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Chapter 1: Introduction: China's National Self, President Xi Jinping, and the Realization of the Chinese Dream -- Chapter 2: Anti-corruption Forever: Discipline and Loyalty -- Chapter 3: Loyalty Toward State and Nation: Top-level design and "Moral Careers" -- Chapter 4: Loyalty to the Nation: Lunar and Martian exploration for Lasting Greatness -- Chapter 5: Post-Zero-Covid Policy: Limits to Loyalty on the Horizon?

This book analyses the ideology that China's leader Xi Jinping has crafted during his decade in power. Chinas political system and domestic and foreign policies have, between 2012 and 2022, become more defined by the political thought of Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader of the Chinese Communist Party since the time of Mao Zedong. Today, Xis China is embroiled in superpower rivalry with the United States and its allies. Therefore, ongoing ideological transformation in the Peoples Republic is destined to have global repercussions. Yet surprisingly, the ideological mission of Xi Jinping is poorly understood. Based on analysis of Xi Jinpings collected speeches, the book argues that Chinas new state ideology is constructed around the three key concepts of loyalty, discipline, and greatness. Xis mission is about ideological re-orientation and re-activation, as well as organizational innovation, seeking to frame Chinas national self as a collective unit under one political banner and one leader. However, despite the monumental Party-state effort to boost the new ideology and state-scripted moral careers, the book contends that Xi Jinping cannot take for granted that political and patriotic loyalty will forever trump the formation of disloyal moral careers in society. Johan Lagerkvist is Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at Stockholm University, Sweden and Senior research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

Medial ontologies. Irremediability : on the very concept of digital ontology / Justin Clemens and Adam Nash ; Umwelt and individuation : digital signals and technical being / Jonas Andersson Schwarz ; Digital unworld(s) : the Bielefeld conspiracy / Yvette Granata -- Being human : extension, exposure and ethics. You have been tagged : magical incantations, digital incarnations and extended selves / Paul Frosh ; Surveillance, sensors, and knowledge through the machine / Sun-ha Hong ; Social media and the care of the self / Ganaele Langlois ; The ethics of digital being : vulnerability, invulnerability, and "dangerous surprises" / Vincent Miller -- Transcendence : beyond life, death and the human. The Internet is always awake : sensations, sounds and silences of the digital grave / Amanda Lagerkvist ; Digital rituals and the quest for existential security / Johanna Sumiala ; Cybernetic animism : non-nhuman personhood and the Internet / devin Proctor ; Death in life and life in death : forms and fates of the human / Connor Graham and Alfred Montoya

This volume advances debates on digital culture and digital religion in two complementary ways. First, by focalizing the themes 'ontology,' 'ethics' and 'transcendence,' it builds on insights from research on digital religion in order to reframe the field and pursue an existential media analysis that further pushes beyond the mandatory focus in mainstream media studies on the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of digitalization. Second, the collection also implies a broadening of the scope of the debate in the field of media, religion and culture - and digital religion in particular - beyond 'religion,' to include the wider existential dimensions of digital media.--

Introduction -- Memories in the making: media, memory, performance -- Retromodern Shanghai: uncanny memories of media futures past -- Strange rhythms of legendary Shanghai -- Performing futures past: memory as mediatised performativity -- American hauntings: memory, space and the virtual -- Epilogue

China has lived with the Internet for nearly two decades. Will increased Internet use, with new possibilities to share information and discuss news and politics, lead to democracy, or will it to the contrary sustain a nationalist supported authoritarianism that may eventually contest the global information order? This book takes stock of the ongoing tug of war between state power and civil society on and off the Internet, a phenomenon that is fast becoming the centerpiece in the Chinese Communist Party's struggle to stay in power indefinitely. It interrogates the dynamics of this enduring cont

The global pandemic threw the world in all its asymmetries and diversities into a limit situation without known coordinates. This article suggests that in its aftermath there is actually a call and an opportunity for more than rethinking existing keywords in the field. It argues that the crisis was "improbable" in the meaning of the word offered by Amitav Ghosh who traces a common sense forged by probabilistic science, that expelled the unthinkable from the modern imaginary. Tracking down this regime of certainty, the essay offers a discussion on the place or displacement of the disorderly, the uncertain, and the disruptive in media theory. It submits that reawakening to the improbable, in light of Karl Jaspers' philosophical anthropology of the limit situation, offers a fruitful conceptual avenue ahead. Apart from introducing the concept of the (digital) limit situation, the article offers a conversation between existential media studies, critical disability studies, feminist STS, and the environmental humanities, by also inviting an extended family of unruly concepts, including dismediation and deferral. It concludes that limit situations can be transformative also for media theory, if we dare to seize them, by means of existential modes of transversal listening to ghostly pasts never fulfilled.

In the present age AI (artificial intelligence) emerges as both a medium to and message about (or even from) the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects. Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the human horizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the 'inevitability' of AI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become living myths, by attending how the technology is embedded in broader appropriations of the future tense. Reclaiming anticipation existentially, by drawing and expanding on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers – and his concept of the limit situation – I offer an invitation beyond the prospects and limits of 'the new AI Era' of predictive modelling, exploitation and dataism. I submit that the present moment of technological transformation and of escalating multi-faceted and interrelated global crises, is a digital limit situation in which there are entrenched existential and politico-ethical stakes of anticipatory media. Attending to them as a 'future present' (Adam and Groves 2007, 2011), taking responsible action, constitutes our utmost capability and task. The essay concludes that precisely here lies the assignment ahead for pursuing a post-disciplinary, integrative and generative form of Humanities and Social Sciences as a method of hope, that engages AI designers in the pursuit of an inclusive and open future of existential and ecological sustainability.

In the present age AI (artificial intelligence) emerges as both a medium to andmessage about (or evenfrom) the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects.Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the humanhorizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the 'inevitability' ofAI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become livingmyths, by attending how the technology is embedded in broaderappropriations of the future tense. Reclaiming anticipation existentially, bydrawing and expanding on the philosophy of Karl Jaspers–and his conceptof thelimitsituation–I offer an invitation beyond the prospects and limits of'the new AI Era' of predictive modelling, exploitation and dataism. I submitthat the present moment of technological transformation and of escalatingmulti-faceted and interrelated global crises, is adigital limit situationin whichthere are entrenched existential and politico-ethical stakes of anticipatorymedia. Attending to them as a'future present'(Adam and Groves 2007, 2011),taking responsible action, constitutes our utmost capability and task. Theessay concludes thatprecisely here lies the assignment ahead for pursuing apost-disciplinary, integrative and generative form of Humanities and SocialSciences as a method of hope, that engages AI designers in the pursuit of aninclusive and open future of existential and ecological sustainability. ; BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds