About

China is already the world’s most deeply integrated and technologically advanced society. The citizen’s identity and agency are coded about a singular government-issued ID. This then ties to everything from one’s bank account and social credit score to one’s messaging and social media profiles and so reconfigures the boundary of what we might consider the ‘person’. In the purest sense, this is the definition of ‘metaverse': a virtual realm mapped onto quotidian reality, from which ‘legitimate operators’ can move seamlessly back and forth. Continuing my masters research into the Chinese metaverse with those at its limits in Hong Kong and Taiwan, I plan to show how the unique perspective of the Tujia minority provides an ideal delimitation within which to chart the boundaries of the cybernetic human in China today, and so present one possible future for the internet globally.

The Tujia are greatly understudied. Millions live within the vicinity of Chongqing, arguably China’s largest, least-westernised, and yet most technologically advanced megacity. There has been no community ethnography of the Tujia in Chongqing, and no studies into how they have been affected by rapid sociotechnological changes, such as the recent roll-out of 5G, soon to be felt everywhere.

Given the rising tides of nationalism in the PRC and their intersection with rapid urbanisation, new media, and the deethnicisation of public discourse, I ask how does Tujia ethnicity modulate the interface of selfhood with the state? Given the prime role played by AI and algorithmic logic in China’s technocracy, how do new technologies further mediate this process? Using online and offline participant observation, semi-structured interviews, network-mapping, and linguistic GIS data, I will build upon the theoretical concept of ‘cybernesis’ that I have developed through my previous research to explain how sociotechnological evolution reconfigures the boundaries of self and state.