Abstract
Craig, Lin, and Cunningham’s book is a forceful attempt to unpack what the authors convincingly argue is a “wildly polysemic” phenomenon: wanghong. Wanghong, a colloquial expression, is a contraction of the words wangluo hongren, or online celebrities. But wanghong has, especially since 2016, come to connote so much more, and the authors’ effort to define it here hints at the wide range of themes that this book covers:
The wanghong industry, as we understand it, refers to social media entrepreneurs and platform and intermediary media professionals working within a highly competitive platform landscape, incubated through regulatory protection, fueled by a rising middle class and responding to the demographic challenges of the urban–rural divide, and which offers potentially more lucrative opportunities for creators than their Western counterparts (p. 2).
Informed by a critical media industries approach and combining theoretical insights with empirical research Craig et al. meticulously work through the different aspects of China’s wanghong’s history and context by applying a conceptual framework of three overarching themes, or what they prefer to call tendencies, (p. 116). They do so without neglecting the movement between these types of wanghong: cultural, creative, and social wanghong. There are, the authors argue, cultural wanghong—this refers to performers already related to established media industries and mainstream entertainment culture: think of musicians, authors, actors, or pop stars. These luminaries use wanghong platforms to further advance their celebrity status (p. 20; 139). Creative wanghong, on the other hand, is defined as amateur creators who often operate with limited budgets which adds to a sense of authenticity that resonates with their followers. These creators are native to social media platforms and generate their own diverse and vernacular creative content—examples are vlogging, cooking, magic tricks, or singing. These creators’ backgrounds, the authors explain, range from urban hipsters to rural peasants and migrant workers—the example of two rural fishermen whose how-to-fish video’s attracted millions of subscribers on several platforms features as an effective example. (p. 112–113).
Finally, they distinguish social wanghong—a group distinctive in their ability to maintain and nurture social, mediated, relationships across wanghong platforms, rather than creating unique content. According to the authors, fostering these types of social relationships is a creative process too (p. 114). In this category, it is not the desire to be entertained or to gain cultural capital, but a type of intimacy generated by the construction of social presence that drives audiences to view their content. This trilateral framework is applied throughout the book and works well to structure this rather wide-ranging object of study.
In chapter one, Craig et al. sketch the dizzying size and scope of the wanghong industry and build a convincing argument that wanghong is from a different caliber than social media entertainment (SME), the latter being a global phenomenon working on platforms in the US. Wanghong on the other hand has, after successful attempts of going global, recently experienced a global backlash leading to a “pivot away from multilateralism, globalization, and historically high levels of global trade” (p. 162). Furthermore, wanghong creators have to take relentless party-state surveillance as a daily reality and official state participation is embedded in structure of wanghong. What the authors do very well here is analyzing the differences between China’s platform ecology and Western platforms, without falling into the trap of Chinese exceptionalism.
Chapter two focuses on the governance of wanghong. Especially insightful is the way in which the authors explain how “the cultural industries,” a term easily glossed over or left undefined, suggest something different in the Chinese context: “behind the economic and commercializing discourse there is a political agenda which aligns culture and media not only with economic policy, but also with ideological control and social governance” (p. 32).
Chapter three analyzes the landscape of wanghong platforms using the concepts of hyperplatformization and interplatformization to argue how wanghong platform ecology is both more competitive and more collaborative than the SME platform landscape.
Chapter four lays bare the conditions and socioeconomic backgrounds of those laboring in the wanghong industry. It traces the speedy evolution of creator labor and shows how this industry is permeated with precarity: not only does internet censorship demand continuous self-governance but also the affective demands on the wanghong worker whose personal lives are deeply intertwined with their professional lives may contribute to loneliness and vulnerability. The longer vignettes of wanghong workers’ experiences in this chapter contribute to a lively description.
Chapter five offers the reader a range of illustrative examples of wanghong creators taking up the complicated concepts of authenticity and creativity. An interesting observation here is what the authors call the “cultural dilemma” of wanghong: often stigmatized by the public media as being hedonistic and supporting materialistic values, there are actually very few wanghong workers who will proudly identify with the job description (p. 136).
The final chapter covers what could be constitutive of “global wanghong” and addresses the cultural politics of globalizing wanghong platforms. These platforms represent, the authors claim, the most effective efforts for Chinese culture to “go out”. At the same time, recent signs of rising platform nationalism undermine the idea that a global creator culture, effortlessly transcending national borders, and cultural differences might take shape any time soon.
All in all, this is on all accounts a well-written and comprehensive overview that does justice to the vibrant and varied landscape of wanghong. A critical reader might argue that the authors have perhaps squeezed in a topic too many—choosing fewer topics could have given the book more depth. This book review can only deliver a very small glimpse of the rich materials offered by Craig, Lin, and Cunningham. It will be a valuable text for undergraduate and graduate courses in global media or comparative media but also gives insights and context for media workers. I am further convinced, and hopeful, that this book will be applied widely in Western media studies, to contest Western centrism still so prevalent in media studies.
