Chinese beauty bloggers: amateurs, entrepreneurs, and platform labour

Abstract

Internet celebrities refer to people ‘that attain prominence and popularity native to the internet’. Internet celebrities rise not only on global social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube but also on their Chinese counterparts. In China, internet celebrities are known as wanghongs. While wanghong refers to a general group of people who achieve fame online, diverse subtypes of wanghongs exist, like meizhuang bozhu (beauty blogger). Chinese beauty bloggers create content about skincare and makeup with their personal accounts and attract a great number of followers. After the group started budding in the mid-2000s, the role of beauty blogger continues to bloom in the fast-growing internet industries of China. This paper examines the roles beauty bloggers play and how these roles take shape in China’s technological and economic context.