Live streaming has reshaped social relations, cultural production, and daily life—especially in China, where the industry surpasses Western counterparts in scale, genre diversity, and revenue. This lecture examines labor relations in China’s entertainment live streaming sector, arguing that state authorities and private platforms jointly regulate desire for political control and profit.
Through Hao Wu’s People’s Republic of Desire (2018), it shows how physical and affective labor become emotional commodities circulating across platforms. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s “libidinal economy” and Thomas Lamarre’s “platformativity,” it argues that platforms fuse the political, economic, and psychic to sustain a “tittytainment” economy that masks exploitation.