Becoming precarious playbour: Chinese migrant youth on the Kuaishou video-sharing platform

Abstract

This article investigates the practices of precarious playbour on Kuaishou, a short-video platform embracing the idea of ‘recording the lives of ordinary people’ and attracting massive numbers of migrant youth to produce creative content as free labour. It examines how young migrants from rural areas in China engage in Kuaishou as a means of realising upwards socio-economic mobility by producing a tuwei (earthiness) culture which has a large fan base. It also examines the way in which they collaborate to cope with precarious conditions lacking guaranteed working time and income, and labour protection. The article attempts to build a conversation with existing scholarship that addresses the ‘exploitation vs. empowerment’ dialectic of labour production. Instead, we address the complexity of digital labour production characterised by a collaborative and symbiotic relationship between social media platforms and users. Through ‘play’ with their followers that generates profit for the digital platform, migrant youth voluntarily accept the uncertain, unpredictable, and risky conditions of digital labour production. They are, however, not passively subjected to platform exploitation but can instead reclaim agency by actively seeking to collaborate with other users to cope with increasing precariousness. JEL Codes: J60, Z10

Relational platform entrepreneurs: Live commerce and the 818 Jiazu

“…The battles involved one jiazu in swarming the livestreaming sessions of the ‘enemies’ and leaving explicit hate speech and curses. Zhou and Liu (2021) identified some types of virtual battles as a major way of revenue creation between Kuaishou and influencers. Kuaishou allowed two livestreamers to be randomly matched (also known as the PK mode) and compete for virtual gifts.…”

“…Some scholars identify Kuaishou users as unlikely creative workers who contribute to the transformation of the Chinese economy and digital culture (Lin & de Kloet, 2019). Others consider the Kuaishou content creators as performing ‘playbour’ – individually and collaboratively offering free labour to the platform in the disguise of playing and having fun (Zhou & Liu, 2021).…”

“…Kuaishou jiazu deserves a closer examination as current scholarly attention on this type of community is still scarce. First, existing research has investigated Kuaishou’s cultural production of young people (Li, Tan, & Yang, 2019; Zhou & Liu, 2021) and rural users (Lin & de Kloet, 2019) through a lens of rural-urban dichotomy (e.g., Liu, 2020). However, Kuaishou has become more reliant on live commerce revenue since 2019.…”

“…Through a relational approach, our exploration of Kuaishou jiazu supports an open inquiry into the multiple manifestations of platform entrepreneurship rather than offering a critique on platform-labour relations. Not seeing Kuaishou jiazu as purely precarious or empowered, we avoid confining platform entrepreneurship to ‘the dialectic of exploitation versus empowerment’ (Zhou & Liu, 2021, p. 322). In this way, the relational approach situates platform entrepreneurial agency at the intersection of the users, platform and state with a social-cultural emphasis.…”

“…Kuaishou jiazu deserves a closer examination as current scholarly attention on this type of community is still scarce. First, existing research has investigated Kuaishou's cultural production of young people (Li, Tan, & Yang, 2019;Zhou & Liu, 2021) and rural users (Lin & de Kloet, 2019) Figure 1. Six mega jiazus and major apprentices based on Wang and Lu (2020) with the numbers of followers summarised by authors in November 2021.…”