Rethinking Addiction in Digital China: Esports, Fintech and AI Chatbots

Wednesday, 07 October 2026 | 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. ET | Virtually via Zoom

With Yichen Rao (Utrecht University; Inclusive AI Lab)

In China, a teenager in an "internet addiction" treatment camp told me that school was simply a badly designed game; an IT worker lost her savings through an investment app; a university student could no longer trust his own writing without asking generative AI to check it. What do these scenes share? Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research in digital China, this talk approaches addiction not as a medicalized category but as a phenomenological condition emerging through particular modes of mediated connection. Across esports, fintech, and AI chatbots, digital media promise to eliminate everyday frictions—waiting, uncertainty, hesitation, and the need to negotiate with others. Yet frictionless interfaces also reorganize how people relate to themselves, to others, and to the future. In a country where "internet addiction" remains widely treated as a social problem, why is one form of frictionlessness diagnosed as addiction while another is celebrated as innovation? What kind of mediated world are people being invited into?

Yichen Rao is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University and China AI Lead at the Inclusive AI Lab. He combines anthropology, media studies and STS to examine how digital technologies and capitalist models shape subjectivities in global China. He has published widely on topics of fin-tech, gaming addiction, digital infrastructure, scams and AI. He has recently been awarded an ERC Starting Grant to examine the global impact of Chinese AI ecosystems and e-commerce platforms and their role in reconfiguring contemporary capitalism. He also serves as a council member of Society of Social Studies of Science (4S) and Sci-Tech Asia research network.

This event is part of the Games and Global Asia Lecture Series. More information at this link.