Performing Eurasianness, Chineseness, and cosmopolitanism as racialized digital labor: sharenting mixed-blood children on Douyin

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this study, I consider the practice of sharenting mixed-blood children on Douyin as a particular case to explore how a racialized discourse facilitates and complicates the mechanism of sharenting in the Chinese context. Through digital ethnography and a qualitative content analysis of short video and audience comments on selected hunxue’er accounts, I explore how three racialized sharenting strategies – performances of Eurasianness, Chineseness, and cosmopolitanism, built around the concept of hunxue, or mixed-blood, are in fact forms of racialized digital labor for increasing visibility and monetizing creativity. The findings demonstrate that through a seemingly agentic and definitely conscious play of mixed identities, these sharenting strategies, exclusive to hunxue’er accounts, justify a distinctive use of children’s digital labor in Chinese society. This study also shows that in Douyin’s landscape, sharenting children from Chinese-Caucasian families appears to be more visible and favored, which not only reveals the insidious logic of global racial hierarchies but also reinforces the structures of dominance in the digital sphere.