Shehui Ren: cultural production and rural youths’ use of the Kuaishou video-sharing app in Eastern China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rural youths in China face very limited life opportunities. Urban-biased educational policies have resulted in an unappealing school environment, where rural students become ‘invisible dropouts’ who physically attend school but have already mentally disengaged. Invoking the Birmingham School’s class-based analyses of youths’ cultural production, we examine how middle school students in rural Zouping, Shandong Province, engage the smart phone video-sharing app Kuaishou to realize their dreams of upward socio-economic mobility as Internet ‘micro-celebrities’ (Senft, T. (2008). Camgirls: Celebrity and community in the age of social media. New York: Peter Lang). These students produce a sub-culture centered on the figure of the shehui ren (‘society man’) and his associated values of brute strength and supporting one’s family. We maintain that in an increasingly neoliberal China where family wealth once again conditions social reproduction and the upward social mobility that education affords, the shehui ren criticizes the widening income gap by highlighting alternate venues of socio-economic advancement.