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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural youths
• cultural production
• anti-school culture
• Kuaishou
• Shehui ren
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editorial board and anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions, and the Shanghai Adream Charitable Foundation for its support. Research for this article was made possible by a National Education Science 13th Five-Year Plan Grant of Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China for Youth Project, entitled “A Longitudinal Research on the Impact of Educational Experiences on Social Mobility of Children of Rural Migrant Workers” (no. EAA170429).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Miao Li (PhD) is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Shandong University, Jinan, China. Her research interests include cyber youth culture, new media and education, and schooling of rural–origin students. She is the author of a book entitled Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass (Routledge, 2015). Her work has appeared in The China Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, and Eurasian Geography and Economics. [email protected]

Chris K. K. Tan (PhD) is an associate professor in the Institute of Social Anthropology at Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. His research interests center on new media, gender, sexuality, and their intersections. He has previously published in Urban Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and Journal of Homosexuality. [email protected]

Yuting Yang is a Master’s degree student at the School of Journalism and Communication, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. Her recent work focuses on communications and networking in education. [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Education of People's Republic of China [EAA170429].