‘You May Return to the Past, but No One’s There Anymore’: Chinese Dreamcore, Affective Remediation, and Chinese Youth’s Participatory Nostalgia

This article examines an emergent internet aesthetic circulating on Chinese social media platforms known as ‘Chinese dreamcore’. illuminating how nostalgia emerges as a collective feeling among Chinese youth whose lives have been shaped by profound social transformations since the turn of the millennium. Through a semiotic analysis of urban spaces, everyday artefacts, and obsolete media technologies featured in social-media posts and videos, the study reveals how Chinese dreamcore constructs liminal and haunted spaces that evoke collective memories and layered emotional experiences among Chinese youth beleaguered by temporal disorientation. Our analysis of user comments further reveals a complex structure of feeling associated with this nostalgic aesthetic, characterised by concomitant senses of loss, anxiety, and disaffection in response to China’s accelerated social change and compressed modernity. The findings thus elucidate how Chinese youth articulate their emotional subjectivities through engagement with mediated memories. To conceptualise such dynamics, we develop the notion of affective remediation, with a view to offering a contextualised understanding of youth cultures and internet aesthetics in contemporary China. In doing so, this study advances existing research at the intersection of cultural memory, public emotion, and digital media.