The meanings of being “underclass” in China are increasingly ambivalent when various disadvantaged social groups also get access to digital platforms which become more and more influential in not just facilitating people’s economic and cultural practices online but also mediating, distorting, and reshaping these processes. Using critical techno-cultural discourse analysis about how the underclass represent poverty and themselves by creating short videos and performing live-commerce on Kuaishou, this study finds that digital entrepreneurialism becomes an interlocking governmentality to discipline the underclass’ online participation. Afforded by the platform and operationalized by multiple networked actors, entrepreneurialism incorporates the underclass in the digitally mediated productive relationship and at the same time disciplines their online representation and exploits the involved entities through both platform labor and monetary investments to cultivate an underclass entrepreneurial subject. Although claiming to include and empower the diversified Chinese underclass, digital platforms actually reproduce the underclassness by mobilizing the calculated conformity among the underclass to experience the intertwining online and offline inequalities through digital entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, nuances of minor narratives still exist in the digitally mediated self-representation.
With increasing influence on everyday social interactions and cultural practices, social media platforms do not just represent but also profoundly reproduce various forms of social inequalities. This essay investigates what role social media have played in the emergence of an underclass habitus among Chinese youth. By focusing on the rise and fall of a participatory hanmai culture on Kuaishou, an underclass-centric social media platform in China, the study identifies social media platforms as key actors in restructuring power relations. Chinese social media platforms, particularly Kuaishou, produce contemporary relationships of power by simultaneously incorporating algorithm design, profit-seeking strategies, underclass users’ expressions, and state surveillance. The overall effect is to mediate, regulate and buttress social inequalities in the process of sustaining Chinese class stratification. This analysis necessarily problematizes and debunks the myth of technological neutrality claimed by social media platforms. The result is that Chinese underclass youth (individual and unexpected acts of human agency aside) are routinely subjected to and reproduced through the logic of both capitalist accumulation and state authoritarianism via their participation on these social media platforms.
This article examines consumer video activism tactics in China and their impact on Chinese consumers and society. Drawing upon 56 semistructured interviews and a case study analysis of Chinese online consumer protest in 2018, we argue that short-video-activism tactics have become an innovative repertoire of contention for Chinese consumers and Douyin, the “sister app” of TikTok, has become a real-time updated database of this repertoire. Using Douyin as a case study, we argue that it plays three key roles in mediating Chinese consumer activism: a techno-cultural construct that affords highly heterogeneous users to present everyday experiences via short videos; a multisided market that profoundly affects the tactics consumers choose to amplify their voices; and a governing entity that both moderates content for its users and simultaneously is subject to government regulations.
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