This research examines the complex labour practices of farmers as platform creative workers in rural China. The Internet infrastructure has gradually spread to rural areas, making the rural areas "networked" and bringing them to platform markets through networking. In the context of existing platform research, which is mostly urban-centric, this paper attempts to focus on the vast and promising but significantly neglected area of rural platforming. This paper will first develop an analytical framework for the platformization of rural areas in China from the three aspects: state, market and farmers. The “New Farmer Program” on Douyin is focused on to explore how the Douyin platform expands its market in rural areas, and how rural farmers participate in the platform's creative process, and the political interests behind it. The study finds that users who participated in the "New Farmers Programme" can achieve fan growth and realisation, and the traffic support of the platform for rural celebrities also shows a "rugby ball" distribution, with less support for the top and tail but more support for the middle with a certain number of followers. However, the creative labour of rural new farmers also suffers from gender bias, reinforcing rural stereotypes, and homogenisation and templating of creative content. And there is a phenomenon and trend of family production business in the growth of rural microcelebrities. In the context of China's economic slowdown, this to some degree, contributes to the wave of migrant workers returning to their hometowns and the trend of counter-urbanisation.

Authors:
Hanxiao Zhang, University College Dublin, Ireland

About the Presenter(s)
Hanxiao Zhang is currently the PhD student in Information and Communication in University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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