Virtual gifting on China’s live streaming platforms: hijacking the online gift economy

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory case study on the nascent “virtual gifting” feature of China’s live streaming platforms. At the nexus of technological infrastructure, social organization, and interpersonal relations, the authors aim to explicate the complex dynamics between the gift economy and the commodity economy in the context of the increasingly platformized Chinese society. This paper will first discuss how the platform infrastructure is geared toward maximizing content monetization through virtual gifting. The paper then examines how corporatized streamer guilds foreground the moneymaking capacity of virtual gifting at the expense of its potential for building communitarian and reciprocal relationships. Based on these structural dynamics, the commodification of virtual relations is further analyzed to demonstrate how the hegemonic construct of virtual gifting is perceived and reproduced at the individual level. The paper concludes by offering a reconsideration of the role of critical communication studies in turning the tide of China’s live streaming industry.

Keywords:

• gift economy
• commodity economy
• Internet
• virtual gifting
• live streaming
• China

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Xiaoxing Zhang is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. His research interests include political economy of communication, global communication, cultural politics, and rural communication. His doctoral research explores the juxtaposed conceptions of the good life in the ongoing transformations of rural China and rethinks the meanings of “China’s rising” in an era of multifaceted global crises.

Yu Xiang is a lecturer in the School of Journalism and Communication at Shanghai University. She obtained her master’s degree in global media studies and her PhD in international communication studies from the University of Westminster in London, UK. Her current research interests are in the areas of critical cultural studies, transnational audience studies, and China-Africa media studies.

Lei Hao completed his PhD in media and communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research explores the intersection of socio-cultural values and distributed technology, particularly the mutual shaping of ethnicity and technology and the social construction of blockchain governance in China. He is the Head of Chinese Operations in Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), a technology company that builds blockchains.

Notes

1 Their streaming experiences covered 14 different platforms. Twelve of them had streamed on more than one platform, and five had streamed on more than four different platforms, which demonstrated the diversity, intensity, and comprehensiveness of their understanding of virtual gifting as well as its social implications.

2 Tuhao (the uncouth rich) is a popular term used by China’s Internet users to mock the country’s nouveaux riche (Zhao, 2014). On live streaming platforms, this term is commonly used to refer to those who have spent a great deal of money on virtual gifting as members of China’s rising class of the nouveau riche.

3 See, for example, platformcoop.net.