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Paper short abstract

This paper examines online videos of invasive species torture on Chinese platforms, where extermination becomes spectacle and pleasure. It traces a grammar of violence that frames cruelty as ecological responsibility, rendering certain lives ungrievable and violence ordinary.

Paper long abstract

This paper develops the concept of a grammar of violence to analyze the proliferation of online videos depicting the torture and extermination of invasive species on Chinese social media platforms. These videos present cruelty as routine, instructional, and pleasurable, circulating through formats that emphasize immersion, repetition, and sensory satisfaction.

By grammar of violence, I refer to a structured set of rules through which harm becomes intelligible, legitimate, and repeatable. This grammar operates through three interlinked mechanisms. First, certain forms of life are named as invasive, positioning them as excessive, out of place, and inherently destructive. Second, material ecological damage is translated into moral threat, allowing violence to be framed as defense, responsibility, or care. Third, affective orientations such as disgust, satisfaction, and righteous pleasure are cultivated, training subjects to experience cruelty as emotionally appropriate and ethically coherent.

Within this framework, torture appears as management, hygiene, and environmental duty. Suffering remains visible, yet it is rendered ethically inconsequential through the prior removal of grievability.

The paper argues that this grammar is portable. Once established, it circulates across domains of governance, from environmental regulation to everyday digital practice, without requiring constant justification. Through the figure of the invasive species, violence is rehearsed in dispersed, individualized forms while retaining moral coherence. The normalization of cruelty toward nonhuman life provides insight into how exclusion, expendability, and justified harm are structured and sustained in everyday nationalism.