Understanding Asia: How it industrializes emotions (Duanju, K-pop, emoji, manga)

For several decades, Asia has been developing cultural formats designed to organize the circulation of emotions on a large scale. Duanju could be to the audiovisual world what the emoji was to writing and K-pop to the music industry: not simply a format from Asia, but a new standard with global aspirations.

A bold hypothesis. And yet, for the past thirty years, several major cultural innovations from Asia, initially perceived as local phenomena, have permanently shaped customs across the globe. Manga, for example, transformed the conventions of graphic storytelling. Emojis completely altered the framework of our written communication. K-pop redefined the relationship between artists, platforms, and communities. Today, duanju seems to be following the same trajectory.

The common thread running through all these innovations goes deeper than mere novelty of format or originality of content. They shift the center of gravity of culture: from the production of works to the organization of interactions. These Asian inventions all emerged precisely at the intersection of communication, technology, and emotion.

This difference is fundamental: what circulates on social and digital networks is not just information. It is feelings, reactions, identifications, emotions, and subjectivities. From this perspective, manga, emojis, K-pop, and duanju clearly appear as particularly effective technologies for the circulation of emotion. Emojis compress an emotion into a symbol, even adding to language without simply replacing it or transposing it into an image like a tracing. K-pop transforms individual emotion into a collective and communal experience. Manga pushes emotional intensity to the very heart of its visual identity. Duanju, for its part, seems to take this logic to its culmination, as it is constructed as a continuous flow of emotion.

Each scene is designed to elicit an immediate reaction: desire, surprise, empathy, anger, frustration, relief. Emotions are no longer merely an effect of the narrative; they become its raw material. And perhaps this is where the true innovation lies. The duanju doesn't simply tell a story adapted to smartphones and their uses. It is designed for an environment where attention is captured less by information than by emotional intensity.

This intuition aligns with sociologist Eva Illouz's analyses of the growing role of emotions in contemporary economies. Emotions are no longer solely experienced individually; they circulate, are exchanged, shared, and create value. From this perspective, major Asian cultural innovations of recent decades could be understood as emotional infrastructures—systems designed to produce, amplify, and circulate emotions on a massive scale. This likely explains, in part, their ability to become global standards. Cultural standards don't prevail simply because they tell better stories. They prevail because they better reflect how an era feels, communicates, and interacts. The global success of emojis was never about pictograms. And the success of duanju is probably not due to short, vertical series.

In both these examples, we are witnessing the same revolution: the emergence of formats optimized for the emotional economy of the digital age. If this is the case, duanju is not simply a new trend from China. It could be one of the first cultural formats fully designed for a society where emotion has become the primary unit of circulation, attention, and value. Thus, duanju not only heralds the future of audiovisual and digital entertainment, but also tells us something more fundamental about the future of our interactions themselves.

Article written by Maëlle Billant

#MaelleBillant