From online to onsite: Wanghong economy as the new engine driving China’s urban development

Abstract

Considering China’s ‘isolated’ digital ecosystem, this paper examines China’s ‘check-in’ activities to understand how the wanghong economy is driving China’s new rounds of urban development, with the purpose of supplementing existing research on digital economies from the Chinese context. Focusing on a representative case study area called Dongshankou in Guangzhou, which is regarded as one of the most popular wanghong places and an emerging commercial centre, I sought to enrich existing studies about digital economies and extend scholarship on platform urbanism from the cultural economy perspective. First, I argue that Chinese consumers’ check-in activities function as the data accumulation process, structuring Dongshankou’s digital capital through the assemblage of online posts and geotags. Therefore, Dongshankou’s urban development challenges the conventional view of creativity as the key factor in the cultural economy for urban development, given that digital capital is now the key driver for urban development in the digital age. Second, the growth of wanghong stores in Dongshankou reveals how the wanghong economy is materialised into urban cultural objects. Emotional value – a crucial selling point that these wanghong stores aim to provide to facilitate consumers’ check-in activities – illustrates how China’s highly participatory digital ecosystem extracts users’ emotions and bodily experiences into the process of capital accumulation, which structures the ‘platform urbanism’ through our daily lives. This paper broadens the horizon for an alternative theoretical agenda in platform urbanism: beyond focusing solely on platform algorithms, how digital platforms and emotions become inextricably linked in economic production should be further explored.

Keywords

Platform urbanism wanghong economy urban consumption everyday life urban China

Introduction

In this paper, I examine China’s recent heated wanghong economy and its associated urban development, at the nexus of the cultural economy and platform urbanism, to understand how the digitally impacted everyday lives and consumption practices of Chinese residents are giving rise to a new urban economy, while simultaneously contributing to the urban development at the same time. By calling it wanghong网红, I refer to a term that is a shortened expression denoting social media and influencers, now widely used for goods, places or stores that are popular on social media platforms. Wanghong is a burgeoning social phenomenon driven by China’s domestic social and cultural activities (Craig et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022). The wanghong economy, therefore, has emerged with tight associations to the digitally impacted everyday lives of Chinese residents, as evidenced by people queuing up for hours simply to check into a store or place that is popular on social media. Areas with a high concentration of wanghong stores can greatly enhance their online presence and attract many visitors, ultimately transforming into a hub for commercial activities and further boost local urban development.

In light of this new urban phenomenon, I argue that the wanghong economy and its associated urban development are worthy of investigation within the field of economic geography for the following reasons: First, despite China’s wanghong economy having been extensively researched in recent media and communication studies (e.g. Craig et al., 2021; Han, 2021), the prevalent ‘check-in activities/daka 打卡’ – being attracted by something interesting online and then check into that place onsite – and the emergence of wanghong places make it geographically relevant, revealing that digital and urban spaces are becoming two interrelated dynamics (Leszczynski, 2020; Sadowski, 2020). This situation is because digital platforms have significantly changed people’s daily lives and consumption practices (Bissell, 2020). People who are intrigued by the attractive posts, so they are motivated to check into these places onsite by making geotags. This phenomenon demonstrates how digital platforms seamlessly integrate into people’s everyday lives by shaping our living environments (Barns, 2019).

Second, examining the urban economy from a cultural-economic perspective offers an alternative understanding of economic geography in terms of how different aspects constitute the urban landscape as specific economic entities (Amin and Thrift, 2007). The wanghong economy, therefore, offers an optimal example beyond the dominance of Western-dominated studies to understand how new cultural activities make the city a specific target for emerging economic activities. While the subsequent urban development requires further exploration beyond the traditional agglomeration of cultural industries and creative clusters, which has a particular focus on the role of creativity in boosting urban economic growth (see Florida et al., 2017), how digitally impacted cultural activities appear to affect the traditional urban development trajectory needs further investigation, which has the potential to contribute to new insights into the role of digital platforms in shaping urban environments (e.g. Barns, 2019; Fields et al., 2020; Graham, 2020).

Third, the wanghong economy and urban development reveal the fundamental penetration of digital platforms in impacting Chinese residents’ everyday lives and shaping urban environments, which aligns with the current heated discussions on platform urbanism in recent geographical studies (see Barns, 2020). Existing studies – mostly from the Global North – have exemplified how digital technologies control, transact and appropriate our everyday lives to create new economies (e.g. Fields, 2022; Grabher and van Tuijl, 2020). While most of these studies are motivated by political concerns about digital platforms, China’s wanghong economy can provide a richer sense of digital economies shaped by different social and cultural relations than existing Anglophone studies. This is because of China’s unique digital ecosystem, that without those worldwide used digital platforms such as Uber and Instagram, China has a relatively closed and endogenous digital ecosystem that shapes its residents’ everyday lives in a different way.

In light of these circumstances, this paper investigates the check-in activities in China to analyse how such cultural activities in urban spaces produce geographical knowledge, and how these everyday consumption practices sustain the urban economy, further driving local urban development in economic thought. By doing so, this paper contributes to urban scholarship in two ways. First, it enriches existing discussions on digital economies by engaging China’s heterodox digital ecosystem and its associated sociocultural activities. Second, contrary to contemporary heated discussions of platform urbanism that takes the political economy approach, I adopt the cultural economy perspective to diversify the understandings of the complexities of digital platforms beyond ontologies of control, appropriation and transaction by including the value of everyday activities.

This paper is organised as follows: First, I build its conceptual framework at the intersection of the cultural economy and platform urbanism, to situate this paper within the current ‘digital turn’ in geographical scholarship (see Ash et al., 2018). Next, I explain the research rationales and case study area, employing an empirical case study to illustrate how new cultural activities have sustained the wanghong economy and driven urban development in one neighbourhood. Finally, the conclusion draws upon the empirical findings to broaden the contemporary understandings of urban cultural economies in relation to discussions of platform urbanism.

Cultural economy and urban development: Agglomeration and creativity

The cultural economy perspective is suitable for this paper’s conceptual framework because the wanghong economy reveals how new consumption practices and cultural activities produce and sustain the new urban economy. The concept of cultural economy demonstrates the ‘cultural turn’ in economic geography by representing culture and economy are no longer dualist concepts; instead it reveals that ‘economies are seen as involving the production, circulation and consumption of “materials” that are cultural in character’ (Crang, 1997: 13). Thus, the economy not only satisfies material needs and generates profits but also seeks symbolic satisfaction and pleasures (Jackson, 2002; Zukin, 1998). For example, cultural industries, culture-led urban regeneration, historic preservation and creative urban hubs are typical examples of these particular spaces that spark consumers’ desires and passions by providing them with the ‘sensory stimuli’ for the urban economy and its development (e.g. Florida, 2003; Grodach, 2013; Waitt and Gibson, 2009).

In this regard, the urban economy can be viewed from a cultural economy perspective to understand why and how signs, symbols and desires sustain it (Amin and Thrift, 2007). This is because cities have undergone a dramatic shift from manufacturing to service-oriented activities (e.g. Markusen and Schrock, 2009), whereby cities are no longer places of production but cultural goods to be consumed and enjoyed (Miles and Miles, 2004; Pratt, 2009). Hence, passion, linked with urban consumption, is considered an important aspect of the urban economy, and different cultural activities such as drinking, shopping and tourism are sustained by consumption in forming urban concentrations through herd behaviour (Amin and Thrift, 2007). Other studies have revealed the various cultural policies implemented by governments such as culture-led urban regeneration (e.g. Miles and Paddison, 2005) and cultural industries (e.g. Pratt, 1997), highlighting the agglomeration of cultural production in stimulating urban development.

Thus, from a cultural economy perspective, cultural industries and leisure facilities can be viewed as the materialisation of urban economies, which are used to keep culture in place (Pratt, 2009). Regarding its role in urban development, an overriding and repeatedly confirmed situation is the agglomeration and spatial concentration of cultural industries (Scott, 2001). To promote the tendency towards agglomeration, creativity ensures the continuous destabilisation of prevailing forms and practices, in structuring the ‘creative milieu’ (Scott, 2001). In this light, Florida (2002) contends that people who are highly talented and educated form the ‘creative class’ in contributing to urban economic growth (Florida et al., 2017). This ‘creative class’ is a group of talents constituting the ‘human capital’, and the low barriers for the concentration of talent are the key point for urban economies (Florida, 2002).

However, following Lee’s (2006) concept of ‘ordinary economy’, which posits that economies reflect the material circumstances of social life and that the value of social life and relationships reveal the inseparability of economy and society in representing the existence of economy (Lee, 2006). Therefore, further attention is needed to determine which perspective should be adopted to understand urban cultural economy needs further attention, as one is about the economisation of culture, and another refers to the culturalisation of the economy (Gibson and Kong, 2005). To elaborate, the former primarily documents how cultural elements are integrated into the economy itself, such as studies on the agglomeration of cultural industries and creative clusters, which reveal the normative interpretation of the economic geography (e.g. Lee, 2014; Pratt, 2008). The latter focuses more on cultural activities such as everyday life, consumption and passion that are deeply embedded in the local context (e.g. Qian et al., 2021).

In this regard, I emphasise the importance of analysing from the perspective of the culturalisation of the economy. If the economy itself is intertwined with different values of social life and relations (Gibson-Graham, 2008; Lee, 2006), the wanghong economy must go beyond only platform algorithms and logistics, as culture itself is divergent in materialising economies (Crang, 1997; Gibson and Kong, 2005). Especially when researching China, a non-Western country that has different urban lifestyles and cultures, will have more insights to contribute to the existing geographical studies. Therefore, taking this analytical framework, it helps to determine (1) how consumers’ check-in activities sustain the wanghong economy and (2) how the wanghong economy is materialised in urban cultural objects, causing the agglomeration of cultural industries. Against this backdrop, this paper narrows its focus on everyday life and urban consumption, paying special attention to local cultural activities in China to understand how the economy is culturalised in the Chinese context.

Positioning platform urbanism in China: Digital capital and different digital ecosystems

In this section, I delve into recent studies to understand the powerful impacts of digital platforms in affecting people’s daily lives and consumption practices. Because digital technologies have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, the pursuit of consumption is no longer limited solely to ‘word of mouth’ marketing and promotion (Pratt, 2000). Comments and ratings on digital platforms also have an increasing impact (e.g. Zukin et al., 2017). ‘Platform urbanism’, which parallels this paper’s research focus on wanghong cultural activities, illustrates the increasingly influential role of digital platforms in reshaping urban conditions and permeating people’s daily lives (e.g. Barns, 2020; Bissell, 2020; Rose et al., 2021), highlighting the changing relationship between technology, cities and capital due to the growing presence of digital platforms in cities (Sadowski, 2020).

To elaborate, unlike smart urbanism, platform urbanism has a tendency in transforming the city to be more market or consumer-oriented (Sadowski, 2020), revealing a new form of urbanisation shaped by the assemblages of digital networks and data (Leszczynski, 2020). Existing empirical studies have demonstrated how digital platforms are becoming the ‘socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement’ (Langley and Leyshon, 2017: 11), highlighting the need to understand the ubiquitous pervasiveness of digital platforms in influencing our daily lives (McNeill, 2021). For example, in the domain of the urban housing market, ‘automated landlords’ show that digital platforms are accumulating financial gains automatically (e.g. Fields, 2022); in the domain of urban labour markets (e.g. Grabher and van Tuijl, 2020), digital platforms have given rise to the gig economy, which has resulted in increased precarity.

Therefore, Graham (2020) contends that platforms control urban interactions while remaining uncountable because of their dis/embeddedness from space-times. In this light, digital capital, which transcends data, reveals a new version of capital accumulation through the assemblage of data in the digital age. Building on this argument, Rosen and Alvarez León (2022: 1) provided a robust discussion by relating it to urban development, they claim that there is a digital growth machine that ‘extends long-standing land development and industrial attraction strategies, to promote urban growth and increase exchange values’.

These studies illustrate that platform urbanism involves data and algorithms are becoming inseparable parts of the cities (Graham, 2020), revealing the evolving relationship between the urban and the digital (Barns, 2020). Digital platforms are operating as new commercial centres for emerging economic activities (Kenney and Zysman, 2020), working as companies and generating new capital accumulation by coordinating different networked actors and signposting the ‘platform capitalism’ process (Srnicek, 2017). In this sense, platform capitalism reveals how existing research takes the perspective of political economy and focuses on the power that platforms wield and how they act as the ‘extractive apparatus for data’ (Srnicek, 2017: 48). However, apart from this overly adopted political economy perspective, cultural geographers have also argued how platforms and affects are becoming inextricably linked (e.g. Bissell, 2020), such as how the success of Airbnb depends on hosts’ emotional labour in conveying a sense of ‘home’ (Spangler, 2020). These studies, therefore, show that there is more potential for future research on how our everyday lives structure platform urbanism.

Further, if situating the existing research about platform urbanism in China, we cannot ignore its peculiar digital ecosystem. Kenney and Zysman (2020), when conducting theoretical discussions on ‘platform economy’, often excluded China due to its ‘isolated’ digital ecosystem that was in stark contrast to digital ecosystems in other parts of the world. As is commonly known, China has a relatively closed internet network, that without the globally used digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, it has its own endogenous digital ecosystem that is fostered by its domestic digital platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin and Weibo (the Chinese variation of Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter, respectively). More importantly, while these Chinese apps are seen as substitutes for these famous digital platforms, it is overly simplistic to assume that they have similar functions and working modes in shaping our daily lives. Alternative interpretations of platform urbanism in the Chinese context are needed to situate it within recent urban studies scholarship.

China’s digital ecosystem is treated differently for two reasons in this research. First, the analysis of digital platforms and their functions needs further elaboration in the Chinese context. Take Tik Tok as an example, although it is a Chinese company, its Chinese version, Douyin, has completely different functional mechanisms associated with e-commerce, live-streaming for key opinion leaders (KOL), marketing and in-app purchases (Gab China, 2021). Kaye et al. (2021) also emphasised that Douyin has developed more mature business models than Tik Tok, with a prominent feature in merchandising products that has effectively turned viewers into buyers. This can be attributed to the unique characteristics of Chinese digital platforms, which are based on a fan economy system that satisfies viewers’ emotional needs and is managed in an organised and consolidated manner (Liang and Shen, 2016). The same phenomenon is widely applied in many other digital platforms in China, mainly due to the country’s robust online retail industry developed by its e-commerce giant Alibaba (Craig et al., 2021; Han, 2021).

Second, China’s digital ecosystem is highly participatory because of this fan economy system, which has introduced new financial accumulation strategies. As Zhang et al. (2022) have described, platform algorithms, sorting and categorisation are used in China to intensify the economy of attention. This situation is because China’s own digital platforms have created a new form of lifestyle where users seek more attention and viewership by sharing their everyday lives and consumption habits (Guo, 2022). This phenomenon reveals the influential role of the media in communication, with China’s robust e-commerce platform and mature online retail model having provided fertile ground for the growth of several internet influencers, who have a huge fan base and can then convert these fans into purchasing power and become a business model (Craig et al., 2021).

Thus, considering China’s ‘isolated’ digital ecosystem and the associated wanghong cultural activities, the wanghong economy further proves that new values of social life and practices continue to structure the economy (Lee, 2006), which has the potential to complement existing scholarship in these two aspects. First, China’s endogenous digital ecosystem shows more promises beyond existing studies about platform urbanism, that the new value of social practices and life reveals an overtly geographical knowledge that can contribute to the currently heated discussions of platform urbanism, because it incorporates the impacts of new cultural and economic activities in parallel with digital platforms’ political influences. Second, interpreting the culturalisation of the economy not only diversifies our understandings of the cultural economy beyond the West (Gibson and Kong, 2005), but also illustrates the role of new technologies and media in achieving new economic objectives (Pratt, 2000).

Research rationale and methodologies

To address these questions, I chose a typical research area, Dongshankou the neighbourhood in Guangzhou, which is regarded as one of the most popular wanghong places in China. Dongshankou used to be a residential neighbourhood with ordinary consumer landscapes such as wet markets, grocery stores and local restaurants that catered to the daily needs of local residents. However, over the past 2 years, it has become one of the most popular commercial centres in Guangzhou, with many new stores aspiring to establish a presence in Dongshankou to capitalise on the wanghong economy for their businesses. This phenomenon is mainly because of China’s check-in (daka 打卡) activities, where Chinese consumers check into Dongshankou with geotags, describing the stores they visit and posting them on Xiaohongshu with enticing comments and popular hashtags. Thus, many wanghong stores are mushrooming in Dongshankou, which is now regarded as the new commercial centre in Guangzhou and a place with great economic potential.

Focusing on this phenomenon, this study adopts qualitative research methods by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews and field observations. Python was also used to extract information from relevant digital platforms using the keyword ‘Dongshankou’. Two critical groups – the new retailers in Dongshankou who took advantage of the wanghong economy and the consumers in Dongshankou who engaged in wanghong consumption – were interviewed to understand how the wanghong economy was sustained through check-in activities and new commercial strategies. In total, 20 new retailers and 16 consumers were interviewed for this research. The consumers were all randomly selected onsite and their consent was obtained before the interview. These two groups of individuals are worth investigating because they promote wanghong consumption and sustain the wanghong economy in different ways. Regarding consumers, most of the interview questions were about their consumption motivations and impressions; interview questions for retailers pertained to their marketing strategies and motivations in response to the wanghong economy.

In addition to the in-depth semi-structured interviews that I prepared for these two groups of people, the content of a major Chinese digital platform, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book or Red, the Chinese variation of Instagram), was researched to supplement the qualitative data collected from the interviews. Xiaohongshu was chosen as it is currently China’s most popular digital platform where the ‘wanghong’ consumption emerges and become widespread. I used Python by using ‘Dongshankou’ as a keyword to search for relevant posts on Xiaohongshu. Since Xiaohongshu is a social media application with no online web pages (as of 2022), the number of online posts included was only limited to only 1000. These 1000 posts were randomly extracted from Xiaohongshu, all within the timeframe from 2020 to 2022. I then coded these 1000 posts in NVivo to identify the most frequent keywords across all search results. All the interviewees and data collected online were coded with pseudonyms, along with relevant descriptions of the participants’ background such as occupation, gender and age.

Materialisation of the wanghong economy in Dongshankou

Xiaohongshu is regarded as the major digital platform for incubating popular (wanghong) stores and places. With its slogan ‘Tag my everyday life’, it offers Chinese residents a platform to share their everyday lives and consumption experiences. Although Xiaohongshu is regarded as the Chinese version of Instagram, its unique platform algorithms are applied to cater to different users’ consumption habits and desires. According to a report by Qu Fang, the founder of Xiaohongshu, the ultimate goal of developing Xiaohongshu in the long term is to ‘establish a closed consumption loop for users to share their everyday lives and purchase goods’.¹ It seeks to increase economic profit using machine learning to adapt its business model and recommend suitable content that corresponds to different users’ interests.

Here, the operating mechanism of Xiaohongshu reveals how China’s robust online retailing system (e.g. Alibaba, Taobao) has significantly permeated Chinese society. A key factor to succeed in wanghong economy is to attract a substantial number of followers to their accounts on digital platforms. As Xiaohongshu becomes the main battleground for making businesses and gaining viewers, producing attractive content and visually appealing photographs are crucial to accumulate followers. In order to take advantage of the wanghong economy for business, having a photogenic consumption environment that encourages consumers to capture and post photographs on their personal social media platforms is essential. Therefore, social media promotion has become a key marketing strategy that many new stores in China employ to attract huge attention online to facilitate onsite consumption. Moreover, shops that can attract tremendous attention online have the potential to convert viewers into buyers (Kaye et al., 2021).

Based on the data collected through fieldwork, some retailers begin promoting their stores even before their official opening. In doing so, they aimed to attract potential customers online and encourage them to visit the store when it opens. For example, Nana, a new retailer in Dongshankou, created a new account on Xiaohongshu to advertise her shop, although it was still under construction and renovation and had not yet officially opened. She was also an emerging influencer on Douyin, working as a fitness trainer, and had already accumulated over 10,000 followers. She expressed her knowledge about channelling her growing impacts on digital platforms to attract her followers to come to her store and buy her clothes. She also highlighted the importance of utilising social medial marketing to gain popularity on Xiaohongshu and promote her businesses:

I require my staff to upload posts on their social media every day, either on Douyin or Xiaohongshu, to promote our stores. By doing this, I hope to attract potential customers’ attention in advance. Here, I say that posting on social media not only means taking photos, but also taking beautiful photos from different angles, with filters, watermarks, slogans etc., using some objects such as feathers, pearls, and flowers to structure the fenweigan (senses of aesthetic aura), and then further geotagging our stores to make them visible and accessible for customers to find. Of course, we also actively use hashtags with popular words such as ‘check in’ and ‘store exploration’ so we can get more attention. (Nana, retailer in Dongshankou, interviewed in November 2021)

During the interview with Nana, the main feature of the wanghong economy was revealed, which has been extensively discussed in media studies about online retailing in making money (Kaye et al., 2021). However, the heavy reliance on digital platforms also revealed that these new retailers were actually being ‘controlled’ by the platform algorithms by promoting their businesses with highly visible hashtags, with the possibility of accumulating potential ‘followers’ (viewers) of their stores. Thus, to appeal to the wanghong economy by starting businesses, Nana felt it is important to structure her store as a photogenic consumption environment where consumers could come to take photographs.

In this respect, stores that seek to take advantage of the wanghong economy and provide consumers with sensory stimuli and a photogenic environment, can be viewed as the materialisation of the wanghong economy to keep culture in place (Crang, 1997; Pratt, 2009). A typical example is Captain Café, which serves coffee and light meals, it opened in Dongshankou in early 2020 (when China had just recovered from the first wave of COVID-19) and is regarded by the public as one of the earliest wanghong stores in Dongshankou. The reason that it became a wanghong store was very evident: decorated with vintage American elements, featuring a highly photogenic environment – including red bricks, industrial design and effective slogans on the wall – and serving visually appealing dishes made it a favoured destination, attracting many people to check in and take photographs (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Captain cafe in Dongshankou decorated in Vintage American style.

Its highly photographable consumption environment received high praise from these visitors, and posts about Captain Café on Xiaohongshu labelled it the new landmark of Dongshankou. Comments describing its highly photogenic environment were as follows:

I recently found that Dongshankou has a newly opened coffee shop; the most unique point is that it directly uses ‘Dongshankou’ as the store name . . . The store decoration gives you the feeling of living somewhere in the USA or in a movie.² (User on Xiaohongshu, posted July 2021)

The empirical evidence reveals that Captain Café appealed to the current popular wanghong economy by providing a photogenic environment, encouraging users to post their photos on social media platforms. An important snippet of information from this online post is that the Captain Café is linked with the place name Dongshankou, which reinforced consumers’ impressions of its location and Dongshankou as a place that offers interesting consumption experiences.

Further evidence that shows how the wanghong economy was materialised in these new stores in Dongshankou includes popular slogans circulating on social media platforms that were commonly used in these wanghong stores, aiming at accommodating consumers’ emotional needs and arousing their emotional resonance. For example, slogans such as ‘coffee in the morning, alcohol in the evening 早C晚A’ were frequently used in these new stores or a coffee shop labelling itself the ‘lonely hearts club’ to appeal to these consumers’ emotions and ignite their passion for consumption and photography (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Examples of affective slogans used in wanghong stores.

In this respect, I view these emerging stores with their highly photogenic environments and affective slogans adopted from social media platforms, as materialised cultural objects of the wanghong economy, which is ‘circulated, produced and materialised’ through its link with urban consumption (Amin and Thrift, 2007; Crang, 1997). These new stores in Dongshankou are no different from other cultural industries or creative clusters that have been widely documented in existing urban scholarship. Consumption, therefore, is a crucial element that sustains the wanghong economy; thus, these emerging new shops focus heavily on providing sensory stimuli to spark consumers’ desires to visit, shop and relax in their stores (Amin and Thrift, 2007).

In other words, these new wanghong stores in Dongshankou, function as spaces that provide consumers with emotional satisfaction through their consumption environments. For example, the word ‘fenweigan’ 氛围感 (a sense of aesthetic aura) was frequently mentioned as the key to success in the wanghong economy. Mr Cheung, a typical retailers who recently opened his new shop in Dongshankou said:

It is essential to ensure your store has a photogenic environment to invoke the feeling of fenweigan. You can see these decorations (e.g. eye-catching slogans and succulents) in my store; they are all well-designed with the purpose of facilitating my customers’ desire to take photos. (Mr Cheung, owner of a designer brand clothing store, interviewed in July 2022)

Here, the term fenweigan, highlights how sensory experiences, emotions and affective encounters are important to the wanghong economy, serving as ‘sensory stimuli’ for consumption experiences by accommodating new cultural activities and the desire for users to consume them (Amin and Thrift, 2007). However, beyond mere sensory stimuli, as illustrated by Amin and Thrift (2007), Mr Cheung also mentioned using feiwengan to provide ‘emotional value’, revealing how consumption environments use decorations such as the affective slogans adopted from digital platforms to emotionally resonate with these consumers and encourage their onsite transactions.

Therefore, from the cultural economy perspective, that passion – through its association with consumption (Amin and Thrift, 2007) – reveal itself as the key factor in sustaining and fuelling the wanghong economy. However, a new change that can be generated from this research is the inseparable role of digital platforms in ‘manipulating’ and ‘controlling’ these stores’ businesses, with the purpose of increasing financial gains. As aforementioned, the wanghong economy is primarily about gaining attention on digital platforms by accumulating a huge fan base that can be converted into buyers. Hence, these new retailers were in fact being ‘controlled’ by Xiaohongshu, whose high volume could help to attract more customers. For example, one of my informants, Mr Lee, illustrated how he encouraged his customers to post favourable comments and provide high ratings on digital platforms, with the purpose of taking advantage of the wanghong economy for the benefit of his store’s businesses:

It is very important to use social media, such as Xiaohongshu and Dazhong Dianping to attract customers. The higher ratings you can get, the more customers you will have. We give them complimentary treats and discounts; we only want them to leave good comments for us and post visually appealing photographs on Xiaohongshu to attract more customers. (Mr Lee, manager of Vital Café, interviewed in November 2021)

Thus, good comments and high ratings on digital platforms benefit these new retailers’ businesses as they take advantage of the wanghong economy to attract more customers. As Srnicek (2017) contends, data serve as the raw materials to be extracted for capital accumulation to structure the process of platform capitalism. This interview quote above reveals that consumers’ ‘unpaid’ enthusiastic comments on digital platforms act as the data for retailers to construct a positive image for future financial gains.

Checking into Dongshankou: Assemblage of geotags and accumulation of digital capital

In this situation, the increasingly enticing and affective posts about visitors’ consumption experiences in Dongshankou, work as data flows that contribute to the digital capital accumulation process for Dongshankou. In particular, check-in activities, as the representative phenomenon that sustains the wanghong economy, have led to the assemblage of online posts and geotags of Dongshankou, which resulted in attracting more customers. For example, Wenwen, a university student in Guangzhou, was one of my interviewees who said she came to Dongshankou to check into these stores because of the attractive posts on Xiaohongshu. She was drawn to photographs of people sitting surrounded by flowers and eating delicate desserts shown on Xiaohongshu, and attracted by very enthusiastic comments calling Dongshankou a ‘must-visit’ place in Guangzhou. She further explained that her intention to check into these stores in Dongshankou was because:

You can see so many posts on Red about people who took photos in these stores here [Dongshankou]; are all dressed so beautifully. With a Lolita dress and delicate makeup, just looking so elegant, standing there [somewhere in Dongshankou], these online posts on Xiaohongshu showed you could take very beautiful photos here in Dongshankou with very interesting consumption experiences. These photos are important, as you can get many likes on your social media account. (Wenwen, approximately 20 years old, a university student, interviewed in April 2022)

Wenwen’s response revealed that her initial motivation to check into these places stemmed from the ‘emotional value’ provided by these wanghong stores and being intrigued by these online posts. This indicates that the wanghong economy is emotionally influenced by the role of urban consumption (Amin and Thrift, 2007). Wenwen’s check-in activities not only revealed her shared identities with users on Xiaohongshu by showing admiration for similar consumption places and products shared by others, but also illustrated how she joined the digital capital accumulation process by posting her consumption experiences online and making purchases onsite.

Moreover, because of Xiaohongshu’s platform algorithms which work to recommend posts to users who live near them within 20 km,³ the fieldwork results also revealed that most of the visitors came to Dongshankou because the interesting posts on Xiaohongshu attracted their attention. When enquiring about their motivations to visit, many of them answered that they came to check into Dongshankou largely because of the recommendations on Xiaohongshu, such as a couple who have been living in Guangzhou for over 7 years, illustrated they came to visit Dongshankou recently because of those interesting posts on Xiaohongshu (interview made with a young couple in August 2022).

Because of these visitors’ frequent check-in activities in Dongshankou, which resulted in the accumulation of a large number of geotags and online posts on Xiaohongshu, greatly enhanced the visibility of Dongshankou; the comments projected it as a place teeming with interesting, must-visit stores in Guangzhou. Therefore, I argue that consumers’ check-in activities, act as the data accumulation process, with their ‘unpaid’ online posts and enticing descriptions and comments attracting more people come to Dongshankou. I further argue the assemblage of geotags and online posts can be viewed as the digital capital for Dongshankou, which illustrates why Dongshankou’s urban development was then successfully driven, because now the urban development is led by the digital growth machine through the accumulation of digital capital (Rosen and Alvarez León, 2022).

Because of the high visibility of Dongshankou on Xiaohongshu, which transformed it into an ideal place with high digital capital for investment, many more investors became attracted and decided to come to Dongshankou to make businesses. For example, Tony Chan, a new retailer in Dongshankou, told me he had come to Dongshankou to do business only a few months before the interview. He mentioned that his reason for choosing Dongshankou was because of its high visibility on social media platforms:

Like other retailers, I chose Dongshankou for investment because it is now a wanghong place on Xiaohongshu. It is very important to take advantage of the wanghong economy to do business, given the stark differences from our parents’ era; everyone will first check their smartphones first to find something interesting and determine which store has the highest rating. Then, they will decide where to indulge their consumption practices. Here in Dongshankou as a wanghong consumption place, you can take advantage of the wanghong label for more visibility and customers. (Tony Chan, owner of a coffee & barber shop in Dongshankou, interviewed in Mar 2022)

According to Tony Chan’s interview quotes, which confirmed that data, shaped by visitors’ geotags on Xiaohongshu, constitute the digital capital for boosting local urban development as Rosen and Alvarez León (2022) claim.

Thus, facilitated by consumers’ check-in behaviours, the wanghong economy reveals not only the influential role of platform algorithms but also its highly participatory features in mediating everyday life through powerful ways (Barns, 2019). On the one hand, the high platform volume provided by Xiaohongshu enhances the visibility of these new stores in Dongshankou by helping them attract more customers, which is in line with Srnicek’s (2017) assertion that the process of platform capitalism is effective in accumulating financial gains. On the other hand, China’s digital platforms are highly participatory, as users’ consumption practices are associated with geographical importance. Marking the place they visited and posting their consumption experiences online showcase the interrelated activities and communication between virtual and material spaces (Sadowski, 2020). Moreover, because of the assemblage of online posts about Dongshankou, their check-in activities have facilitated the agglomeration of wanghong stores in Dongshankou, which shows that cities are platform-mediated and how urban environments are being reshaped by the quotidian use of digital platforms.

Converting Dongshankou into a wanghong place: Motivation for check-in activities

Therefore, Dongshankou has evolved from a residential neighbourhood to a hotspot with a high concentration of wanghong stores, attracting many new consumers who come to Dongshankou to check into those new stores. This transformation suggests that Dongshankou is now being consumed and enjoyed as a cultural good (Miles and Paddison, 2005). Its improved built environment and revitalised urban vitality are indicative of how the agglomeration of wanghong stores in Dongshankou stimulates its urban consumption and attracts investment from multiple businesses. Dongshankou is now being considered a new emerging commercial centre in Guangzhou, which has further attracted several investors to come to Dongshankou to launch businesses. This urban phenomenon shows digital and urban spaces now work as two interrelated dynamics (Sadowski, 2020), highlighting the quotidian use of digital platforms in producing new urban infrastructure and shaping the cities. Therefore, the inseparable role of digital platforms that are integrated with Chinese residents’ everyday lives in causing the agglomeration of wanghong stores in Dongshankou and stimulating its urban development needs further exploration.

Two points need further elaboration in this context. First, Dongshankou’s urban development has been boosted by these prevalent check-in activities and the agglomeration of wanghong stores. Through digital platforms, users can share their consumption experiences online, and the use of these digital platforms, in fact, lowers the barriers (cr. Florida, 2002) for Chinese consumers to participate in sustaining the wanghong economy. Contrary to the existing literature, with its long-held belief that urban development is driven by the accumulation of creative classes and agglomeration of cultural industries (e.g. Gibson et al., 2002; Grodach et al., 2017) – highlighting ‘creativity’ as the key factor in cultural economy that can contribute to urban development (Florida et al., 2017) – this paper challenges this perspective by considering the disruptive role of digital platforms.

Just like Srnicek (2017) argues, data is the key factor for capital accumulation in the digital age, and the digital growth machine reveals that urban development is now led by the accumulation of digital capital (Rosen and Alvarez León, 2022). Because of the ‘low barriers’ posed by the digital platforms, consumers’ check-in activities served as the data collection process, causing the ‘assemblage of geotags and online posts’, which then led to the accumulation of digital capital in Dongshankou, boosting its urban development. Thus, rather than the concentration of talents and ‘creativity’ (see Florida, 2002), evidence from Dongshankou reveals that digital capital is becoming the key factor driving urban development in the digital age (Rosen and Alvarez León, 2022).

Second, following Gibson and Kong’s (2005) approach of interpreting the economy from the perspective of the culturalisation of economy, it becomes imperative to understand the motivation behind these consumers’ check-in activities. According to the fieldwork data, when inquiring about these consumers’ motivation about coming to Dongshankou to check into these stores, two types of common responses were as follows:

To be honest, after checking into these wanghong stores in Dongshankou, I feel very disappointed. They just look good in photos, they [coffee shops and restaurants] do not offer tasty food . . . I came to Dongshankou to check into these stores because I saw interesting posts on Xiaohongshu; also, if I see many people queuing up for one store, it also piques my interests as I want to know why there are so many people waiting there. (Yingying in her 20s, a consumer in Dongshankou, interviewed in April 2022)

Many wanghong (KOL/influencers) come to Dongshankou to take photos, so I am also attracted to come to Dongshankou to check in. . . I feel Dongshankou is a healing place, with interesting stores and people, and visually appealing locations to take photos. (Lulu, female, makeup artist, consumer in Dongshankou, interviewed in April 2022)

The insights gathered from these two interviews, the consolidated consumption practices ‘manipulated’ by Xiaohongshu, and the emotional value provided by these wanghong stores, reveal that the urban development of Dongshankou goes beyond merely platform algorithms, being closely intertwined with people’s emotions and bodily experiences, as these consumers’ passions and emotions are being integrated into the capital accumulation process in supporting the wanghong economy.

In this sense, even though the urban development initiated through the wanghong economy in Dongshankou parallels how platform algorithms are impacting the growth of new economic activities in changing the urban landscapes – revealing how cities are now constituted by data and platform algorithms (Fields et al., 2020) – this paper’s research findings further prove the complexities of digital platforms in structuring platform urbanism to monetise different aspects of our everyday lives (Rosen and Alvarez León, 2022). Due to the growing inseparable role of digital platforms in affecting our daily lives by shaping a highly participatory digital ecosystem, China’s check-in activities have illustrated how digital platforms extract users’ emotions and consolidate their consumption behaviours into the capital accumulation process, which further impacts our living environments and urban development trajectories. Therefore, our everyday lives and bodily experiences are also being treated as a form of data, which are extracted into the capital accumulation process of digital capital. Platform urbanism, thus, also constitutes the commodification of our emotions as digital platforms are monetising different aspects of our urban lives.

Conclusion

This paper explores the check-in activities in China to investigate how Dongshankou became an emerging commercial centre and a popular wanghong place in Guangzhou. Focusing on China’s popular wanghong economy, where people queue up for hours only to check into a place or store that is popular on Chinese social media platforms, this paper outlines the process by which digital platforms have given rise to a new urban economy that has also boosted local urban development. By conducting this research, I highlight the peculiarities of the Chinese digital ecosystem – a relatively enclosed internet network with its domestic digital platforms – which is in stark contrast to the contemporary widely discussed platform urbanism that developed in the Global North, revealing new forms of platform urbanism from a Chinese context. Building on conversations between the cultural economy and platform urbanism, I distinguish this paper from existing studies about digital economies by elaborating on how new urban development goes beyond merely platform algorithms and data.

This paper’s research findings contribute to contemporary urban scholarship in two ways. First, the increasing use of digital platforms sheds new light on the cultural economy and urban development in the digital age. As the empirical evidence from this study reveals, the quotidian and ubiquitous use of digital platforms has greatly changed people’s everyday lives (Ash et al., 2018; Barns, 2019). Check-in activities in China revealed how digital platforms created a highly participatory ecosystem, facilitating people’s everyday lives while simultaneously impacting the urban landscapes. Therefore, the wanghong economy reveals not only how digital capital is structured and accumulated through consumers’ check-in activities, but also how online posts and geotags serve as the data for the platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), structure the digital capital through the assemblage of geotags and online posts, which further boosted its urban development through the digital growth machine (Rosen and Alvarez León, 2022). Therefore, beyond traditional understandings of the agglomeration of ‘creative classes’ and ‘creativity’ in the cultural economy for urban development (e.g. Pratt, 2009), I argue that, facilitated by the powerful role of digital platforms and without the need to be ‘creative’, consumers’ check-in activities serve as the data accumulation process in structuring the digital capital for Dongshankou, which further boosted its urban development with the assemblage of online posts and geotags.

Second, I argue that the wanghong economy and its associated urban development in China, reveal how digital platforms are monetising users’ emotions and bodily experiences in shaping urban environments. The cultural economy perspective, therefore, differentiates this paper from the existing studies that have taken the political-economy approach in analysing the growing powers of platforms in constructing platform urbanism (e.g. Fields, 2022). Building upon existing platform urbanism scholarship, which contends that it is a mode of urbanisation that is inherently shaped by conditions and affordances of platforms (e.g. Barns, 2019; Graham, 2020), I use the cultural economy perspective to enrich the complexities of platforms, arguing that digital platforms are extracting our emotions, passions and bodily experiences into the digital capital accumulation process. As the urban development in Dongshankou has shown, the growth of wanghong stores with affective slogans that mostly reflect Chinese residents’ consumption preferences by providing them with emotional value, reveals how emotions are monetised through digital platforms into material objects in sustaining urban economies while simultaneously shaping urban environments.

Therefore, intersecting with the cultural economy, this paper supplements existing platform urbanism research from the cultural economy perspective by arguing that the urban environment is now inextricably linked with emotions in the digital age. The assemblage of geotags and online posts in this research, shows how emotions, passions and desires are being extracted into digital capital and then materialised in wanghong stores in creating the new urban economy and boosting urban development. To conclude, I agree with Barns (2019: 9) that ‘if we fail to attend to the more quotidian, performative and participatory spaces of platform intermediation, we may inadvertently render the space of the urban as a subsumed domain of smart, algorithmically governed infrastructures’. China’s wanghong economy, therefore, reveals how, beyond algorithms, people’s everyday lives and their growing inseparable relations with the use of digital platforms can change and shape urban environments in powerful ways.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The fieldwork I delivered in Dongshankou was one of the happiest moments I had in Guangzhou, therefore I want to thank people (Kaiyin, Sam, and many others) who kindly offered their help to make this research come true. I also want to thank the handling editor of EPA and three anonymous reviewers of this paper for their comments that enhanced this paper’s theoretical strength.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42122007).

ORCID iD

Liu Cao

Notes

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