Theoretical Genealogies of the Emotional Economy and the Chinese Context

In contemporary society, emotion has entered value production, exchange, and the organization of social relations to an unprecedented degree. However, existing discussions of the "emotional economy" have long faced three related difficulties:the coexistence of conceptual overexpansion and overspecification, the conflation of different theoretical lineages, and insufficient explanatory power in the Chinese context. This article systematically reviews four major strands of scholarship:emotional labor; post-Fordism and immaterial labor; emotional capitalism and affective economies; and platformization and emotional governance. On this basis, it proposes a core criterion for identifying the emotional economy, namely, whether emotion has shifted from a "private feeling" to a social resource that can be produced, mobilized, measured, exchanged, or disciplined. The article further develops a three-level analytical framework-object, mechanism, and explanation-and distinguishes between two basic forms:an emotionally embedded economy and an economy of emotional objectification. It argues that the distinctiveness of China's emotional economy lies not only in the larger scale of platforms or the greater density of mediated settings, but also in the fact that it unfolds within a social order already deeply structured by relationality, moral obligations, and differentiated social ties. Rather than simply replacing the relational society, platforms are re-encoding it by transforming emotional exchanges once organized through differential obligations and everyday reciprocity into new relational mechanisms that are visible, quantifiable, subscribable, and governable. The emotional economy, therefore, should be understood not merely as an extension of the commodification of emotion, but as an important mechanism through which the relational order is being reorganized in the platform era. In this sense, the article aims to provide an operational analytical framework for the study of the emotional economy and a new theoretical lens for understanding social transformation in contemporary China.