“A Simple Life”: Detachment, Non-Work, and Accountable Refusal on Chinese Social Media

Presentation by Lisa Richaud (Université libre de Bruxelles, Paris IAS) as part of a workshop organised by Siyu Tang (University of Oxford) and Theodore Stapleton (University of Cambridge).

Closed to the public.

Presentation

Scholarship on the refusal of work in contemporary China has largely revolved around questions of resistance, while offering broad overviews of discursive repertoires and emerging lifestyles. Relying on digital ethnography of the “Non-Working Club” on Chinese social media Douban, this article takes a different tack, asking how “withdrawing” as lived experience becomes narratable, which is to simultaneously ask how the detached, present-reclaiming subject becomes accountable, to herself, to others.

To address these questions, the fellow focus on the public self-narration – written and visual – of “non-working days” by one singular Douban female user spanning five years. Starting with the author’s own evocation of “willful living” (renxing er huo), she shows how the “willful subject” (Ahmed 2014) accounts and makes up for the refusal of work through an aesthetics of thrift and (un)productive rhythms. If the process blurs the lines between willfulness and willing, the accounts simultaneously serves as a site to cultivate detachment from conventional ideas of “the good life” despite ambivalence, reaffirming unproductive existence as enviable.

Paper presentation in closed workshop “Suspended Futures: Strategies for Reclaiming the Present in Contemporary China”.

Terms of participation

The workshop, in English and which is closed to the public, will take place at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. 

Organizers

Organized by Siyu Tang (Oxford University) and Theodore Stapleton (Cambridge University).