Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Four-year team-based digital ethnography of China’s tipping-based livestreaming (as streamer and room manager) shows how gendered polarisation becomes platform governance: rankings and patrons institutionalise informal authority (“jianghu”) as vernacular legitimacy.

Paper long abstract

Scholarship on polarisation often centres ideological confrontation and formal political camps. Based on a four-year longitudinal, team-based digital ethnography of China’s tipping-based live video platforms, this paper conceptualises polarisation as a platformised mode of gendered governance within popular and youth cultures.

Methodologically, the study combines participant observation with role-differentiated immersion (“labouring participation”). The first author participated as a streamer and performer, while the second author worked as a room manager (live-stream moderator responsible for chat moderation and community management). This dual positioning enables analysis of how polarised alignments are produced through platform infrastructures and interactional labour.

Polarisation here centres less on overt political issues than on disputes over intimacy and legitimacy: who counts as a “respectable” female performer, what constitutes “professional” labour, and which forms of male participation are recognised as legitimate. Platform mechanisms (leaderboards, intimacy metrics, competitive live battles) translate relational claims into visible, comparable scores, intensifying moral evaluations and producing durable community splits.

We show how high-spending male patrons gain status through rankings and intervene through protection claims and moral discipline. We conceptualise this as platformised jianghu masculinity, a culturally resonant form of informal male authority rooted in loyalty, moralised charisma, and symbolic hierarchy. Here, jianghu refers to an informal order historically associated with opaque, weakly regulated interaction beyond state-centred authority. Platforms institutionalise such authority by rendering it visible and rankable, turning polarisation into a governance mechanism that stabilises platform order and provides a vernacular infrastructure of legitimacy in China’s digital economy.