China’s livestreaming industry: platforms,politics,and precarity

Defining livestreaming

Livestreamers are one kind of wang hong. Livestreaming is broadcast video streaming services provided by web-based platforms and mobile applications that feature synchronous and cross-modal (video, text, and image) interactivity. Across livestreaming platforms, users (‘livestreamers’ or, in China, zhubo or showroom hosts) have generated content genres (‘verticals’) of onscreen performance that include game play, cooking, painting, karaoke, and what Daniel Recktenwald calls ‘social eating’ (Recktenwald, 2017; see also Recktenwald and Du, 2016). Livestreamers convert their onscreen practice and interactivity with their followers into revenue streams, generated through features and affordances both on and off platforms. Major platforms, numerous intermediaries, and livestreamers comprise an emerging industry that is co-evolving alongside legacy media as well as interactive media industries, like videogames and e-sports.

Livestreaming in China is quite different from Western platform livestreaming. China’s popular embrace of livestreaming needs to be seen in the context of Western, in particular US, established media diets, which have included much more programmatic diversity, including live or live-like content, such as reality TV and even pornography. Apart from Twitch, a dedicated live gameplay platform, most attempts in the West at livestreaming at scale have been experimental and often spectacular fails, such as Facebook Live, whose unwitting hosting of real-time murder in the US in 2016 spelt its radical curtailment.

Mapping the dimensions of the wang hong economy relies on numerous assumptions, complicated by definitional challenges and the reliability of Chinese consulting firms and platforms. Depending on the source, wang hong can refer to the Chinese SME industry as a whole or to any one of its component verticals, such as beauty vlogging, livestreaming, or gameplay. Estimates of the value of livestreaming range from $US5 billion in 2016 (Moshinsky, 2016) to $US4.4 billion in 2017 (Lavin, 2018) to $US10 billion in 2018 with predictions for $US19 billion in 2022 (iResearch, 2018).

Similarly, assessments of the sustainability of livestreamers vary from the celebratory to the bleak. A report from Daxau Consulting (2017) refers to livestreamers making millions. Media reports describe how a billion-dollar industry is emerging from women ‘singing and slurping soup’ (Weller, 2017) and China’s ‘stream queens’ are getting rich by airing their lives online (Birtles, 2016). But numerous sources reference a Tencent Research Institute report that claims that ‘only 5 per cent made more than 10,000 yuan ($1500 USD) a month, while more than 70 per cent said they earned less than 100 yuan ($15 USD) a month’ (Meng, 2017b). Even then, with a reported 3.5 million commercial livestreamers, 5% translates into hundreds of thousands successful livestreamers.

Similar variability is evidenced in considerations of the gender, content, and class of Chinese livestreamers. Yang (2018) claims that only 20% of the livestreaming industry is based on gaming and gameplayers (who, if successful, have lucrative prospects), while the rest is dominated by IRL (In Real Life) streamers, of whom 70% are women appealing to audiences comprised of 75% men. Chen (2018) reported that now livestreaming men have become the object or beneficiaries of well-paying female viewers, who refer to the men as ‘little puppies’. However, IRL content rooted in gender performativity may not be the only successful vertical of livestreaming. Lu et al. (2018) surveyed a diverse Chinese livestreaming landscape comprised of a ‘wide variety of activities that viewers had a high interest in watching’.

We are cautiously optimistic about emerging evidence of opportunities provided by livestreaming for those who have not benefited from China’s economic advance. Numerous sources reference the success of rural and uneducated livestreamers, including a New Yorker account of a Chinese farmer-livestreamer making millions (Liu Y-L, 2018). One livestreamer we interviewed, Cheese, hails from a small village in Shanxi Province and began livestreaming after failing in another business. He told us, ‘I am one of the livestreamers who do not have money myself. The internet changed my life. If I do not do livestreaming, what can I do? I am an ordinary people in lower class, but my monthly revenue is more than a small company now’ (Cheese, 2018).

Explanatory frameworks

Our theoretical framework draws on critical media industry studies (CMIS) (Havens et al., 2009), a theory of the middle range which seeks to account for both structure and agency, power and resistance in media industries. Havens et al. argue that, among the classic trio of industry, text, and audience, the vast majority of critical media scholarship has favored the latter two areas.

Ultimately, the intent in this approach is to make the media and communication field more coherent. This requires bringing the concerns and focus of macrolevel political economy and cultural studies closer together. To do this, however, it is necessary to critique both. CMIS pays close attention to the political, economic, and social dimensions of popular culture and its production practices. What political economy and cultural studies often see as mass culture fatally compromised by commercialism, CMIS regards as a major focus for representation and contestation, often around marginalized and emerging groups. ‘Ignoring the logic of representational practices in entertainment production works to reinforce the relative invisibility or misrepresentation of those who often have the least power in the public sphere’ (Havens et al., 2009: 250).

Cultural studies inform CMIS’s focus on ‘the complex and ambivalent operations of power as exercised through the struggle for hegemony’ (Havens et al., 2009: 235). But serious, sustained attention to the industrial processes of digitization and globalization differentiates CMIS from cultural studies. On the other hand, the tendency in political economy to focus on news media means that CMIS often differentiates in its focus on entertainment – where pursuing the implications of power and influence ought to be much more nuanced:

If and when popular culture is considered within a political-economic analysis, there is a reductionist tendency to treat it as yet another form of commodified culture operating only according to the interests of capital. There is little room to consider the moments of creativity and struggles over representational practices from that vantage point. That said, similar to political economy, and in contrast to other forms of media industry analysis, we are fundamentally concerned with questions of power; although we perhaps draw from a different range of thinkers in order to explain what we identify as the ‘complex, ambivalent, and contested’ behavior … which occurs in these industries. (Havens et al., 2009: 236)

Havens et al.’s call for attention to ‘quotidian practices and competing goals’ (2009: 236) is crucial for our project, with its sustained attention to everyday agents and clashes of business culture and state strategy. Methodologically, we also align with their emphasis on mid-level fieldwork in industry, including, given the emergent nature of SME, the knowledge of the realities of new media practice acquired through interviews. This article is based on mixed methods, including desk research, content and discourse analysis of Chinese-language media accounts, industry reports, and media content, and original interview fieldwork conducted in 2017 in China. Among 22 interviewees, nearly half were with livestreamers working either full or part time, while other interviews were conducted with platform and multichannel network (MCN) executives directly involved in wang hong management, investors, and media scholars in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Most platform executives were contacted first on social media platforms such as Linkedin and Weibo. Livestreamers were introduced by platform executives and our connections through alumni and events at USC Annenberg and Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

However, we are well aware of the need not to try to push SME (and livestreaming as a subcomponent of it) back into a box called media industries as traditionally understood. They need to be understood as communication as much as content media and which exhibit and exploit the technological and commercial affordances of platforms captured within the emerging fields of platform studies and social media studies (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Papacharissi, 2015). But the big differences – at least for media studies – between legacy media and SME lie not only in the affordances of what Nick Srnicek (2016) calls ‘platform capitalism’, but also just as importantly in the agency and identity of creators who work in this industry.

This also differentiates our work from production studies (Caldwell, 2008; Mayer et al., 2010) and introduces key twists in the narrative of labor precarity that dominates this subdiscipline. SME creators, and wang hong as the Chinese component of it, are largely composed of those who started out as amateurs, and the industry does not have anything like the division of labor seen in established media.

Chinese SME creators – wang hong – operate entrepreneurially and interdependently within this media ecology across multiple platforms and stakeholders, whether fan communities or general users, sponsors or advertisers, regulators and policy makers. Creators benefit from the creation, distribution, and exploitation of intellectual property, but also engage in social content innovation, generating discursive, improvisational, unscripted, and multimodal fare as featured in vlogs, streams, memes, gifs, ‘tweets’ and ‘stories’. Production practices are ultra-low budget and creator labor is more about online community management through the interactive, curatorial, and networking affordances of social media platforms, including commenting, liking, sharing, co-creating, and collaboration (Jenkins et al., 2013).

This article therefore adopts a creator-centric optic and seeks to illustrate the interdependencies among industrial, social, technological and economic, and political vectors in Chinese livestreaming, exemplifying CMIS’s attempt to keep structure and agency, power and resistance in creative tension.

The industry optic is seen through the way Chinese livestreaming gameplayers operate centrally within the Chinese video game market, comprising China’s huge games, e-sports, livestreaming, and wang hong industries. This cross-industry integration and leverage evidences the depth and innovation of China’s digital creative industries. Analysis of the social dynamics of livestreaming focuses on the fact that, while gameplayers are overwhelmingly male in a highly gender-ordered industry, entrepreneurial female livestreamers have been empowered by state-sponsored cultural shifts in economic migration and engage in gendered performativity across platforms that see ‘pretty girls’ appealing to the emotional needs of ‘lonely leftover men’.

World-leading technological and economic innovation is exemplified in e-commerce integrations. In response to a rapidly expanding Chinese middle-class consumption culture, Chinese livestreamers ride marketing imperatives directing consumers to cross-integrated platforms to engage in what trendsetting messaging app Sendbird calls ‘live commerce’ (Sendbird, 2018). But politically, Chinese livestreaming is deeply problematic; platforms and streamers have been the repeated target of state-based regulation, intervention, and censorship.

The central paradox of platforms, politics, and precarity in China, then, is that live streamers enjoy a greater degree of economic stability and opportunity than their Western online creator counterparts due to China’s advanced e-commerce platform integrations, but this is offset by the greater precarity they face around the cultural politics of livestreaming. China’s live streamers have become central focal points in the increasing tensions between the cultural politics and economic ambitions of digital China. We now analyze livestreaming through the complex interplay of industrial, social, technological and economic, and political vectors.

Industrial: play for pay

‘Gamers’ are people who play video games; ‘gameplayers’ broadcast their playing of games. These latter are what Hector Postigo (2014) refers to as ‘videogame commentators’. China’s streaming platforms experienced a similar trajectory to that in the West, which has seen generic platforms like YouTube cede leadership in gameplay to specialist platforms such as Twitch. (The success of professional gameplayers contributed to Twitch’s acquisition by Amazon for $1 billion in 2014.)

The first wave of Chinese livestreaming platforms, referred to as showrooms, were PC-based and catered to diverse streamers and fan communities who watched ‘showroom hosts’ sing, dance, and tell jokes. The evolution of these PC-based livestreaming platforms has been dependent upon securing investment funding from China’s booming venture capital-based start-up economy, coupled with constant iteration to keep up with technological advances.

The success of China’s gameplay platforms and gameplayers has been fueled by the co-evolution of rapidly accelerating and globally dominant Chinese videogame and e-sports industries. China’s videogame industry dominates the global market and its revenue exceeded $30 billion in 2018 (Ramirez, 2018). In 2003, the Chinese government recognized e-sports as an official sport (Szablewicz, 2016), thus nurturing a professional industry reportedly worth over $1.26 billion in 2017 (Takahashi, 2017). More broadly, this success is also the consequence of state-supported national players, namely the BAT. In addition to owning numerous platforms, including livestreaming platforms, Tencent has become the world’s largest game company, far eclipsing its nearest competitor, Sony (Takahashi, 2018).

The strength and innovativeness of Chinese digital culture is clear from the extent to which gameplay is vital to growth and competition across three industries: game publishers, e-sports tournaments, and livestreaming platforms. The forms of integration established among these three industries have been more seamless and more effective than in the West. The earnings of top gameplayers can exceed $10 million per year (QQ News, 2017). Gameplayers secure revenue through diverse streams. An executive, Liu Shuo at QuanminTV, a gameplay and e-sports platform, was clear in interview that, because of the level of cross-industry integration and gameplayer embeddedness, gameplayers typically receive a base salary plus gifts (Liu S, 2017). Premier players can dictate the terms of their salary and percentage of gifts. The contrast of the sustainability of Chinese gameplay with that in the West could not be starker.

Platform diversification is the consequence of a competitive platform landscape but also the competition for premier gameplayers. An executive at Huya, a major game livestreaming company (Anonymous, 2017) noted, ‘Since 2016, we added content other than game livestreaming because signing game livestreamers can be very expensive. Livestreamers can jump among different platforms and take their fans with them.’ Xu Songsong at Qixiu, a livestreaming platform owned by iQiyi, explained further:

A game livestreamer is so expensive for platforms because his or her fans are valuable. A head game livestreamer can have one or two million in their online audience. For platforms, such a large number in the online audience is ideal to advertise. But the fans will follow the livestreamers if they move to different platforms. It is a challenging battle for platforms to avoid losing players and their audiences. (Xu, 2017)

Social: ‘pretty girls and lonely guys’

Our analysis of the most relevant Chinese trade and popular coverage, as well as 150 instances of Chinese academic writing, suggests livestreaming is highly problematic. China-based scholars talk of ‘vulgar and sexual content’ (Wang, 2016) and ‘being vulgar, going low’ (Yang, 2016). Scholars based outside of China, such as Aynne Kokas, consider livestreaming as ‘an entire industry of virtual girlfriends’ (Kaiman and Meyers, 2017). A feminist studies take on the phenomenon from Zhang and Hjorth (2017) frames Chinese female gameplayers or Nüzhubo (Chinese for ‘female casters’) engaging in gender performativity, demonstrating entrepreneurial agency while subverting ‘traditional performative norms’ around gender (2017: 17).

China’s one-child policy – now modified to some extent – has contributed to a vast gender imbalance estimated to be near 70 million more men-to-women by 2020, with millions of ‘lonely leftover men’ (Sun, 2017). China’s shift from a rural agrarian and manufacturing base to a more consumer-oriented, service-based economy has contributed to mass migration from rural to urban centers, often government sponsored (Johnson, 2013). What Grossman (2012) calls the ‘feminized service sector’ has further contributed to gender imbalance as young women move to cities to pursue training and opportunities, while rural men stay put to maintain family-run enterprise in agriculture and manufacturing.

The consequence of these conditions has left millions of Chinese men partnerless with few opportunities for family formation and romance. Rural Chinese men rely on smart phones for basic communication but these provide entertainment and interactivity previously limited, inaccessible, or unaffordable. Their phones provide access to hundreds of applications, which now include any number of livestreaming applications and, in turn, their ‘virtual girlfriends’. As Beijing Normal University scholar and livestreamer, Zhang Hongzhong, claimed in interview:

Chinese people are lonely due to the fast pace of urbanization. A large number of people are going into big cities where they feel lonely. 30 million lonely souls are floating above the sky of Beijing. Alternatively, these conditions apply in the countryside because rural Chinese have fewer entertainment options. (Zhang, 2017)

But platform affordances have also enabled some female livestreamers to craft their careers against the grain of inexorable eastwardness. Liu Xinling, a manager at Momo, gives an example of a female livestreamer in Sichuan who is ‘not very pretty, but funny’, and yet found success through livestreaming:

She works for a local supermarket as a cashier. Sometimes she livestreams in her uniform so the audience knows. She is different from other pretty girls for her authenticity. She tells jokes and does crazy and funny things so people think she is a comedian. She can make 10,000 yuan a month, which is higher than many white collars income locally. She does not have to move to a big city for better resources since she can live a decent life in her hometown. (Liu X, 2017)

In field interviews, platform executives confirmed the point that Chinese migratory loneliness informs the success of gendered livestreaming. Qixiu manager Xu Songsong (2017), for example, was clear that ‘Chinese people lack companionship, rarely have occasion or places to spend time, money, and energy. Watching livestreaming can partially satisfy their needs.’

But livestreaming industry conditions have contributed to tensions between female streamers and platforms rooted in the politics of gender, labor, and exploitation. These tensions are exemplified in Anna’s interview. A livestreamer on Bigo, Anna acknowledged that she is ‘fully aware of what kind of livestreamer I want to become’, which she interpreted as not a ‘tease’ and not cynically performing just for the money. She described her manager encouraging her to ‘tease’ her male followers claiming ‘There are so many wang hong. How else can you get virtual gifts?’ As Anna defiantly declared:

I did not come to this job to do this … I was upset and walked away. I told his manager that it was not acceptable. Then the manager above both of us told me, ‘Don’t worry. Just ignore it.’ So I did. But there are still people like that, unfortunately … This is how they think they are going to attract people … Girls who are 16 or 17, educated to believe that they can make lots of money this way. (Anna, 2017)

Provocative livestreaming may be a viable strategy for securing attention early in their career but may not prove sustainable. A Huya manager explained that sexually explicit content may feature at the beginning but eventually ‘dies down’ due to censorship and audience boredom (Anonymous, 2017). These concerns may also be a symptom of a maturing industry. As Huo Nifang, the Chief Operating Officer for Papi Jiang (who is the most famous wang hong creator in China), explained as she distinguished Miss Papi’s operation from livestreaming:

Livestreaming is messy now. It has (some) supervision and management, but it feels that the industry is mostly about sexually explicit content. Livestreaming is a very good concept, but the field does not have good content now. Some wang hong are making money, but the whole industry goes to a direction that I do not feel right. So we have not entered into this field. (Huo, 2017)

Technological and economic: ‘live commerce’

‘Live commerce’ is trendsetting messaging app Sendbird’s term for how livestreamers integrate their streaming practice with an e-commerce revenue strategy. As this is a relatively new and rapidly accelerating phenomenon, little scholarship exists, although Chinese business journalists and market specialists have taken note:

Livestreams are the newest shopping experience in China, and with the ability to interact with trusted reviewers in real time, they offer shoppers a more immersive, informative shopping experience than most physical store, e-commerce platforms and home-shopping channels. (Zheng, 2018)

China has led the world in platform e-commerce integration and the factors underpinning it are a classic case of tech ‘leap-frogging’, as we noted, quoting the New York Times’s Paul Mozur (2016) at the start of the article. As investment consultant Tim Shirata (2017) explained, ‘WeChat’s livestream platform includes integrated e-commerce built into the app itself. It’s as if a Facebook live feed from your favorite celebrity discussing some product they love had an e-commerce shopping cart right next to the video.’ Such frictionless e-commerce integrations remain at the planning phase on many Western platforms. Livestreamers launch online stores through Alibaba’s Taobao and T-mall e-commerce platforms (a cross between Amazon and e-Bay) where fans can purchase snacks, keyboards, and other products with a percentage of the purchase going to the livestreamer. In addition to promoting other brands and products, livestreamers launch and produce their own.

Chinese livestreamer Zhang Dayi made $US46 million in 2016 by using live commerce to grow her own fashion and beauty brand through her Taobao store (Ap, 2017). While Zhang Dayi aspires to expand her live commerce business across Asia, ‘one obstacle she identified is that the e-commerce infrastructure and online buying habits of the populace is different in these countries from the way they are in China’ (Pan, 2017). These limitations extend to the West where ‘live-streaming and e-commerce platforms largely operate independently of each other. On Amazon, the largest e-commerce retailer in the US, no live-streaming platform exists for merchants to use as a marketing tool’ (Soo, 2018).

In late 2017, the state issued the ‘PRC E-Commerce Law’, described as ‘an attempt to gain greater control over online consumer markets’ (Dickinson, 2017). These platforms must register with the state and this supervision is intended to thwart smuggling and counterfeiters, while also protecting intellectual property (Banerjea, 2018). However, live commerce practices driven by livestreamers has been relatively uninhibited by regulatory oversight in terms of brand integration disclosure, particularly in contrast to the West. Whereas ‘[t]imes are about to get tough for [US] influencers … with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) watching very closely how social media personalities disclose their relationship with brands, and more stringent enforcement possibly in the works. No such problems in China’ (Shirata, 2017, original emphasis).

Across platforms, the hyper-commercialization of live commerce – perhaps China’s equivalent of America’s Gilded Age – has to be managed carefully by creator and platform alike. Users have complained about livestreamers engaging in too much product placement and advertising. Platforms have exerted limited control over their livestreamers that reflect the power dynamics of platforms and streamers. Liang Yiping at YY E-sports commented:

YY livestreamers make money by virtual gifts mostly, they also do product placement and selling dried pork floss cakes and keyboard. Some of them also own WeChat stores or Taobao Stores. But we do control their ads or product placement because these may affect their performance. It is not good to users if they just advertise all day long. (Liang, 2017)

Political: censorship and ‘edge ball’

Consideration of state action around livestreaming must again stress differentiation from the West and underline the interrelationship of the four vectors: industrial, social, technological and economic, and political. Creator precarity in Western systems is largely driven by the experimental and volatile nature of the SME market for brands and advertisers, together with the endlessly iterative algorithmic tinkering engaged in by platforms with often little thought given to creator sustainability. This happens even though creators’ work and output increasingly form the lifeblood of major platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, and Snapchat. On the other hand, in China, the precarity of creators (and indeed of the whole industry) is due to its problematic social status, which puts it squarely in the political frame.

For Pierre Bourdieu, précarité mapped the difference between laborers ‘with permanent jobs and those with casual ones’ (Alberti et al., 2018: 448). In China, authorities’ policies and decisions significantly influence how ‘permanent’ livestreamers’ work can be. If it was simply a matter of market and platform functioning to meet demand, Chinese livestreaming would be an outstanding success. Instead, we have a replay of ‘Edge Ball’ – borderline acceptable online expression – which has been a feature of Chinese popular cultural practice for decades (Keane, 1998).

While the Chinese state has, broadly speaking, facilitated rather than regulated live commerce as an economic system, policy makers have accelerated a series of crackdowns and warnings directed at livestreaming content. The emphasis here is core cultural politics, to investigate and stop practices that may ‘harm social morality’ (Horwitz, 2017). Starting in 2016, policy directives were directed towards livestreamers, platforms and applications. In mid-2016, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFFT) banned female livestreamers from ‘erotic banana-eating’ (Phillips, 2016). In one instance, a livestreamer was detained for five days after she was presumed to have streamed from the Empress Dowager’s bedroom in the Imperial Palace, only this proved to be a set in a studio. Huajiao’s punishment came as part of a recent nationwide inspection of 50 major livestreaming platforms. SARFFT shut down ten online platforms and around 30,000 livestreaming accounts, in an inspection which aimed to weed out content that is ‘vulgar, obscene, violent, superstitious, concerns gambling, or harms the psychological health of underage people’ (Lai, 2017).

In 2017, the pace of crackdowns accelerated, with SARFFT shuttering 73 platforms and 1870 livestreamers receiving lifetime bans (Xinhua, 2018). Later in the year, SARFFT ordered three major online platforms, Sina Weibo, iFeng, and ACFUN, to suspend their livestreaming function because they did not have proper licenses, which cost their parent companies billions in stock value. License regulation proves to be a form of soft cultural censorship as affirmed through ongoing edicts from the policy makers. In late 2017, the agency introduced a formal set of regulations for livestreaming platforms, dictating that they must not ‘harm national security, damage social stability, disturb societal order, violate the rights of others or broadcast obscene or erotic activities’ (Kaiman and Meyers, 2017). Platforms are also strict in regulating the content they carry and move quickly when infractions occur. For instance, in 2017, Meipai, a short video platform, banned their livestreaming services after primary school student content featured nudity (Meng, 2017a).

In 2018, the pace of state intervention accelerated. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism removed 370 livestreaming apps for compliance failure, blacklisted 14 companies for operating under fraudulent licenses, which meant shutting down their 57 livestreaming applications. Since 2017, over 400 livestreaming platforms have experienced a crackdown because they have ‘violence, pornography gambling, superstition, and other values harmful to public morality’ (Yang, 2018: 1).

These crackdowns have shifted partial oversight to the platforms and the effects on company practice is now manifest, often as much where moral surveillance is accomplished through machine learning. All the platforms we interviewed have divisions dedicated to supervision and censorship. Once livestreamers are discovered to have erotic or sexually explicit behaviors, their account is shut down. In interview with an executive at Huya, a leading livestreaming platform, the executive acknowledged, ‘compared with recorded video content, livestreaming content is more difficult to censor since things happen so fast’ (Anonymous, 2017).

Platforms have developed diverse strategies that combine human and automated curation. According to He Jinkai, a marketing manager at Yi Live, of the 2000 employees at their firm, half of them (1000) are involved in online supervision (He, 2017). In contrast, according to Yiping Liang at YY E-sports, ‘YY does not have many staff for supervision. Most of the supervising work is done by software. Real people are just a complement for the content that cannot be identified by machines’ (Liang, 2017). Lin Mengxi at Today’s Headline, a news aggregator, said her company also had supervising teams as large as 700 people in Beijing, Tianjin city, and Shandong Province, who operate under tremendous pressure. ‘They should not let any rule-violating content be released. Making mistakes leads to severe punishment like heavy deductions on the salary’ (Lin, 2017).

The cultural politics of the state are not necessarily in conflict or misaligned with the values of streamers or their fan communities. Livestreamer Liu Xinling (2017) emphasized that she understood the position of the government. Compared to pre-emptive state-based guidance and direction, self- and community-censorship is preferable. Even those individual livestreamers who have been targeted by the state may be acquiescent. As Bobby Kiki (a pseudonym) said:

I started to do livestreaming on some new platforms, and one of them is Huoshan (Volcano). My account was shut down so I asked the platform what happened. They said my skirt shows my thighs. When I stand up the skirt shows a bit of my legs and it is not allowed.

But she also added ‘My family members [i.e. fans] are strict. They do not want me to wear sexually explicit clothes. I need their permission before shooting advertisements or appearing in reality shows’ (Kiki, 2017). Bobby Kiki continues to operate as a livestreamer on other platforms.

Conclusion

Any examination of cultural politics and precarity on Chinese platforms must take into account distinctly different relations in China between state, market, technological innovation, and society. And the Chinese state is not a unitary entity, always acting in unison. We have argued that CMIS is an appropriate explanatory framework for dealing with cultural and economic opportunities on the part of individual and small business agents in this dynamic macro-political and technological context, and have situated our approach in relation to cultural, production, platform, and social media studies. Our major findings are that highly advanced e-commerce integration on platforms has underpinned the economic sustainability of Chinese wang hong and livestreamers in particular, but that this enhanced sustainability must be weighed against the ever present possibility of state action in pursuit of upholding ‘social morality’.

The most recent developments in this story illustrate this complexity. In late 2017, with provincial support, Wuhan opened Damara Village, a ‘livestreaming base’ located within a European-themed tourist park, designed to host 100 livestreamers (Kun, 2018). ‘As a new type of business in mass communication, life streaming is moving from a purely online industry to offline,’ said Qiang Yuexin, dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at Wuhan University (quoted in People’s Daily, 2017). In partnership with Douyu, one of China’s largest livestreaming platforms, Wuhan launched a livestreaming festival. In its first year, the event garnered 156,000 attendees and 12 million online followers (Cision, 2018).

Meanwhile, in mid-2018, a state-sponsored backlash towards gameplay has become codified as part of a larger public health initiative to protect ‘children’s eyesight or myopia’. In order to watch their favorite Chinese gameplayers at a Western e-sports event, Chinese fans downloaded Amazon-owned Twitch, a livestreaming gameplay platform. The app became the third-most popular in China until it was abruptly shut down and removed from the app store (Hall, 2018).

As Guobin Yang (2014) has cautioned, scholars should consider the distinctive Chinese ideals and practices that have shaped the Chinese internet. Such cautions should include how we need to recognize state action as not unitary but strategic, involving simultaneously market framing and management, incubation, and support for world-leading technological innovation, as well as strict moral censorship of these rapidly evolving SME industries which provide Chinese netizens with voice, meaning-making, and potentially sustainable and, for some, lucrative careers.