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Previous research has noted the ambiguous persuasive potentials of reiteration: repeating a statement, slogan or image can work both positively and negatively, can both help and hinder the effectiveness of a political message. Considering that repeated propaganda in China is broadly ineffective in generating wholehearted public support, this article is interested in how and when repetition does achieve meaningful persuasion. Drawing on affect theory to address these multiple potentials, it critically reconsiders the nature of persuasion itself, arguing that affective engagement is crucial in sustaining and consolidating temporary tendencies that lead to alteration in the social fabric. Looking at humorous 'socialist memes' popularised on the Chinese internet in recent years, the article conducts a discourse analysis on the patterns they reveal to break down this reiterative practice as an unfolding event, revealing how its humour disrupts official language and engages the public affectively. It argues that practice of repeating these memes produces interpretive ambiguities around the official language, and in doing so re-directs socialist persuasion towards a liberalised end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet Chinglish, a product of the integration of the Internet and Chinese culture, is the most popular form of Chinglish in present-day China. The present paper has conducted a detailed study of Internet Chinglish, distinguishing it from China English, exploring the characteristics and the causes of its popularity from the perspective of Memetics, and making a prediction that Chinglish, if satisfying certain conditions, may transform to China English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay theorizes the potential uses and limitations of describing a text as "viral." Literary texts are often described as viral when they serve as tools of self-expression for those who reproduce them: viral texts must therefore delete or suppress qualities that mark them as alien, and emphasize qualities that identify them with those who might repeat them. As they circulate, viruses span and connect social and intellectual lineages through rhizomatic motion, as described by Deleuze and Guattari. These concepts provide an occasion for a rereading of the contemporary circulation of the poetry of Gu Cheng 顾城, whose verse and biography have circulated widely and been intensively transformed in the past thirty years. The partial and mutated versions of his life and verse that circulate via film, television, print, calligraphy, and especially the Internet produce a shared fantasy of a "free" poet whose genius excludes him from social constraint, and who deserves and enjoys the limitless adoration of women. This fantasy is made circulable in part by suppressing the experience of his wife, Xie Ye 谢烨, whom he killed in 1993, a deletion whose marks are clearly visible in a historicized analysis of popular treatments of their story. On the strength of Deleuze and Guattari's argument that the rhizome cannot be encompassed but instead only extended through rupture, the essay then reads Xie Ye's prose compositions "Games" and "Your Name Is Little Mu'er," finding them to contain stories that can travel and concepts whose circulation may contribute to antipatriarchal goals. The piece concludes by arguing that the metaphor of the virus reveals the position of the scholar who reproduces texts for study, and that thinking through the virus implicates scholars in the ethics and pragmatics of spreading texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]