(Un)dreaming rural China Gender in Wanghong cultures as digital contact zones

Since the mid-2010s, rural content creators (wanghongs) have attracted hundreds of millions of viewers on Chinese digital platforms, transforming countryside life into a site of intense affective investment and cultural contestation. At the center of this study are four prominent creators (Li Ziqi, Dianxi Xiaoge, the Huanong Brothers, and Ling) and the audiences who watch, comment on, and emotionally invest in their content. I argue that these platforms function as digital contact zones where rural masculinities and femininities are co-produced and contested. Li Ziqi and Dianxi Xiaoge invite visions of rural womanhood that viewers alternately embrace and resist; the Huanong Brothers’ rural masculinity is rhythmically recalibrated through the danmu (video-overlaid comments), from parody to pandemic-era solidarity; Ling’s Douyin counseling livestreams render rural women’s voices at once intimate and structurally entangled. Taking an intermedial approach, I foreground the relational, sonic, and temporal-rhythmic dimensions of digital engagement comparatively underexplored in rural wanghong studies.