How do Chinese livestreamers on TikTok perceive and construct authenticity?

Platforms like TikTok and Twitch have given rise to a cast of new influencers who possess a significant market reach. These digital influencers earn substantial followers and income from their audiences, advertisements and so on. Due to the low-cost delivery and online payment infrastructure in China, rural Chinese livestreamers, namely rural influencers, also sell products directly on Tiktok as a popular form of monetisation.

To be precise, they put a lot of effort into convincing their livestreaming audience that they are real and authentic by self-branding as farmers living in rural areas. How do these rural livestreamers understand and construct authenticity? Is there any tension between the perceptions of authenticity from livestreamers and platforms? It were questions like these that triggered my initial interest in and thoughts about this topic.

Authenticity in platform labour studies

The central question of digital labour is how the information economy gives rise to new forms of value production and exploitation. As a contemporary form of platform capitalism, big tech companies like Google and Facebook deploy sophisticated technology to control labour, produce ideologies to gain consent from platform workers and monitor them with specific automated technologies.

In this context, platform workers usually live with precarious labour conditions. Among the scholarship on how workers are mobilised into platform labour, authenticity is an important motivation and an element that workers need to embody.

Authenticity and entrepreneurship are the tenets of the self-branding culture that promotes the participatory culture and encourages ordinary people to become digital influencers or micro-celebrities. However, existing studies on authenticity have largely focused on the creative labour of content producers in the Western context, revealing the tension between platform discourses of authenticity and workers' actual labour experiences. A global perspective is helpful to explore the labour experience, working conditions and subjectivities of digital influencers from other areas, like Asia.

The social media entertainment industry in China has also given rise to live e-commerce thanks to the convenient online payment and logistics infrastructure, which allows consumers to watch goods being made and order them directly, receiving them within three or four days. A large number of Chinese peasant residents creatively set up livestreaming studios to show the authenticity in various situations to promote their products, creating a different meaning of authenticity and a regime that integrates creative and physical labour.

In order to understand their labour experience, I conducted a six-month fieldwork in a poor county in northern China. Informing my researcher identity in advance, I worked as an assistant for digital influencers in two live-streaming teams and conducted fifteen in-depth interviews. The following opinions are based on my observations, and on the stories of the informants.     

Two narratives of authenticity

There is a tension about authenticity of live e-commerce between the platforms’ discourse and the perception of sellers. The study found that platforms such as Kuaishou and Douyin define authenticity as visualising real life through video technology, as an opportunity for marginalised people to be seen, and as a way to self-commodification without social capital.

This emphasis on authenticity is incorporated into the discourse of empowerment and entrepreneurship, encouraging individuals to seize opportunities to work for themselves and their family, which is not precisely equivalent to self-branding culture highlighting the individual in Western context.

For digital influencers in rural China, authenticity means different things. First, video technology requires them to address infrastructure issues. They need to ask product suppliers for help preparing for livestreaming, such as setting up a space similar to a real production set and ensuring basic infrastructure conditions such as electricity, internet and lighting.

Second, digital influencers only select specific products and workers that are perceived as authentically rural to be seen on their livestream. For example, in order to highlight the production process as very clean, manual and non-industrial, they only hire local good-looking old ladies to act as workers while hiding the real workers in poor conditions, away from the camera.

Third, a variety of social capital and collective labour is also required for live e-commerce to perform authenticity. Digital influencers should be skilled at media technologies such as handling cameras and video editing, have enough funding to invest in warehouses and hire delivery workers, and be able to train local rural residents to work on the platform as assistants. All this hardship in constructing authenticity is missing in the authenticity discourse as defined by the platforms.

Silencing the real experience

The digital influencers performing live e-commerce, however, also choose not to reveal their true labour experiences on livestreams or other social media. They aim to make their audience view them as ‘normal farmers’, thus promoting their agricultural products.

As a result these livestreamers, who have benefited greatly from livestreaming e-commerce and the platform economy, also serve the authenticity discourse of platforms. In turn, this attracts and mobilises other ordinary rural residents, while reproducing the rural-urban divide on livestreaming and covering up the inequalities inherent in platform labour.

Duan Shichang is a PhD candidate in the school of journalism at Renmin University of China. His research covers a wide range of subjects including science and technology studies, infrastructure studies, and labour studies.

References

• Banet-Weiser, S. (2012). Authentic™. New York University Press.
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• Zhang, L. (2021). Platformizing family production: The contradictions of rural digital labor in China. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 32(3), 341-359.
• Poell, T., Nieborg, D. B., & Duffy, B. E. (2021). Platforms and cultural production. John Wiley & Sons.