor’) that garner millions of views, the Netflix series House of Cards (2013–18) that gave birth to the practice of ‘binging’, or the short-lived show Firefly (2002), which went on to acquire a cult following and was turned into a movie. In Cultural Studies, there is a long tradition of taking seriously these media artefacts embraced by the masses, because they are simultaneously products of the cultural industries that involve intricate, often ideologically laden considerations for production, distribution, and consumption, and important means through which people—as producers, distributors, and consumers—make sense of everyday life at particular historical moments. My encounters with these products were at times serendipitous, not unlike what an anthropologist might experience in open-ended field research. I’d like to think that they came to the foreground during my participant observation in American media life as someone who has been paying attention to how the figure of ‘rising China’ manifests itself here. I was intrigued by their popularity and the myriad forces that shape their making and reception in ways that transcend national boundaries to bring Chimerica—or the entanglements of China and the United States—into visibility. To be sure, there were perhaps many others that did not show up on my radar and that deserve engaged analysis. But I hope readers will pay more attention to how I approach the objects than to what they are or are not.

One of the challenges for Cultural Studies scholars is the constant output of the cultural industries, hence the unfolding nature of the phenomena we examine. In my case, I probably would have liked to touch on another recent Chimerican media product, the Netflix production of the 3 Body Problem (2024), inspired by the work of the Hugo-winning Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin. My ‘Chimerican’ friends and I couldn’t help but compare the show with its Tencent counterpart (which has 30 episodes as opposed to the six made by Netflix). While some prefer the perceived loyalty to the original novel in the Chinese production but feel it drags on too long for commercial reasons, others have found the Netflix version unwatchable even if compact and concisely adapted. But the fact that there is such a transnational viewing public comparing the two speaks to the prevalence of a Chimerican subject position embodied by those watching and discussing both versions.

One striking moment in the Netflix show is the heightened, if also all-too-predictable, spectacle of Chinese state oppression during the Cultural Revolution. While it is of course historically relevant and important for moving the plot along, it helps form the most durable impression of the Chinese state in this version. Since the cast and scenes of the Netflix production are mostly removed from the Chinese context, I feel the audience is deprived of an opportunity to see the ‘ordinary Chinese everyday’ onscreen, of which you do get a glimpse in the Tencent version, when the main characters are not just chasing aliens but also eating noodles, cooking for kids, and working in high-tech science labs. I guess the naturalised way to represent the Chinese state on Netflix and what it leaves out would be something that I would have liked to talk about if the project had continued beyond the book.

LS: I really resonate with how contingent you make the notion of ‘rising China’, closely reading this trope as a media artefact with myriad discursive effects. I also appreciate how you read each case to tease out the often underacknowledged power disparities between China and the United States. This intervention is deftly executed especially in your chapter on language politics. I love that you point out both the historical and the ongoing linguistic hegemonies of English, and the reality of the United States ‘establishing the standards to which others must conform’. This is a theme you so productively developed in your first book about the coerciveness of the intellectual property rights regime. Talk more about the implications and consequences of those asymmetries that are masked by the discourse of parity and competition between China and the United States.

FY: There are perhaps two ways to look at this unevenness. One is explicit—that is, if you look at the sheer number of America-originated cultural products that have been popularised in China and compare that with the ‘counterflow’ of China-produced ones accessible in the United States, the quantitative difference is obvious and speaks to asymmetries in the use/effectivities of ‘soft power’, however much the Chinese state seeks to appropriate that for its own purpose. One consequence of this asymmetry is the extremely limited representation of China or Chinese people in American media life that reflects the complexity of the nation and its history. This perhaps explains why some of us, when watching the Olympics this past year, realised it was one of the rare moments when we in the United States had the opportunity to see so many Chinese people doing incredible things, such as getting perfect scores in diving, and even winning the praise of American commentators. Nonetheless, at the global scale, there is still no Chinese icon as famous as the US-born global star Taylor Swift, despite the popularity of athletes such as basketball player Yao Ming and Eileen Gu, the ‘Chimerican’ skier who won gold for China at the last Winter Olympics.

At the same time, there is a more implicit way in which an American ‘imaginary’ (a term I used in my first book)—whether it is through branding, soft power, or the American dream—helps shape how the Chinese state and Chinese people think about themselves and their futures. In this book, I’ve focused on how this imaginary shapes the politics of language, especially reflected in the aspiration on the part of the Chinese state to instrumentalise Chinese language learning to accrue soft power. Another recent example is the Chinese box office hit Nezha 2, released right after the Spring Festival this year. It is now the world’s highest-grossing animated film ever made, having surpassed the previous record-holder, Hollywood’s Inside Out 2 (2024). Many on Chinese social media have celebrated this media event as a triumph over Hollywood’s longstanding hegemony. But if you watch the film, it is hard to miss Hollywood’s stylistic influence, not to mention the numerous explicit visual and narrative references made to the United States, such as a temple that looks like the Pentagon, as some viewers have pointed out. The fact that a film so ostensibly exemplifying the surge of Chinese cultural nationalism is so frequently discussed in relation to America and Hollywood really demonstrates the workings of the American imaginary in shaping Chinese film culture.

Again, paying attention to this kind of asymmetry can help those of us studying China unveil what ‘Chimerica’ masks: Niall Ferguson’s original idea that China and America are simply ‘symbiotic’ in economic terms. As I demonstrate in the book, even as we acknowledge the undeniably rising status of China on the global stage, it remains important to address and analyse more closely the ongoing strivings of the United States in shaping globally hegemonic media and politics.

LS: You engage race and racialisation in several ways over the course of the book. How would you disaggregate race, racialisation, racism, racial capitalism, and the respective contexts to which you are applying them in your cases? How are these processes distinct from Othering, or Cold War–mongering? I am particularly interested in the notion of racialisation of the Chinese state and how you distinguish this from racialisation of China, the Chinese people, or all Asians, as they were conflated racially in the West, especially during Covid?

FY: My use of ‘racialisation of the Chinese state’ to describe a dominant rhetorical pattern in Chimerican media that depicts ‘rising China’ as an Other may seem counterintuitive at first. Race and racialisation have historically been applied to the categorisation and subjugation of humans. Even though the (Chinese) state is often embodied in the national leader(s) representing it, it is not a human entity. At the same time, the way in which ‘rising China’ is presented in American media life has led me to see it as a figure co-produced with Chimerican media. The embodiment of this figure, in turn, makes it possible for it to be dehumanised or imagined to behave in anti-human (rights), sub-human, or superhuman ways. In other words, this Othering of the Chinese state takes on characteristics that can be best analysed as a form of racialisation because it works to produce ‘rising China’ as simultaneously a subject and an object.

It is also my observation that it is common for the more educated and critically minded to decry Western stereotypical depictions of China as racist even when the object of ridicule is not the Chinese people per se but actions taken by or associated with the Chinese state. The ‘China virus’ comes to mind as a most glaring example, given that President Trump’s ‘Wuhan virus’ and ‘Kung Flu’ rhetoric has been widely criticised as racist. This use of race rests on an understanding of the Chinese state as an agent who is perceived to have created a virus or censored information. Using ‘the racialisation of the Chinese state’ thus lends more precision to the analysis. It is also timely, given that ‘rising China’ still figured prominently in the Trump campaign in the most recent US presidential election in 2024, as it did in 2016 and 2020.

My analytical use of race and racialisation also allows me to bring China/China Studies into a more productive dialogue with the well-developed critiques of racial capitalism, which I have learned and am still learning from my American Studies and Asian American Studies colleagues. One point of connection here concerns the role of the state, as the Othering of the Chinese state often performs important ideological work in shaping the imagination of what the government can do for the public good; think of the right’s Othering of socialism to reduce public spending on health care and education, for example, which has very real implications, especially for people of colour within the United States. Establishing connections of this kind defies the kind of ‘anti-relationality’ characteristic of racial capitalism, which corresponds to the idea that the dominant (racial) group often pits those in subordinate positions against one another (for instance, Asians versus Blacks) to undermine their potential for coalitional solidarity.

In other words, I believe mobilising the concepts of race and racialisation in the context of Chimerican media does a kind of political work that can be rendered legible if we recognise the embodied and material dimensions of Othering when it comes to the figure of the Chinese state. I also found it telling that the Democratic campaign in the most recent US election cycle so carefully downplayed China or even race more broadly. It was no accident that Tim Walz’s extensive China connections became such a talking point for the right. It shows the ideological operation of the Trump campaign to contrastively invoke China to delegitimise the role of the federal government in advancing a common good for the American public, and it is distinguishable from racism towards people of Asian descent.

LS: I am wondering about the implied unity of this process, especially given that you propose to apply it to the Chinese state. Before and during Black Lives Matter, critics turned to emphasising anti-Blackness to underscore that not all racialisations are equal. One of the—often explicit—subtexts here was the comparison with Asian Americans as ‘model minorities’ bringing out the ostensibly more positive valences encoded in their racialisation. This prompts me to wonder whether a comparative racialisation framing might be more appropriate to your case, making clear that the modes of racialisation of the Chinese state are not directly comparable with those of, say, American minorities? Perhaps this is what you invoke, indirectly, in the conclusion when you speak of ‘relational racism’?

FY: I appreciate the insights of comparative analysis when it comes to race and racialisation, especially when it is grounded in critiques of empire and imperialism while being attentive to the different and often transnational histories and experiences of various groups. When writing this book, I found myself drawn more to the framework of ‘relational racism’, which intersects with comparative racialisation but highlights the interconnectivity between racialisation processes in ostensibly discrete national contexts. This is in part because as a media and globalisation scholar, I am interested in how happenings in one place help shape events and processes elsewhere, and how media—referring here to the very material processes of making, circulating, and consuming media contents—play a role therein. This attention to interconnectivity doesn’t necessarily undermine the comparative approach, as it does not render the various experiences of racism and racialisation interchangeable. Instead, my approach draws attention to how different processes of racialisation implicate one another in different parts of the world.

In the conclusion of the book, I try to get at this by connecting the protests prompted by George Floyd’s murder—arguably attributable to the widespread use of mobile phones manufactured by Chinese workers (also known as ‘iSlaves’) to ‘bear witness while Black’ in the United States. Situating this in the broader understanding of racial capitalism allows us to bring to the foreground the otherwise obscured connections between seemingly incommensurable experiences—the environmental racism and police brutality that gave rise to the ‘I can’t breathe’ slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement and the air pollution in China deriving from its status as the world’s factory, for example—to pave the way towards a politics of relationality.

More broadly, a deeper engagement with the globalised conditions of political economy can help inform and sharpen our critiques of cultural phenomena that intersect with race and racialisation. This is yet another area in which interdisciplinary dialogues between Media/Cultural Studies (with close attention to the political economy of media), Asian Studies (with more focus on historical forces and geopolitical impacts), and Asian American Studies (with longstanding engagement with race and empire) can be most productive.

LS: Looking to the future, you talk, citing Couldry and Mejias, about ‘a kind of political convergence that has rendered “the orders of liberal democracies and authoritarian societies … increasingly indistinguishable,” given the continuous dispossession of human life under data colonialism’ (p. 122). I really value this focus on the blurring of democracy and autocracy and would welcome you walking us through how shifting data regimes bring this about. And how would you revisit this point given the years that have elapsed since you finished the manuscript?

FY: Paying closer attention to the connection between media and politics allows us to go beyond the ‘democracy versus autocracy’ binary. When House of Cards became the first binge-able show on Netflix in 2013, ‘big data’ was still an emerging practice in what is now known as platform capitalism, which extracts profit from user-generated data. Interestingly, the show, whose production was predicated on big data, not only has a prominent presence of ‘rising China’ in its narrative (emblematised by the figure of Xander Feng in Season 2); it also became hugely popular in China, generating a tonne of reviews on social media and in print journalism about American and Chinese politics. My analysis of this show’s production and reception demonstrates that media encompassing discourses, devices, and platforms are not just instruments for representation but together provide an environment in which politics takes place and are therefore impactful for real politics. Think about the frequency with which the cast and plotlines of Scandal (2012–18) have appeared in the most recent Democratic campaigns and how much Veep (2012–19) was invoked when Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate.

One may even think of the media buzz surrounding the Harris–Walz campaign while it briefly beat Trump at his own game with its many viral-worthy short videos (predominantly on the Chinese-owned platform TikTok) and taglines. I was fascinated by the frequent invocation of ‘energy’ as the internet witnessed impressive numbers of memes as well as large crowds at rallies, which in some ways again points to an environmental understanding of media. But in the algorithmically divided landscape of social media, it is unlikely that those at different ends of the political spectrum will encounter the narratives from the other side unless they make an effort to do so. And the election outcome perhaps speaks to this continuous division in the media environment.

Indeed, the post-election moment perhaps calls for even more reflection on the seeming political activation prompted by the Harris–Walz campaign, which in some ways recalls the protests against the extreme measures of the Covid lockdown in late-2022 China and the Chinese diaspora, discussed in the book’s conclusion. The role played by platform capitalists such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—if not the operation of data colonialism more broadly in the 2024 US election—also deserves more in-depth scrutiny. And it certainly remains to be seen whether the protectionist and isolationist policies proposed for a second Trump term continue to deploy the anti-relational logic of racial capitalism, especially in terms of the technological rivalry with China.

Interestingly, just as the escalating US–China trade war 2.0 has paradoxically intensified the felt presence of ‘rising China’ in American media life, the perhaps short-lived phenomena of American TikTokers flocking to the Chinese app RedNote (小红书, translatable as ‘Little Red Book’) at the onset of the now stalled TikTok ban in the United States earlier this year has offered another glimpse into the space created by Chimerican media. An estimated half a million users decided to talk to people in China directly, using artificial intelligence (AI) to translate their words into Chinese, stating that they willingly offered their data to China, expressing amazement at the level of consumption there, and even learning some Chinese swear words and recipes for everyday Chinese dishes along the way. Of course, what many of them saw was a very upper-middle-class version of China, with the Chinese users of RedNote primarily coming from first-tier cities with more cosmopolitan lifestyles and experiences. But transnational encounters of this kind no doubt bring into view the continuation of Chimerican entanglements even as geopolitical tensions persist. As a Chimerican media event, it also calls for more inquiries into China’s infrastructural—rather than representational—presence in the US media landscape, as shown in the widespread use of TikTok and RedNote but also WeChat, the ‘super app’ popular among domestic and diasporic Chinese. 

Since finishing the book, I’ve turned my attention to a new project on Shenzhen, which is at the centre of the intensifying US–China tech competition. The city is the birthplace of many of China’s tech companies—including Tencent, which owns WeChat—and is today a hub of innovations in AI, robotics, and drones. During my recent fieldwork, some of my interlocutors in Shenzhen said the US–China tech war took place in one street in Shenzhen, Yuehai Road, where Huawei, Tencent, DJI, and many other tech giants are headquartered. It is also an important stop featuring Chinese tech in the 2025 China tour of the highly popular Black American YouTuber Darren Watkins, jr (or ‘IShowSpeed’). I would be very interested in further analysing these dynamics through the lenses of media, place, and space in my future research, especially the ways in which media-makers in China negotiate globalisations from ‘above’ (that is, dictated from the Global North) as well as ‘below’ (in the Global South). ‘Chimerica’ will likely return in this story in one form or another, and it may extend beyond the geographic confines of the two nation-states and into places such as Africa, which stand to displace the bipolarity of Chimerica. Indeed, my close engagement with Chimerican media in Disorienting Politics is ultimately not meant to reify the existence of this bipolarity but rather to attend to what it privileges and excludes in shaping political imaginations.