Abstract
This essay critically reviews the existing research on wanghong studies in China. It advocates that wanghong studies should go beyond its dominant disciplines in ‘platform studies’ and ‘(digital) labour studies’ to embrace ‘celebrity studies’ and ‘China studies’. It proposes the innovative concept of ‘wanghong thinking’, which refers to the mindset that guides the experiments of the Chinese Communist Party in incorporating the popular wanghong culture, logic and economic model to achieve various social, political and economic objectives. Finally, the essay offers critical reflection on the ‘online-traffic-enabled’ social governance and economic development in China’s wanghong era.
Keywords
Wanghong has become a hot topic in the field of Chinese Internet studies in recent years, against the backdrop of China’s booming short-video platforms, livestreaming industry and live commerce. Abbreviated from the Chinese term ‘wangluo hongren’ (literally ‘person with Internet fame and popularity’), wanghong – in the Chinese context – overlaps with a few English terms in its meaning and is usually translated into these terms for English academic writing. These terms include ‘micro-celebrity’, ‘Internet celebrity’, ‘key opinion leader’ (KOL) and ‘influencer’, but none are exactly the same as wanghong, given the history, connotation, scope and social-cultural implications of the Chinese term and phenomenon. I therefore concur with Ge Zhang (forthcoming) on using the vernacular wanghong in its own terms rather than trying to translate it to any English counterpart because the term has already gone beyond its original meaning and requires ongoing conceptual creation and recreation.
From the perspective of media archaeology, the history of wanghong can be traced back to ‘wangluo mingren’ (literally ‘Internet celebrity’), which emerged after China connected to the Internet in the 1990s. Chinese media and scholars usually divide wanghong into three generations from Web 1.0 to 3.0 eras 1 (see Wu et al., 2023). In the Web 1.0 era, wangluo mingren mainly refer to famous online writers on bulletin board system (BBS) forums and dedicated online literature portals, such as Anni Baobei. In the Web 2.0 era, they mainly refer to ordinary people – such as Furong Jiejie and Feng Jie – who accidently become well-known online through their attention-grabbing images or personalised speeches on blogs and video-hosting websites. In the Web 3.0 era, they started to be called ‘wanghong’ rather than ‘wangluo mingren’ and the term came to refer to content creators, social media entrepreneurs and live-streamers who actively use social media, short-video and livestreaming platforms to promote their visibility and self-branding for monetisation – such as Li Jiaqi and Li Ziqi. As I argue elsewhere (Xu & Zhao, 2019), although this chronological periodisation overlooks the crossover between the three eras and the ‘trans-platform’ practices of wanghong, it importantly reflects the changing relations between the evolution of digital infrastructures, platforms, the affordances they can provide to users, and the practices of being famous online for individuals. The evolutionary perspective is also conducive to our understanding of the transformation of China’s digital media technology, culture and economy through the ever-changing practices of becoming famous online.
Returning to ‘celebrity studies’
Existing publications on wanghong largely focus on wanghong in the Web 3.0 era. The quantity of publications started to proliferate from 2016, the year widely dubbed by the Chinese media as ‘Year One of Wanghong’. The timeline is roughly in parallel to the global rise of ‘platform studies’ (de Kloet et al., 2019; Poell et al., 2019). Wanghong is widely seen as ‘visibility labour’ (Abidin, 2016), ‘creative labour’ (Craig et al., 2021) or ‘entrepreneurial labour’ (Yu et al., 2022) undertaken by individuals who follow the ‘platform logics’ (Burgess, 2021), such as clicks, subscriptions and algorithms, and work with ‘specific architectures, interfaces, and affordances’ of platforms to monetise their online fame, and ‘in turn influence, negotiate, and resist platform cultures’ (Burgess, 2021, p. 25). Using digital ethnography, content analysis, interviews and other qualitative methods, scholars have examined various aspects and consequences of the celebrification and platformisation of wanghong, including, but not limited to, their subgenres (Shen, 2023), online performance in livestreams (Zhang & Hjorth, 2019), short-video content production, consumption and circulation (Li, 2020), subcultures (Zhang & Xu, 2019), social class (Lin & de Kloet, 2019), incubators and economic models (Han, 2021).
However, I found that current research often ignores the connection between wanghong studies and ‘celebrity studies’, a well-established interdisciplinary field in which researchers study key issues in the production, circulation and consumption of fame and the roles performed by celebrities in shaping cultural, economic and political practices in local, national and transnational contexts. As a researcher who studies Chinese digital media and celebrity studies, I have been arguing that it is important to take wanghong culture as an evolution of Chinese celebrity culture in the digital era (Xu & Zhao, 2019) and to incorporate wanghong studies into what we call ‘China celebrity studies’ (Jeffreys & Xu, 2021). I made the call to return to ‘celebrity studies’ because my research on the governance of hanmai and chibo wanghong (Xu et al., 2022; Xu & Zhang, 2021) shows that, to survive and succeed, they have to possess the same ‘neoliberal subjectivity’ – with the Chinese characteristics that allow them to ‘meticulously navigate the complex trade-off between neoliberal market ideology and Party ideology’ – as the traditional celebrities, such as film stars and pop singers (Xu & Yang, 2021, p. 12). Like traditional celebrities, wanghong are also expected to become role models and pass on ‘positive energy’, and they are under the scrutiny of the state, industry, platforms, and the public. The regulation and governance of this new type of celebrity also serve the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) broader social governance agenda and are essentially political. For example, the crackdown on chibo aims to promote the national ‘Clean Plate Campaign’ against food waste and the Anti-food Waste Law (Xu et al., 2022). Similarly, naming, shaming and punishing Fan Bingbing for her tax evasion aimed to symbolically mitigate public outcries against the extravagant income of celebrities and growing income inequality (Jeffreys & Xu, 2023).
I argue that wanghong exist in the same ‘celebrity ecology’ as traditional celebrities in China and that they have constituted an important part of it. The legacy of socialist role models and state-media-celebrity-public relations also casts a long shadow on wanghong and has greatly influenced their performance, culture, regulation and governance. Bringing wanghong back to ‘China celebrity studies’ could help us go beyond the creator-centric approach in wanghong studies to critically examine the roles of wanghong in China. Guided by subfields of celebrity studies, such as celebrity politics, philanthropy, diplomacy and activism, we can research some understudied topics, such as wanghong philanthropy (e.g. using wanghong livestreaming for poverty alleviation), wanghong (including ‘foreign wanghong’) for internal and external propaganda, nationalist wanghong, and regulation and governance of wanghong. I have started exploring some of these topics from ‘celebrity studies’ perspective and approach with my collaborators (see Jeffreys & Xu, 2024; Xu et al., 2022; Xu & Qu, forthcoming). Furthermore, I would advocate for scope expansion of wanghong studies to include critical study on what I call ‘wanghong thinking’ (wanghong siwei), its practices and impacts.
‘Wanghong thinking’ as new research agenda
Wanghong is no longer a ‘noun’, but has become an adjective and prefix to refer to some non-human objects that obtain ‘online traffic’ (liuliang) and become famous, such as wanghong cafés, restaurants and tourism spots. Zhang et al. (2022) named these urban-digital spectacles as ‘wanghong urbanism’. These spectacles, according to Zhang (forthcoming), are co-created by entrepreneurs/designers, digital platforms and their users following the ‘replicable commercial and/or aesthetic logic of datafication and standardisation’. An interesting phenomenon in recent years is that governmental organisations and officials at various levels have increasingly adopted the self-branding strategies of human wanghong and the commercial and aesthetic logic of wanghong urbanism to promote Party propaganda, diplomacy, governance, local tourism and economy. ‘Wanghong thinking’ here specifically refers to the mindset that guides the CCP’s experiments of incorporating the popular wanghong culture, logic and economic model to achieve various social, political and economic objectives.
For example, to make China’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy known to more domestic audiences and to promote nationalistic sentiment, China’s outspoken foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian was made a ‘wanghong diplomat’ and was widely reported and discussed online. China Central Television (CCTV) also cultivated a few anchormen from its news programmes to become ‘wanghong witty talkers’ on Douyin to bring the state media closer to audiences and weaken its propagandist image. Many county mayors joined wanghong’s live commerce shows to help local farmers sell agricultural products. Some of them became ‘wanghong mayors’ for their talent performance, approachable language and image in livestreaming. The creation of wanghong tourist cities, such as Zibo and Harbin, demonstrates the power of ‘wanghong thinking’ in boosting the tourism industry. The two local culture and tourism bureaus harnessed short-video platforms and other digital media channels, designed urban-digital spectacles, collaborated with wanghong and traditional celebrities for promotion, and made meticulously designed videos of welcome speeches or performances by their own directors of cultural and tourism bureaus go viral – all to obtain liuliang for the cities and attract tourists to check in offline. Many cities are currently copying this successful model to empower local tourism with ‘wanghong thinking’. Different from other wanghong phenomena, either the ordinary/grassroots wanghong or the commercial wanghong spaces, wanghong created under ‘wanghong thinking’ shows a stronger sense of design. Governmental organisations are usually the designers. They can decide who/what they want to promote to gain wanghong status and for what purposes these wanghong should serve. They also have the power to influence liuliang for what they want to promote on social media platforms through their intimate relations with these platforms. The collusion between the government and digital platforms (mainly through their algorithmic manipulation) is possible to help anybody or anything gain liuliang and become wanghong.
The rise of ‘wanghong thinking’ can be seen as a result and continuation of the national implementation of ‘Internet Plus’ (hulianwang jia), a concept and strategy proposed by the CCP in 2015 to drive economic and social innovation and development through digital information technologies. The national implementation of ‘Internet Plus’ in social governance and many other industries (e.g. Internet + tourism, Internet + agriculture) has equipped the governments and government officials with what is popularly called ‘Internet thinking’ (hulianwang siwei), the mindset to ‘use the Internet as a model, method and tool to raise, analyse and solve problems’ (Zhao, 2018). In this sense, ‘wanghong thinking’ can be seen as an evolutionary practice of ‘Internet Plus’ in the wanghong era. Its essence lies in the ‘metricated mindset’ (Bolin & Schwarz, 2015) that the governments learnt from the ‘platform logics’ of wanghong economy to quantify the success of their propaganda, government–public interaction, economic development and so on with liuliang. These so-called innovations guided by ‘wanghong thinking’ in political and economic areas have offered many interesting cases to examine the relations between digital technologies and the authoritarian state, which can contribute to the study of China’s ‘digital authoritarianism’ and ‘authoritarian resilience’ in Chinese political sciences. Bringing ‘wanghong thinking’ into wanghong studies can therefore help link the field to China studies to critically investigate the impacts of wanghong culture, logic and economic model on China.
Conclusion
In this article, I have examined the state of wanghong studies in China and advocate that wanghong studies should go beyond its dominant disciplines in ‘platform studies’ and ‘(digital) labour studies’ to embrace ‘celebrity studies’ and ‘China studies’ (through the perspective of ‘wanghong thinking’). This can help diversify the research agenda of wanghong studies and draw on interdisciplinary resources to better understand the impacts of wanghong, its culture and economy. Last, but not least, I also want to express my concern about the current popularity and ongoing impacts of ‘wanghong thinking’. I worry that it will promote the ‘short termism’ (Muller, 2018) and ‘technological solutionism’ (Morozov, 2013), which encourage governments and government officials to pursue immediate ‘attention economy’ effects through digitally enabled performance rather than making long-term and fundamental changes. Once the public have aesthetic fatigue from the platformed performance, and the copying of successful wanghong models is becoming less and less effective, what will be the next liuliang passcode for the CCP’s social and economic innovation and development?
