CHINA!
 | |
| Cover of CHINA! | |
| Type | Book (collaborative chapbook) |
|---|---|
| Editor | Charlotte Fang |
| Publisher | Remilia House |
| Published | 2024 |
| Subject | Chineseposting |
CHINA! is a 2024 collaborat chapbook edited by Charlotte Fang and published by Remilia House. It collects texts and images made between 2021 and 2023 in connection with Chineseposting, a practice of reposting imagery from Chinese social media alongside text produced through machine translation.[1]
Contents and form
The book is subtitled An extended meditation on virtue, love, beauty, affect, Confucianism, machine translation, and the experience of being a Chinese girl online.[1] It includes contributions by Senna, Purb, and others, an editor's note by Fang, and a translator's introduction by Michael Dragovic.[1]
Editor's note
Fang's editor's note addresses the role of machine translation in the work's production. It states that authorship cannot be divided between the human participants and the translation system, and treats this ambiguity as an intended feature of the practice.[2]
Translator's introduction
Dragovic's introduction places Chineseposting in its platform and cultural context. It describes the practice's translation method, in which English text was translated into Chinese and back with Google Translate. Because Twitter used Google Translate for its built-in translation button, posters could anticipate what readers would see when they clicked "translate."[3]
The introduction also identifies practical reasons for posting in Chinese. Chinese characters carry more information per character than English, which allowed roughly three times as much content within Twitter's character limit. Posting in Chinese also made posts less exposed to Twitter's content moderation, which was less effective for non-English text before the platform's 2022 change of ownership.[3]
Dragovic connects the practice's free borrowing and unattributed remixing to post-authorship. He describes its cultural stance as a "Sino-Western synthesis" in which cultural identity can be chosen rather than fixed by birth, and its emphasis on sincerity and beauty as a departure from the nihilism of earlier internet art.[3]
Relation to Chineseposting
CHINA! anthologizes material from Chineseposting, which began on Twitter in 2021 and later spread to TikTok through Based Retard Gang.[1] Fang has described Chineseposting in terms of three themes common to Remilia's work: decentralized artmaking, post-authorship, and neo-orientalism, presenting it as an example of the "posting as art" ideals of the New Net Art Manifesto.[4] The book serves as both an archive of work made online and a printed art object.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Fang, Charlotte (2024). CHINA!. Remilia House.
- ↑ Fang, Charlotte. "Editor's Note." In CHINA!, edited by Charlotte Fang. Remilia House, 2024.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Dragovic, Michael. "Translator's Introduction." In CHINA!, edited by Charlotte Fang. Remilia House, 2024.
- ↑ Charlotte Fang (November 21, 2023). "Tweet on Chineseposting practices". X. Retrieved November 2, 2025.