On Friday, 17 January 2020, the Thammasat University Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology will present a special lecture, Virtually Girlfriends: Emergent Femininity and the Women Who Buy Virtual Loving Services in China. The event will be held in the fourth floor meeting room of the TU Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology Faculty of Social Work Building on Tha Prachan campus.

The speaker will be Associate Professor Chris K. K. Tan of the Institute of Anthropology, Nanjing University, China. Students and other members of the TU community are welcome to attend.

Nanjing University, known as Nanda, is a major public university. Its official motto has been translated into English as Sincerity with Aspiration, Perseverance and Integrity, or Be Honest and Intelligent, Study Hard and Act Sincerely.

Nanjing University accepts many students from overseas. In 2014, it admitted about 3600 overseas students, about 40% from Asia, 40% from Europe and North America, and 20% from other regions. As the university website states,

• Nanjing University is one of the top tier universities in China, and also one of the first to enroll international students in China. Tens of thousands of international students from over 100 countries have studied here, including prominent international alumni in politics, business, academia and other fields.
• In the area of Chinese language and culture, Nanjing University serves as the training site for such diverse organizations as the Chinese Department of UN, the Council on International Education Exchange (CIEE), the Chinese Teaching Association of New York Area and the American National Chinese Flagship Program. Nanjing University is also designated as a national test site for the Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK), the Test of Practical Chinese (C. Test) and the TCFL Capability Test. HSK test participants here keep a high ranking record.
• In other academic areas, Nanjing University also receives talented students either through joint programs such as the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies and Sino-German Institute for Legal Studies or through individual application… With its first-rate faculty, high-quality instruction, rich variety of courses, wide-range majors and abundant research opportunities, Nanjing University warmly welcomes students and scholars from all over the world.

The Thammasat University Library owns a book published by Nanjing University Press, Journeying through the Bible by Siu May Kuo. It is a study of New Testament criticism and interpretation through Bible stories. The book is shelved in the General Stacks of the Pridi Banomyong Library.

Associate Professor Chris K. K. Tan describes his research on the university website:

I am an anthropologist of new media, gender and sexuality. I currently study how new media technologies such as the cell phone influence the ways people in China create, buy, and sell online affects and intimacies.

In March 2019, Associate Professor Tan published a coauthored article featuring parallel research to the subject of his lecture on 17 January, in Information, Communication & Society (iCS), which transcends cultural and geographical boundaries as it explores a diverse range of issues relating to the development and application of information and communications technologies (ICTs).

Associate Professor Tan’s abstract reads as follows:

As China continues to neoliberalize in the new millennium, the Internet and other social media also enable new subjects of affective labor to emerge. Since 2014, young men increasingly hawk their services as xuni lianren (virtual lovers) on popular Chinese websites. These men explicitly state that while they neither sell sex nor meet their clients in person, they behave otherwise as actual boyfriends would: over chatting apps, they talk to clients for leisure, and provide relief from frustrations accumulated from family, school, and work. Using fieldwork data gathered from male virtual lovers, we argue that that their sale of immaterial affective labor substantiates the idea of the social factory by demonstrating that social relations are indeed transforming (albeit incompletely) into relations of production.

The social factory is a concept developed by the Italian Italian philosopher and politician Mario Tronti was one of the first theorists to develop the term in his text Factory and Society (1962).

Tronti’s books may be borrowed by TU students from the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service. The TU Library also owns other books which discuss the work of Mario Tronti, who argued that technical and social processes of capitalist society have become connected so that the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society.

Basing his research on the concepts of Mario Tronti, Associate Professor Tan observes that in China,

for a whole month, customers can hire virtual lovers to talk to them while performing character roles that range from innocent girl-next-door and abusive stepmother, to xiao xianrou (‘cute young thing’) boys and tyrannical bosses. For instance, a client may get her lover to play the role of the caring next-door-uncle who greets her in the morning, inquires whether she has eaten lunch, bid her goodnight before she sleeps, while listening the rest of the day to the woes she has to suffer in school.

Virtual lovers can be either male or female. Usually less than 25 years old, they typically cater to customers of the opposite sex. Neither side of this care-for-money transaction meets the other in person. Depending on the lover’s comfort level, s/he communicates with the customer via text and/or voice messages and, at best, video chats on WeChat, QQ, and other smart phone instant messaging apps. Lovers all work part-time; they are either university students, or hold entry-level white-collared jobs in real life. Having no basic pay, virtual lovers earn an average of 1,000 RMB (145 USD) a month. This remuneration, an income too small for anyone to live on by itself, is derived entirely from selling their affects to their customers.

Young women dominate the virtual lover business on both the buyers’ and sellers’ sides; men with the qualities that women desire can easily find girlfriends, and do not have to tax themselves emotionally as virtual boyfriends.

The article concludes:

Beginning in the first half of 2014, young Chinese consumers can purchase inexpensive care and concern from equally young virtual lovers. Virtual loving enables customers to hone their dating skills, and lovers can earn enough to cover their daily expenses despite the heavy cut that the shops often take from them. The fact that virtual loving exists as a legitimate business indicates that affective labor has shed enough of its stigma for youths to use it to earn money. Virtual loving challenges the materialism inherent in the Marxist labor theory of value… Now that it has been proven that one can make money from selling affects, other similar labor forms will undoubtedly emerge in the future. What we see here then are the beginnings of a new, online ‘participatory culture’ in China, where consumers no longer passively get manipulated, but actively seek their own rewards as producers in their own right (Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). Given China’s highly restricted media environment, however, virtual loving and other forms of commodified affective labor hold great promise to refine the theories of participatory culture originally formulated in the more liberal West.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)