Abstinence for the sake of modest success: a Chinese anti-masturbation group’s path to individualisation

ABSTRACT

Based on three-month online participant observation in “Jie Se Ba,” a male-dominated pornography abstinence forum with 6 million users, this article explores how low-status men in China recode the requirements of Chinese individualisation by using China’s traditional ethics in order to make individualisation accessible to themselves. I examine their aspirations as desiring selves, their means of self-mastery and the community culture they have established. Due to a lack of financial power, educational background, and cultural resources, members of this group disengage from mainstream desires for financial success and middle-class-style self-fashioning practices. Instead, by appropriating traditional Chinese sexual ethics, they set more modest family-centred aspirations and adopt jiese, or masturbation abstinence, as a means of practicing self-mastery to build their striving selves. In their efforts to integrate themselves into Chinese individualisation, they accept and express a set of conservative gender-sex and familial ethics. This article argues that such a situation is caused, at root, by a social mechanism within Chinese individualisation that restricts, excludes and stigmatises low-status groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Individualisation
• striving self
• self-mastery
• masculinity
• China
• pornography
• masturbation
• Jiese

Introduction

Having masturbated for ten years, now I’ve decided to abstain from it!

Masturbation has destroyed my life, now I want to reboot it!

I’m screwed because of my porn addiction.

Help! What should I do to recover from porn addiction?

These comments come from “Jie Se Ba” (Quitting Pornography Forum), a Chinese male-dominated online forum, which is well-known as China’s largest pornography abstinence forum. Somewhat similar to NoFap in the Western context, “Jie Se Ba” provides a self-help community for male internet users to share their struggles with pornography and masturbation, as well as their experiences of successful abstinence attempts. Followers of “Jie Se Ba” also make efforts to spread their beliefs offline. Sticker advertisements for “Jie Se Ba” can be found almost everywhere in public toilets in China, warning men to “stay away from pornography to have a healthy life.”

In this article, based on materials posted on “Jie Se Ba,” I explore the relationship between the discourse of “quitting masturbation” and the individualisation of Chinese low-status men. Users of “Jie Se Ba” see masturbation abstention as a form of self-mastery through which they shape their enterprising or “striving” selves. To justify this approach, they appropriate traditional (neo-)Confucian culture, its notion of sexual asceticism, and traditional Chinese medical knowledge to establish a set of folk theories about “jie se.”

In a cultural context where Chinese people are gradually becoming more sexually liberalised (Farrer 2014; Pan and Huang 2013; Zhang 2011), abstaining from masturbation appears to be an outdated practice that goes against the current trend. However, jiese or “quitting masturbation,” does not serve as an ultimate goal but only as an instrumental technique for men. Putting their faith in technologies of the self to quit masturbation, users of “Jie Se Ba” seek to escape from the mental morass of their failed lives and gain an opportunity to recode and pursue chenggong (success) and self-fulfilment—a type of individual desire that has been shaped by the process of individualisation in Chinese society since the early 1980s.

Through the case of “Jie Se Ba,” this article intends to explain the particular Chinese cultural context in which jiese practice makes sense for low-status men, and to reveal how this disparaged and seemingly anti-intellectual practice leads users of this online forum toward modest individualised aspirations and a conservative gender-sex perspective.

The striving self and pessimistic youth culture in China

In “Jie Se Ba,” jiese is commonly seen as a pathway from failure to success in life. Users frequently express their dissatisfaction and regret about their past lives and count on practicing masturbation abstention to change their life coordinates. This strong belief in individual responsibility for personal failure and success is a typical feature of individualisation in the sociological sense. In order to contextually understand this belief, it is necessary to review the formation of the ideal of the “striving self” (Yan 2012; 2013) during Chinese individualisation.

According to Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002), individualisation has become the basic structure of society in the second modernity in Western Europe. Motivated by the (albeit now fading) support of institutional dependences such as the welfare state, pensions and labour markets, individuals are disembedded from traditional and first-modernity social categories such as social class, family and community, and shaped as self-entrepreneurs to live for their own sake. Using the term “enterprising self” to describe this new type of subjectivity, Nikolas Rose indicates how selves are invented and endowed with autonomy and individual aspirations.

[The self] is to strive for personal fulfillment in its earthly life, it is to interpret its reality and destiny as a matter of individual responsibility, it is to find meaning in existence by shaping its life through acts of choice. (1996, 151)

In contrast, the individualisation of Chinese society has taken a different path. People in Mao’s China (1949–1976) were to an extent liberated from traditional ties of family and kinship. However, they were immediately re-embedded into socialist collectives and forced to participate in the socialist nation-building programme (Yan 2010). With the collapse of socialist ideals, self-serving personhood was encouraged after China’s reform and opening in 1979. At the same time, however, the party-state presided over a massive retreat from national welfare and a restructuring of state-owned enterprises, pushing individuals into a suddenly open labour market without recognising their citizenship rights or providing sufficient legal protections (Andreas 2019; Ong and Zhang 2008; Yan 2009). Yan refers to the self formed in this particular situation as the “striving self” (Yan 2012). Although it is also “a self-driven, calculating and determined subject who wants to better his or her life in accordance with individual plans” (Yan 2013, 282), this striving self is strictly limited to the economic dimension due to the party-state’s resolute non-acceptance of political democratisation. In the face of worsening social stratification, individuals are forced to deal with institutional inequalities and oppressions, such as official corruption, collusion and conspicuous consumption, through personal striving to climb the status ladder (Sun 2004; Wang 2003). The lack of social justice also gives rise to so-called success-ology (chenggong xue) in China’s educational and cultural market, whereby young people are disciplined by the party-state and entrepreneurs to have a positive mentality despite their disadvantaged position, and to fight hard to develop themselves and change their destiny (Connery 2019; Pun 2005). As a result, financial success has become not only an economic indicator, but also an ethical obligation that distinguishes successful and moral individuals from unsuccessful ones with “low quality” (suzhi di) (Liu 2020; Rofel 2007).

Although fighting for success has become a universal value in contemporary Chinese society, the situation is harsher for low-status individuals, who can only rely on their own diligence since they lack sufficient financial power and social relationships (guanxi) (Yan 2013). In the absence of sufficient state-sponsored social safeguards, many of them are left to face the highly uncertain labour market alone, making it more common for them to encounter serious setbacks. Given this, low-status youth may suffer from stunted individualisation and cannot see themselves as fully enterprising selves (Hanser 2001). Worse, since the new millennium China’s stratified class system has exacerbated their disadvantage. In the early reform era, self-made success stories could be found among groups such as small-scale individual businesspeople and educated professionals (Goodman and Zang 2008, 10–15). However, upward social mobility became much more difficult to access as economic power was gradually concentrated in the hands of elites including local government and CCP cadres in the late 1990s (Goodman 2014, 78–82). By the early 2010s, urban youth unemployment had become a serious social problem further intensified by China’s slowing economic growth (Lin and Sun 2010; Liu 2020).

Although many youths still strive for upward mobility in this situation, “the[ir] dominant goal of everyday life is to improve life chances instead of self-realisation through choice of lifestyles” (Yan 2010, 14). According to Hansen and Pang (2010), this is because they do not have many opportunities to win in educational and job competition. Moreover, after encountering inevitable personal failure, this group tends to accept the cruel process of individualisation and blame themselves, rather than lamenting the institutional social injustice and inequality, partly due to state-led depoliticisation which inhibits public discussion of these issues (Hansen 2013; Yan 2013). This situation sometimes gives rise to seemingly irrational means of coping with competitive pressures. Fengshu Liu (2020, 99) notes that young students even pray to spirits and anchor their hopes on supernatural powers when they prepare for exams that may offer them more upward mobility opportunities.

Due to the narrowing of moving-up channel, the ideal of the striving self has been constantly challenged in the post-Mao era. Vanessa Fong (2004) notes that the young generation in the early 2000s began to worry about credential inflation. This trend has intensified in recent years. In China’s “schooled society” where educational opportunities once provided crucial access to upward mobility (Liu 2020), this loss of faith in education’s utility may signal a failure of the individualisation process or at least the emergence of partial anti-individualisation. This tendency was first seen in Chinese youth culture. In 2012, diaosi (loser) emerged as a trending topic. Young internet users called themselves diaosi to express self-mockery and emphasise their low status in China’s rigidified class pyramid. Literally translated as “dickfuzz” (the hair on the male genitalia), the use of this term was characterised by a strong sense of self-stigmatisation (Szablewicz 2014). Yet paradoxically, the popularity of diaosi also spoke to internet users’ acceptance of state-led social class polarisation and the ethic of striving for financial success. Many internet users believed that unlike the rich, diaosi had the chance to live out inspiring rags-to-riches success stories (nixi) (Cao and Xu 2015). However, this belief in the power of striving has faded with further social stratification and economic downturn in post-2012 China. Terms such as foxi qingnian (Buddha-style youth) in 2017 and tangping (lying flat) in 2020 were created to articulate young people’s pessimistic attitude towards participating in the futureless rat race (neijuan), and their aspirations for a mediocre and less stressful lifestyle (Bu, Meng, and Zhang 2018; Zhang and Li 2023). Although the party-state harshly suppresses this type of pessimistic youth culture by promoting public’s “positive energy” (zheng nengliang), the wave of success-oriented individualisation may be experiencing at least a temporary pause in post-pandemic China, with youth unemployment reaching an astonishing 20.4 percent in 2023 (Chen and Wang 2020; on unemployment rate, see NBS 2023).

The above frameworks briefly illustrate the Chinese social contexts in which this research is situated. Confusingly, then, the online culture of jiese—which largely accepts Chinese success-ology—is emerging in a context where many other young individuals are withdrawing from the ideological idealisation of personal striving. To understand this particular online culture, we need to look at the specific background of jiese as a technology of the self.

Self-mastery and (neo-)Confucian asceticism

Technologies of the self, according to Michel Foucault, are a means

which permits individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality. (Foucault [1971] 1988, 18)

In the process of individualisation, self-mastery has become a crucial ethical imperative as it is believed to promote “the virtues of character—self-reliance, sobriety, independence, self-restraint, respectability, self-improvement,” that lead individuals to the ultimate life goal of maximising personal happiness and accomplishment (Rose 1996, 35).

In the Chinese context, technologies of the self are also viewed as a central means of shaping the selfhood, and an individual responsibility promoted by the authoritarian party-state (Lewis, Martin, and Sun 2016). However, due to the severe class stratification in China, exercising technologies of the self to fulfil grand aspirations tends to be unrealistic for low-status groups. As Yan (2012) notes, they instead rely on self-mastery primarily to meet the requirements of the labour market in order to secure their basic livelihoods in the China’s competitive society. In this situation, resignation to discipline, diligence and the hope for delayed gratification provide them with an imagined way out (Liu 2020; Willis 2020).

In addition, sexual asceticism is commonly used as a means of mastering masculine selfhood. According to Foucault (1985; 1986), in Greco-Roman culture, self-mastery of one’s sexuality was believed to enhance masculinity and thus male dominance. Conversely, the pleasure of masturbation was rather disparaged as it was believed to lead to effeminacy. In the Chinese context, since the Song dynasty (960–1279), the framing of sexual asceticism as a moral imperative began to spread among intellectual elites due to the emergence of neo-Confucianism (songminglixue, Pan 1998). The elite masculinity of junzi (the cultured man) emphasised intellectuals’ capability to assist the emperor to govern the country. Strict self-cultivation (xiushen) through obedience to the patriarchal family institution was then seen as a necessary means for budding intellectuals to transform themselves into eligible political elites. Excessive or deviant sexual desire, viewed as men’s overindulgence in private affairs and disobedience to their masculine family/public obligations, was thus disparaged by dynastic rulers (Song 2004, 88–104; also see Louie 2002). This norm was also imposed on the emperors themselves. Since the subjugation of the Western Zhou dynasty (in 771 BC) due to King You of Zhou’s indulgence in lust, “[official] historical narratives [began to argue] that free mingling between the sexes invariably brought about enervating decadence that could ruin a state” (Hinsch 2013, 25). Rulers’ obsession with spiritual asceticism reached its highest peak when the dynastic reign faced irreparable decline in the late Qing (from the mid-nineteenth century) due to internal revolts and external invasions. The Qing rulers introduced a massive prohibition on erotic literature and aimed for “the eradication of licentious thought” from the public (Pan 1998, 20).

The abovementioned sexual attitudes also exist in contemporary male ascetic cultures. Take, for example, NoFap, a successful anti-masturbation movement in the Western online context. Scholars suggest that male users seek to perform a type of “real” men through NoFap self-mastery. This ideal usually points to the users’ embrace of meritocratic heterosexuality (Taylor and Jackson 2018). Men claim that their failure to control their sexual energies creates a pathological, and therefore effeminate subjectivity (Hartmann 2021). Being anxious to rebuild masculinity and sexual attractiveness, they see masturbation abstention as a path that “allow[s] the ‘extraordinary’ to emerge from [one’s] ‘ordinary’ self” (Burnett 2022, 493). Given the chauvinistic social visions of NoFappers, NoFap culture is generally seen as indicative of an androcentric pursuit of self-fulfilment.

The situation is different in the modern-day Chinese context. Influenced by (neo-) Confucian masculine morality, Chinese male asceticism does not primarily emphasise aggressive, chauvinistic individual achievement, but rather a concern for men’s morality and productivity. For example, in traditional Chinese medicine, jing (semen) has two meanings: it refers not only to seminal fluid, but also to “the basic substance that forms and maintains the activities of life” (Farquhar 1999, 9). Therefore, masturbation raises an ethical crisis because it means that men waste their bodily essence for pleasure, harm their spirit, and thus disobey their obligation to carry on the family lineage and fail to practice filial piety. Despite the fact that the concern about losing jing is fading due to more liberal sexual attitudes, the moral concern remains in some low-status cultural contexts (Pan and Huang 2013; Zhang 2015). In light of this, the “quitting masturbation” movement in China does not have a grand “man up” implication (as in the NoFap example), but instead mainly reflects a pragmatic moral concern about the failure of masculine self-fashioning.

Through analysis of an online pornography abstinence forum, the remainder of this article discusses how low-status Chinese men recode the coordinates of their individualisation by practicing masturbation abstention as self-mastery. The dramatic reconfiguration of economic patterns, state ideology and social hierarchy in post-socialist China has spurred a public demand to adapt to the national marketised transformations by exercising technologies of the self. However, I argue that the notions of body maintenance, self-mastery, and self-optimisation should not be seen as introduced solely by Western modernisation. The fact that these, rather than other ideas, have taken root in China is due to their high congruence with the (neo-)Confucian idea of cultivating junzi and managing sexual desire. This context allows Chinese men to swiftly embrace jiese as a path to individualisation. However, for low-status men, their disadvantaged social (economic, cultural and educational) position limits them to accessing only cheap and disparaged technologies to practice self-mastery. Jiese thus becomes a crucial—perhaps indeed the only—means for them to engage with the ideological and ethical landscape of Chinese individualisation, showing us a little-appreciated attempt by ordinary people to envisage modest success.

Mapping “Jie Se Ba”: demographics and methods

“Jie Se Ba,” literally translated as “Quitting Pornography Forum” is a subforum of Baidu Tieba. Baidu Tieba itself is an online platform hosted by Chinese search engine company Baidu, which allows internet users to establish their own online interest communities, manage the communities through their own forum moderators, and post and comment on various interest content. To date, there are over 23 million subforums based on Baidu Tieba. “Jie Se Ba” is one of the top-50 Baidu Tieba subforums in terms of follower figures. As of June 2023, the forum has approximately 6.8 million registered users and over 91 million total posts (Baidu Tieba 2023).

In “Jie Se Ba,” the daily conversations in the posts are mainly related to masturbation and pornography. Users frequently write about the troubles brought by their long-term masturbation and pornography-browsing behaviour, and are determined to quit “porn addiction” and masturbation (He 2021). According to Hartmann’s research on NoFap, porn in this situation usually acts “a form of mediated sex” which is primarily masturbatory: “Porn can thus be understood as a masturbatory matter” (2021, 411).

So far, “Jie Se Ba” remains an under-researched and under-documented forum. My project can only draw on a very limited amount of ethnographic research directly about “Jie Se Ba” in order to approximate the demographics of its users. Due to this inadequacy, I also introduce further research and surveys on broader Chinese sexuality-related issues in order to propose my hypothesis about the social status of “Jie Se Ba” users. In their research on “Jie Se Ba,” both Yuechuan Cheng (2018) and Lang Zhou (2020) suggest that heterosexual young men and male adolescents make up the majority of the core members of “Jie Se Ba.” Research on “Jie Se Ba” typically involves participants between the ages of 19 and 36 (Zhou 2020; Zou, Zhang, and He 2023). Additionally, Peiliang He and colleagues (2017) surveyed approximately 1100 male adolescents who engaged in “Jie Se Ba,” 70 percent of whom reported excessive masturbation. These previous findings partially support the above speculation about age demographics.

With regard to the social status of the core users of “Jie Se Ba,” Zou, X. Zhang and He point out that there is “a wide range of educational backgrounds including high school, undergraduate, and graduate degrees” (2023, 388) among their research participants. However, they also note that the majority of their participants have only a middle or high school education and work in typical low-status urban service jobs (E.g. taxi drivers, cashiers, and waiters). This suggests that the core users of this forum are likely to belong to disadvantaged groups in terms of educational background, and are likely to be of economically low status in China’s credential society, where job requirements have been continuously rising due to credential inflation since the late 1990s (Fong 2004; Liu 2020).

My observation of the themes of users’ conversations in the forum tends to support this view. Active users commonly complain about their poor mental health and their struggles with low income, precarious employment, and school failure (especially high school), contending that excessive masturbation is the root cause of these problems. During my observation period, I tagged and archived 32 posts whose content included misogyny and men’s confessions about their masturbation addiction. In most of them, the authors emphasised not only their dissatisfaction with their physical status, but also their low economic and educational status (and sometimes their forced singlehood due to marriage squeeze) by repeatedly employing expressions such as “accomplishing nothing” (yishiwucheng) and “left stranded penniless” (shenwufenwen).

Given this, we can tentatively hypothesise that active members of “Jie Se Ba” share common anxieties of ordinary low-status men or teenage boys who lack basic sex education. Users’ attitudes towards masturbation provide further confirmation. According to Suiming Pan and Yinyin Huang (2013), sexual attitudes and social status have an interaction effect in China. Engaging freely in masturbation is a sign of belonging to a higher social class, whereas those who are less advantaged have more traditional views on the practice. “Jie Se Ba” users emphasise a conventional sexual belief that masturbation is an unfilial behaviour that brings shame to their families and themselves. This view is consistent with the sexual attitudes of low-status Chinese group.

Despite the above references, I acknowledge that the demographics of this study remain ambiguous. The term “low-status” in most cases refers to users’ descriptions of their feeling of being low-status rather than on empirical proof of their actual low educational and economic status. The latter cannot be thoroughly clarified solely based on participant observation aimed at a highly fluid anonymous forum. The age and regional differences of users also remain unknown. Therefore, I would prudently describe the demographics I hypothesise for “Jie Se Ba” as likely rather than proven.

In addition to the (likely) demographics of “Jie Se Ba” users, for broader context, it is necessary to briefly mention the common opinions about “Jie Se Ba” on the Chinese internet. In general, conventional sexual attitudes are not uncommon in the Chinese online environment. This is because, first, Chinese youth generally lack sex education during their compulsory education period (Pan and Huang 2013), and second, there is still no consensus on the effects of masturbation among Chinese youth groups, especially in a situation where soft porn is proliferating online (on Chinese online pornography and soft porn, see Jacobs 2012; Huang 2017). However, in this situation, “Jie Se Ba” is nevertheless still highly stigmatised and demonised by many online communities. One reason is that “Jie Se Ba” users cite many seemingly anti-intellectual discourses that draw on Chinese (neo-)Confucian abstinence ethics to construct a set of folk theory of “quitting pornography” (Pan 1998). Another factor is that the jiese movement has unsettlingly shown nationalistic and misogynistic tendencies. Between 2012 and 2017, the moderators of “Jie Se Ba” organised core users to repeatedly harass and occupy other online communities, particularly the Baidu Tieba subforums of fans of Japanese ACG culture, in the name of sharing information about “quitting pornography” and resisting foreign cultural invasion. Furthermore, in July 2020, a member of this group posted illegal sticker advertisements in a rural middle school in Henan Province, spreading information about Nv De Ban (courses on traditional women’s virtues): a training course which targets female adolescents and teaches so-called “women’s virtues” derived from traditional Chinese ethics (Cao 2020). These behaviours not only aroused the disgust of Baidu Tieba users but also raised the alarm of the state regulators due to “Jie Se Ba” users’ evident capability to mobilise. In light of this, “Jie Se Ba” is near-universally viewed as a culturally reactionary, pseudoscientific, and overly fanatical online community. This fact creates a certain cultural distinction between users of “Jie Se Ba” and “normal” online communities.¹

Surprisingly, despite its poor reputation, follower and daily active unit figures of “Jie Se Ba” illustrate that it still maintains considerable community activity while constantly attracting new members. This situation raises an unavoidable question. For the vast majority of Chinese young people who have received basic science education, this type of anti-intellectual subculture is inconsistent with their common sense about modern medical science. Why, then, does “Jie Se Ba” continue to play such a notable role and maintain strong vitality in the current Chinese online culture?

In order to explore the cultural logic of this jiese movement, this study uses digital ethnographic methods, including three months of participant observations from September to November 2020, to collect data by examining users’ online posts and comments. During this period, I temporarily became a follower of “Jie Se Ba” and observed other users’ conversations related to masturbation abstention for 40–60 min daily, 4–5 days a week. I first observed and recorded recurring topics in the forum, primarily to inductively focus my key themes, and subsequently tagged and archived posts that were highly relevant my focus. By the end of this phase, I had tagged 52 well-responded posts and archived the first 50 comments of each post in chronological order. I categorised these into four overlapping topics: the dissemination of jiese theory, the sharing of personal jiese experiences, (pan-)misogyny, and men’s “confession.” By coding these topics, I have no intention of mapping “Jie Se Ba” as a whole, but rather focus on examining the dynamic interaction between the discourse of Chinese individualisation and jiese folk theory. I ultimately consider jiese theory as a sign that some low-status groups are actively embracing and recoding China’s individualisation trend.²

Emotional distress and modest success in “Jie Se Ba”

When logging into “Jie Se Ba,” it is common to see a number of posts from users vowing to quit pornography or asking other users for advice on jiese issues on the forum’s homepage. Unlike the humorous, satirical but aspirational style of conversation on the NoFap forum (Taylor and Jackson 2018), posts in “Jie Se Ba” usually show a serious, censorious and self-critical sensibility. Users insist that porn, and by extension, masturbation addiction, has ruined their lives. Masturbation is often described as “self-pollution” and an “evil behaviour,” and users frequently bemoan how masturbation has seriously affected their daily lives and mental state. Referring to other members of “Jie Se Ba” as shixiong (senior abstainers), users sincerely expose their own personal history of masturbation and seek criticism, comfort and guidance. Many of them also post to record their abstinence challenge and invite community members to witness their arduous journey of rebooting their lives. In light of these discussions, it seems that pornography and masturbation have had serious negative effects on community members’ physical and mental health, making “quitting pornography” one of the few ways for them to recover from their autoerotic afflictions. However, by examining the motivations for members’ abstinence journeys in the posts, I find that users’ individual struggles in fact seem not directly connected to so-called “pornography/masturbation addiction.”

During my observations, I noticed that few users claimed that they had quit masturbation due to specific diagnosed sexual diseases or conditions. The majority of the time, community members attempted to abstain from masturbation for unrelated or even peculiar reasons. Among these, a major proportion of posts were associated with users’ complaints about their own physical fitness. Some users reported a lack of energy and feeling tired all day while suffering from insomnia at night, arguing that this was the result of excessive masturbation. Others discussed their physical imperfections, disliking their features such as “small stature” or “spotty face” and believing that abstinence could help to resolve these issues. Even bad temper, poor social skills, bad memory and failure in exams were among the reasons people practiced jiese.

Although these peculiar reasons for jiese are not entirely homogeneous, they can generally be seen as signs of “Jie Se Ba” users’ emotional distress caused by their anxiety about lacking self-mastery. As mentioned above, this anxiety was usually the result of Chinese success-oriented individualisation. Individuals perceived their lack of self-management as due not simply to their negative embodied experience, but to their self-identity as losers vis-a-vis the current social hierarchy. For example, many users shared their low-status experiences, such as being “unable to pay the money/loan back” and “being bullied by my supervisor at work,” and stressed the “achievement gap” in which they “repeatedly fail to climb out of the life’s abyss” while “other people demonstrate their talents and get ahead in every walk of life.” In general, their acceptance of China’s individualisation process retroactively produced their pessimistic feeling about their “stagnant” lives. Therefore, I argue that the pursuit of chenggong (success) is the deeper motivation for their obsession with jiese, behind their own surface claims.

“Being men, we must be successful” (zuowei nanren, women yiding yao chenggong) is an iconic slogan of “Jie Se Ba,” and many users directly align their abstinence challenges with their personal career efforts. In one post, a user complained that he could barely manage to practice abstinence due to his long-term unhealthy habits. However, he felt it was necessary to have a try, saying:

Almost all the young people in their late 20 s in the village have bought cars. But I have no money and no wife, and I live a failed life. I am even afraid to visit my relatives at New Year.

Some shixiong then gave him some entrepreneurial advice, commenting:

I think the best thing to do is to focus on your career if you have a job and not leave yourself too much free time.

Maybe you should look at how successful men spend their days.

Hard work and focused goals were generally seen as the best support for quitting masturbation in “Jie Se Ba.” One user wrote, “I focus on my career when faced with the difficulty of quitting pornography.” To highlight this relationship, members frequently posted explicit work or learning goals such as “contacting a gas station for consultation and cooperation,” “resolving to summarise ten annual reports of listed companies in my field per day” or “preparing for the upcoming postgraduate entrance examination in the next two months so I must quit masturbation now.”

As previous research (Zhou 2020; Zou, Zhang, and He 2023) has shown, a focus on a successful career path appears to be the driving force for “Jie Se Ba” users, where quitting pornography is seen as a self-disciplined commitment to personal development. However, I argue that the mainstream individualised ethic cannot be entirely embodied by this group, as their low-status lived experiences cannot match the dominant success-oriented aspirations in China (Rofel 2007).

Browsing through the posts on “Jie Se Ba,” we can see a number of miserable personal narratives. Some users go into great detail about their “failed lives” and tell the community what they think about themselves. Some claim to feel incompetent because of unemployment or dropping out of school; others engage in self-loathing due to a lack of confidence in the workplace and repeatedly express their confusion regarding their uncertain future. With China’s economic downturn and the severe credential inflation in recent years, it seems that young lower-middle-class men are also joining the ranks of “Jie Se Ba” to deal with their personal problems. Some undergraduate and master students on “Jie Se Ba” admit that they are “doing badly” (hunde buhao) and have to find some obscure measures to get their lives back on track.³

Admittedly, “Jie Se Ba” members do want to pursue a successful career; however, they are well aware that such an ambition is far removed from their own lives. Therefore, they are not preoccupied with having a successful career, nor do they deal with their problems through rigorous self-exploitation and self-optimisation. Instead, they attempt to deflect their aspirations for a successful career and self-fulfilment into less grand ones that are more within their reach. Examples of these include dealing with the mental affliction caused by their difficult situation, taking responsibility for their parents and themselves, and maintaining a harmonious family by caring for their family members. Users are convinced that these actions constitute the authentic purposes of their lives. For example, one user wrote:

At the moment, the people I am most ashamed for are my parents … I once thought that I could at least live an average life, even if I failed to achieve what my parents expected of me … But I am and will always be a wimp who causes them worry.

In response to this self-accusation, users encourage him to practice jiese rigorously in order to reboot his life, get married and fulfil his filial piety before his parents have become too elderly.

On this point, I argue that the users of “Jie Se Ba” as a group of low-status men, have evidently recoded and reshaped the mainstream process of Chinese individualisation, particularly its ethical obligation to pursue financial success. Their aspirations for a modest form of success that emphasises family responsibility can also be easily justified by the state’s call for family-based care and neo-familism in a context where the state is retreating from public childcare and pensions, revealing the complexity of state-led individualisation in China (Lewis, Martin, and Sun 2016; Yan 2018).

However, one question remains unanswered: why is it the practice of jiese specifically, that acts as the mediator between the current situation of “Jie Se Ba” users and their modest self-fulfilment? In order to understand this, it is necessary to take a look at the Chinese pornographic landscape.

Jiese practice in China’s pornographic context

In this section, I frame jiese practice as a means of mediating the conflict between the low-status lived reality of the group and the unattainable social requirements they face. Even after recoding the grandiosity of dominant aspirations into a more realistic, modest form, members of the group still need to find a workable (imagined) way to close the gap between their current situation and ordinary self-fulfilment.

Significantly, even for lower-middle-class men, it is not easy to find and adopt a viable path to modest self-fulfilment in the current social hierarchy. As noted above, a pessimistic youth culture has been created by young Chinese internet users to persuade themselves to abandon most grand aspirations and remain confined within their financially and culturally modest lives. Compared to many hopeless lower-middle-class youth, “Jie Se Ba” users do still attempt to achieve some humble goals, but have fewer options for their technologies of the self due to their limited financial prowess and educational background.

For instance, one user posted to share his life story when he vowed to jiese. Born in a rural area, he met inevitable failure in the nation’s competitive education system and decided to drop out of senior high school to work. However, due to fighting back against bullying by co-workers in a nightmare workplace, he left with a criminal record and continued to work as a low-end worker for the next decade. What happened to him can be seen as an epitome of the exclusion of low-status rural men in the process of Chinese institutional modernisation. Nevertheless, in the context of China’s depoliticised society and public sphere, this user ultimately understood his situation as karma caused by his own “evil behaviour” (eguo baoying), namely his failure to manage his autoeroticism, saying:

The damage caused by masturbation is really overwhelming. I started it when I was in middle school … [and so] I was not concentrating on my academic performance at all. Due to the bother of lust, I was obsessed with chasing girls and ended up dropping out of school. … I am now 26 years old and continue to suffer from the consequences of my evil behaviour: I have achieved nothing, I stand no chance of getting hitched, I have a wretched appearance and only a low level of education … I have wasted my youth on masturbation and gained bad karma! I really hope you can take my experience as a warning and stick to jiese no matter how hard it is!

Possible excessive masturbation may be only a negligible failure in the field of self-mastery and self-fashioning, but it may also be the most accessible means of self-mastery. It only requires individuals to build a strong will against their own libido, and does not require additional energy or an increase in the individual’s financial burden. Furthermore, “Jie Se Ba” users can simply try again if they fail their abstinence challenge (pojie). Its characteristics of low cost and low stakes may explain why jiese practice is ultimately chosen by users who envisage restarting their lives.

It should also be noted that the particular (traditional and modern) ethical landscape in China leads individuals toward spiritual asceticism. This factor is interwoven with the social status of “Jie Se Ba” users, leaving them with a sense of guilt for normal masturbation. In this light, the paradoxical situation of pornography in China, where it is rapidly spreading and widely consumed online but is simultaneously forbidden by the state, merits further analysis. I will tackle this by means of three key contextual clues.

First, it is relevant to note that the strict regulation of pornography in the post-Mao era has continued to sustain relatively repressed sexual attitudes stemming from the mainstreaming of neo-Confucianism. During the Cultural Revolution, sex and sexuality were rarely mentioned in public discussion. As Pan (2006) notes, this silence was not so much the result of direct state prohibition but rather the influence of a particular political impulse. Passion for the revolution repressed other everyday issues and thus private sexuality was seen only as a means of maintaining biological reproduction. This situation changed after the economic reform and opening-up in 1978. As a desire which is harmless to political stability, sex entertainment and pornography emerged as unofficial practices (Jacobs 2012; Pan et al. 2004; Rofel 2007). However, the state still chose to uphold conservatism on sexual issues due to concerns over the disintegration of morality and party-state authority. Between the late 1980s and the 2000s, the party-state frequently conducted anti-yellow campaigns (saohuang yundong) aimed at confiscating soft and hardcore pornographic products, which had been prohibited since 1949 (Sigley 2006). In the early 1990s, citizens who published pornographic magazines could even face the death penalty if the case involved large sums of profit (Li 2014). Although Pan and Huang (2013) note that the control of pornography in the 2000s was more of a publicity stunt, recent research demonstrates that rules governing online porn videos, live streaming, and sexually explicit online fiction were tightened after 2009 (Huang 2017; Jacobs 2020).

Second, despite the fact that pornography is strictly regulated by the party-state, China has paradoxically witnessed a rise in both soft and hardcore pornographic products since the 1980s. Anti-yellow campaigns are not particularly effective with Chinese youth (Li 2014; Pan et al. 2004). As the servers of most Chinese-language pornographic websites are located abroad, young people can easily browse them by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service to bypass the Great Firewall (GFW). According to Pan and Huang’s survey in 2009, more than half of youth in the 14–17 and 18–29 age groups have searched for online pornography (Pan and Huang 2013, 143–144). In addition, since the 2010s cloud services and livestreaming apps have become new vehicles for these groups to watch pornography (Huang 2017). Even on some major livestreaming platforms in China, soft porn is accepted as a means to draw traffic and generate profit (Wang 2020). In this situation, Internet users may find themselves seeing soft pornography even if they had no intention of doing so.

Users of “Jie Se Ba” are acutely aware of this online situation and actively seek ways to avoid seeing porn. In a post discussing the Baidu Tieba app, an author advised other users not to update to the latest version of the Tieba app on their mobile devices. He indicated that an earlier version of the app, which does not provide push notifications on the homepage, is more suitable for members of “Jie Se Ba” because they can use most of the features of Tieba without viewing “explicit pictures or videos.” These “explicit pictures or videos” refer to the sexually suggestive ones that frequently appear on Baidu Tieba’s homepage, as well as on the site’s recently introduced live streaming page where soft porn is widely disseminated. In this community where users embrace abstinence, soft porn is more broadly defined than in other forums. However, despite the Chinese government’s anti-yellow actions in 2020 and 2021, soft porn content is still widely available not only on illegal pop-up advertisements but also on major live websites, causing emotional distress to users of the group (Wu 2020; Yu 2021). In this situation, the fact that pornography is officially prohibited is frequently used to defend users’ jiese practice, particularly in light of the ongoing proliferation of pornographic products.

Finally, I note that in this paradoxical pornographic landscape, individuals’ social status strongly influences their acceptance of liberal sexual attitudes. Li Yinhe (2014), after studying clients in the sex trade, finds that there is a positive correlation between the use of sexual services and social class. Similarly, Pan and Huang (2013) point out that men from higher social classes often enjoy masturbation and browse pornographic websites (see also McMillan 2006). The situation is quite the opposite in the lower social class. This group generally considers sex to be dirty and shameful, regarding it as a sign of social disruption (Pan and Huang 2013, 65–80). In line with this view, “Jie Se Ba” users label sexual desire as evil (xieyin). They even invent a set of measures to halt the desire (duannian) in order to prevent themselves from having sexual fantasies. On this basis, many users claim that sexuality is only for carrying on the family lineage and warn newcomers not to indulge in sexual/autoerotic practices.

Illustrating this, one “Jie Se Ba” user stated that he disagreed with the widely held belief that “masturbation is harmless.” He contended:

[This claim] is from the perspective of a healthy man but ignores that masturbation could be highly addictive [if people frequently browse pornography]. Also, it only aims at the physical problem and ignores the mental distress caused by masturbation. In my view, it is difficult for us (“Jie Se Ba” users) to masturbate moderately, so it would be a better choice to quit masturbation entirely.

Users position themselves as low-status men who lack the ethical capacity to properly exercise self-control and maximise their individual happiness. Their sexual attitudes, in turn, reinforce their own humble self-identity in terms of social and moral status, and finally justify their peculiar technology of the self. As a senior user illustrates:

People who have talent and grand ambitions never pick up this evil habit. Knowing that we are more slow-witted than others, shouldn’t we use dumb methods and try harder [to achieve modest success]?

Appropriating the traditional, adapting to the modern

It also needs to be stressed that the relatively low social status of “Jie Se Ba” members limits the cultural resources they can appropriate and thus restricts their choice of technologies of the self, making jiese one of their few available means of self-mastery.

Andreas Reckwitz’s perspectives (2020) on the culturalised society may be helpful here. As he points out, in the late modern period, culture has become a type of resource, with self-fulfilment being a common goal particularly for the well-educated new middle classes. Gaining unique cultural experiences becomes a crucial means of shaping people’s singularities, giving their lives “genuine” and significant purpose. However, the accelerated appropriation of cultural resources by the middle class squeezes the cultural space of the low status. The latter possess only a small amount of cultural capital and are heavily influenced by negative culturalization, which means that they are rarely given opportunities to “culturalise their own lives in an ethical and aesthetic manner” and are forced to live a lifestyle that “lacks in quality, recognition and perspective” as a result of worsening class polarisation (252). In their muddling-through lives, self-discipline is simply a necessary means of “managing everyday life and to avoid falling any further down,” rather than a way to “rise through the ranks” (254) in the social system. Given this, they may be forced to take perverse measures in a helpless situation.

In line with Reckwitz’s perspective, “Jie Se Ba” users ultimately construct a set of jiese folk theories by appropriating Chinese folk knowledge such as jing (semen) theory from the traditional Chinese medical system, vulgar Buddhist and Taoist (actually neo-Confucian) asceticism, and a traditional emphasis on men’s role as breadwinners in Chinese families, in order to justify their jiese practice.

“Zheng Qi” (Righteous Energy) is an app which is popular among followers of “Jie Se Ba.” For them, it is a place where people can gain encouragement and self-development in terms of jiese knowledge. As well as a counting streak which evaluates users’ abstinence challenges, there are a considerable number of articles categorised into various sections, such as “compassionate animal protection” (cixin husheng), “Zen and wisdom” (chan yu zhihui), “ways of self-cultivation” (yangshengzhidao), “traditional culture” (chuantong wenhua) and “will training” (xiuxin chijie). These articles cover topics such as economic success stories, charitable acts, animal protection advocacy, the explanation of karmic rewards in popular Buddhism, the concept of abstinence and filial piety in traditional Chinese culture, as well as some traditional Chinese medical ideas. Senior users often advise newcomers to “Jie Se Ba” to first understand the ideas of jiese by reading the articles rather than blindly starting jiese practice. Some well-known “educational” posts in “Jie Se Ba” also emphasise this point. For example, when an “expert” in jiese wrote a post outlining “fifteen tips for jiese,” he specifically warned other users that it is useless for people to force themselves to quit masturbation by means of a strong will alone because they then cannot eradicate the “evil thoughts” (xienian) that will lead them to practice masturbation again. To do this, one must comprehend the root causes of why masturbation and pornography would lead people into a dangerous decline. On this point, a large number of posts uncoincidentally have recourse to the (neo-)Confucian notion of sexual asceticism. As one post enjoins other users:

Men who have ambitions will never indulge in sexual pleasure! Look back in history, whether in China or elsewhere, can you name a great man who is submitted to lust? Virtuous emperors in ancient China also put emphasis on the affairs of the empire.

In similar exhortations, familial responsibility is also highlighted as a crucial reason for jiese. Masturbation is framed as contrary to the ethics of becoming a decent man, since this behaviour wastes a man’s bodily essence and thus opposes the normal logic of family reproduction and filial piety. At worst, it can even be seen as killing (potential future generations) and must be remedied by practicing vegetarianism, liberating captive animals and doing good as Buddhism teaches.

If users still complain that they find it difficult to practice abstinence even after following this jiese ethic, shixiong in the forum resort to harsh moral judgements based on traditional Chinese familism to seriously admonish them, warning that constant masturbation means a failure of self-care and thus a betrayal of one’s parents, oneself and one’s future family. Sometimes, success stories are also be used as examples to demonstrate what users can achieve if they overcome their “demons,” and to inspire users, especially newcomers, to continue to discipline themselves strictly in this domain.

In this situation, the seemingly peculiar jiese folk theory demonstrates a subtle congruence with the concept of the “striving self,” showing how the modern trend towards individualisation and traditional Chinese ethics have jointly promoted “Jie Se Ba” members’ belief in the practice of abstinence as a path toward modestly successful masculine selfhood (Yan 2013). Although spiritual asceticism and traditional junzi masculinity are typically viewed as residues of traditional culture, they still have astonishing vitality and recognition, and are being integrated into contemporary contexts through the emerging cultural meaning-making practiced by conservative groups like “Jie Se Ba.” In this story, individualisation is a far more flexible and even chaotic process than one might expect, as this process typically requires the mediation of local cultural resources in order to take root as a localised form. Traditional Chinese ethics are appropriated by “Jie Se Ba” users in their folk theory not only due to the cultural squeeze of the middle classes, but also because, as a widespread residual cultural element, these ethics offer “Jie Se Ba” members a more convincing way of explaining their current low status and dealing with their emotional and ethical distress in a familiar manner within the rapidly changing Chinese society (on residual cultural elements, see Williams 1977).

This situation also allows jiese to be practiced as a unique technology of the self for members. Supported by traditional ethics, masturbation is not explained as a normal biological need, as it is seen by modern medicine, but as a disobedience to the traditional but still-valued norms of male behaviour. This motivates negative feelings of guilt, shame and regret in low-status men, and in turn justifies jiese as a necessary means of (imagining) halting their own decline, reversing their low status, and even achieving more in life.

Nevertheless, their practices have intensified the cultural distinction between the jiese group and other online communities, as well as their sense of being cultural, ethical and economic low-tier aliens in the online world. In “Jie Se Ba,” some users portray other internet users who make fun of jiese culture as born losers who are ignorant, arrogant, and lack persistence and patience. In this way, they actively distinguish themselves, as enlightened jiese-routers, from benighted non-jiese routers from outside, allowing their community culture to be established. Unfortunately, their positive belief in jiese is usually articulated to users’ aspirations to build traditional heterosexual patriarchal extended families under the ethical dominance of young men. Jiese practices are thus linked with broader gender-sex reactionary ideas in the realm of family ethics.

For example, apart from filial piety, “Jie Se Ba” users also keen on discussing their stereotype of women as sexual entrappers. Some users contend that “an ugly wife” can be a good choice since she will usually “have a decent job, be more submissive in the family and thus can help her man to do good deeds (xingshan),” and conversely have a conservative consensus on female beauty, saying that beautiful women are evil because they make men yield to their sexual desires and lose their bodily essence. Similar reactionary ideas have shaped a peculiar cultural combination in “Jie Se Ba” of traditional Chinese spiritual asceticism, unabashed sexual objectification, and male chauvinism that runs counter to the mainstream dynamics of sexual desire in post-Mao China. This combination, I propose, may be indicative of “Jie Se Ba” users’ low-status, conservative and yet pro-state cultural position.

Stated by Evette Zhang (2015), in the post-Mao era, the popular culture of yangsheng (nourishing life) in terms of sexuality—that is, the control of jing—is based on the state’s recognition of the legitimacy of individual desire. Therefore, it does not point to asceticism, but is rather a symbol of (men’s) capacity to pursue and control sexual enjoyment. Yangsheng in sex aims to guide individuals to satisfy their desires in moderation in “liberated” China. In contrast, “Jie Se Ba” users promote a pure form of asceticism. This idea highlights their excluded position in Chinese modernisation which has shaped the (sexually) “desiring subjects” (Rofel 2007). They carefully manage their sperm since they find that they have become disadvantaged not only in the trend toward sexual liberalisation, but also in the ongoing economic liberalisation of Chinese society. Therefore, jiese practice can also be seen as a kind of metaphor in which low-status men recall their traditional and reactionary gender roles. As the value of their older-style masculinity has diminished as a result of a liberalising society, one of the few ways they can protect their dignity and defend against fear of adapting to new cultural and sexual norms may be to blindly support state-led conservatism in the gender-sex domain.

Conclusion

In this article, contextualising “Jie Se Ba” users as a group of low-status Chinese men, I examine how this group both accepts and struggles to participate in the exclusive processes of Chinese individualisation. As previous research on “Jie Se Ba” has noted, users view the practice of self-mastery as the only way to change their muddling-through lives (Zou, Zhang, and He 2023). However, as Chinese individualisation is generally shaped by middle-class aspirations, lifestyles and work ethics, low-status men find it difficult to engage with this trend and therefore have to recode its requirements and approaches as attainable in terms of their own humbler economic and cultural social status (Rofel 2007; Zhang 2010). Jiese or quitting masturbation, becomes their preferred technology of the self to achieve a modest, ordinary form of success, which is to live a mundane life as a breadwinner in a traditional male-dominated family.

With regard to this trend, three key points need to be made in closing. First, I propose that recoding individualisation may prove to be a universal trend in China’s competitive and precarious society. Modest and conservative aspirations may also meet the Chinese party-state’s demands to maintain social stability. One reason is that such family-centred aspirations, although a result of precarious individualisation, uncoincidentally respond to the party-state’s call for family care in the context of the state’s withdrawal from childcare and increasingly serious elderly-support issues (Yan 2018). Another reason is that, unlike the recent anti-individualisation sentiments among Chinese youth, low-status men’s willingness to recode and engage in individualisation from the position of underdogs may help to maintain Chinese capital reproduction, which is largely based on the exploitation of the disadvantaged (Zhang 2022). Perhaps surprisingly, then, the jiese practice strongly supports current social reproduction.

Second, traditional Chinese ethics, although sometimes regarded as outdated and superstitious, actually play a crucial role in localising the individualisation trend and enabling jiese to become a contextual technology of the self. Sexual self-mastery is highly praised in (neo-)Confucianism as a means of fostering elite masculinity. Given this, “Jie Se Ba” members’ acceptance of such traditional knowledge helps them to construct a conservative understanding of the requirements of individualisation, in which male sexual abstinence is necessary for self-fashioning. It is only in this context that jiese, a seemingly peculiar technology of the self, can be practiced by individuals to envisage their life reboot, modest self-fulfilment, and reintegration into China’s individualisation. In this respect, jiese is a rational option for “Jie Se Ba” users. Individuals who cannot adapt to the individualisation trend tend to integrate new social requirements with traditional, conservative and modest practices. This active self-therapeutic practice demonstrates their “modernised literacy,” although their efforts to deal with their own contextual emotional distress are routinely stigmatised by popular media and ordinary internet users as pre-modern, illiterate, superstitious and thus unethical.

Finally, I have examined the jiese community culture in the specific current cultural and political landscape of China, noting that this reactionary phenomenon in the sex-gender field may further the paternalistic conservatism of mainstream Chinese politics. The resistance by “Jie Se Ba” users to the porn industry and their use of traditional Chinese ethics is not superficial, but deeply intertwined with state-led nationalism and gender hierarchy. The fact that the cultural resources they have activated are in line with state-led political-cultural conservatism may encourage this group to develop their gender-sex conservatism in the broader cultural and political realm, for example, seeking to justify jiese culture as an example of state-endorsed “positive energy” and grassroots patriotism (Zou, Zhang, and He 2023, 392).

Disciplined by Baidu Tieba due to its overt support of “women’s virtues” in 2020, “Jie Se Ba” today seems less controversial than before and tends to exercise stricter self-censorship to prevent its users from spreading extremely reactionary views inside and outside the forum. But a cultural distinction between “Jie Se Ba” and other communities still exists. Outside of “Jie Se Ba,” this forum is described as “the spiritual paradise of losers filled with the foolishness of underdogs” and “an online cult” spreading its ideology. In this situation, users often become besieged and entrenched in their seemingly unreasonable asceticism less because of a lack of sexual knowledge than because of their general low status. It is therefore urgent to draw attention to this structural exclusion and stigmatisation in the individualisation process. In effect, this type of social repression and distinction serves as a mechanism pushing low-status men toward China’s state-led reactionary politics.

Special terms

Table

jie se/Jie Se Ba	戒色/戒色吧
chenggong/chenggong xue	成功/成功学
suzhi di	素质低
guanxi	关系
diaosi	屌丝
nixi	逆袭
foxi qingnian	佛系青年
tangping	躺平
neijuan	内卷
zhengnengliang	正能量
songminglixue	宋明理学
junzi	君子
xiushen	修身
jing	精
Baidu Tieba	百度贴吧
yishiwucheng	一事无成
shenwufenwen	身无分文
Nv De Ban/nvde	女德班/女德
shixiong	师兄
zuowei nanren, women yiding yao chenggong	作为男人，我们一定要成功
hunde buhao	混得不好
eguo baoying	恶果报应
pojie	破戒
“saohuang” yundong	“扫黄”运动
xieyin	邪淫
duannian	断念
Zheng Qi	正气
cixin husheng	慈心护生
chan yu zhihui	禅与智慧
yangshengzhidao	养生之道
chuantong wenhua	传统文化
xiuxin chijie	修心持戒
xienian	邪念
xingshan	行善
yangsheng	养生
Zhihu	知乎
Pincong	品葱

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Fran Martin for her invaluable suggestions throughout the development of this article. The idea for this article originated from a writing group at Shanghai University. I am also thankful to Luo Xiaoming and Wu Zewei for their discussions with me and the insightful ideas they shared during the early writing phase.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chenglin Liang

Chenglin Liang is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on Chinese youth culture, cyber-nationalism, masculinities of low-status and lower-middle-class Chinese men, and the broader cultural production of Chinese online communities. His PhD project seeks to outline the pessimism and disenfranchised masculinities of lower-middle-class Chinese men over the past decade, and to explore their cultural and political influences.

Notes

1 During my observation and writing phase, I searched for the keyword “Jie Se (Ba)” on several Chinese online platforms, including “Zhihu,” the largest Q&A website in China, some sub-forums on Baidu Tieba, and “Pincong,” a forum mainly accessed by China’s firewall bypassers and overseas users. The majority of comments took unkindly to jiese theory and blamed it on insufficient sex education. Some hostile comments even portrayed “Jie Se Ba” as a cult.

2 Additionally, three key points relating to human research ethics should be noted. First, “Jie Se Ba,” as a subforum of “Baidu Tieba,” is an open-access public forum and does not require individuals to register an account in order to access to user-generated content. Content may thus be considered as in the public domain. All posts are uploaded under pseudonyms and there is no way for the reader to ascertain the real identities of the posters. Therefore, I have translated some posts from Chinese to English and quote them directly, without risk of posters’ identities being discoverable. Second, the data collection was completed when the author was studying at a Chinese university. As most Chinese academic institutions do not have a research ethics committee, no formal ethics approval was required for this research. However, since citing the translated open-access data may raises ethical concerns, I have further anonymised the data by deleting reference to post authors’ original pseudonyms. Third, posts on “Jie Se Ba” usually disappear quickly from the homepage and are subsequently unsearchable. This is largely due to regular refreshes of the forum by operators to handle high volume of posts. Most of the posts archived by the author and analysed in this article have since been completely deleted from “Baidu Tieba” servers. This situation strongly protects the authors of quoted posts from possible re-identification.

3 Unlike the low-status men in “Jie Se Ba,” this group of users may believe more in the dominant aspirations for financial success, as they have relatively greater chances of moving up into the urban cultural middle class, even in the face of serious unemployment problems in China. They temporarily practice jiese partly due to the panic caused by their lack of income sources and increasingly bleak future in the context of the Chinese recession. Nevertheless, they are not the majority of the core users of “Jie Se Ba,” nor are they the main research subjects of this study.