Selling beauty in digital China: gender, platform, and economy

Abstract

This research problematizes the rapid growth of beauty blogs, investigating how this process has been shaped and accelerated by gender discourses, platform labor, and the beauty industry, each of which is rooted in the broader context of China’s social transformation. It offers an integral frame to understand the drivers and effects of beauty bloggers and the wanghong economy in China. It reveals that the explosive development of beauty blogging in China is a result of connections and cooperation among heterogeneous actors at a specific historical conjuncture. Gendered beauty has played an indispensable role in China’s economic reform in that the former has driven and strengthened the latter and vice versa. Platforms worked in tandem with changing beauty discourses and promoted their expansion through beauty blogs. In the meantime, the rise of beauty blogging in China is an embodiment of global capitalism, which has strong ties with the beauty industry’s pre-digital system of mass production.