Abstract

The Mandarin Chinese term wanghong (网红) a shorthand term for wangluo hongren (literally “person popular on the internet”), frames the enticing shores of online celebrity through the peculiar lexical domain of a grassroots popularity. This explorative study on wanghong circumvents the framework of microcelebrity or internet influencers and argues that wanghong as it stands today is way more complex than merely internet fame and deeply entrenched in contemporary Chinese post-digital everyday life.

By post-digital, I specifically refer to how the online and offline processes and practices in relations to wanghong have become so congruent with each other that the distinction no longer makes sense. Wanghong as continuing conceptual (re)creations go way beyond what the term literally refers to as ‘internet red (fame)’: it becomes a prefix that is attached to a great many contexts, for example, wanghong cities, wanghong spaces, wanghong faces, wanghong architectures, wanghong shops, wanghong cafés/restaurants, and wanghong ice cream. In many cases, the spaces/objects/people under discussion are not famous at all, not even in the ‘micro’ sense, but attached to wanghong nonetheless.

What unites all these terms is not necessarily internet fame per se, but a replicable commercial and/or aesthetic logic of standardisation and circulation between platform capitalism (from WeChat to Dianping to Little Red Book to Instagram, and their recommendation algorithms and timeline micropolitics), user practices (from the simple acts of posting photos and reviews, to image filter apps, to professionalized teams of photographers and costume/makeup artists), and the owners of various spaces (including designers, entrepreneurs and so on).