Dear Colleagues,

In November 2025, a long-form interpretation of Feng Xiaogang’s film Youth (芳华) went viral on Bilibili, amassing over 35 million views before being removed. The three-part commentary series by the prominent creator “聊会电影吧” used the film not merely as cinema, but as a discursive shell through which to articulate grievances about inequality, class immobility, and workplace exploitation. While presented in the genre of film analysis, its emotional core was unmistakably political: an indirect appeal to Mao-era egalitarian ideals and a critique of contemporary social stratification.

The rapid mobilisation surrounding Youth has spotlighted a phenomenon often described as Maozuo (Maoist Left) or the Internet Left—a digitally mediated revival of Maoist nostalgia, class discourse, and anti-elitist sentiment. Emerging across short-video platforms, comment cultures, and algorithmically assembled publics, this trend raises pressing questions about how cultural memory, socioeconomic frustration, and political imagination are being reconfigured in China’s current information ecosystem.

At stake is more than viral expression. The circulation, interpretation, and subsequent suppression of the Youth commentary reveal deeper tensions in China’s governance of ideology, public sentiment, and information security. They also show how digital platforms have become sites for new forms of grassroots left populism—forms that are neither liberal nor explicitly oppositional, but rooted in coded expressions of longing for equality, collective welfare, and moral clarity associated with Maoist ideals. Through metaphor, nostalgia, and cultural reinterpretation, users craft indirect yet resonant critiques of contemporary governance, signalling a shifting landscape of political affect and resistance in the digital age.

Dr. Chi Zhang

Guest Editor

Suggested Themes for the Special Issue

This special issue invites contributions that examine how Maoist nostalgia, left populism, and class discourse re-emerge through cultural artefacts, digital media, and governance structures in contemporary China. We welcome theoretically innovative and empirically grounded analyses on topics including, but not limited to:

1. The Revival of Maoist and Left Populism Online
   • Social grievances, economic precarity, and generational experiences driving digital Maoist sentiment
   • Left populism as a grammar of critique distinct from liberal democratic demands
   • New subjectivities: who produces and consumes Maoist-leaning content, and why

2. Affective Publics and the Emotional Politics of Inequality

• Class resentment, precarity, and collective longing as affective glue
• The emotional economy of egalitarian nostalgia in the digital age
• Virality as an ideological event: collective ecstasy as political communication

3. Cultural Memory as Political Resource

• How Youth(芳华), Cultural Revolution narratives, and PLA-era aesthetics serve as discursive anchors for contemporary critique
• Cultural artefacts—films, novels, memes, nostalgia scripts—as triggers for political mobilisation
• The reimagining of Mao-era ideals through public performance and digital storytelling

4. Performative Nostalgia and Digital Re-enactment

• Nostalgia as performance rather than historical reflection
• Digital re-enactments of revolutionary ethics, aesthetics, and hierarchy
• The politics of representing the Mao era in algorithmically mediated spaces

5. Platform Governance, Censorship, and Ideological Boundaries

• How platforms and regulators respond to content that critiques inequality yet draws legitimacy from the socialist past
• The governance of nostalgia: differential treatment of Maoist vs. liberal critiques
• Algorithmic rituals and the management of politically sensitive memory

6. Coded Language, Transcript, and Encrypted Resistance

• Maoist vocabulary as a safe idiom for expressing class anger
• Film interpretation and cultural commentary as proxies for discussing inequality and injustice
• Affective encryption: emotional cues and indirect signalling among like-minded publics

7. Comparative and Theoretical Perspectives

• Connections between China’s Left-populist revival and global waves of nostalgic populism and anti-elite sentiment
• Theoretical contributions to understanding coded resistance, ideological nostalgia, or affective governance
• New frameworks for analysing the intersection of memory, affect, and digital authoritarianism

Manuscripts should be submitted online at porcelainpublishing.com/by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. 

The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 0 GBP. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English.