‘Generating electricity with love’: spontaneity, decentralization, and loose solidarity of queer youth community in contemporary China

This paper examines queer youth communities that have emerged over the past decade despite increasingly authoritarian governmentalities targeting queer activism in the People’s Republic of China. These student-led queer communities, which have been widely present across major Chinese universities, are largely unregistered and operate outside conventional queer Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) frameworks. Adopting a community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology and a mixed-methods approach that integrates qualitative and quantitative analysis, this study focuses on the 10-year development of an influential queer youth community, RainbowsArc (RA, pseudonym). By emphasizing community microdynamics, we identify spontaneity and decentralization as two key characteristics that distinguish the operational logic and organizational structures of these queer youth communities from those of conventional queer NGOs. The paper further explores the community’s reproduction through member turnover and its transformative actions in response to intensified policing and censorship of student queer groups in China after 2020. Finally, we theorize loose solidarity as an assemblage of queer youth communities’ commitments to ‘generating electricity with love,’ a mode of organizing that resists the commercialized and hierarchical logic of conventional queer NGOs. We propose that this alternative ku’er solidarity – loose, yet resilient and transformative – offers a framework for reimagining queer activism, community-building, and social movement mobilization in contemporary China.