From invisible to visible: Kwai and the hierarchical cultural order of China’s cyberspace

Abstract

Contemporary China owns over 750 million Internet users, and a short-video-sharing app named Kwai has over 600 million users. From 2016 to 2017, when Kwai emerged as the largest short-video-sharing app and the fourth largest social media app in China, its major competitor Dou Yin was just released, and no other similar app could post a serious threat to Kwai. However, the emergence of Kwai to the mainstream public was tightly intertwined with a media discourse that established Kwai as a representation of rural China and low culture. Words like “vulgar,” “low,” “absurd,” and so forth were constantly used to describe Kwai and its users, and Kwai embodied a representativeness of rural and low culture that carries a taken-for-granted characteristic. This article unpacks Kwai’s controversial emergence and examines the power relations and cultural dynamics that were at play when Kwai was established by the mainstream media discourse a rural and culturally low. It interrogates the media discourse that constructs a regime of representation of Kwai, as well as how it contributes to the establishment of a regime of truth about Kwai, rural China, and rural Chinese. I unearth the seemingly natural condition of this representativeness and argue that Kwai’s controversial emergence from 2016 to 2017 signifies China’s rural–urban dichotomy, as well as a dominance of urban culture. I also indicate that we see a flow of this cultural dynamic from the physical world to the cyberspace, where the urban culture exercises the power to define and marginalize the rural.