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Paper short abstract

This study examines China's "jiangzhehu only daughter" hashtag, revealing how privileged women's digital performances reproduce patriarchal structures. It demonstrates how regional privilege, filial post-feminism, and platform logics create depoliticised empowerment within authoritarian constraints.

Paper long abstract

This dissertation investigates the emergence and cultural significance of the “jiangzhehu only daughter” hashtag phenomenon on one of the most popular lifestyle social networking platforms in China, the RED (Xiaohongshu). Through the mixed-method research design, this research combines the analysis of user posts with semi-structured interviews of participants. This study aims to examine how the only daughters of families from China’s economically privileged regions navigate the gender performance within existing patriarchal structures.

Drawing on post-feminist theory and intersectionality, the research presented here reveals the intricacies of empowerment and limitation in today’s Chinese online spaces. First, it examines how “refined materialism” is used to justify consumption, as individuals deploy educational and cultural capital to present luxury as a sign of personal refinement. Second, it explores the rise of “digital filial performance” as a gendered mode of aesthetic experience that honours family legacies as well as produces personal identities; Third, it analyses how algorithmic infrastructures on digital platforms both enable expressions of empowerment and impose constraints that depoliticise feminist discourse.

The study demonstrates that while the social networks offer new sites of identity formation, they retain entrenched power relations through the mechanism of algorithmic brokerage. It also highlights how Western post-feminist frameworks have been digitally adapted within China’s distinctive cultural and political context. Through the analysis of the negotiation of mainstream values in new digital domains by this hashtag, the research provides a further avenue of insight into the comprehension of gender, technology, and cultural evolution in the digital era.