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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how rurality is performed as an aspirational identity on Douyin. Drawing on digital ethnography, it shows how pastoral aesthetics, authenticity narratives, and everyday labor produce visibility, celebrity, and commercial success, blurring performance and becoming.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how rurality is strategically performed and cultivated as an aspirational identity within China’s short-video platform Douyin. Focusing on influencers who leverage the platform’s “rural” channel, it explores how creators gain visibility, followers, and eventually celebrity status and commercial opportunities through livestream e-commerce. Drawing on digital ethnography and content analysis of rural lifestyle creators, the study analyzes how pastoral aesthetics, moral narratives of authenticity, and affective rhythms of everyday labor are mobilized to produce aspirational selves that resonate with both urban nostalgia and platform logics.

Rather than treating rurality as a fixed background or inherited identity, this paper conceptualizes it as an aspirational project—one that is actively (per)formed through carefully curated visual styles, speech patterns, labor practices, and family relations. These creators craft a version of “the good rural life” that combines simplicity, diligence, and moral virtue with entrepreneurial ambition and platform-savvy self-branding. In doing so, they blur the boundary between lived rural experience and staged performance, revealing how influencer becoming involves continuous negotiation between authenticity, visibility, and monetization.

The paper further shows how platform infrastructures, including algorithmic categorization and monetization mechanisms, shape aspirational rural performances. While the rural channel promises transformation and upward mobility, such opportunities remain unevenly realized, producing new tensions between vulnerability and value. By foregrounding rurality as a digitally mediated aspirational identity, this study contributes to broader debates on aspiration, self-making, and becoming in platformized social worlds.