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Chinese Journal of Communication
ISSN: 1754-4750 (Print) 1754-4769 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcjc20
Like a “Frog in a well”? An ethnographic study of
Chinese rural women’s social media practices
through the WeChat platform
Yini Wang & Judith Sandner
To cite this article: Yini Wang & Judith Sandner (2019) Like a “Frog in a well”? An ethnographic
study of Chinese rural women’s social media practices through the WeChat platform, Chinese
Journal of Communication, 12:3, 324-339, DOI: 10.1080/17544750.2019.1583677
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1583677
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Like a “Frog in a well”? An ethnographic study of Chinese rural
women’s social media practices through the WeChat platform
Yini Wangaà and Judith Sandnerb
a
Hunan University, Changsha, China; b
University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
In the Chinese context, prior research has investigated internal migrants’ and
rural residents’ uses of information and communication technologies (ICT), but
studies on rural women’s social media practice are rare. Moreover, the role
that social media platforms, such as WeChat, play in rural women’s everyday
lives and their transformations based on their online interactions lack a
qualitative nuanced account. Based on an original study that explored the use
of WeChat by 25 rural women aged from 40 to 52 years in Hanpu Town in
south-central China, the data explored in the present study were collected
during a 5.5-month period in 2015. Contextualizing this sample of rural
women’s platformized interests within the socio-political framework of Chinese
government Internet Plus strategies, the discussion considers how the women
used (and were likely to continue to use) WeChat to engage in online activities
related to their offline experiences, thus aligning them with entrenched Chinese
socio-cultural values. An ethnographic fieldwork methodology and a social
constructionist theoretical framework were used to investigate these rural
Chinese women’s daily experiences in using WeChat. The findings provide
evidence of their knowledge-building, business acumen, emotive communicating,
and new levels of self-awareness through using WeChat.
Keywords: social media; WeChat; rural women; platformization; Internet Plus
Introduction
People like us are already “frogs in a well,” seldom going out. If we want to
entertain, we entertain close by. In this [WeChat], [I] can learn a lot of things.
Sometimes, like classmates, posting photos of them going out, and … something
reposted, knowledge I have learned [from this], quite helps! It is usually difficult to
see these, if it is not through WeChat, I rarely get in touch with these things.
– Xin Huang, Participant1
In the Chinese idiom “a frog in a well,” the frog is not a good model of learning.
Narrow-minded and short-sighted, the frog is ensconced in his stinky well and even
brags about his living environment to the turtle of the Eastern Sea. Only after the
turtle tells him how deep and extensive the sea is does he realize how shallow he is
(Shanshan Yang, 2016). By initially comparing herself to this character, paradoxically,
research participant Xin Huang demonstrates both the limitations of her social
position and a new-found awareness of it, which the platform WeChat enables. The
difference between Xin Huang and the frog in the well is that WeChat has the capacity
to connect her to broad community networks and information, thus helping
her to feel less isolated and potentially socially cultivated.
ÃCorresponding author. Email: yini_wang@hnu.edu.cn
ß 2019 The Centre for Chinese Media and Comparative Communication Research, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Chinese Journal of Communication, 2019
Vol. 12, No. 3, 324–339, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1583677
Chinese social media platforms have been designed to offer a plethora of networking
functions, and they have been developed to align with key political and
economic incentives in order to facilitate certain patterns of user behavior
(Stockmann & Luo, 2017). WeChat, the most popular Chinese social media platform,
was launched by the Internet business tycoons Tencent in 2011 (Tencent &
CAICT, 2015). It offers multifarious services, including instant messaging, social
networking, reading, shopping, gaming, taxiing, and online banking options.
Regarded as a platform that builds networks of private and close social contacts
(Harwit, 2016), its popularity has expanded in recent years. However, the ways in
which the platform has affected and has been adopted by rural Chinese women
remains largely unexplored. Prior research has investigated the uses of information
and communication technologies (ICT) and social media by internal rural
migrants (Wallis, 2013; X. Wang, 2016) and rural residents (Oreglia, 2012, 2014;
Wallis, 2015). Oreglia (2012, 2014) found that the use of ICTs by rural people was
motivated by entertainment and communication incentives and enhanced their
social, economic, and educational opportunities. However, older women were
always marginalized by the rural patriarchy. Wallis’s (2013, 2015) exploration of
female migrant workers in the city and rural entrepreneurs in the countryside
revealed that engagement with the Internet and mobile phones reproduced gender
hierarchies. Unlike their male peers, entrepreneurs used their mobile phones
mainly to maintain their limited social networks rather than to expand them, to
enhance their business, or participate in informal learning. X. Wang’s (2016, p.
154) textual analyses of social media postings shared by Chinese rural migrants
showed that “social media has served to reinforce, disrupt or simply shift gender
roles in different situations”. Wallis’s (2018) more recent ethnographic analysis
demonstrated the empowering role of social media in enabling therapeutic emotional
expression and individual encouragement in female domestic workers in
Beijing. These previous findings suggest that new media platforms may be both
promising and constraining for rural Chinese women. Through its various affordances
(Bucher & Helmond, 2018), could WeChat be considered an empowering
and transformative tool especially for rural Chinese women, such as Xin Huang?
Contextualizing these rural women’s platformized (van Dijck, 2012) interests
within the socio-political framework of Chinese government Internet Plus strategies,
the discussion considers how the women used (and were likely to continue
to use) WeChat to engage in online activities related to their offline experiences,
thus aligning them with entrenched Chinese socio-cultural values.
Technology and the Chinese rural context
Since the 1980s, rural urbanization and industrialization in China have led to the
considerable growth of the rural economy particularly during the early 2000s
(Shen, 2006). Investment in infrastructure construction and social development in
rural areas has further modernized rural centers (Chen, 2010). A prominent
achievement has been the proliferation of ICTs, which resulted from the implementation
of government supported informatization programs (Liu, 2016) that
were aligned with the broad blueprint of promoting the development of the information
economy (CAICT, 2016b). There has also been rapid growth in the
Internet and social media use in China’s rural regions. According to the Chinese
Chinese Journal of Communication 325
Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC, 2018), by the end of 2017, the
number of rural Internet users reached 219 million, accounting for 27% of the
overall 772 million Internet users in China. WeChat was the most popular networking
application among the rural population, attracting 27.9% of users and far
exceeding the Twitter-like microblogging platform Weibo (CNNIC, 2017).
Corresponding to the Chinese government’s strategic Internet Plus project,
which was unveiled in July 2015, Tencent initiated the Internet Plus Countryside
model a month later. This model was designed to increase rural interconnectedness
to not only information, but also “emotion” and “fortune” to “achieve leapfrog
development in the countryside in virtue of mobile Internet” (Feng, 2015).
WeChat, the flagship product of Tencent, has without doubt become the buttress
of this plan because of its social, mobile, localized appeal (Negro, 2017). This platform
has penetrated the political, social, and economic lives of ordinary rural
Chinese people (CAICT, 2016a). With its wide endorsement, WeChat may well
indicate what the China Academy of Information and Communications
Technology (CAICT, 2016a) referred to as the platformization of Internet businesses
in China. Daily activities, such as information seeking, social networking,
reading, learning, seeing a doctor, shopping, and enjoying entertainment, are facilitated
through WeChat’s platform capabilities.
Rural Chinese women
Since the upsurge in China’s Internet economy, the opportunities and challenges
brought to rural Chinese women by social media platforms, such as WeChat, are
both similar to and different from those at the national level. Although rural
urbanization and informatization have highly improved the rural economy and living
standards, the 60-year implementation of the household hukou registration sys-
tem2
has created entrenched rural and urban structural inequalities (Wu &
Treiman, 2007), which have caused rural residents to be less entitled than their
urban counterparts are with regard to employment, education, medical services,
and social welfare (Li & Tsang, 2003). Discrimination motivated by gender distinction
has also affected rural Chinese women’s education and employment opportunities,
and they have been regarded as less valuable than their rural male
counterparts (Li & Tsang, 2003). For those born in the 1960s and 1970s, when
equal rights for Chinese women were arguably neglected and resources were limited,
there was only a slim chance of their self-betterment through education and
employment. Additionally, because they live in a patriarchal society that is based
on Confucian cultural values, rural Chinese women are also bound by the role of
“housewife” (Zhang, 2014), in which prescribed duties and codes of conduct
underpin their social responsibilities. Because of these institutional, historical, and
socio-cultural factors, this cohort of rural Chinese women could potentially be
considered disadvantaged, similar to “a frog in a well … confined to the limits of
[a] hole” (Shanshan Yang, 2016), compared with the younger generation of rural
Chinese women, their rural male counterparts, and urban citizens. However,
because of the penetration of Internet services and mobile phones in rural areas,
these elder women have gained access to WeChat through their smartphones.
What might this access mean for some of these women according to their individual
motivations for both overcoming social boundaries and working within them?
326 Yini Wang and Judith Sandner
Ethnographic methodology
Twenty-five rural women aged from 40 to 52 years living in the township of
Changsha, China participated in the broad research project on which this paper is
based. An ethnographic fieldwork methodology (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007)
and a social constructionist theoretical framework (Holstein & Gubrium, 2008)
were used to investigate these rural Chinese women’s daily experiences in using
WeChat. The 25 participants were selected through opportunistic and snowball
(Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007) sampling methods. The initial contact was made
through the ethnographer’s (Wang’s) existing town-based offline and online social
networks, and extra recruitment occurred through introductions by the participating
women. Among the participants, no one had attended university, one had a
college degree, two had vocational training, and three had finished high school.
Fifteen had gone to middle school, but three had withdrawn. Four had attended
primary school, and one had withdrawn in her fifth year. The main reason for
their incomplete schooling was that their families were too poor to fund their educations,
and in many cases, a family had more than one child to feed. All participants
were married with children, and they had never migrated to the city.
Although they lived in the countryside, some differed from traditional peasants
who worked exclusively on farms and fed livestock.
Between February and July 2015, online participant observations of WeChat
interactions and 50 face-to-face in-depth interviews took place. The participant
observations focused on the online space, which is considered a legitimate field site
in ethnographical research (Hjorth, Horst, Galloway, & Bell, 2017). On WeChat
Moments, users post texts, photos, short videos, and web links to share aspects of
their everyday lives. WeChat users can also subscribe to various official accounts
that produce news and other user created content, and they share what they find on
these accounts on Moments. Reading posts from participants, liking, reposting,
commenting on them, and having conversations about the posts (via other social
media platforms) allowed the ethnographer to obtain rich first-order constructs3
(Schutz, 1962), gain insights into the data, and build and maintain good relationships
with the participants (Baker, 2013). Texts, photos, videos, links, conversations,
and a vast range of threads posted by the women were captured using screenshots
(1927 in total) and NCapture (789 links), which is a feature of the computer-assisted
qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) NVivo (Ezzy, 2013). The results were
categorized, codified, and subsequently analyzed after follow-up interviews, during
which the motivations for much of their communication on WeChat were identified.
Motivations for rural women to use WeChat
Managing/marketing rural businesses with WeChat
Firms can use WeChat as a platform to market products and maintain customer
relationships (Shuai Yang, Chen, & Li, 2016). Ordinary WeChat users also sell
products through WeChat’s official accounts and Moments (Fan & Cao, 2017).
This developing phenomenon of doing business through social media platforms is
widely called “weishang” or “micro-business” in China. The terms “weishang” or
“micro-businessperson” are also used to denote the salespersons. Ng, Huang, and
Liu (2016) identified three types of business models adopted by salespersons on
WeChat: delivery-by-producer weishang; agent weishang; and purchase-on-behalf
weishang. The rural women who sold commodities on WeChat did not fall into
Chinese Journal of Communication 327
these categories, yet they undoubtedly tried to benefit from social media marketing
by using their nascent skills. Ten women ran small businesses with their husbands,
which ranged from a stationery and convenience store to a hardware store, a noodle
shop, butchery, fishing gear store, clothing shop, home appliance repair store,
electronic appliance store, and a mahjong parlor, in Hanpu Town. These shops
were mainly based in the women’s houses in different areas of the region. Five
women had adopted WeChat as a potential platform for promoting their traditional
businesses based in their physical stores, which was observed in three main
online activities: exhibiting products on Moments; communicating on WeChat;
and learning strategies from official accounts.
Xia Zhang had been running a clothing shop for 16 years in Shizilu, the center
of Hanpu Town. She named her store after her real first name; it sold both men and
women’s clothing. Until 2014, Xia Zhang had managed her business without the
assistance of digital technology with the exception of mobile phone calls. Then she
employed WeChat to increase her business profile, display products, learn strategies,
and communicate with suppliers and customers. Her transformation did not occur
immediately after she registered her WeChat account. A year after adopting WeChat
in her business, she was still adjusting to this new phenomenon. She did not realize
that using WeChat would become so valuable until her customers asked her to use it
so they could get information about her products. Xia Zhang explained:
Now many others are using WeChat. [They] say, I manage this business. They ask, do
you have WeChat? I think it’s like if you don’t use WeChat, you don’t keep up with
the pace! So catering to everyone’s need, I’ve added this stuff. I didn’t use it before.
With her 16-year-old daughter’s help, Xia Zhang set up a business profile to promote
her clothing store. She used the name of the business as her WeChat name, and she
posted a picture of the shop as her profile photo. In the What’s Up section, she wrote
the following appeal: the “most beautiful clothes are about to set off your very pretty
and charming figure. Come quickly to ÂÂ clothing store and have a look.” A new type
of business started to unfold as a matter of course. Xia Zhang’s WeChat contacts
extended from her relatives to suppliers, other businesses, and customers. She discussed
the availability of clothing styles and sizes, negotiated prices and meeting times for
stocking products, and considered promotional strategies with wholesalers. She also
observed how other business operators promoted their businesses on Moments. She
subscribed to official accounts, such as “Teach You How to Dress,” and acquired additional
sales skills. Xia Zhang learned to provide customized services for clients; she
chose new styles that suited individual customers and sent them photos privately on
WeChat. This technique kept her customers informed and provided personalized recommendations.
However, Xia Zhang exhibited her commodities with photos on Moments
only after her customers had requested her to do so. She explained:
Some people came and said, “You have new arrivals?! I don’t know when you have
new arrivals and what they look like! You [should] post on that [Moments] so that I
can see if you have what I like.” Some people are lazy to come. They see you stock
new goods, they come.
The consumption behavior of Xia Zhang’s customers had been shaped by her
popular social networking business or weishang. They experienced the facility of
328 Yini Wang and Judith Sandner
online shopping from other merchants, such as weishang, and they expected a
similar service to be provided. Xia Zhang chose to share only one group of photos
of new arrivals on Moments each time to avoid annoying her customers. She reasoned
that posting these exclusive photos on WeChat was more convenient for her
customers because they did not have to come to the physical store to see if there
were clothes that they wanted to buy. They could view the new styles on Moments
and then visit her store in person. WeChat acted as an online window to her offline
store, which not only cultivated more personal connections with existing customers,
but also drew the attention of potential new customers who visited her
clothing shop. Nonetheless, Xia Zhang was conservative in adopting other innovative
ways of showcasing products on Moments, such as videos. When she saw that
her supplier had posted a video showing customers snapping up clothes in a store,
she commented:
I saw what was hot fashion yesterday, the scene of snapping up clothes … showing
clothes were all sold out, you need to make a reservation. I was thinking, whether
that was true or not … [A]s a merchant, managing a business, in fact I need to learn
from that. But I haven’t adapted to it yet. Maybe I would get there this year. I have
the intention, but I haven’t started it. I just got to this last year. It seems like
everything will go well if I start posting like that. Looks like it is very easy, like an
everyday job, but I haven’t got accustomed to this yet.
Fang Liu, the owner of a convenience store in the Hanpu community, was more
proactive than Xia Zhang in adopting WeChat to generate offline business. For
instance, shortly after she posted a photo of two bottles of her newly stocked beer
products, Fang Liu wrote a positively themed comment to entice customers:
“Soloking beer. Tasty. Convenient. Friends come and have a taste and buy.
Welcome everybody.” She used inclusive words, such as “friends,” “welcome,”
and “tasty” to appeal to the sensory responses of her customers in advertising
alcohol. She also strategically presented her business identity as industrious and
inspirational by using the WeChat name, “No Pain No Gain,” which demontrated
her determination to be successful.
Fang Liu also spoke about the progressive benefits of living in the network
age, emphasizing that “everybody” should learn how to use the Internet:
This network era, everybody needs, and could use … . Anyhow, if we want to
follow the era, we need to learn from them, learn every day. It’s right that it’s never
too late to learn. Knowing nothing, like us, you don’t know how to use QQ4
, how to
use WeChat; business gets tough sometimes. Now all use that online, some payment,
transfer, can directly transfer on mobile phones. We haven’t started it yet.
It was imperative for her to have a WeChat and/or a QQ account to ensure her
economic viability; otherwise, her business would fall behind those that had
merged into the “network.” Fang was open to every opportunity the Internet provided
to develop her business. Displaying products on WeChat was her first move
in following such opportunities. E-commerce would be her next move in advancing
her offline business.
Most rural women’s business practices were aimed at securing offline sales generated
by displaying products online and learning effective online communication
strategies to promote their traditional offline trade. Their practices showed their
Chinese Journal of Communication 329
active engagement with innovative ways of managing small businesses by using
WeChat as well as their openness to explore transformative business methods despite
challenges. They considered WeChat a valuable platform for demonstrating
product availability, enhancing communication and relationship management, and
developing their business acumen. These rural businesswomen were not as adept
at promoting products using polished photos and highly technical advertising messages
as weishangs were. Nonetheless, by using WeChat to advertise their enterprises,
they improved their digital literacy skills, thus potentially empowering
themselves as emerging small-scale businesswomen.
The practices of these rural women were also subject to the larger political and
economic forces that shape China’s market economy. The thriving weishang business
ethos and the broad information economic boom in China have transformed
Chinese lifestyles and consumption behaviors. In 2016, the weishang market in
China was valued at $51.4 billion (RMB 328.8 billion), and it is expected to grow
30-fold by 2019 (iResearch, 2017). Not only weishang but all forms of social networking
commerce are encouraged by the Chinese government because they align
with the business model and development philosophy of being “innovative, harmonious,
green, open, and shareable” proposed by the Ministry of Commerce
(MOC), the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), and the National
Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) (2016). WeChat’s well-rounded
technological infrastructure affords functionalities for almost every business procedure
(Yanes & Berger, 2017), and it is used to build integrated online and offline
social networking interactions (Shuai Yang et al., 2016). Without doubt, WeChat
has become the major platform used to manage business and consumer lifestyle
relationships. Traditional retail businesses, severely affected by this new economy,
have been urged by the government to transform to Internet convergence (MOC,
2014; MOC & CIECC, 2017). Situated in this macro political and economic context,
rural Chinese women who do not have high levels of education and lack
opportunities for self-advancement elsewhere are acquiring the social awareness
that online business has a huge economic potential for self-advancement.
Therefore, rural Chinese women’s WeChat business operations are included in the
classifications of economic governance by the Chinese government. Their activities
are by-products of the development of China’s information economy and the
stimulation by governmental and industrial stakeholders. However, such renewed
economic benefits are accompanied by the pressures of meeting customers’
requests, adapting to new business models, constantly changing online dynamics,
and digital literacy demands. With limited resources, many rural women (especially
older rural women) are challenged in using new information technologies. A
rupture exists between the government’s and the society’s construction of technology
and rural women’s attempts to use technology to reconstruct themselves, particularly
in their socio-cultural contexts. This dichotomy is often implicit and
disregarded by rural women, but is identifiable through exploring their individual
uses of the WeChat platform.
Making use of WeChat official accounts
WeChat’s subscription feature provides users with reading opportunities. The
subscription content is generated by official accounts5
that are registered by
330 Yini Wang and Judith Sandner
individuals, media institutions, and corporations, and it can be shared on
WeChat Moments. Reading and sharing this content was one of the main
activities in which the rural women participated.6
It was through reading and
sharing WeChat articles that these rural women developed the motivation for
learning and experimenting, through which they discovered a channel for
self-expression.
Twenty identifiable themes emerged from the linked articles, the most prominent
of which were the following: life philosophy; fake information; nourishing of
life; women; useful tips; public affairs; folk culture; gender relations; and social
relationships. The themes relevant to this discussion of the women’s emotional
self-expression and learning were the following: life philosophy; nourishing of life;
women; useful tips; gender relations; and social relationships.
Learning and experimenting
As a peasant and the mother of a child with a mental deficiency, Xin Huang
had many home-based domestic tasks, including cooking, cleaning, and farming.
Even though her father-in-law occasionally assisted, unlike other women, she
could not leave her home unattended. In her WeChat networks, she learned
about events in the outside world, which she had no opportunity to experience,
such as attending festivals, traveling in other parts of China, or working in the
city. Browsing WeChat’s Moments and reading public articles became her main
online activities. By reading articles about women, marriage, friendships, and
life, Xin Huang also learned how to take care of herself and conduct herself in
different relationships:
Sometimes in it, [I] learn many things, like relationship between husband and
wife, how to get along, like how to be sincere to friends. [I’ve] learned quite a lot
in it.
[They] tell you to tolerate when you need to tolerate. From within, [I] can see other
men are … can objectively see how men live and their personalities, can compare
with the man at home, sometimes take a change.
Xin Huang shared an article that was generated in the official account, “Learn
to be Smart Women.” The title of the article was “‘If I marry you, you’ll be the
president!’ There is a kind of woman who is happy no matter whom she marries!”
The article started by relating a story about former US President Barack Obama’s
wife Michelle, but continued with an extended story about how a happy and confident
woman can maintain a happy marital relationship through a strong sense of
self. Another article entitled, “Meet with you sooner or later, it is good as long as
you are sincere,” encouraged both women and men in relationships to cherish, forgive,
respect, and tolerate. From these similar articles, Xin Huang learned skills
that she thought would be beneficial to her own marriage. Min Wang shared Xin
Huang’s ideas and talked about applying them:
[T]he phenomenon talked about in these [articles] indeed exists in life. Just to say, in
the future, you have this kind of idea, when you come across the same problem, you
then consider it to some extent to avoid it as much as possible.
Chinese Journal of Communication 331
’Articles about nourishing life, which provided methods of keeping healthy and
improving well-being as well as information about practical life skills, received
much attention. Xin Huang recalled how this knowledge had some transformative
effects:
I think I am not doing badly in taking good care of myself. Before I did not read
WeChat, I did not think in this way. Oh, [I] think it [the article] makes a point! I
value myself more. That is not to, like working, not to tire out myself. What I want
to eat and is good for myself or so, will change gradually. Before I used WeChat? I
did not value myself like this. If I had my period before, I never paid much attention
when I was working. Now I attend to my body a little more. Valuing self, now it is
valuing myself through WeChat.
She learned to appreciate herself by eating healthily, pursuing beauty, and keeping
fit. Hence, the articles she read about the reality of social organization and reflections
on the core structures of Chinese society, such as guanxi, friendship, and
family were prevalent. Confucian ideas about how to maintain good relationships
and how to exercise and exhibit filial piety were among the most popular. One
post forwarded by Bin Dong advised thinking about and tolerating others and
taking responsibility for family members, which are Confucian precepts that are
usually promoted in Chinese society and accepted as social norms to instruct and
guide people in behaving properly (Y. Wang & Balnaves, 2017). In Bo Liao’s
opinion, this kind of article reminded her about how to be filial in her relationship
with her parents:
After I read this kind of article, I may go … or, emm … if parents have some
shortcomings, go to forgive them. Or, don’t find fault with them no matter what.
Anyhow everybody has this kind of shortcomings or that kind of shortcomings.
People are all like this. Having a read, I think it is beneficial.
Moreover, Chinese people value their relationships with friends. As Xiaotong Fei’s
(2012) “differential mode of association” indicated, in the flexible circles of guanxi,
friends follow family. However, the cultivation of contacts and connections among
friends is essential because they are a very important type of social capital
(King, 1991). Thus, it is necessary to behave properly in interpersonal relationships
in order to maintain positive, strong friendships. Articles that reflected this
philosophy frequently trended on the rural women’s WeChat Moments, as Qin
Li explained:
Having a look at those articles, [I] feel people should be easy-going. Don’t divide
with them because of minor contradictions. Having read them, myself would reflect
on myself sometimes. [I] think some friends, sometimes myself too, [have] trifled
with friends or some minor conflicts. After reading those articles, spontaneously
these small conflicts would be resolved. [I] would not be too particular about
it sometimes.
This kind of content advised people to be tolerant and generous, to have an open
mind to earn the trust of friends, enhance friendships, and gain advantages in
interpersonal relationships. Through their reading and sharing on WeChat, in their
40s and 50s, this cohort gained knowledge and self-advancement, and they sought
to be healthier and attain greater quality of life.
332 Yini Wang and Judith Sandner
Experiencing emotional self-expression
In contrast to direct online self-disclosures and interactions, the rural women
expressed their emotions implicitly, particularly by reading and circulating selected
WeChat articles. Various articles reflected empathy with rural women’s thinking
and touched on their lived realities. Min Wang offered the following:
Because many times those articles are written, I think, sometimes suited to my state
of mind very much! I really feel that my thoughts at that moment, what I wanted to
say was, “it quite makes sense. It is indeed like this.” I very much agree with what it
says. Sometimes it is indeed like that. When you are upset, it says in a way that can
get to the bottom of your heart. It speaks out all that you want to say.
The 70 articles were about women’s real-life situations and roles in their marriages,
in their families, and at work. For example, “Women’s story, just published yesterday
… men cannot stand after reading it!!!” was shared by Fang Liu, who wrote
about the hardship of being a woman by depicting every aspect of a female’s
expected social function: “Women are living a quite hard life: heart belongs to
parents, body belongs to husband, time belongs to children, only wrinkles belong to
themselves.” This article reminded rural women of their positions as daughters,
wives, and mothers, communicating the challenges faced by all Chinese women. In
its conclusion, the article appealed to women to love themselves.
Emotional expressions were also prominent in articles about gender relations,
especially spousal relationships. The article entitled “Nobody lives very easily”
included stories about normal married life and women’s difficulties in maintaining
good relationships with their husbands. Min Wang posted, “these are the microcosm
of reality, but they reflect much helplessness in life … ” Regarding a post
that described how sad a woman feels when her husband offers no consolation
when she needs it, Min Wang commented, “It quite makes sense. I agree
very much.”
These articles disclosed Chinese women’s fragile affections and real-life situations,
empathizing with women’s frustrations and the associated social responsibilities
as wives, mothers, and daughters. The articles that appealed to men to love
and care for their women expressed rural women’s similar aspirations. Because
they live in a patriarchal society, Chinese women are always demeaned and
restrained by traditional gender norms (Leung, 2003), and their emotions are
devalued. In hierarchical familial relationships, it is the unspoken norm that
women hide negative emotions about their marriages and families from the public
because they are regarded as family secrets (Pik-chu, 2012), which, if disclosed,
could damage “face” and bring shame to the family (H. Wang, 2011). Reading
and sharing the WeChat articles opened up a collective channel that was an outlet
for the expression of the rural women’s feelings about their social roles, which
they routinely suppressed.
Some articles empathized with rural women, advocating modern values, such
as autonomy and independence in a straightforward manner. The article “Things
that women should insist” listed nine things that women should do for themselves.
Except the traditional proverb, “be elegant in the drawing room and skillful in the
kitchen” (shang de chufang, xia de tingtang)7
, the tips motivated the women to
embrace modern attitudes, such as independence from their husbands and personal
pursuits of beauty and health. These contemporary values were a striking
Chinese Journal of Communication 333
contrast to the realities faced by rural Chinese women, because they depicted perspectives
that were vastly different from traditional women’s roles of being a good
housewife, always thinking about the family but neglecting themselves, and
restraining their behavior in accordance with customary social values. These guidelines
represented what was on the rural women’s minds: the desire for more autonomy
in marital relationships and self-development. By sharing these thoughts on
WeChat, the rural women gained emotional sustenance, especially in light of the
different realities they were confronted with in their offline lives.
Engaging with the WeChat articles led to some changes in the rural women’s
daily lives, but their interpretations of them also highlighted some of the structural
conditions that have long been established in Chinese society. The Chinese
Confucian cultural tradition includes prescriptions for the gender roles and social
responsibilities of Chinese women, which emphasize being a filial daughter, a virtuous
wife, and a good mother (Leung, 2003). The concept of “good housewife”
(Wallis, 2015; Zhang, 2014) epitomizes these characteristics, and it has a much
stronger hold in Chinese rural areas than in Chinese cities. Despite some transformative
social media experiences and knowledge acquisition, these rural women
sought to fulfill their “good housewife” duties inside the family while cultivating
themselves to be socially competent outside it. These prescribed socio-cultural
norms were not challenged by the spread of modern values on WeChat, but were
incorporated through it, which corresponded with Wallis’s (2015) finding that
Chinese rural women’s uses of new media technologies did not break but reproduced
gender hierarchies. Although an emerging group of rural Chinese women
celebrate their acquisition of information, knowledge, civilization, and improvement,
those who are unaware of or underprivileged in accessing new forms of
information technology remain disadvantaged.
Discussion and conclusion
The women in this study appeared to be enlightened and empowered through the
WeChat platform, demonstrating an emancipated sense of self in their everyday
online interactions. They experienced more than a simple connection with a broad
social network, and they explored innovative ways of achieving economic benefits.
Their use of WeChat opened opportunities for learning and self-advancement,
including coping strategies for expressing suppressed emotions, which were
unavailable to them before their implementation of social media. The circulation
of articles that were imbued with both traditional values and modern principles
conveyed ideas about the modern Chinese female to the rural Chinese women who
participated in this study. By reproducing the ideology embedded in traditional
Chinese female roles and delineating an idealized picture of independence and freedom,
these articles were resonant with rural Chinese women’s disadvantaged realities,
emotions, and cultural values, reinforcing their ideas that being a good
woman meant both adhering to Chinese cultural rituals and cultivating modern
values by being self-enterprising, independent, and knowledgeable. This duality
corresponds to the Chinese government’s policy for women’s development and
rural modernization. In 2013, shortly after Jinping Xi was inaugurated as the
Chinese president, the initiative for women’s development was launched by the
cadre of the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF). In addition to promoting
334 Yini Wang and Judith Sandner
equal rights for Chinese women, Xi underscored the responsibility of women to
carry forward Chinese family traditions and family virtues, facilitating the continuance
of civilized and harmonious social morals in the great national rejuvenation,
such as respecting the elderly, loving the young, bearing hardship, withstanding
hard work, and improving the self constantly (’ People’s Daily, 2013). Flourishing
Chinese traditional culture, especially Confucianism, has been leveraged strategically
by Xi to realize the great revival of the Chinese nation, increase social cohesion,
and consolidate the legitimation of the Communist Party’s leadership (Perry,
2017). The project of female emancipation therefore has been imprinted with cultural
symbols and core socialist values, highlighting the significance of social morality
and self-autonomy. ACWF, which is the official organization that represents
all Chinese women’s rights and interests, ensures that these top-down concepts are
passed to the common Chinese females. An example is the recent implementation
of the Women’s Action of Rural Revitalization strategy.8
The official accounts of the use of WeChat examined in this research speak to
the cultural development of rural Chinese women’s online practices. However, the
content is subject to the political guidelines of the Chinese governments’ citizenship
program because the circulation of information on WeChat is formal and
structured (Stockmann & Luo, 2017), and it is regulated by policies that conform
to socialist values and social morality.9
Hence, WeChat also serves as a tool for
cultural governance, and it facilitates the construction of “ideal” modern female
citizens. Because WeChat shares its advertising avenue with the owners of official
accounts through “Social Ads” (Xiang, 2014), increased readership means
increased profits. WeChat articles are therefore created by official accounts with
“catchy” words, sensational titles, affective images, and appealing music to attract
rural women’s attention to opportunites for commercial development and self-promotion.
By enabling these technological, economic, political, and cultural capabilities,
WeChat’s platform has become embedded in individuals’ everyday lives,
governing their economic and cultural practices while ensuring the retention of
user agency. These findings echo’ Wallis’ (2018) study on female domestic workers
in Beijing, which found that through sharing social media postings about indirect
virtual care work, self-care, and words of wisdom, Chinese women gained in positivity
and self-realization. Their expression through social media engagement signaled
not only their empowerment but also their participation in therapeutic
governing (Zhang, 2017). Based on the findings of this study, it could be argued
that rural Chinese women may be considered both beneficiaries of and vulnerable
to the platformization of Chinese society.
Notes
1. This study was approved by the University of Newcastle’s Human Research Ethics
Committee protocol H-2014-0348. Written informed consent was obtained and
anonymity was addressed through the use of pseudonyms.
2. Hukou is a unique system of managing China’s population. It represents an
individual’s civil identity. Implemented by the Chinese government in 1955, this
household registration system divided Chinese hukou into “agricultural” hukou and
“non-agricultural” hukou to differentiate between rural and urban residents. In July
2014, the Chinese central government proposed abolishing the dual hukou system and
merging the rural and urban hukou into a univocal “resident hukou.” By 2015, when
this study’s fieldwork was conducted, this reform had not been implemented by many
Chinese Journal of Communication 335
local governments, except in Henan, which implemented the new policy in November
2014. In 2016, other local governments started to regulate the policy gradually.
3. The ethnographer observed the subjective knowledge and experiences of rural women
through their social media use, which were first-degree constructs in the’ Schutzian
(1962) sense. The analysis yielded the researcher’s second-degree constructs, which
were crystalized in the forms of themes, patterns, and theoretical conceptualization.
4. Launched by Tencent in 1999, QQ is a social networking platform similar to WeChat.
5. A report by the CAICT (2016a) showed that by 2015, over 10 million official accounts
had been established, which remained one of the main sources of information for
WeChat subscribers.
6. The fieldwork captured more links (798) to subscribed content than the number of
original posts (23.4%) created by the rural women on their Moments accounts. These
links were coded into 20 themes with some overlap among them. For example, links
coded in the category “nourishing of life” could also be coded in the category “fake
information.”
7. This Chinese proverb gender stereotypes a perfect Chinese woman, that is, being a
good housewife in the family and being sophisticated in social experience outside the
family’(Xiao, 2006).
8. In February 2018, the ACWF issued the Guidance on Promoting Women’s
Contributions to Achieving Rural Revitalization. In March 2018, the vice-president of
the ACWF introduced the Women’s Action of Rural Revitalization strategy.
9. WeChat’s Public Platform Service Agreement states that the owners of official
accounts are forbidden to produce and circulate content that violates “the law,
socialist system, state interest, citizens’ legal rights, public order, social morality, and
the authenticity of information.”
Notes on contributors
Yini Wang is an assistant professor at Hunan University, Changsha, China. In her current
research, she uses ethnographic methods to explore the online practices of Chinese rural
women and youth through their engagement with social media. Her expertise comprises
identity construction, social media, advertising, and quantitative and qualitative methodology.
Dr. Judith Sandner is a mid-career researcher with expertise in critical discourse studies, the
application of communication theories, and multidisciplinary research methodology training for
honors and postgraduate students in communication, design, and information technology.
Dr. Sandner’s current teaching profile includes Communication and Discourse and Digital
Communication Production Studies at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia.
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