Managing compassion: The affective dynamics of rural representation in the Chinese reality TV show X-Change

Introduction

Since the commercial success of two primetime series – Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Survivor – in 2000, reality TV has become a global “phenomenon” that has generated considerable popular and political fervor over the past two decades (Kraidy and Sender 2011; Murray and Ouellette 2009). Compared to other televisual genres, a distinctive feature of reality TV is that it presents classed identities and foregrounds classed relationships (Wood and Skeggs 2011). This has been most observable in the subgenre of makeover shows, which often hold a “middle-class/bourgeois gaze” (Lyle 2008) and publicly embarrass, humiliate, or shame lower social classes through camera angles, editing, and comments (Eriksson 2016; Hirdman, 2016; Reifová 2021; Reifová and Hájek 2021). In this (problematic) production mode of reality TV, the complexity of class divisions is reduced to an issue of psychology and morality, an intervention that cultivates neoliberal subjectivity and disseminates neoliberal values such as consumption, competition, and self-transformation. Some scholars thus see reality TV as a form of neoliberal governmentality and a technology of the self, as the structural inequalities and injustices of society are magically erased in its representations (Ouellette and Hay 2008; Redden 2018).

However, such explorations are highly contextual to Western, in particular American and British television, leaving open questions concerning classed identities, emotions, neoliberalism, and reality TV in other media landscapes. Building on research of reality TV in non-Western contexts (e.g., Kraidy 2010), this article investigates reality TV in the context of post-socialist China, focusing on the mechanism of compassion in X-Change (2006–2019), an urban-rural life-exchange show produced by Hunan satellite TV (HSTV). While X-Change partially shares the neoliberal socioeconomic backdrop of Western reality shows, the show is qualitatively different from them, most notably in its claim to garner social attention, compassion, and support for rural people. As producers Li Hongli and Liu Qian explained, they seek to expose the “secret [bottom] society around us” by offering the opportunity to “walk in another’s shoes,” and “more crucially, [hoping] to draw social attention towards children who have been left behind in rural areas” (Li 2006; Liu quoted from Zhao 2006).

Yet, a closer examination of X-Change is necessary to ascertain whether and how it opens up an alternative affective engagement of compassion in its narratives and images. As some studies have noted, the production of Chinese reality programs involves complex negotiations between various forces, including state power, market logic, and popular aesthetics (e.g., Zeng and Sparks 2019), which could cause the emotional expressions and constructions of meaning in the text to diverge from what the producers had anticipated. To address this, I first offer a brief background of the Chinese hukou system and China’s agricultural policy, which has led to urban-rural differentiation and rural poverty. Then, I locate X-Change in the dynamic relationship between Chinese media and the rural, and introduce the show itself. Next, drawing on relational affect theory and applying multimodal analysis, I examine the expressions and registers of compassion in both the representational and affective dimensions of X-Change.

My argument suggests that the show constructs a nuanced repertoire of compassion by creating three “affective lines of flight” (Grossberg 1992, 82) that articulate a tender-hearted and visceral sympathy with a vulnerable rural child, a positive empathy and inspiration with an optimistic rural agency, and a neoliberal philanthropist pity with a grateful rural receiver, respectively. In doing so, the show empowers rural lower-class people by offering them visibility and highlighting their agency, but it simultaneously disempowers them by detaching rural suffering from unequal social structures, and addressing this suffering through a neoliberal philanthropy that ultimately serves the moral superiority of the urban middle class. Eventually, such a repertoire of compassion closely resembles what Chouliaraki (2010) refers to as the “post-humanitarian” style of appealing, which engages the audience into highly personalized experience and action, rather than involving them in the construction of a collectivistic ethical community envisioned by socialist ideology.

The hukou System, Peasants, and Left-Behind Children in China

Since the Chinese government established the household registration system (hukou) in the 1950s, the population has been divided into two categories: rural hukou and urban hukou (Liu 2005). As a result, being a peasant in China is not just a profession for subsistence, but also an institutionalized class identity. With the goal to boost industrialization and urbanization, the hukou confined them to rural areas, only allowed them to engage in collective agricultural production, and squeezed the value of their labor through price scissors. Therefore, the hukou system is not simply a way to provide population statistics, but more importantly, to directly control population mobility, and to facilitate the separate allocation of rights and resources between urban and rural areas (Chan 2009). The benefits of the social welfare system, which include basic necessities like food and clothing, and employment, education, labor insurance, medical care, pension, etc., are not available to rural hukou while they are guaranteed by a birthright to urban hukou (Yang and Cai 2000). As a result, the gap between rural and urban areas has widened rapidly, forming an urban-rural dual structure, in which peasants are excluded from the modernization process and fall into long-term poverty and backwardness (Zhao 2002).

Since the market-oriented reforms introduced in the 1990s, China has adopted a relatively flexible hukou system, providing rural populations with limited freedom of movement (Zhang 2010). This has encouraged a significant number of peasants to put down their hoes in search of employment in cities, which has historically created “the laborer tide” (mingong chao) (Shao and Bo 2013). However, working in the cities would not guarantee them stable employment, incomes, and welfare; their difficult-to-change rural hukou status still leads to discrimination against them as “semi-men” with only “partial citizenship” (Fang 2012). Most children of peasant workers have to be left behind in the countryside, for their parents cannot afford to raise them in expensive urban settings. Some social surveys have shown that, due to poverty, lack of parental care, and even the need to take care of the elderly in turn, rural left-behind children often display more mature, sensible, diligent and independent traits than their peers (Lv 2005); however, for the same reasons, they are also more susceptible to psychological and behavioral issues, such as loneliness, unsociability, study weariness, and even criminal impulses (Zhou 2005).

It was not until the 2000s that CPC began to put the resolution of the serious “three rural problems” (san nong wenti) of “agriculture, rural society and the peasantry” on its agenda (cf. Wen 2009). At the 16th National Congress of the CPC in 2002, the state put forward a new strategic model of balancing urban and rural economic and social development. Later these thoughts were further clarified as the “scientific concept of development.” In 2005, the state decided to abolish agriculture taxes and launched a major new program for the construction of a new socialist countryside (jianshe shehuizhuyi xin nongcun) that claimed to include the countryside in the historical strategy of the socialist modernization (Chinese Government 2006). From 2004 to 2022, nineteen “No. 1 Central Documents” were issued consecutively by the CPC, which position the resolution of “three rural problems” as the “top priority” of Chinese modernization (Guangming 2022).

In line with this strategic shift, the past fifteen years have witnessed a gradual change from a time of urban bias within governmental strategy to one characterized by “industry nurturing agriculture and cities supporting the countryside,” and the “harmonious economic development” of both urban and rural areas (Li and Hu 2015). However, longstanding and deeply ingrained urban-rural structural injustice and ensuing rural poverty have not been erased, nor can they be easily done away with by a new policy in a short term; the suffering and vulnerability of rural people in the ongoing process of social stratification persists.

Rural Discourse in Chinese Media

Media scholars have noted that the urban-rural dual structure is both represented and driven by the Chinese mass media system (He 2018; Li 2004). Since the 1980s, China’s mass media system has also undergone an unprecedented transformation, shifting from “command mouthpieces” to advertisement-based and profit-driven media enterprises (Zhao 2008). Taking the lead, HSTV initiated a strategic transformation in pursuing a high-end “new mainstream” (xin zhuliu, Wu 2014), positioning the more economically powerful urban middle class as its target audience, despite the fact that Hunan province is a major agricultural province with a predominantly rural population in the midwest of China.

Consequently, rural people and the countryside are either ignored or misrepresented by Chinese mass media (cf. Zhu 2019). In contrast to the modern, civilized, and advanced city, the rural is often constructed as backward, closed, and abandoned. This was particularly evident in the 1990s when mingong chao emerged intensively. Lv and Zhao (2009) found that confrontation and conflict between the city and the countryside became the dominant media narrative, in which peasant workers are primarily associated with bloody events such as mining disasters, crimes, homicides, etc. Meanwhile, rural left-behind children are also covered negatively in the media, with emphasis placed on their personal problems and difficulties. This coverage pattern, according to Chen et al. (2012), aids in drawing the public’s attention to them, but it also contributes to the stigmatization of left-behind children as “problem children” and even a destabilizing force in society.

However, the urban centrism of Chinese media has not gone unchallenged. The unique aspect of China’s media reform is that state control predominates (Zhao 2004). In accordance with the strategic shift of rural policies, CPC issued new guidelines, commonly known as the “three closenesses” (san tiejin), for propaganda work, emphasizing that mass media should be close to reality, close to life and close to the masses, with the goal of building a “harmonious society” (Huang 2004). As a practical act, the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), one of the highest decision-making institutions of Chinese media, has issued a set of specific regulations for the production, content, and distribution of mass media since 2002. Accordingly, reality TV producers are required to limit “entertaining” portions while “including more grassroots people from all walks of life to participate in the production of reality shows,” and “making ordinary people the leading characters of the show” (cited in Xu 2015).

The socialist propaganda framework of the Party-state has offered opportunities for marginalized peasants and the lower classes of society to reveal themselves extensively in mediated spheres. However, media researchers found that their images are still otherized, not in an antagonistic and violent sense as in the 1990s, but as glorified, sublimed, even mystified (Zeng 2011). Through the lens of the urban middle class, rural life is projected as a kind of pre-modern cultural resource with a high aesthetic that can oppose the drawbacks of the modern city. Criticized by Cody (2019) as an elite form of ruralism, this sub-genre of rural idyll in essence projects the yearning for a good life by the anxious urban middle class, and is problematic because it fails to truly engage rural people.

X-Change: A Brief Introduction to the Show

X-Change, made by HSTV in 2006, is a Chinese reality show where two children swap identities for a limited time and live with each other’s family. Although several changes to the production team have led to changes in its content and style, what endures throughout its broadcast history and is best known to viewers is the meta-narrative that tells a life-exchange story between troubled teenagers from urban privileged families and left-behind children from remote rural areas. The global formats Wife Swap and Trading Spouses served as inspiration for the life-exchange concept, but due to potential issues with Chinese traditional family norms, HSTV substituted switching children (ages 8–18) for spouses.

There are two clear groups identifiable in the narrative: first, the rural participants, including rural left-behind children, their parents, relatives and neighbors; second, the urban participants, including urban children, their parents, and their social network. The two groups also represent the contrasting personalities, values, and social relationships that are negotiated in the show: rural, peasant and working class, conservative, other-oriented values that are formed through blood and geographical ties; versus urban, middle, and upper class, aggressive and self-oriented values formed through business ties.

Each season consists of two to seven distinct exchange stories or series, each with a separate title and airing in two to ten episodes. In a standardized and repeated pattern, each story tells of a transformational journey that begins with an urban and a rural child preparing to leave their home. After a long trek to the other’s home, the exchange officially start. Predictably, entering a totally new environment and facing the tasks set by the program will elicit intense emotional responses and interpersonal disputes. It is in the ongoing collision of bodies, ideas, and lifestyles that the participants from two different worlds gradually develop intimacy, mutual understanding and recognition, all the while pushing the journey of transformation toward a happy ending. The concluding reunion scenes show them returning to their respective families with gains: urban children learn to appreciate life after receiving an education in rural suffering, while rural children garner donations from cities to improve their material circumstances.

Analyzing Compassion in and by Reality TV

Compassion is broadly understood as a positive, connecting, and altruistic emotion that arises in witnessing another’s suffering (Berlant 2004). In modern civilized society, compassion is often accompanied by humanitarian actions to alleviate the suffering of others. For this reason, compassion forms the “moral foundation of social justice,” without which the moral sensibility required to pursue justice cannot operate (Williams 2008, 8). However, compassion is not an automatic and unavoidable ethic that motivates individuals to do good. In certain situations, compassion can easily deteriorate into a narcissistic sense of self-worth or superiority gained through asserting one’s morality, reinforcing rather than erasing the distinctions between “us” and “them.”

As many studies have emphasized, the media plays a significant role in representing and evoking compassion. For example, Höijer (2004) views the media as an intermediate link between politics, humanitarian organizations, and the audience, which can foster collective global compassion by publicizing to the distant suffering. However, the media may also fuel Western-centrism with the employment of domestication strategies that focus on issues that only concern themselves, rather than genuinely caring about distant others (Joye 2015). The media may even encourage the voyeuristic position of a witness that appreciates the spectacular aesthetic of distant suffering (Chouliaraki 2008). Furthermore, “compassion fatigue” and the rejection of compassion may result from excessive, repetitive, and sensational media representations (Maier 2015).

The complexity of compassion is evident not only in its inconsistent expressions and social effects, but also in the variety of approaches to researching compassion . According to Käpylä and Kennedy (2014), when exploring the roots of compassion in philosophy and psychology, one can differentiate between an affective and a cognitive approach, with the former understanding compassion as an innate biological and hard-wired embodied response, while the latter interprets compassion as an informed emotional response related to the cognitive and rational processes. Drawing on relational affect theory (Burkitt 2014; von Scheve 2018), this article theorizes compassion as “an embodied yet socially informed” emotional repertoire that emerges in the relational dynamic between a sufferer and a non-sufferer, during which the latter is mobilized to recognize and co-suffering with the former (Käpylä and Kennedy 2014, 266). By theorizing compassion as inherently affective and cognitive, this approach makes it possible to conduct a fundamentally psychosocial analysis of compassion, as well as to incorporate a careful detection of connected emotions, most notably empathy, sympathy, and pity, by locating them along a continuum, while acknowledging their differences in articulation with social signification.

Given this, I understand the media as both a producer and a context for the relational dynamic of compassion. According to Grossberg (1992, 82), “there are affective lines of articulation and affective lines of flight—through social struggles over its structure.” Through a repetitive and continuous organization of the verbal and non-verbal emotional forms of expression and behavior, the media creates “affective lines,” wherein social norms and values about emotions are negotiated and its distinctive emotional repertoire is formed. In this regard, I am interested in how the “affective lines of flight” of compassion are embodied and articulated in the Chinese reality show X-Change, and what kind of emotional repertoire the show creates for the audience.

To do so, I qualitatively analyzed X-Change through a three-stage process. In the first stage all seasons of X-Change were viewed, with the aim to identify the narrative momentum and temporal structure of the show. The second stage involved the selection of a few key episodes for close reading, as they were representative and “information-rich” in demonstrating the setting, structure and staging of compassion. The first five stories of Season 7 were analyzed. The final stage consisted of identifying illustrative scenes and narrative moments infused with signs of compassion, to which I applied a “multimodal” analysis that concentrated on both textual and audiovisual aspects (Kress and van Leeuwen 2020). Specifically, the textual aspect focused on narratives, conversations, and comments of the voice-over that makes compassionate expressions and descriptions; the audiovisual aspect focused on the affective tonalities that register a compassionate stance, including mise-en-scène, camera work, lighting, editing, music, and sound effects.

Narratives on Rural Suffering and Left-Behind Children

Each story of X-Change begins with a short interview and montage sequence introducing rural children as protagonists, in which their incredibly poor family status and living conditions are presented directly to the audience. In The Call of Maternal Love (Season 7 Series 2), the opening scenes depict not only the hard lives and broken families of two rural protagonists – Jiang Xin and Wang Honglin – but also other similar situations of left-behind children in the Baxian village, a small, impoverished, and isolated village in Shanxi province, central China. When the director asks, “Whose parents were injured because of working outside?” most of them raise their hands, and the narrative then emphasizes the fact that the majority of the adults in the village were working outside in hazardous mines for a pittance, and were disabled or even dead . The rural children take turns in speaking: “my dad can only lie on the bed, his leg is broken,” “my uncle was blown to death in the coal mine,” “my dad is dead, he was buried [in the mine]” (Episode 1, 00:12:50–00:13:45).

While narrations of the tragedies caused by mining disasters are already sympathetically moving, the close-up shots that highlight the innocent but sorrowful faces of those left-behind children work as affect in process that serve to further strengthen a compassionate appeal to the audience. The material visibility of their tears and their chapped and reddened skin captured by the camera at once communicate to and move audiences, inviting them to pay attention to and empathize with the “lived” feelings of those rural children. It can thus be claimed that the program creates an “affective line of flight” that articulates a visceral, humanitarian, and tender-hearted emotional response with the suffering of rural families and, in particular, with that of the vulnerable and innocent rural children.

Furthermore, the program frequently contrasts urban with rural scenes, making the poverty and hardships of rural living—such as the risks of unregulated coal mining, the misery of migrant workers, and the ensuing plight of families in remote villages—more conspicuous and heart-rending. These narrative strategies obviously cater to the “three closeness” principles and the requirements of the NRTA, but are also employed by the program as soft-core “money shots” to boost ratings, that is, as televised moments of emotional upheaval based on confession, heartache, or joy rather than conflict and anger (the basis for the “hard-core” money shot) (Grindstaff 2002, 26). In this approach, the emotional performances of rural children, including their bodies, labor, and identities, are exploited by the program to foster a sense of spectatorial closeness and intimacy, thereby contributing to the “affective economy” that “creates a ratings economy out of an affective one” (Dominguez 2015, 157). As will be discussed below, such an economy may allow rural left-behind children to gain attention and donations, but it can hardly afford them initiative; the benefits they can gain from exposure to the program are far less than those obtained by urban participants and the program itself.

Despite X-Change offering a repertoire that expresses compassion for rural suffering, this repertoire is premised on erasing or hiding the unequal social structures of urban-rural differentiation, which is achieved through subsequent interpretations of the causes of rural suffering. By referring to Dhoest et al.’s (2021) explanatory models of poverty, I identified two explanatory models of rural poverty and suffering in the show: the natural accident model and the individual accident model. First, the local natural and geographical environment is held responsible for economic poverty, including steep terrain that makes the village inaccessible, or low crop yields due to extreme climate, water scarcity, and poor land quality. For example, Baxian village is described as poor because: “It is located in a remote place and has a small amount of arable land,” “There was no other way out but to mine,” and “the children are naturally left behind.”

Second, it is implied that the individual’s bad luck is to blame for his suffering. When the program introduces Wang Honglin’s uncle, we as the audience follow the camera to enter his living room and listen to his former experience of being paralyzed due to a mining accident. While it is previously mentioned that mine disasters are by no means rare, the program refers to his experience as merely “an unfortunate accident that happened 16 years ago,” and shifts the narrative focus to how he actively manages his life after accepting this accident as an established fact. This narrative approach thus gives Wang and other rural people a voice and implies the agency in the face of misfortune, but without providing any contextualized information about this “misfortune,” such as, their disadvantageous position within the unequal hukou system and social power relations.

Through a combination of the two explanatory models, rural poverty and suffering are implied to be natural, inescapable, and predestined; whether attributable to harsh natural conditions or the ruthlessness of fate, the unchangeable nature of the causes further implies that poverty is a fixed condition that rural individuals must face and cope with within an immutable and unmentionable social structure. In the meantime, the program employs a highly personalized visual strategy, inviting the audience to immerse in the details of rural participants and their difficult lives. For example, during the narration of Wang Honglin uncle’s experience, accompanied by a slow paced and low-pitched background music, an extreme close-up shot focuses on the tears in the corner of his eyes, then a bust shot that shows Wang’s grandma’s dejected expression as she sits aside, and an additional extreme close-up shot that shows her rough and cracked hands while wiping tears. These audiovisual signs clearly express compassion with rural people and encourage audiences to empathize with them, yet the explanatory discourses are more likely to appeal to the audience’s sympathy for specific individuals who are highlighted by the program, instead of identifying them as a collective and recognizing their shared sufferings within a structural framework.

Managing Compassion Through Positive Energy

Although X-Change delicately avoids bringing up the social structure when representing the physical and psychological trauma of peasants and rural residents, it still runs the risk of amplifying negative feelings associated with suffering, which could give rise to “inharmonious voices” that are deemed politically incorrect and may transform into resentment, grudges, and even a mobilizing force (Chen and Wang 2020). I contend that X-Change crafted an optimistic and hopeful narrative that aligns with the officially promoted ideological discourse of “positive energy,” thereby effectively dissolving the negative disruptive potentials that might result from appealing to compassion.

For example, in Far Away (Season 7 Series 5), after a voiceover introduced the distressing circumstances of Yang Jie with a rather sympathetic tone, noting that the twelve year old left-behind girl not only undertakes heavy housework and farm work everyday, but also has to take care of her young siblings, a piece of brisk and upbeat music began to play, indicating the shift in the mood of the program. The lyrics are presented with subtitles while the camera follows Yang’s figure cutting wood in the forest: “Can this little power / climb hills / can this little heart / carry much pain / can these little hands / hold any dreams” (Episode 1, 00:13:50). The song serves as a medium of positive energy that generates an emotional yet remarkably upbeat and hopeful tone by praising the strength of “the little,” giving the scene an aesthetic feeling of laboring. In this way, the rural protagonist is no longer represented as an unfortunate and powerless victim who accepts reality in a passive manner, but rather as an active and empowered actor who strives to cope with hardship and regain control of life with a positive attitude.

Since “positive energy” has vigorously been promoted by the CPC as an official ideological strategy in 2012 (Yang and Tang 2018), it is no coincidence that we can find its performance in HSTV-produced programs. Rooted in both traditional “positive propaganda” (zhengmian xuanchuan) (Li 2013) and the more recent turn to “soft propaganda” (Huang 2015) in the “thought work” of the CPC, the “positive energy” discourse demonstrates its great effectiveness in articulating the dominant state ideology with positive, uplifting, and hopeful feelings and thoughts in Chinese ordinary life and mass culture. In contrast to previous hard and heavy-handed propaganda, “positive energy” thereby enables the “hegemonic intervention” of the CPC aimed at subtly and flexibly changing individual attitudes, social values, and political ideologies, so as to more effectively accomplish the aim of dissolving social hostility and providing legitimacy for the regime (Yang and Tang 2018).

With the “symbolic resource” (Van Dijk 2001) of positive energy, X-Change creates a positive yet virtual affective articulation between rural classes’ endurance for “ku” (bitterness, suffering, hardship) and future happiness, thereby attributing to them emotions of hope and self-determination while simultaneously affirming their preexisting socio-political positions. For example, in Fly Against The Wind (Season 7 Series 3), when introducing the poor family situation of the rural protagonist He Zhijun, the program edited an interview with his mother, in which she smiled at the camera and talked about her feelings: “I feel hard, but for my sons it should be hard, I hope they are all promising in the future.” The subsequent montage shows her toiling in the fields and praises this widowed rural woman as “the most beautiful mom in the world.” With similar scenes repeated in different stories of X-Change, the program appreciates the rural qualities of forbearance, sacrifice, and dedication as desirable virtues, and advocates that the most crucial thing in facing suffering is to maintain a positive attitude and hope for happiness. In so doing, the rural suffering and misery are glossed over, and positive energy even transfigures them into a necessary pathway to a better future.

In this sense, by emphasizing agency, subjectivity and dignity of rural individuals, “positive energy” prevents the negative effects, such as fatigue and apathy, that can come from constantly exposing the audience to scenes of suffering and misery. Meanwhile, it may delegitimize moral claims for public actions on rural suffering, by only inviting recognition while preemptively labeling any request for reflection, criticism and modification of the status quo as anomalous “negative energies” that should be removed. To put it differently, “positive energy” works ideologically not only by subsuming and maximizing individual’s positive emotions, but also by pre-empting negative emotions, thoughts, and actions that potentially endanger the political system. There is, however, a tendency of deviating from the narrative of compassion, as the representation of an optimistic rural agency has implicitly expressed a recognition of (unequal) social structures, and is more likely to invite the audience to be spiritually moved, inspired, and elevated, rather than eliciting their moral sensibility to social justice.

Tears of Compassion

By visualizing compassionate encounters after the exchange journey officially began, X-Change offers a template on how a compassionate relationship can be established in practice, simultaneously educating viewers on normal and ideal versions of cross-class communication. Urban “parents” often show compassionate reactions to the rural protagonists, embodied in gestures such as stroking their shoulders for comfort, showing empathetic looks, weeping, and hugging. For example, in Fly Against The Wind (Season 7 Series 3), tears filled the eyes of Zhao Di’s father when he first met the rural boy. He quickly turned his head to avoid the camera and wiped the tears away . Then he spoke to the camera, with a cracked voice: “I didn’t expect them to be so poor, his clothes were so thin. . . my eyes flowed down unconsciously when I saw his clothes” (Episode 1, 00:28:45). The involuntary tears, unnatural bodily displays, and pained speech in front of the camera signify authenticity on a material and quasi-tangible level, thereby enticing audiences to identify his emotional reactions as genuine rather than staged.

Subsequently, the emotional trigger is further verified by the helpful behaviors displayed by urban participants, but primarily found in consumer actions such as giving a complete make-over, indulging in a sumptuous meal and going shopping, attending extracurricular interest classes, etc. —a typical process of transforming rural children according to the tastes and lifestyles of the urban middle class. This unilateral model of transformation reached its pinnacle at the end of the exchange journey: in a school playground or classroom, urban teachers and students donated to rural children, who in turn bowed to them and expressed gratitude to them one by one. Through positive images portraying gratitude of the rural for the generosity of the urban, and the latter’s respective sympathy towards the former, the show creates a “sympathetic equilibrium,” a representational logic based on an emotional relationship between the rural protagonist as receiver and the urban audience as potential benefactor (Chouliaraki 2010, 112).

In this way, X-Change draws on a promise of empowerment for the urban audiences in its repertoire of compassion, which is to alleviate rural suffering by articulating individualized practices of volunteerism and philanthropy. Furthermore, the show extends this solution to routine public welfare—HSTV cooperated with China Youth Development Foundation to establish the Hope Project—Hunan Satellite TV “Happy Growth Foundation” in June 2007 to provide financial support for rural schools. The ways in which the show integrates charities further verifies the authenticity of its appeal to compassion, and encourages viewers to become active donors who can make a difference in the lives of rural children in a practical way.

However, without an equal and integrated perspective on the city and the countryside, its (material) assistance is nothing more than condescending generosity and pity from the commanding city, while distributing obligations of gratitude to rural receivers. Itt is not just about showing caring and compassionate attitudes, but a matter of who occupies “the position of judgement” (Skeggs 2005, 977) to have a say in expressing attitudes and determining value. Paradoxically, images of rural protagonists fill up the screen yet their position is being marginalized and displayed as the object of generosity of the urban middle class. Therefore, while it appears that the boundary between urban and rural identities has been broken by the emotional media of cries and hugs from both sides in reunion scenes, such emotional reconciliation is actually connected to “an attitude of fundamental difference and asymmetry” (Käpylä and Kennedy 2014, 264), which orients compassion towards a narcissistic self-contentment obtained by asserting the moral superiority of the urban middle class.

Conclusion

The decades-long hukou system and unequal resource allocation in China have led to a stark urban-rural division, making rural people vulnerable classes at the “bottom” of society. Recently, there has been a shift in national strategy to address rural poverty and problems. This article analyzed how the reality show X-Change promotes a compassion connection between the urban middle class and rural lower class, as an active response to changing urban-rural patterns. By focusing on the representation of rural protagonists, attributions of rural suffering, and scenes of affective encounters between urban and rural protagonists, I show how X-Change offers a rather nuanced emotional repertoire of compassion for the audience that includes three different affective lines of articulation that legitimize certain feelings, expressions, agency, and actions while excluding others.

Firstly, the show displays a tender-hearted and visceral compassion repertoire towards rural suffering, especially rural left-behind children, rendering them vulnerable and innocent victims who inhabit an unfortunate destiny. The accompanying explanatory models and the personalized visual representation have focused compassion on specific rural individuals highlighted by the program while refusing to acknowledge rural problems as the expression of unequal power relations and social structures. Then, by appropriating the ideological discourse of “positive energy,” the repertoire performs a positive empathy towards a rural individual with positive emotions and agency. However, when the notion of accepting suffering as a necessary pathway to future happiness is presented, this positive discourse runs the risk of disarticulating with compassion and suppressing public action on the grounds that these may be unnecessary. Finally, the emotional repertoire shifts to a privatized and neoliberal philanthropic pity from the urban middle class towards grateful rural receivers, represented by consumerist transformation and donation ceremonies for rural children.

As a whole, based on the integration of humanitarian discourse, socialist ideology, and neoliberalism, such an emotional repertoire proves that a balanced, harmonious, and politically correct style of compassionate engagement is beneficial to both rural and urban sides. There is, however, an inherent “cruel optimism” (Berlant 2011): the claims and expressions of social connection, care, and solidarity are voiced in an increasingly individualized, commercialized context, and pursued by means that lead us in the opposite direction than envisioned. As the affective lines of flight gradually shift from compassion to positive empathy and pity, the position of rural people in media representations likewise moves from the foreground to the background, and metamorphoses into a vehicle for eliciting emotional responses from urban protagonists and audiences. Arguably, this ambiguous and dynamic affective mechanism of X-Change is a refraction of larger post-reform structural shifts in Chinese society, which have a profound impact on social relations, especially in relation to socio-cultural psychology connected to (unstated) class identities.