This article develops a space-centered theoretical framework that integrates the assemblage theory, critical spatial analysis, and political economy to analyze platform development. We conceptualize a digital platform as the “platform multiple” constituted by encompassing, parallel, and intersecting assemblages that are empirically and analytically visible. As shifting constellations of heterogeneous constituting elements, each of these assemblages operates within and across socially enacted and power-laden spaces. Platform companies deploy spatial strategies, one common form of which is scaling-up, to form and transform assemblages within and across spaces to achieve the spatial fix of capital. The execution of spatial strategies triggers spatial frictions with existing structural power relations, giving shape to the path and configuration of platform development. We illustrate this framework by examining Didi, China’s largest ride-hailing platform. Using mixed methods to collect empirical information in Xi’an, Guangzhou and beyond, we employ a process-tracing strategy to analyze Didi’s expansion and transformation, the spatial frictions it encountered within, across, and between local and national scales, and the corresponding spatial frictions it encountered on the global scale in the capital’s attempts to achieve spatial fix via IPO. The study debunks spatial imaginaries of platforms’ smooth scaling-up by demonstrating all kinds of spatial frictions they encounter within and across spaces. It extends the discussion of spatial fix by highlighting the capitalization of scale itself, widely seen in the platform economy and among tech firms. It further offers a transferable analytical toolkit for approaching platforms as contingently and practically enacted spatial processes.
AI application development platforms incorporating generative artificial intelligence into their technology stack are reconstructing software development paradigms. Drawing on the convergence of platform studies and infrastructure studies and engaging materially attentive political-economic critique, this study combines theoretical literature review with hands-on experience in building AI agents on the Coze platform to propose the concept of “Level 4 platforms,” exploring how agent platforms function as weak emergence structures in technological programming practice, generating differentiated functionalities and possibilities for action through user operations. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, this study further proposes the analytical framework of “Human-Media Co-individuation,” employing the concept of “intraface” to analyze how users achieve dynamic element-network configuration through visual programming interfaces. Through a case illustration of building a research literature assistant agent, this paper demonstrates the four-stage operational chain—from goal definition, component configuration, and workflow construction to testing and iteration—revealing how users and technical elements achieve co-individuation through mutual adjustment. However, this study simultaneously identifies the structural limits of platform-based empowerment: commercial logic constraining user creativity, new forms of digital divide arising from unequal digital literacy, precarity stemming from platform dependency, and fundamental reliance on existing infrastructure platforms. Whether this transformation represents genuine change or a reconfiguration of existing power asymmetries remains contingent upon the ongoing unfolding of technological development, commercial strategies, regulatory interventions, and user practices.
“Cultural stealing,” the perceived appropriation of Chinese cultural symbols by the Korean entertainment industry for commercial gain, has become a flashpoint for Chinese K-pop fans negotiating between national identity and transnational consumer culture. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, online texts, and participant observation, the study examines the controversy surrounding the K-pop group NCT and disentangles the dynamic relationships among the company SM Entertainment, NCT idols, the fan community NCTCS, and individual fans. The findings reveal that “cultural stealing” captures a broader tension in which fans must simultaneously defend their cultural heritage and act as consumers within the very industry they critique. SM’s strategic ambiguity and invisibility created the conditions for the controversy, while NCT idols were caught between the competing demands of Korean and Chinese fan communities. NCTCS performed a gatekeeping function during content translation and dissemination, inadvertently stabilizing the capital’s interests even as it sought to protect its community. Individual fans employed the three self-authorization strategies of reforming , recontextualizing , and rationalizing to reconcile their appreciation for K-pop with their cultural identity. These responses reflect the irreconcilable demands of transnational cultural capitalism, in which the same commercial logic that drives K-pop’s global reach also produces the conditions for cultural appropriation controversies that no single actor can fully resolve.
This research explores the portrayal of Chinese masculinities in the context of interracial marriages on Douyin, Chinese TikTok. It examines how their self-representations are shaped by the intersectionality of gender, race, and algorithms and contribute to the broader discourses on race, power, and identity in China. Through purposive sampling on Douyin, this study investigates how Chinese men navigate and showcase their identities in relation to the significant Other in these interracial unions to garner viewership. While previous research has shed light on the gender tensions in Chinese-foreign interracial marriage through the binary racial angel of whiteness and blackness, this research comprehensively investigated couples from different geographical background to analyze the Othering practices. Unlike previous research that has focused disproportionately on Chinese women marrying foreign husbands, this study centers on how Chinese men are increasingly showcasing foreign wives on Douyin. Three key themes emerge from this study: 1. Through the celebration of Chineseness by embracing Chinese culture and navigating Chinese modernity, the marriages of Chinese men to foreign women are framed as signifiers of enhanced masculinities and emblematic of the nation’s ascending geopolitical prowess; 2. A transnational Chinese masculinity is constructed as a responsible patron at home/homeland; and 3. A self-representation of Chinese identity, referred to as a new “Oriental Self,” which amasses patriotic viewers and monetizes this attention for economic gains on Douyin.
Using the framework of procedural rhetoric, this study combines the walkthrough method, participant observation, and in-depth interviews to examine how idol subscription platforms restructure fan–idol intimacy within Chinese K-pop fandom. The findings reveal that idol subscription platforms, exemplified by Bubble, operationalize intimacy through paywalled one-on-one rhetoric, asymmetrical interaction, and simulated directness. Fans purchase in Bubble is not merely exclusive content or information access, but entry into a structured scene of intimacy in which closeness is repeatedly experienced and confirmed. The article proposes the concept of proceduralized intimacy to capture how fan–idol intimacy is formatted, sustained, and monetized through platform procedures while preserving its imagined authenticity. It suggests that in the platform era, intimacy is increasingly becoming an object of infrastructural design, commercial extraction, and everyday negotiation.
This article examines how AI-powered robots, idols and digital humans are reshaping China’s creative industries. Drawing on ethnographic research and media analysis, it shows how AI-driven entities are deployed across entertainment and social media platforms to engage audiences and redefine performance. These digital figures blur the boundaries between human and machine, destabilizing conventional notions of authenticity, artistry, and authorship. By analyzing how audiences and tech entrepreneurs who work with AI encounter these figures with excitement, unease, and familiarity, the article demonstrates that AI has become both a spectacle and part of the infrastructure in cultural life. It argues that the case of AI in China, shaped by the convergence of state ambition and platform capitalism, provides a critical vantage point for understanding how creativity is being reorganized at the intersection of technology, governance, and affect.
This research explores the transformative impact of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the creative and business practices within China’s online literature industry, which presents a unique intersection between creator economy, disruptive innovation and platformed cultural production. This study first maps AI integration across major platforms through two case studies: China Literature’s ‘AI + IP’ synergy, rooted in a subscription-based, IP-driven entertainment ecosystem, and Tomato Novel’s aggressive yet recalibrated approach for balancing economic efficiency with creative authenticity under a free content model. Discourse analysis further reveals a complex tension: while corporate platforms seek to expand creative capacity and achieve economic scalability, with an optimistic narrative of AI empowerment, authors exhibit widespread distrust and resistance, rooted in concerns over AI’s disruptive potential and regulatory ambiguity. This article conceptualises AI integration and resistance as a reflection of persistent power asymmetries and contested values between platforms and creators in Chinese online literature, while highlighting creators’ potential to renegotiate agency and governance in the AI-driven transformation.
The rapid growth of artificial intelligence is significantly transforming the production relationships and power dynamics within China’s creative and cultural industries. Focusing on small and medium-sized animation studios, this study uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore how AI technologies, within a platform-based environment, reshape the power balance between studios and platforms. The findings reveal that AI has shifted creative work from “drawing” to a practice mainly focused on correcting AI-generated outputs, effectively turning creators into “correctors.” Although efficiency has gone up, work has become more demanding, and the risk of losing skills has increased. This change results from the technological monopoly platforms built with proprietary AI tools, shifting small and medium-sized teams from traditional “distribution dependence” to a dual reliance on “distribution channels and production tools.” Under this new monopoly, workers’ operational data is used as training material without compensation, leading to implicit exploitation and the erosion of studios’ core knowledge assets, which weakens their unique competitive advantages. In response, small and medium-sized teams develop strategies such as “manual refinement,” creating a continuous bargaining dynamic; however, these efforts are ultimately absorbed by platforms as training data. This study reveals a new type of platform monopoly in the AI era, one that extends beyond market dominance to also control creative practices and data extraction.
This article focuses on the definition and redefinition of “good” and “promising” creative formats by film and television professionals. In particular, I examine how short-form content, and especially “microdramas” have recently come to be seen as the future by Chinese production and data professionals working for streaming platforms such as iQIYI, Tencent Video, Youku, and Mango TV, which have long been oriented towards the professionalized production of long-form content. I first analyze the perception shift that has led these professionals to believe that the predominance of short form has become an irreversible trend, and the changing meaning of “short form” in this context. The second section explores how this change in perception has materialized in ways that have fostered a self-reinforcing process: it is associated with the emergence of new career paths for producers and creators, new creative conventions, new economic and symbolic hierarchies between different categories of content. The conclusion of the article elaborates on the analysis of this rise of microdramas as a path dependent transformation process. I contrast what I have observed in the Chinese case with the findings of my previous work on Hollywood in this regard. This article is based on in-depth interviews with content professionals conducted in Beijing and Changsha in 2024 and 2025.
The global triumph of Chinese AI depends on a hidden workforce of data annotators in the Global South. This comparative study examines the lived experiences of 38 workers in Egypt, Morocco, and Kenya who label images, transcribe speech, and refine datasets for Chinese tech companies through cross-border chains. Drawing on semi-structured interviews analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, four themes emerged: (1) a layered architecture of subcontracting and deliberate client opacity; (2) a granular system of algorithmic discipline and gamified precarity; (3) a piece-rate economy delivering volume yet precarious earnings; and (4) regulatory voids filled by local intermediaries and emerging worker solidarity, including organizations such as Kenya’s Data Labelers Association. Engaging with frameworks of planetary labor markets and algorithmic imposition, the study shows that Chinese firms’ exclusive BPO model creates discipline fundamentally different from Western platform precarity, while national contexts dramatically reshape outcomes across the three countries.
Artificial intelligence is ever more integrated into the creator economy, shaping the conditions within which creative work is produced, circulated, valued, and recognised. As AI is incorporated into creative tools, platforms, and cultural production, creators are encountering new opportunities alongside renewed uncertainties about authorship, occupational roles, creativity, and artistic value. Four interrelated themes are introduced as a framework for contextualising AI in the creator economy: contested and coexisting creativities, adaptation as negotiation, human and non-human distributed agency, and trust and ethics. Together, these themes illuminate how creators, companies, and state institutions respond to changing technological conditions while negotiating enduring questions about creative authority, participation, responsibility, and recognition. The articles collected in this special issue interrogate these tensions as AI is used, experienced, contested, and adapted across different creative practices, organisations, and occupational spaces.
This paper examines one of China’s earliest and most influential hobbyist game-making communities, 66RPG. Through digital ethnography and archival research, it explores how 66RPG functioned as a participatory playground where hobbyists engaged in both game creation and collective ludic practices. The study shows how members collaboratively built virtual storyworlds, engaged in MMOG-like creative experiences, and performed group identities through gamified systems from the mid-2000s. By introducing the concept of collective creational play , it theorizes a culturally situated mode of produsage in which the process of making games was itself experienced as a multiplayer, affective, and socially embedded activity, revealing the utopian, collectivist, and gamified creative cultural forms of early Chinese digital culture.
This article aims to investigate how Douyin’s Local Life Service exemplifies the infrastructural turn through recursive datafication process. Combining mixed-methods approach of interface walkthroughs, policy document analysis, and 18 stakeholder interviews, the research moves beyond prevailing analyses of datafication confined to online environments, and examines how digital and physical interfaces are recursively integrated to capture, transduce, and reproduce urban data flows. It reveals that Douyin’ s infrastructural power lies not merely in data extraction, but in its capacity to orchestrates a recursive operational matrix wherein data capture from digital interfaces and physical urban spaces mutually reinforce and reshape each other. The article proposes a novel framework of recursive datafication, theorizing datafication as a tripartite and interconnected process of accumulation, transduction, and reproduction that consolidates infrastructural power. It further advances a relational perspective on infrastructural platforms, demonstrating how platform power derives from and reconfigures the conditions of urban economic practice, spatial mobility, and subject formation. Thus, the study ultimately contributes to platform urbanism and critical data studies by rethinking the connections between platform interfaces, datafication, and infrastructuralization.
Artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentally transforms who communicates and how meaning circulates. Yet the field risks missing this inflection point by treating AI as merely another empirical context for existing frameworks rather than as a phenomenon exposing those frameworks’ limitations. This commentary argues that AI reveals ontological parallelism—the tendency for communication research to address emerging phenomena through isolated paradigmatic lenses that coexist without meaningful dialogue. While pluralism has historically strengthened the field, parallelism becomes a liability when a phenomenon simultaneously occupies multiple ontological categories. AI functions as tool, medium, agent, and infrastructure at once, collapsing distinctions that organize communication scholarship itself. We advance three interconnected claims: (1) AI represents fundamental transformation demanding paradigm shift and theoretical innovation, not incremental extension; (2) AI amplifies three long-standing disciplinary misalignments between micro and macro theory, methods and theory, and humanistic and scientific traditions, pushing these contradictions toward crisis; and (3) this crisis requires reconsidering what binds communication scholarship as a coherent field when the phenomena that defined us no longer hold stable meanings. Communication research contains the conceptual foundations needed to address AI, but only through explicit ontological positioning and movement from parallelism toward productive pluralism. The choice is whether to apply familiar frameworks in parallel or let AI’s ontological challenge drive theoretical innovation while reconstituting field identity.
This article examines how generative AI platforms reconfigure authorship and creative agency in music production. Drawing on interviews with non-professional Chinese creators, it addresses the question of how individuals sustain authorship when cultural outcomes are co-produced with algorithmic systems. The article introduces the concept of authorial positioning to describe the reflexive and tactical practices through which human creators establish their authorial presence and creative agency in AI-mediated contexts. Findings demonstrate, first, that participants experienced an ambiguous sense of authorship as they perceived themselves as neither entirely present nor absent from their creative works, requiring continuous interpretive labour to claim authorship; second, creators developed strategic repertoires, including exploratory improvisation, adaptive calibration, and tactical appropriation, to navigate algorithmic unpredictability and infrastructural dependency. These dynamics reveal that creative agency is distributed but asymmetrically exercised through human interpretive labour. Drawing on these findings, the article contributes to ongoing discussions of authorship in music by proposing the concept of authorial positioning to capture the reflexive and tactical labour through which creators sustain authorship within human–AI assemblages. It offers empirical grounding for understanding how authorship is relationally enacted under conditions of algorithmic mediation, moving beyond human–machine or empowerment-constraint dichotomies.
As a technology that is not yet stabilized and may never be, anxieties and expectations around AI are circulating rapidly. They often oscillate between utopian and dystopian framings, in which AI is either framed as the savior or as the ultimate danger. This resonates with discourses surrounding the internet in its early days. We are not witnessing the first AI hype or myth; earlier summers and winters happened in the second half of the 20th century. In its focus on what AI can do and produce, contemporary discourse is complicit with meritocracy, privileging outcomes over process. How to resist, twist, or ignore the workings of AI and its impact? This article argues for a refocus on the process of reading, writing, and working together, in which the articulation of one’s own voice is pivotal.
The prosperity of China’s digital gaming ecosystem would be impossible without the contributions of large numbers of informal gamer-workers through their play-to-earn labor practices. We define gamer-workers as individuals who occupy a vast gray area between casual play and formal employment. Though they come from diverse social backgrounds and are driven by varying motivations, gamer-workers closely tie their gaming practices to the pursuit of a livelihood, with socioeconomically disadvantaged groups forming a significant but not exclusive part of this workforce. Drawing on qualitative data from participant observation in game communities, interviews with frontline practitioners, and media narratives from multiple sources, we present a systematic overview of this overlooked—and at times misrepresented—labor landscape. Specifically, we develop a five-part typology that situates informal gamer-workers across the full cycle of game development, circulation, consumption, and iterative optimization. The typology highlights how game-related platforms and companies extract value from five key roles: (1) outsourced and freelance labor in game production, (2) user-end service workers who manually enhance gameplay experiences, (3) streamers who play a central role in game entertainment, (4) coordinators who bridge gaps left by platform infrastructures, and (5) various forms of profiteering—including but not limited to gold farming—that fuel the expansion of in-game economies. Our analysis also examines the intrinsic connections across these labor roles and the structural conditions of devaluation and precarity in which informal play-to-earn practices help proliferate China’s digital gaming ecosystem. The experiences of gamer-workers thus shed light on how digital labor is—and will continue to be—reshaped in a future where the boundaries between work and play are increasingly blurred.
This article explores how Girl Top/Boy Bottom (GB) genre in hetero-romance games creates critical spaces where fans actively engage in counter-heteronormative gender and sexuality politics. Using the concept of “constructive fantasy,” this paper examines how women fans negotiate and experiment with gender roles and sexuality in hetero-romance and how their efforts breach the boundary between fantasy and reality. We identify three ways in which constructive fantasy is manifested: (1) fans’ interpretative canonization of the fandom, (2) internal and external “border wars” that define and police fandom boundaries, and (3) the extension of fandom ideals, values, and preferences into other realms of social life. In this way, fantasies motivate individuals and communities to engage in various forms of constructive fan practices at different sociocultural levels. We argue that, by exercising constructive fantasy, GB fans generate new gender and sexuality politics through “female gaze,” challenge dominant beliefs about male effeminacy and amatonormative female representations, and articulate feminist sensibilities within and beyond fandom publics.
