key: cord-0060097-shqsmx0j
authors: Craig, David; Lin, Jian; Cunningham, Stuart
title: Platforms
date: 2021-02-26
journal: Wanghong as Social Media Entertainment in China
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-65376-7_3
sha: aaabb6ba5193f9513445b2ec2475864ab85a5ee7
doc_id: 60097
cord_uid: shqsmx0j

The autarkic development of social media platforms underpins China’s wanghong industry. We call the accelerative rate of adoption of world leading platform technologies hyperplatformization. We use the term interplatformization to explain the way in which Chinese platforms engage in interoperability that results in a more collaborative platform landscape than its Western SME counterparts. The interaction between wanghong platforms and subscription-video-on-demand portals for internet distributed television produces both opportunity and threat for wanghong. We use the concept of social presence—involving technological innovations of social commentary, social streaming, and social video—to analyze the social industries in this chapter. These create affordances that enhance wanghong platform and creator viability through a near frictionless ability to engage in social tipping and social commerce.

e-commerce platforms like Taobao now introducing livestreaming features.

We identify platform strategies encountered by the wanghong industry which we name as hyperplatformization and interplatformization, portalization, and the affordances of social presence. These platform strategies advance our understanding of how this industry has become a central driver of China's digital economy while providing the underlying sociotechnological and material conditions for the wanghong industry. As detailed in Chaps. 4 and 5, wanghong platforms nurture and empower dimensions of creator labor and management in many distinct ways from those operating in the SME industry. These conditions have extended wanghong culture deeply into Chinese society, particularly amongst rural and grassroots Chinese netizens. As Chap. 6 explores, the same conditions propelling the wanghong industry forward domestically may also inhibit China's cultural, economic, and political ambitions internationally.

In Social Media Entertainment, Stuart Cunningham and David Craig (2019) developed a revisionist account of political economy mapping the SME platform landscape. In contrasting this emerging media ecology from legacy media, we identified a clash of business management cultures between Silicon Valley ("NoCal") strategies of iterative "permanent beta" innovation from Hollywood ("SoCal") strategies of maintaining mass media incumbency at almost any cost. We also exposited the vital distinction between digital and social platforms: closed, professional video streaming, digital platforms like Netflix compared to open access, pro-am video streaming, social media platforms driven by network effects like YouTube.

In our comparative account of these platform landscapes in this chapter, we build off our industrial frameworks of cultural, creative, and social and engage with broader themes of digital and platform capitalism and the platformization of cultural production. Dan Schiller's account of digital capitalism (1999) was an early harbinger of attention to the perilous agglomeration of power and oligopolistic practices of tech conglomerates operating in collusion with state interests. Most of these kinds of largescale political economic accounts have been Western-centric, focusing on the United States-based, global scaling, tech industries, often referred to (IOT) . These studies in political economy provide critical diagnostics of the interplay between platforms and economic systems, but we must be cautious of too neat an application of well-established explanatory Western paradigms that may obscure distinctions in Chinese capitalism as well as platform ontologies, functions, and effects. Prior to the rise of China's digital economy, scholars like Donald Nonini (2008) challenged the framing of China through Western critical models like neoliberalism since China's model of capitalism is differentiated by state-control that shapes and limits how markets operate, determines property rights, and shapes free trade.

We stress that the wanghong platform landscape exhibits both greater competition and greater collaboration than we see in the SME platform landscape, dominated by the oligopolistic and hegemonic strategies engaged by members of GAFAM (Smyrnaios 2016) . These tech behemoths own a handful of SME platforms that dominate the global landscape, whether Google-YouTube, Facebook-Instagram-WhatsApp, or Amazon-Twitch, while Twitter and Snap (Snapchat) remain minor players. In contrast, the BATs compete against, collaborate with, and, in some instances, secure controlling interest of other platform owners, whether Sino Weibo, Bilibili, Bytedance's multiple platforms including Douyin, TikTok, Huoshan, Xigua, and Toutiaou, or Kuaishou. In addition, China's platform economy has witnessed the proliferation of social media affordances across platforms, whether dating apps like Momo and Blued or ecommerce platforms like Taobao or JD.

As we further argue in this chapter, the degree of competitiveness is a consequence of many factors, including the rapid uptake of technology, limited path resistance, diverse financial instruments driving technological investment and differentiation, and, as we saw in Chap. 2, state-based policy incentivization. And collaboration is framed by a shared mission, very much state-aligned, against Silicon Valley hegemony. Some of this competitiveness and yet collaborative spirit is captured by Youku platform executive Bryan Shao (2016) in his interview with us: "They can kill us, and we can kill them. So, we need to stay together so we can both grow faster".

Our other caution is that an application of the platform capitalism framework that stresses uniformity between Western and Chinese models risks under-valuing the technological, social, and economic innovations developed in the Chinese system: technological advances that deliver what we call "social presence", new business models and e-commerce integrations that underpin a broader array of wanghong creators across more diverse markets with greater potential for sustainable careers than in the SME industry.

We also use the concept of platformization. In 2015, Helmond introduced the concept of platformization to account for "the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web and the consequences of the expansion of social media platforms into other spaces online" (p. 5). David Nieborg and Thomas Poell (2018, p. 4276 ) define platformization as the process of "the penetration of economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms into the web and app ecosystems, fundamentally affecting the operations of cultural industries". Platformization, like the concept of the platform society (Scholz 2017; van Dijck et al. 2018) , focuses critical concerns for how platform ecosystems are changing societal structure and organization. In China, as Jeroen de Kloet et al. note (2019) , platformization is not uniform, rather "follows different trajectories along the vectors of infrastructure, governance, and practice" (p. 254).

We now examine the central trajectories in the wanghong platform landscape, noting their differences with the SME landscape. These trajectories include hyperplatformization advancing the uptake of technologies and nurturing more competitive conditions. Interplatformization refers to collaborative strategies of interoperability across platforms. Portalization refers to an oscillatory process between the social networking, open access, and entrepreneurial affordances of social media platforms and the convergence by legacy media industries on to closed, IP-dominated, internetdriven, video streaming "portals" (the term derives from Amanda Lotz 2017). Finally, we consider how wanghong platforms evidence a more accelerated progression towards the affordances of social presence.

The twin concepts of hyperplatformization and interplatformization activate our earlier assertion that the wanghong platform landscape is both more competitive and more collaborative than the SME platform landscape. Hyperplatformization refers to the accelerated adoption of ICT and mobile and the underlying material conditions for China's platform economy that, in turn, fuels the growth of the wanghong industry. These conditions are reflected through analysis of the growth of China's rapidly expanding e-commerce industry. Accompanying this strategy is also interplatformization, which reveals a more collaborative environment in which platforms engage in greater interoperability than their Western counterparts. As previously mentioned, these strategies are motivated by a competitive focus against Western platform imperialism. Michael Keane and Guanhua Su (2019, p. 4) are quite blunt about this: "China Inc. is directly pitted against Silicon Valley".

From 2009 to 2018, internet use and penetration in China doubled from around 30 percent to 60 percent, while American internet use and penetration has plateaued at 70 percent over the same decade ( Fig. 3.1 ). Internet use operates in tandem with the growth of China's smartphone base. There are now over 800 million internet users in China and 98 percent of them are mobile ( Fig. 3.2 ). Since 2012, China has been the largest smartphone market in the world and, in 2020, smartphone penetration is approaching 60 percent, with nearly 1 billion users (NewZoo n.d.) . Affordable access to high speed internet access coupled with such smartphone penetration create the conditions for China's platforms to flourish and, in turn, wanghong creators harnessing them for cultural and commercial value.

China's digital economy in 2019 was claimed to comprise nearly a third of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to Hyperplatformization has been propelled by China's robust, government-sponsored and -backed venture capital (VC) system, which has fostered a risk-taking, competitive tech landscape underwriting China's digital economy. According to Tim Hardin (2017), a Silicon Valley banker, tech startups are financed by "supportive government guidance funds, cash-rich corporations, high-net individuals, and serial entrepreneurs who are reinvesting their proceeds from China's first wave of successful exits". From 2007 to 2016, China's VC fundraising has grown 10-fold to rival that of the United States, peaking in 2018 before experiencing minor declines in 2019 (Kunthara 2019) . According to the China-based Huron Report, as of 2019, China is fostering more tech startups, or "unicorns", than the United States, turning Beijing into the "unicorn capital of the world".

The rise of China's tech sector, platform economy, and wanghong industry can be partly attributed to the influx of global financial capital since the 1990s (Hong 2017; Jia and Winseck 2018; Tang 2020) . As Hong (2017 Hong ( , p. 1495 ) points out, "although the Great Firewall and market restriction shield Chinese Web companies from direct competition from Silicon Valley, Chinese companies tap into the same pool of financial resources as their United States counterparts". The most powerful Chinese internet giants, including the so-called BAT and the new giants such as Bytedance and Kuaishou, all receive a significant proportion of VC investment from the United States, Japan, Singapore, and other countries. This global financial network brings not only money but technology, talent, and international experience to Chinese internet companies, which at the same time are protected from the fierce competition in the global market.

The conditions have persisted into the 2020s despite rising tensions between China and the United States. For example, Silicon Valley-based Sequoia Capital is the largest VC firm in the world and has invested in United States and Chinese technology valued at over USD 1 trillion. Investments include United States tech behemoths, like Google and Facebook, who own platforms, including YouTube and Instagram, vital to the SME industry. Comparably, the firm has invested in Chinese tech conglomerates central to the wanghong industry, most notably tech firms central to the rising competition of their e-commerce platforms, including Alibaba, JD.Com and Pinduoduo. More notably, they have been core investors in ByteDance since 2014, the owner of multiple platforms including Douyin (also referred to as TikTok), Toutiao, Houshan, and Zigua. Bytedance also owns comparable and parallel platforms outside China, including TikTok, which shares similar functions to Douyin and has been the target of a global backlash. TikTok was banned in India in early 2019, and threatened with divestiture by the United States in mid-2020, with Sequoia a potential bidder. Nonetheless, despite these geopolitical headwinds, in late 2019, Sequoia announced USD 2.4 billion for Chinese investors in startup companies, including wanghong platforms. "Setting politics aside…It's a sign that when valuations are concerned …investors can overlook the potential political pitfalls of dealing with China" (Clark and Shieber 2019) . Despite the rapidly increasing stress of platform nationalism (a concept further discussed in Chap. 6), United States venture capitalism has been consistently and increasingly attracted to the China tech scene.

In addition to VC investment, both domestic and foreign, Chinese companies have launched IPOs in the United States, securing capital through listing on the NASDAQ, although this practice has slowed in the wake of tougher United States restrictions and relaxed Chinese regulations (Hu 2019) . Instead, China has launched the STAR Market, a "tech marketplace", comparable to the NASDAQ but with fewer restrictions and barriers to entry. After receiving a given number of rounds of VC investment, China's tech firms can launch an IPO in this tech market where it may be possible to secure public funding, while operating under far less onerous conditions that demanded by NASDAQ. In comparison, companies listed on the STAR market trade at three times higher value relative to their earnings than on NASDAQ, if also creating untenable conditions that some Western analysts describe as "a bubble ready to burst" (Reuters 2020) .

In light of these conditions, the STAR market has fueled an "IPO frenzy…funneling tens of billions into emerging technologies" (Yue 2020) . But the consequence is Chinese platforms listed in this market are made vulnerable to control by even larger Chinese firms, most notably the BATs. These firms merely need to acquire controlling market shares rather than more expensive mergers or acquisition, producing greater synergies around their larger tech ambitions within and beyond China. For example, Tencent has secured controlling shares in the two leading gameplay livestreaming platforms, Douyu and Huya, which align with efforts to dominate the Chinese and global game industry. As we will see through this chapter, other wanghong platforms listed on these markets have also been subject to controlling interest by their competitors, but have been able to continue operation. Contrast this pattern to the SME platform landscape where, for example, Twitter acquired the short-video platform Vine in beta only to shut it down when they failed to successfully monetize the platform, a move short-sighted in the wake of rising Chinese-owned competition like TikTok.

The heart of China's digital economy is their digital and social media platform ecosystem, upon which multiple stakeholders, users, operators, municipalities, and nearly every market and industry have grown dependent, including the wanghong industry. While this system has been dominated by their national champions, known as the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent), it has allowed for emerging major players, like Bytedance and Kuaishou, to potentially threaten their primacy. These Chinese internet giants have engaged in synergistic platform strategies to create an encompassing ecosystem through which Chinese netizens shop, bank, communicate, and play. These firms provide near-frictionless one-stop shops for Chinese netizens' needs at the push of a button and in the palm of their hand. These firms have also created a nested-doll like environment for the growth of next-generation tech firms and platforms, referred to as unicorns. Whether directly or indirectly, the BATs have some form of equity investment in more than half the unicorns (Huxiu 2018). This networked investment system reflects the centralized role of the BAT champions in the transformation of China's digital economy. Yet, in 2019, this system of outside VCs, STAR Markets, and BAT-investment has also produced more unicorns worth over USD 1 billion than in the United States, and turned Beijing into the "unicorn capital" (He 2019) . Beyond the launch of startups, in the wanghong landscape, these underlying conditions foster greater platform competition and nurture more collaboration, if also afford the means for controlling ownership through market-based strategies.

China's hyperplatformization also rests on what economists refer to as "leapfrogging" because of a conspicuous lack of path dependency on older, mature industries and markets. For nearly two decades, China has pursued a "twin-track strategy, which involves merging industrialization and informatization" that embraced ICTs for the purpose of leapfrogging forward into a digital-based economy (Dai 2002) . This strategy dates from 2000, when Premier Zhu Rongji launched the Tenth Five-Year Plan, declaring that "Leapfrogging in productivity in development may be achieved by melding informatization and industrialization, the two processes reinforce each other and progress simultaneously" (Dai 2003, p. 8) Chinese leapfrogging through technological innovation laid the pipeline for the wanghong economy. China's delay in laying copper wire and telephony contributed to the rapid uptake of mobile telephony. In the United States, in the retail sector, massive chain and box stores dominate their sectors whereas in China, these sectors have been far less efficient at servicing the needs of China's rapidly growing middle class (Mozur 2016) . These needs are now met through leapfrogging to a more competitive array of e-commerce platforms, just as China's poorly designed credit card system is offset by its online mobile payment system which has resulted in a near-cashless, QR code-driven economy. Tencent's WeChat pay and Alibaba's Alipay account for 90 percent of online transactions and online mobile payments have grown from under USD 1 trillion in 2013 to nearly USD 40 trillion by 2018. According to the NGO, Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), China has experienced a "digital payments revolution" (CGAP 2019), particularly through promotion of online payments, mobile phone use, and online access to e-commerce platforms, even in the poorest rural corners of the country.

China's e-commerce system is framed and supported by the statesponsored drive to move every industry online as quickly as possible through tax initiatives and subsidies. China's e-commerce market is now three times the size of the United States and growing at a rate of 27 percent a year-suggesting that "as China goes, so goes the global e-commerce market" (Lipsman 2019) . Unlike the West, dominated by Amazon, China's e-commerce system has fostered a more competitive platform landscape, including Alibaba and JD.com and Pinduoduo. The latter, rival, platform did not exist before 2015 but now has over half-a billion monthly users (Kharpal 2020) . As of 2020, JD.com and Pinduoduo not only threaten Alibaba's primacy in the Chinese market but are valued higher than Baidu, one of the original BATs. China's ecommerce platforms are advancing outside their borders, competing directly against United States ecommerce platforms. By 2018, Alibaba's international platform, AliExpress, had already expanded into Russia, Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America (Sun 2018) . Of particular note is the success of Taobao which, as The Economist (2015) described, "[f]rom shoes to furniture and cosmetics to cars, shoppers in China can find just about anything on Taobao, the country's biggest online marketplace".

Yet, despite vast growth in platform power, the BAT have not monopolized China's tech market in the same way that we now see in the very worrisome dominance of Silicon Valley hegemons Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple in their respective markets. Rather, there is greater platform competition that better reflects textbook capitalism. Consider Sina-owned Weibo, which was launched in 2009 and spun off in an IPO in 2014, after which Alibaba investment comprises a third of the company. Once deemed a serious competitor to Twitter (Zhang and Negro 2013) , Weibo has evolved well beyond that comparison. Weibo has become the model of sustainable growth and innovation for Chinese social media. Weibo has surpassed its Western counterpart Twitter in both the integration of more technologically advanced features such as online mobile payments and live streaming, as well as in scale. While limited mostly to Chinese users, domestic and expatriate, Weibo has over half a billion users, as compared to Twitter's 330 million, even though Twitter's reach is global. The company better integrates photo and recorded video, boasts a multi-platform strategy that includes acquisition of livestreaming platform Yizhibo, and the launch of Instagram-like picture-based platform, Oasis or Lvzhou. Contrast this with Twitter's inability, after early phase acquisition, to integrate the livestreaming platform Periscope, or monetize the shortvideo platform, Vine.

Interplatformization-collaboration between rival tech firms and platforms through the interoperability of features, services, and affordances (Lv and Craig 2021 )-is another strategy that distinguishes China from the SME landscape. The Silicon Valley model has moved away from the open internet towards a "walled garden" approach, emulating features and services of their rivals, as in the case of Facebook-owned Instagram introducing similar "story" functions like Snapchat and short-video like TikTok. Rather than link to competing e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay, Facebook launches its own "marketplaces"-with limited success. Other than Twitch, most SME platforms have struggled to introduce online mobile payment services, whether linked to credit card companies, bank accounts, or bitcoin.

Contrast this with wanghong platforms, particularly the near-frictionless cross-platform integration of ecommerce and online mobile payment services. Tencent-owned platforms like WeChat allow creators to integrate links to rival ecommerce platforms, like Alibaba-owned Taobao and Tmall. This practice would be the equivalent of Instagram and YouTube not only allowing but promoting links to a creator's Amazon page or eBay store. The two largest competing online payment systems, Alibaba-owned Alipay and Tencent-owned WeChat Pay are uniformly available across this platform landscape. In partnership with Alibaba, Sina Corp-owned Weibo launched an in-app online mobile payment systems called WeChat Wallet. (WeChat is owned by TenCent.) Unlike the app store oligopoly enjoyed by Google and Apple, China has multiple, competing and collaborating, app stores, including stores within platforms like WeChat and Alibaba, referred to "lite apps" and "mini-programs". Even these stores-within-platforms still allow users, including wanghong, to harness features and services from rival platforms. Even though Sina-owned Weibo launched its own e-commerce tool, Xiaodian ("little-shop"), it allows creators to link to ecommerce platforms owned by rival firms. In contrast, Instagram launched an in-app store designed to keep creators and consumers from linking to Amazon (Del Rey 2019).

There are exceptions and complications to this picture. For example, Tencent's innovation and acquisition strategies are monopolistic in intent. Since 2016, Tencent has attempted to corner not only the Chinese social media market but also global media industries. The company has been "taking over global gaming" through either purchase or majority stakeholder investment of game publishers (Custer 2016) . Tencent may also replace Baidu as the top investor in iQiyi, which could conceivable merge with Tencent Videos to dominate China's streaming video landscape (Culpan 2020) .

With WeChat, or Weixin, Tencent has developed a platform ecosystem at a huge scale. As Ge Zhang and Gabrielle de Seta (2018) note, "largely inspired by the app-centric ecology of functions of WeChat, mobile oriented social networking platforms have largely reshaped the local digital media landscape" (pp. 63-64). Breathless business journalism claims that "Facebook wants to be WeChat" (Statt and Liao 2019) . Indeed, Facebook and WeChat have been framed in the literature as both platform and infrastructure (Helmond et al. 2019; Plantin and de Seta 2019) . To the originally identified properties of platformization that, along with digitalization, include participation, modularity, and programmability, could be added scale, ubiquity, and criticality of use, which refers to the centrality of these platforms to the larger digital economy.

Launched in 2011, WeChat by 2020 has over 1 billion users and combines messenger and social networking services with finance, retail, entertainment, food delivery, and more. Imagine some combination of Uber, Bank of America, eBay, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook but also add Doordash, Fandango, and Ticketmaster. WeChat has now launched livestreaming features on the platform as well as its own ecommerce platform, decoupling links to Alibaba-owned Taobao and Tmall. These developments signal a shift away from interplatformization and interoperability with rival platforms and towards more of a "walled garden" of selfcontained features and services. As we cover in Chap. 6, 2020 has seen the United States Trump administration threaten to ban WeChat, along with Bytedance-owned TikTok, signaling a consolidation of the era of platform nationalism (Mozur and Zhong 2020) .

However, Tencent's monopolizing tendencies remain relative outliers and have not inhibited the increased competition and ongoing collaboration across the wanghong platform landscape relative to SME. Rising tech and platform competition throughout China's digital economy contributes to a strategic and disruptive roundelay of platform innovation and oscillation between different value propositions, socio-technological features and affordances, and, in turn, wanghong viability. These patterns may be best reflected in the following account of wanghong platforms converting into streaming video portals-a pattern that, in some instances, abruptly forced wanghong creators and their fan communities to explore alternative platforms.

As we have noted, Cunningham and Craig's Social Media Entertainment (2019) framed the SME platform landscape in the dynamic tension between two world-spanning but United States-based industrial cultures: tech (Silicon Valley or NoCal) and entertainment (Hollywood or SoCal). YouTube was the prime exhibit in that analysis of the tension between these two cultures, oscillating between the functions of a social media platform and those of an experimental video-on-demand, over-the-top, television-like service.

In this section, we consider how China's tech landscape has comparably oscillated between video streaming, IP-controlled portals that align with the frameworks of cultural industries and social media platforms driven by network effects and online engagement aligned with our framing of social industries. We contrast the evolution of YouTube to Youku, at one point considered the "YouTube of China". While our earlier accounts of hyperplatformization and interplatformization have driven wanghong entrepreneurialism and viability, these oscillations have sometimes proven onerous and sometimes highly problematic for wanghong to manage.

In her treatise on portals (2017), Amanda Lotz showed how internet distributed television services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are different from broadcast and cable television, as well as social media platforms that include video streaming players. Portals, for Lotz, are "crucial intermediary services that collect, curate, and distribute television programming via internet distribution" (Lotz 2017, p. 8) . Features of portals typically include professionally-generated content, nonlinearity (ondemand), algorithmic, customer-centric curatorial practices, the prevalence of subscription-based revenue models, and the vertical integration of these operations within traditional media conglomerates-for example, Disney+ and HBO Max. Amongst international SVODs, Netflix stands alone as a pure play streaming video company.

The "streaming wars" (The Verge n.d.) have proceeded, with heightened, now global, competition between deeply capitalized SVOD services, including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+, HBO Max, and others. China has its own streaming wars, with increasing competition between Baiduowned iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku, now owned by Alibaba. Their parent companies have since launched parallel portals in Southeast Asia, like Tencent-owned WeTV, in an early bid to compete against United States portals (Lim 2020).

We understand portalization as the process by which entertainment IP content is now increasingly curated and delivered by portals. This process includes not only video, but also the streaming audio portals hosting music and podcasts such as Spotify and Pandora. These sites almost exclusively feature professionally generated, licensed, or owned content and are funded through subscription (and sometimes advertising) revenue models. Portalization has accelerated during the COVID pandemic that has severely disrupted legacy media distribution and exhibition. As Craig and Cunningham (2021) track, tech-tonic shifts and battles have played out very differently between digital portals and social media platforms, legacy media and tech industries, in the West and China. This is starkly seen in the divergent evolution of YouTube and, at one point, its closest Chinese counterpart, Youku.

Hector Postigo (2016) offers a vivid image of Silicon Valley tech company strategy. It is like "a bettor at a roulette table who is in the happy position of betting on all the numbers, where the payout in aggregate outweighs what appears to be an otherwise wild investment" (p. 15). For nearly two decades, Google's YouTube has cultivated a commercializing environment for native social media creators uploading user-generated content designed for community engagement. Over the same time frame, the platform has repeatedly attempted to compete with the likes of Netflix and Amazon through the distribution (and sometimes commissioning) of professional media. This played out through YouTube's repeated relaunches and renamings of their subscription video platform: from YouTube Music Key, to YouTube Red, to YouTube Premium. They have been mostly unsuccessful. YouTube Premium is now advertising driven, the original content has shifted from expensive scripted fare to reality and lifestyles, and, according to their CEO, operates more like a music streaming platform . YouTube has also struggled to integrate social networking features like their rivals Facebook and Snapchat. Efforts like Orkut, Friend Connect, Buzz, and Google Plus, and their community button, have proved mostly epic fails.

China's platforms and portals have initially been happy to emulate and reverse engineer Western tech models, a strategy called the "flying geese models" of technological development (Keane 2006) . Youku was once referred to as "China's YouTube". In 2005, the day after YouTube was launched, the Chinese platform Tudou debuted with an open access platform that allowed users to post and share video content. Youku launched a year later and merged with Tudou in 2012. As Google purchased YouTube a year after its launch, Alibaba purchased Youku, albeit nearly a decade later. In our interview with Youku executive Catherine Zhang (2016), she explained that Youku was also emulating YouTube's user interface, identified similar content verticals, and introduced a comparable user content ID system.

Youku-Tudou also introduced partnership agreements for their native amateur creators, encouraging monetization and professionalization. This helped launch the channels and brands of wanghong supercreators such as Papi Jiang aka Miss Papi. She first emerged on Youku with what Jian Xu and Xinyu Zhao (2019) describe as comedic rants, or tucao. This format combines humor, vulgarity, and accents that border on the offensive that endeared large fan communities to Miss Papi, as well as censorship by the state for using foul language (Schoenmakers 2016) . Like YouTube Originals, Youku also launched an original channel strategy (zipindao) to generate original content fashioned after legacy media fare, such as original web series, produced by both legacy media producers and native Youku wanghong creators. Youku's IP platform strategies helped convert professionalizing amateurs into IP generators, exemplified by the success of Joy Stick's original scripted web series Surprise (wanwan meixiangdao) or online talk shows like Baozou Big News (baozou dashijian) (Zhao 2016) .

But since 2016 the platforms have pursued starkly different trajectories. YouTube continues to foster a creator-centric video ecology alongside channels owned and operated by traditional media companies. Creators like gamer PewDiePie and child unboxer Like Nastya compete with T-Series, run by an Indian music label, and multiple Netflix channels promoting series and topics. Youku has opted for a more dramatic shift, completely abandoning its creator-centric model to compete directly against other video streaming services like Tencent Video and iQiyi. Youku has gone from imitating YouTube to looking like Hulu (Ye 2019).

Youku's wanghong have struggled, ongoing viability limited to those few skilled and trained to convert their content and performative practices into more conventional forms of media IP, like talk shows, web series, and DIY. For the vast remainder of wanghong whose practices are rooted in their commercialization of social engagement with their communities, social platforms becoming portals prove highly disruptive, even disastrous. Papi Jiang has effectively abandoned Youku, first migrating to other platforms like Weibo and WeChat. She has since moved off-screen, launching PapiTube, a multichannel network that represents thousands of wanghong creators, before joining Baidu in 2018 as Chief Content Officer (Li 2019) , only posting on her site to announce the birth of her baby. "Whether this marks Papi Jiang's departure from wanghong status", Xu and Zhao (2019) remark, "needs further observations" (p. 145).

Chinese social media platform Bilibili has also oscillated between portal and platform strategies. Launched in 2012, Bilibili initially relied on loyal engagement with a cybersubculture of anime and game fans. This culture is known by the acronym ACFUN, although ACFUN is also the name of another competing platform launched by Sina. Bilibili is also distinguished by its unique video platform and player. Niconoco is a Japanese innovation that allows users to comment directly on screen in real time, a process referred to as bullet messaging (danmaku). We go into more detail on this affordance in the next section of this chapter.

Like Sina Weibo, Bilibili is not controlled by the BAT although both Alibaba and Tencent are investors. Exemplifying interplatformization, such investment encourages Bilibili to engage in cross-platform interoperability customized to appeal to Bilibili's game and anime fan community. "In a savvy move, Alibaba hooked up food delivery unit Ele.me with Bilibili in December to tap a demographic of anime-watching and gameplaying young people reliant on delivered meals" (Liao 2019a) . Going public on the NASDAQ in 2018, Bilibili secured investment from Sony America to promote Sony's mobile gaming features. Like Sequoia's prominence in China's VC system, Sony's investment in a Chinese platform signals how foreign tech and media companies can bring capital and investment into the Chinese platform landscape, but not through ownership nor influencing content. For all that, Bilibili has yet to turn a profit. Neither did YouTube during its first decade, relying on its owner, Google's, deep pockets.

After going public, Bilibili was expected to become "the next YouTube" (Liangyu 2020), adding one more flying goose to the flock. The platform entered into original production and licensed IP with traditional media suppliers. The platform live-streamed a New Year's Eve Spring Festival gala that surpassed the ratings of Chinese broadcast TV in part by introducing less traditional performers and more youth-oriented fare, like World of Warcraft costumes and Harry Potter music. Catering to its gamefocused users, the site entered into exclusive deals to live-stream major e-sports tournaments.

Unlike Youku, Bilibili continues to encourage and help monetize their native creators and their channels, referred to a "Up zhu" ("uploaders"). The site maintains the functions of a user-generated platform, allowing for open-access video streaming by creators. The platform launched its "KOL management" division which signs creators to exclusive deals on the platform, includes an MCN talent agency signing creators operating across other platforms, an in-house advertising agency, and production studio (Lawrence 2020) . Whereas YouTube demands that creators secure a certain level of followers to enter into a partnership, aspiring Bilibili creators must merely correctly answer a series of questions to enter into their partnership program and secure a portion of advertising revenue. The platform also introduced live-streaming functions, which introduced live-gamers who might appeal to the platform's fanbase.

Nonetheless, platform investment comes with new stakeholders, obligations, and expectations, often at the expense of the older ones. Torn between its twinned portal-platform ambitions, trade stories feature "Bilibili vs Bilibili: The Culture Clash dividing China's YouTube" (Siqi and Davis 2020) . Bilibili's attempt to "embrace a wider audience" (Davis 2020 ) has contributed to a backlash from its ACFUN community. Is this a "subculture sellout" (Liangyu 2020)? As Qin, a veteran user of the platform remarked, "My paradise has been desecrated…Bilibili is no longer that platform where I could watch videos while socializing with others. I now feel like I'm just another user" (Siqi and Davis 2020) .

Nevertheless, the platform has doubled down on portalization, launching a "celebrity-driven" creator strategy and entering into deals with the likes of Hollywood star Dwayne Johnson. Bilibili has progressively eroded the culture for their native creators. A number of them have migrated to the AcFun platform. A first-generation platform launched in 2007, AcFun is co-dependent upon its rivals, runs on Sina's video player, and previously secured investment from Youku Toudou. The platform has remained loyal to its niche fan culture. However, in 2018, the platform was purchased by rising tech competitor and Tencent-backed Kuaishou (Li and Jourdan 2018) . This aligns with the Tencent's expansive global gaming strategy through ownership of game publishers, investment and control of live gaming platforms Douyu and Huya, and aggregation of wanghong platforms that appeal to game fan communities.

Portalization continues to play out across the wanghong platform landscape. In 2020, Bytedance's long form video platform Watermelon, or Xigua, has aggressively pivoted away from user-generated, open access to compete against the likes of Youku, Tencent Video, and iQiyi. Most notably, this strategy included securing first-run releases of major Chinese feature tentpoles films like Lost in Russia, brought about by the collapse of theater distribution due to the coronavirus outbreak. While these portalization tendencies have introduced greater precarity for creators, the next section of the chapter shows that the wanghong landscape has significantly progressed the affordances of social presence, a strategy that has deepened the sustainability and connectivity of wanghong platforms and creators.

Social presence in the wanghong platform landscape is cultivated by technological innovations that allow for social commentary, social streaming, and social video. These affordances, in turn, enhance wanghong platform and creator viability through the near frictionless ability to engage in social tipping and social commerce, the latter two phenomena part of a "social+" business model. These developments have underpinned strong growth in the industry and differentiate wanghong further from SME.

First coined by James Gibson (1977) , the concept of affordances more broadly refers to the "actionable possibilities" available to humans within any environment. As Taina Bucher and Anne Helmond (2017) argue, the concept of affordances remains "a key term for understanding and analyzing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users" (p. 233). Cunningham and Craig (2019) use the concept of affordances to distinguish social media platforms from other channels of media distribution, whether theatrical, broadcast, cable, or streaming, and the practices of creator labor and management operationalized across them. We identified how communicative affordances (Hutchby 2001 ) of SME platforms help both users and creators develop "network publics" (boyd 2010). Coupled with commercial affordances, creator entrepreneurialism has the potential to flourish in an environment where "financial and social economies co-exist" (Humphreys 2009, p. 1) .

Social presence refers to the perception of being present with a real person. As Joon Lim, Youngchan Hwang, Seyun Kim and Frank Biocca (2015) explain, "the concept of social presence has evolved from interpersonal communication, specifically from Goffman's (1963) notion of the mutual awareness of and attention to each other in a space" (Lim et al. 2015, p. 160) . First introduced by John Short, Ederyn Williams and Bruce Christie (1976) in the field of computer science, the term "social presence" captured "the salience of the interactants and their interpersonal relationship during a mediated conversation" (Oh et al. 2018, p. 1) . The concept of social presence has featured in more recent discussionsespecially from Chinese communication and media scholars (Liu et al. 2020; Lu et al. 2016 ; S. Wang 2020)-regarding the socio-technological affordances of virtual reality, social media, and livestreaming. As Wang and Lobato (2019) noted, Chinese scholars' focus on social presence signals their awareness of the need to differentiate the ontology of China's platforms from those of the West.

Approximating social presence can foster deeper engagement and intimacy and encourage greater interactivity. For wanghong platforms and creators, these affordances have nurtured new social business models generating greater remuneration and sustainability.

Affordances supporting social presence were introduced relatively early in wanghong history. Around 2008-2009, game and anime-focused platform Bilibili and AcFun were launched, featuring Japanese-designed Niconico video players. These players allowed users to conduct rapid-fire bullet messaging (danmaku) in real time across recorded video. Chinese communication scholars have highlighted the socializing affordances that bullet messaging provides users, creators, and their communities. Elaine Zhao (2016) described danmaku as "reinvigorating the meaning of liveness while creating a sense of sharedness amongst audiences" (p. 5454).

Jinying Li (2017) argued that danmaku has changed "video consumption into social communication" (p. 235). Other scholars have pointed to the bullet messaging's "pseudo-synchronicity" (Hamano 2008; Yeqi 2017) and "virtual liveness" (Johnson 2013) . Yuhong Yang (2019) argued that danmaku facilitates "the social practice of participatory viewing" (p. 3).

To date, none of the prominent platforms in the SME landscape have ever integrated bullet messaging, including YouTube and Facebook. Chauncey Jung (2018) thinks this may reflect the multilingual nature of these platforms. According to Pew research (van Kessel et al. 2019), 17 percent of YouTube videos posted each week are English-language, although they comprise nearly a third of the views. The ephemeral nature of the social commenting may also pose challenges for platform moderation and state surveillance, although regulations introduced in 2019 have imposed greater censorship (Feng 2019) . Nonetheless, at the peak of use, danmaku allowed users to subvert norms and engage in controversial topics. This affordance might explain how danmaku has fostered a subcultural space on Bilibili in which anime and game fans may engage in subcultural and political resistance (Yin and Fung 2017) . As Zhen Chen (2018) argues that, despite the platform's intentions for financial gain, Bilibili's features like danmaku allows users to "transform themselves into tactical prosum-ers… They employ various tactics to resist such control, manipulation and exploitation" (p. 2).

Danmaku was only the beginning. Over the past decade, the uptake of livestreaming technology throughout this landscape has most dramatically advanced the affordances of social presence. (Livestreaming was introduced in greater detail in Chap. 2). Here we offer a brief summary of the evolution and proliferation of Chinese livestreaming in relation to the affordances of social presence. Livestreaming provides the means for social streaming, the ability for users to more deeply engage with their fan community in real time, whether through the streaming screen or a chat room that offers synchronous text-based interactivity.

Social streaming is a vital affordance in the livestreaming vertical of live gaming. Live gaming, also referred to as gameplay, refers to streamers playing video games accompanied by either jokes and/or instruction, while simultaneously interacting with their fan community either on the same screen or in a chat room. With reference to livegaming on SME platforms like YouTube and Twitch, Postigo (2014) described how "the social affordances frame practices such as community participation, systems of subscriber recruitment and exchange and valuation, competition, participatory culture and so forth" (p. 216). For nearly a decade, Twitch has remained the dominant player in the live gaming SME landscape (Bloom 2019) although, in 2020, competition emerged between Twitch competing against Microsoft's Mixer and Facebook and YouTube's gaming platforms. Mixer has since folded, although these platform wars "kicked off a talent war for streamers" (Webster 2020) , pointing towards the ongoing influence and entrepreneurial agency of live gaming creators in the SME industry. Outside of live gaming, however, livestreaming has struggled for viability, suffering from a global backlash due to rampant abuse of the platforms hosting criminal activities that the platforms appear incapable of thwarting through content moderation.

In China, livestreaming has tracked a more prolific trajectory. As captured in greater detail in Chap. 2, this trajectory is a consequence of underlying socio-economic conditions coupled with state-driven cultural and creative industries and social policy. Much like the SME livestreaming landscape, the vertical of live gaming has proven a driver of wanghong industry growth and creator viability. Unlike the SME landscape, live gaming comprises only a portion a vastly more diverse array of Chinese livestreaming platforms and verticals advancing more lucrative practices of livestreaming creators, also known as showroom hosts, or zhubo.

Launched in the mid-2000s, niche social media platforms dedicated to game culture have accompanied the parallel rise of China's gaming and esports industries, in turn, part of a larger strategy to make China the "global center of the games industry" (Cao 2020) . Launched in 2005 at the same time as YouTube and Youku and similar to AcFun, Duowan appealed to gamers and their fans. Five years later, the platform introduced live streaming, was renamed YY Live or Huanjushidai, and pivoted to include a vast array of livestreaming verticals, creators, and affinity communities well beyond gaming. As the vanguard platform leading this innovation, YY Live is known as the "forefather of the country's massive live streaming industry" (Hallanan 2019) . Through introduction of virtual tipping, YY Live helped launch the online gift economy, while also integrating its own e-commerce platform Yijan. Virtual tipping and ecommerce integration refer to business models discussed in greater detail in the following section on social+ business models.

In 2018, YY spun off its live gaming platform, Huya, in competition against Douyu, another live gaming platform. China's live gaming sector has proven highly competitive, thus lucrative for live game players, as it has in the SME industry across platforms like Twitch and YouTube Gaming.

In the span of four years, according to iResearch Global (2018), live gaming has grown from USD 2.6 billion in 2016 to USD 23.55 billion in 2020-a growth rate of 900 percent. In 2016, live gaming platform wars were waged between three platforms: Douyu, Huya, and Panda TV. This competition between platforms helped live gamers extract enormous salaries for exclusivity while racking up millions of RMB in virtual goods, or social tipping, as we explain later in this section. After Panda TV folded, Douyu and Huya constituted a duopoly, dominating 60 percent of the live-game market. Both Douyu and Huya have since launched IPOs through the market and Tencent has purchased controlling shares in both platforms, with the anticipation that these will be merged . On balance, while these strategies may align with the patterns of digital and platform capitalism, we argue that Tencent's platform strategies are more of an outlier, as mapped in this chapter across a vastly more competitive landscape than its SME counterpart.

A decade later, live gaming still dominates livestreaming in SME. In China, however, live gaming represents only 20 percent of the livestreaming industry (Yang 2018) . Rather, what has emerged is a more diverse live streaming industry with rapidly scaling streaming platforms (zhibo) dominated by native, entrepreneurial, IRL (In Real Life) streamers (zhubo). The diversification of livestreaming platforms features deeply gendered and affective creators and performativity. The appeal of and demand for online mediated intimacy afforded by these platforms have contributing to what Kokas referred to as an industry of "virtual girlfriends" (Kaiman and Meyers 2017) . Conditions of creator labor and management are elaborated on in Chaps. 4 and 5.

Another core instance of social presence is the introduction of livestreaming across Chinese dating apps in the mid-2010s, which Western platforms introduced only years later. Initially for the purpose of creating real world dating opportunities, as well as sexual hookups, informed by the demand for online and mediated intimacy, livestreaming advanced the affordances of social streaming and presence. Like YY Live, these features allowed the dating apps to introduce social platform business models, like tipping and ecommerce integration, upon which wanghong creators have prospered.

Launched in 2011, Momo was initially compared to the Western-based dating app, Tinder, and pejoratively described as the "one night stand app" (Rosenman 2013) and "a magical tool for getting laid" (Cendrowski 2014) . However, in 2015, Momo introduced livestreaming, evolving the platform from "location-based dating to social entertainment" (Lee 2017) . By 2018, Momo was one of the largest livestreaming apps in China, Tinder only launched a live video feature in mid-2020 in response to the COVID-19 epidemic (Tilman 2020) . While still featuring dating services, Momo promotes livestreaming for other "social activities like chat rooms, karaoke performances, and talent shows", further differentiating the platform from a vast array of United States-owned dating apps like Tinder, Match, and OK Cupid (Sun 2020).

These patterns have been emulated across China's LGBTQ dating apps in contrast to their Western counterparts. Launched in 2012, eleven years after China removed homosexuality from country's list of mental disorders, Blued targeted the LGBTQ community. Three years later, the platform introduced livestreaming and, by 2016, ranked 13 th amongst all Chinese livestreaming apps (Shen 2017) . By mid-2020, the platform has 49 million registered users, has expanded throughout Southeast Asia, and launched an IPO on NASDAQ . In contrast, United Stateslaunched gay dating app Grindr has never secured more than 6 million users and struggled to integrate livestreaming features. In need of investment, in 2016, the platform sold majority interest to a Chinese gaming company, Beijing Kunlun Tech. Since then, the United States government has attempted to force the sale of the platform back to Western owners out of concern over data privacy and potential extortion by its Beijing owners (Sanger 2019). As we explore in Chap. 6, this fits a pattern whereby China's newly successful international tech profile is being impacted by the rise of platform nationalism and the growing "splinternet".

Across these platforms and apps, through the affordances of social streaming and presence, creators are securing revenue by deepening virtual intimacy amongst their fan communities, as reflected in recent scholarship. Lik Sam Chan (2019) thought Momo "opened up new possibilities for socializing, relationship-seeking, sexual experimentation, business practices, and so on" (p. 14). Shuaishuai Wang (2019) argued that the rise of wanghong creators operating off the livestreaming features on Blued creates the material conditions for "affective platform economies" and "performative labor".

While livestreaming continues to flourish in the wanghong platform landscape, ongoing competition demands that these platforms advance new strategies, including portalization. While still one of the leading zhibo, YY has integrated a wanghong talent management and IP-incubation strategy. The platform hosts wanghong festivals like the YY festival in Guangzhou while launching reality shows on the platform designed to identify next-generation wanghong talent. In addition, the platform has secured deals for their native wanghong talent, like the Modern Brothers, a C-pop boy band group, who are encouraged to grow their community across other platforms like Douyin but who return to YY to watch them in concert (Hallanan 2019) . Other zhibo have comparably expanded into IP, portal-like practices, emulating some of the SME portalization programming practices like YouTube Premium and Instagram's IGTV. Momo sponsors variety shows like Plasticity and I Love Anime.

Like YY, Inke is a prominent live streaming platform pursuing a similar talent and IP-management and portal-like strategy. Inke cast their native creators in scripted programs like Emotional Cuisine 2, a workplace drama set in a Chinese restaurant whose owner recounts the stories of guest diners. This series has nurtured the careers of aspiring actors and "deconstructed China's star-making factory" inside China's legacy media industries (Ouyangshaoxia 2019). Securing record viewership for Inke, the series has been described as a "live + miniseries" business model as part of the platform's "pan-entertainment" strategy (Wang 2019). The series features short-form video ideal for mobile viewing, distribution well beyond Inke itself, while starring Inke creators whose fans are encouraged to propose future storylines.

Social commentary and social streaming in the wanghong platform landscape afford greater social presence. Social streaming in the form of live gaming has proven profitable in both the SME and wanghong industries. However, as reflected in the diverse evolution of Chinese and Western dating apps, social streaming operates expansively across more Chinese platforms featuring more diverse verticals, while fostering a new wave of creators advantaged by the affordances of greater social presence. While the vast competition amongst streaming platforms contributes to the afore-mentioned patterns of portalization, these features and affordances have also led to forms of social content innovation. We now turn to the rise of "social video" platforms, including Douyin and Kuaishou, as evidence of further affordances of social presence.

Across industry and academic discourses, the rapid uptake of Chinese platforms, Kuaishou (or Kwai) and Douyin are more hyped and critiqued by their short-video modalities. These discourses, however, more often underdetermine the distinctive socio-technological architecture and engineering that these platforms offer and the user and creator affordances they provide. Varying from 7 seconds to one minute, the hype regarding short video emphasizes the short-lived attention span of digital and mobile youth. The ill-fated consequence of this emphasis has produced expensive flame outs in the Western platform landscape, most notably the collapse of the mobile short-video platform Quibi (Sperling 2020) .

In the SME industry, discourses surrounding short video start with the launch of Vine. Vine's appeal and innovation extended well beyond video length to include mobile-first design, a user-interface that feature in-app editing features, looping video that promotes repeat viewing, a channelless user interface and algorithmic recommendation system that expedited social virality, and a hyper-editing technique that emulated the "Kuleshov effect" (Pavlus 2013) . (The latter refers to meaning-making effects generated by the juxtaposition of two diverse images.)

Vine's features and affordances nurtured a new wave of creators and forms of content, such as Zach King's digital illusions. As King (2015) mentioned in our interview, "different platforms give you different rules and boundaries". While still in beta, Twitter purchased Vine and, within two years of launch had 200 million users before it was shuttered. The reasons given for Vine's demise included increased competition from emulating competitor Instagram, the inability to effectively monetize the platform through advertising revenue, as well as poor platform management (Newton 2016) . Vine creators had loudly protested the lack of profit participation or revenue partnerships before abandoning the platform for its competition, including Instagram and Snapchat (Chen 2016) .

Twitter's failure to accommodate Vine creators signaled that creators had become critical to the growth of next-generation SME platforms. Likewise, in the wanghong industry, where multiple short-video Vine-like competitors launched concurrently with their Western counterparts. Weishi was a Vine-like app that proved an ephemeral example of Tencent's strategy of launching competing platforms that attempt to emulate the features of next-generation platforms. After shutting down the platform, Tencent relaunched Weishi in 2018 to compete with Douyin by offering subsidies to wanghong creators totaling nearly USD 500 million (Zhao 2018 ). Tencent's competitive management strategy might best be described as "if you can't beat them, buy them", comparable to that of Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp; however, we still advance this agglomerative pattern by Tencent as more Chinese industry outlier than norm.

Driven by competitive pressure, Meitu-owned Meipai integrated the short video modality of Vine and Weishi with the filter functions of Instagram to secure over half-a-billion users. Within a year, however, the platform pivoted rapidly to introduce live streaming and launched and integrated its own ecommerce store called MeituBeauty. The platform has aggressively introduced filtering and AI systems designed for appeal to the beauty wanghong and their communities. These strategies signal platform and market alignment as China's middle class drives growth in domestic lifestyle industries of beauty, fashion, and home décor.

Despite industry discourses hyping overnight success, both Kuaishou and Bytedance-owned Douyin (China's domestic version of TikTok) were launched in the same period as these other short video platforms. However, as Yunwen shows in her research on Douyin, these social video platforms have been designed to further heighten users' perceptions of "immersion, presence, and entertainment". Their sustainability is testament to their platform management strategies of continuous iteration, innovation, and integration of state-of-the-art social video features and predictive AI recommendation algorithms, as detailed here through comparative platform histories.

Founded in 2012, Bytedance has been acclaimed as the "world's most valuable startup" (Ting 2019) . In less than a decade, Bytedance now rivals the BATs in market value, advertising revenue, while eclipsing their global reach. Bytedance owns three short video platforms, Douyin and Huoshan within China and TikTok without. Other platforms include news-focused Headlines, or Toutiao, Bytedance has been labelled an "app factory" (Cortese 2020) , acquiring, investing in, or launching over 80 platforms across all sectors, signaling that a new "B" has emerged in the pantheon of national champions.

In 2016, Bytedance acquired Beijing-based musical.ly, a Western-facing platform with similar short-video and music integration. The platform was relaunched in 2018 as TikTok and soon became the fastest growing social platform in the world in scale. As we will see in Chap. 6, Bytedance's platform strategy has helped transform the firm into the first global Chinese platform company and affirm the aspirations of founder Zhang Yiming: "From the start, Zhang, a former Microsoft engineer and Chinese serial entrepreneur, had the goal of running a borderless company" (Fannin 2019 ).

Douyin's platform innovation, much like Vine's was, is not limited to a short-video player but also sophisticated and professionalizing in-app editing, music library integration that fosters content practices like lip-syncing and dancing, and predictive AI recommendation filters. Douyin's advances in social video progress further embed social presence. Recent platform scholarship has begun to focus on social presence. As we have seen, refers to Douyin's users' perceptions of "immersion, presence, and entertainment". Ethan Bresnick (2019) talks of "virtual play structures" fostering "intensified play" in contrast to conventional video sharing platforms. Zhicong Lu and Xing Lu (2019) argue the platform's appeal lies in its ability for users to develop "virtual intimate relationships" coupled with "positive energy" that aligns with Chinese socio-cultural values of keeping face, or guanxi. In fact, Positive Energy or zhengnengliang, is the name of the platform's trending video tab. Douyin's features, as Xu Chen, D. Bondy Kaye and Jing Zeng (2020) remind us, also serve the interest of the state "by promoting playful patriotism online" (p. 1). Lu and Lu (2019) point to how Douyin promote "fashionable lifestyles" along with content designed for "informational and practical purpose". Douyin has rapidly cultivated China's young, cosmopolitan, middle-class netizens, located primarily in Tier 1 and 2 cities. This contrasts with the demographic targeted by platforms like Kuaishou and Bytedance's Huoshan, which targets rural users and creators. This pattern suggests a kind of socio-cultural platform pillarization, segmenting China's platform society by class and location as much as by affinity or interests.

This segmentation contributes to the rise of diverse classes of wanghong creators-and we will look more closely at this in Chaps. 4 and 5. On Douyin, high-end, cosmopolitan creators like Li Jiaqi (Fig. 3.4) , a male superwanghong, known as the "lipstick king" can drive 40 million followers to his Taobao store and sell out "15,000 lipsticks in five minutes" (Huang 2020) . Alternatively, Xinbao uses Huoshan to amass over 400,000 followers while based in a remote mountainous village in Western China. She demonstrates how to harvest rice and forge iron, before encouraging her followers to visit her ecommerce store to buy her fermented tofu. In their targeting of Tier 4 and 5 cities and villages, both Huoshan and Kuaishou commercially and culturally empowered rural creators and "pushed people from poor villages like Xinbao to the spotlight in a virtual world" (Yuming 2020) .

Platform pillarization across diverse segments of Chinese society correlate with how each platform introduces user interfaces, modalities, and platform services that advance social presence. For example, Kuaishou's rural users and creators reflect a slower-paced society with greater emphasis on traditional culture and lifestyles. These strategies and conditions show in different features, including Kuaishou's better integration of livestreaming alongside recorded short-form social video than Douyin. Kuaishou's main discovery page primarily shows videos from a user's own social network as compared to Douyin, which promotes videos based on algorithmically-determined popularity across the entire platform. As a result of these functions and features, Kuaishou users spend up to twice as much time on Kuaishou than Douyin (Iqbal 2010) . As confirmed in our interviews with Kuaishou executives (Kuaishou executives 2019), the key objective of Kuaishou's interface has been designed to foster user engagement and stickiness, stated proverbially as "soft fire makes sweet malt". The consequence of all these features is to make Kuaishou a more "relationship-based" platform than Douyin, which is most notably fostered between the creators and their fan communities. In our interview with Kuaishou executives, they claimed the platform promotes a culture that nurtures brother-like relationships (laotie) between wanghong creators and fans, or as they referred to them, "creator-followers". Similarly, the ability of platforms to foster engagement and closer relationships converts into more revenue for the platform and its creators. All the platforms feature both advertising as well as social business platform models, like social tipping and social commerce, as further discussed in the next section. According to our interview with a senior MCN executive (Kuaishou executives 2019), most of Kuaishou's revenue, and in turn, wanghong revenue, comes from social tipping, which makes the platform more reliable for MCNs and wanghong creators, whereas advertisers revenue proves, in his description, "inconsistent and unreliable". However, these advertising conditions may reflect the socio-economic stability outside of China's fast-growing middle class located within Tier 1 and 2 cities. Douyin secures more revenue through higher advertising rates targeting cosmopolitan, upscale users .

This platform pillarization may prove mutable as ongoing platform competition and market demand for growth results in constant and rapid platform iteration. As in SME, wanghong platforms are introducing new features and services and, in some instances, pivoting towards an IP-centered portalization model. As Kuaishou strives to secure more revenue from high value advertisers, in recent marketing appeals, the platform is targeting more young, urban, and cosmopolitan users. Like Bilibili, this may result in Kuaishou becoming yet another "subcultural sell-out" (Liangyu 2020) . Likewise, in our interviews with Bytedance executives (Bytedance executives 2019), they resisted discussing Huashon, pejoratively dismissing their own platform as "grassroots"; rather, they prefer to tout Douyin, promoting its cosmopolitan users and wanghong creators and, in turn, higher advertising rates and revenue. In 2020, Bytedance renamed Huoshan as Douyin Huoshan and introduced a "ladder plan" designed to "nurture content creators to produce more premium content" .

For every platform that may appear to abandon the lower tier, rural Chinese netizens, another enters into the fray. As the third social ecommerce platform in China, Pinduoduo's growth story has been called "miraculous", securing RMB 1 trillion (USD 141 billion) in half the time it took Alibaba or JD (Norris 2020) . The growth of this platform reflects a commitment to the growth of China's grassroots economy, launching 1 million stores with livestreaming features for Chinese farmers and cooperates to promote agricultural goods. As with all these initiatives, platform innovation is aligned with state interest. "Pinduoduo's latest initiative backs Beijing's efforts to revitalize economic activity after the government started lifting the lockdown on communities and other coronavirus containment measures across the country from last month" (Xue 2020) . The ability of these platforms and creators to appeal to multiple segments of Chinese society reflect not only the greater affordances of social presence, but also the integration of social platform business models.

As China's digital and platform economies have evolved, so have policy, industry, and academic discourses around the "+", or plusification of internet technologies. The term Internet Plus or Internet + was first introduced by a Chinese industry consultant in 2012 before it was adopted as a policy strategy in 2015 (Zhang 2017) . The adoption of live streaming technologies logically contributed to discourses surround new business models referred to as "live streaming +" (iResearch Global 2018). As mentioned in the last section, a "live + miniseries" model refers to the integration of interactive scripted content with creator talent across social media.

The next iteration of this discourse is social+. As first espoused by Chinese tech journalist Zen Soo (2018) , the concept of social+ refers to how "different industries such as education, news and e-commerce are anchored by a social pillar that drives user engagement and growth … For companies that have successfully navigated Social+, a model unique to China, victory comes in the form of millions of active users amassed in a relatively short amount of time. Social+ apps are often recognized for their user stickiness, incorporating social elements that incentivize users to come back day after day". As we argue here, the viability of social+ stems from these greater affordances of social presence. The most prolific and lucrative social+ business models are social tipping and social commerce.

Social tipping is also known as online tipping or "da shang", fan tipping, digital tipping, live tipping, gift sending, and virtual goods. The practice involves sending creators money or virtual goods that can be converted into money out of appreciation to grab the streamer's attention (Chan 2016) . Although tipping is not practiced offline, in China, "they tip millions online" (Xiang 2016) , which suggests the wanghong industry is introducing new social norms which recognize and reward entrepreneurialism and entertainment values.

This social platform business model has proved lucrative for the growth of wanghong platforms and creators operating across them. As Jilei Zhou et al. (2019) claim, this practice was "invented by Chinese companies…and widely adopted by Chinese live streaming firms" (p. 1) before it was introduced on SME platforms like Twitch. Social tipping took off in China as far back as 2013. When Chinese pop singer Hua Chenyu posted a song on Weibo in 2014, through both download fees and tipping, "he made $17,000 USD in five hours and he wasn't even famous yet" (Frosco 2019) . Once Momo introduced a tipping feature alongside integration of livestreaming, within two years, social tipping became a key revenue driver, growing five-fold across Momo, eclipsing both advertising and subscription business models. Inke gamified social tipping, encouraging what has been coined "Player knockout (PK) battles" between live streamers trying to secure the most tips within a given time frame.

According to scholars, the heightened affordances of social presence advanced by these platforms contributes to the desire for social tipping. As Boying Li, Zhengzhi Guan, Fangfang Hou, and Alain Yee-Loong Chong (2018) researched, "we find that contextual factors (that is, interactivity and social presence) are positively associated with consumption intention in live streaming" (n.p.). As poignantly captured in Wu Hao's documentary People's Republic of Desire (2018), IRL livestreamers vie for the remunerative affection of their fans through social tips. These business models helped lift rural and uneducated wanghong out of poverty, even if often deriving income from working poor out of gratitude for "helping to ease their loneliness" (Jarowoski 2018) . These working conditions are, however, fraught with precarity, demanding long hours that epitomizes affective labor (Hardt 1999) and aspirational labor (Duffy 2017) in these high-stakes platform-driven battles to win the hearts and savings of their fans. One might as easily condemn these platforms, business models, and practices as epitomizing the commodification of the "social" in social industries (Sandvig 2015) as commend them for their advancing social mobility and amelioration within China's hyperplatformized digital economy.

Social commerce is another social+ business model. Shanelle Mullen (2019) defined social commerce as "the ability to make a product purchase from a third-party company within the native social media experience". In China, social commerce and social+ have often been used interchangeably to describe the interplatformization of ecommerce and social media platforms and creator practices. As Haiqing Yu (2019) describes, social+ "combines social networking and entertainment in the context of e-commerce transactions" that have contributed to the popularity of older generation platforms like WeChat and "rising stars like Pinduoduo and Xiaohongshu" (p. 33); the former was discussed in our last section and the latter, also known as Little Red Book, will be further mentioned below.

While Taobao links remain operable across this landscape, the platform also launched Taobao Live in 2016, upon which livestreaming creators, or zhubo, like Viya and Li Jiaqi, are flourishing. According to a senior director of e-commerce, "Taobao Live is quickly becoming the model of future retail. Livestreaming is now the primary infrastructure for e-commerce moving forward" (Alibaba Group 2020). Every retailer and sales force exists on this platform: "5000 real estate agents…23 global automakers such as BMW and Audi" (Yi 2020) . Competing ecommerce platforms, JD and Pinduoduo, have since integrated their own zhibo apps as well.

As with any business model in this landscape, social commerce also introduces risk and precarity for both platforms and creators. Backed by both Alibaba and Tencent, Little Red Book, or Xiaohongshu, is a social commerce site that integrates Instagram-like photo modality and comments promoting beauty and lifestyle wanghong creators along with ecommerce functionality. Founded in 2013, the platform grew rapidly to 200 million users. However, fast growth may have been faux growth, violating the social norms of platform and wanghong engagement. In 2019, the press revealed the platform was populated by fake reviews and reviewers and the platform was suspended from the app stores. In an attempt to reverse the damage, the platform introduced its "brand partner program" and deleted all their creators, numbering over 13,000 (Zheng 2019). Rapid falls from grace can also lead to fast redemption narratives. Little Red Book returned in 2020 seeking half-a-billion in VC investment while also launching livestreaming functions. Even as precarity remains an embedded feature throughout the wanghong industry, these social+ business models driven by the affordances of social presence have advanced the viability of platforms and creators.

The COVID-19 crisis in China may have even further accelerated the growth of the wanghong industry, at least according to Chinese and Western business journalists and websites. "When people were confined to home, the new industry was buoyed to new heights, and many brands turned to wanghong to help boost sales through livestreaming promotions" (Wu 2020) . According to business consulting site 1421 (2020), the wanghong industry is one of the few to benefit from the crisis, tripling in revenue from 2019 to 2020, driven by the growth of social video and social streaming sites. Across the ecommerce platform JD.com alone, there were more than 4 million wanghong creators, from rural farmers to mayors, promoting agricultural products and cultural tourism to hundreds of millions (Y. Wang 2020b). In addition to social commerce, the pandemic is also generating new forms of social content. Sponsored by liquor brands, "live clubbing" refers to musician and DJs hosting online dance parties to cope with "the social dis-dance". As one record label executive stated, "it's creating a new entertainment front and a new model of business" (Y. Wang 2020b). In China's near future, it may be conceivable that anyone could become a wanghong accessing-and growing increasingly dependent upon-these platforms to capture commercial, cultural, and social value.

This chapter outlined distinctions between the wanghong and SME platform landscapes. We studied processes of hyperplatformization and interplatformization fostering wanghong entrepreneurialism. We also saw oscillating patterns of platform-portalization that caused brutal outbreaks of creator precarity, evidenced by the collapse of Youku's creator channels. Wanghong platforms, we noted, have advanced the affordances of social presence, evolving from social commentary to social streaming and social video. Accompanying this socio-technological innovation is the rise of social+ business models of social tipping and social commerce. How have these strategies, affordances, and business models shaped wanghong creator culture? In the next chapters, we find out. 

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Intensified Play: Cinematic Study of TikTok Mobile App

The Affordances of Social Media Platforms

Interview with (Anonymous) Bytedance Executive

China Has a Big Plan to Become the Global Centre of the Games Industry

The Guy Behind China's Tinder

16 Observations on Livestreaming in China

Multiple Uses and Anti-Purposefulness on Momo

The Mirage and Politics of Participation in China's Platform Economy

#PositiveEnergy Douyin: Constructing 'Playful Patriotism' in a Chinese Short-Video Application

Swinging from Vine: More than Half of Top Vine Influencers Have Left the Platform

Poetic Prosumption of Animation, Comic, Game and Novel in a Post-Socialist China: A Case of a Popular Video-Sharing Social Media Bilibili as Heterotopia

White Paper on China's Digital Economy Development and Employment

Setting Politics Aside, Sequoia Raises $3.4 billion for US and China Investments

The 44th China National Statistical Report on Internet Development (第44次中国互联网络发 展状况统计报告

ByteDance's Investments Bring a Data-driven Approach to New Sectors

Tech-tonic Shifts: The U.S. and China Models of Online Screen Distribution

Tencent Buying iQiyi Smells a Lot like that Uber Deal

Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley

How Tencent is Taking Over Global Gaming. Tech in Asia

Towards a Digital Economy with Chinese Characteristics? New Media & Society

ICTs in China's Development Strategy

China's Streamer Bilibili Aims to Embrace a Wider Audience Without Alienating its Fans

The Platformization of Chinese Society: Infrastructure, Governance, and Practice

Instagram Just Took Advantage of Amazon's Biggest Weakness

Not) Getting Paid to do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work

The Strategy behind TikTok's Global Rise

Real-time Censorship for Real-time Comments

The Rise of Digital Tipping-From Music To Your Own Paycheck

The Theory of Affordances

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How YY Used Modern Brothers to Revive its Stagnant Live-Streaming Platform

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The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready

Facebook's Evolution: Development of a Platform-as-Infrastructure

Pivot to Internet Plus: Modeling China's Digital Economy for Economic Restructuring?

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The Economies within an Online Social Network Market: A Case Study of Ravelry

Technologies, Texts, and Affordances

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Chinese Authorities Put the Brakes on a Surge in Live Streaming

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When push comes to nudge: a Chinese digital civilisation in-the-making

Everything You Need to Know about Pinduoduo, the Fast-growing Rival to Alibaba and JD in China

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Interview with (Anonymous) Kuaishou Executives

VC dollars for China Take a Dip in 2019

What You Need To Know About Influencer Marketing In China

Chinese Dating App Momo Sees Record Revenue Growth Thanks to Live Streaming

Papi Jiang and Microcelebrity in China: A Multilevel Analysis

What Drives People to Purchase Virtual Gifts in Live Streaming? The Mediating Role of Flow

The Interface Affect of a Contact Zone: Danmaku on Video-Streaming Platforms

Tencent Backed Kuaishou Buys Rival AcFun in Chinese Online Video Battle

Subculture Sellouts: Kuaishou and Bilibili Embrace Normcore. Sixth Tone

Alibaba Takes an 8% Stake in Tencent-Backed Anime Streaming Site Bilibili

China's Gay Dating App Blued Eyes Nasdaq IPO to Expand Overseas

How Social Media Engagement Leads to Sports Channel Loyalty: Mediating Roles of Social Presence and Channel Commitment

Why China's Entertainment Giants are Turning Their Focus to South East Asia. The Drum

Global Ecommerce 2019: Ecommerce Continues Strong Gains Amid Global Economic Uncertainty

Exploring the Influence of Live Streaming in Mobile Commerce on Adoption Intention From a Social Presence Perspective

Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television

Social Presence, Trust, and Social Commerce Purchase Intention: An Empirical Research

Fifteen Seconds of Fame: A Qualitative Study of Douyin, A Short Video Sharing Mobile Application in China

Firewalls and Walled Gardens: The Interplatformization of China's Wanghong Industry

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Targeting WeChat, Trump Takes Aim at China's Bridge to the World. The New York Times

Social Commerce: What it Is, What it Isn't, and Why You Should Care

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The Platformization of Cultural Production: Theorizing the Contingent Cultural Commodity

Is China Becoming Neoliberal?

Pinduoduo Growth Story Needs a New Chapter

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Vine's Great Mobile Design is All About Its Engineering

WeChat as Infrastructure: The Techno-Nationalist Shaping of Chinese Digital Platforms

The Socio-Technical Architecture of Digital Labor: Converting play into YouTube money

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China's STAR Market Doubles Nasdaq's Gains This Year

China's Sexual Revolution: 'one-night stand' App Momo Boasts 80 Million Users. South China Morning Post

The Social Industry

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Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy

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The Social Psychology of Telecommunications

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The GAFAM Effect: Strategies and Logics of the Internet Oligopoly

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Streaming Wars

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Everything You Need to Know About ByteDance, the Company Behind TikTok

A Week in the Life of Popular YouTube Channels

Chinese Affective Platform Economies: Dating, Live Streaming, and Performative Labor on Blued. Media

Chinese Video Streaming Services in the Context of Global Platform Studies

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Capital Accumulation and Work in China's Internet Content Industry: Struggling in the Bubble. The Economic and Labour Relations Review

China Doesn't Tip In Restaurants, But They Tip Millions Online

Changing Platformativity of China's Female Wanghong: From Anni Baobei to Zhang Dayi

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A Primer on China's Live Streaming Market

The Danmaku Interface on Bilibili and the Recontextualised Translation Practice: A semiotic technology perspective

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Intertextuality, Cybersubculture, and the Creation of an Alternative Public Space: 'Danmaku' and Film Viewing on the Bilibili.com Website, a Case Study

Alibaba-owned Livestreaming Platform Taobao Live Sees Rapid Growth Amid Outbreak. Caixin Global

Youth Online Cultural Participation and Bilibili: An Alternative Form of Democracy in China

Game On: The Rise of the eSports Middle Kingdom

China's 'social+' Approach to Soft Power

IPO Frenzy Grips China's Nasdaq-Style STAR Market

The Story of a Rural Vlogger

Interview 31 May with David Craig

Dean of School of Journalism and Communication

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Online Entertainment| Professionalization of Amateur Production in Online Screen Entertainment in China: Hopes, Frustrations and Uncertainties

Tencent Bets on its Revived Weishi App to Take on TikTok in Short-video Streaming

Kim Kardashian Meets Chinese Top Livestreamer Viya. Jing Daily

The magic of danmaku: a social interaction perspective of gift sending on live streaming platforms