Becoming Wanghong: How Foreigners Achieve Internet Celebrity in China

The burgeoning internet celebrity industry in China has encouraged the emergence of foreign wanghong (洋网红) as active content producers on the Chinese internet. Achieving online fame and constructing a resonant personal brand while staying within Chinese state’s permissible boundaries is a challenge for all internet influencers in China. Foreign wanghong, for their part, also have to deal with Chinese publics’ ambivalence and fluctuating perspectives on engaging foreign culture, expectations around “being foreign” and cultural nationalism fed by the currents of geopolitics. This study focuses on the performance and personas of foreign wanghong and investigates how these creators navigate the complexities of the Chinese internet to achieve substantial followings. Going beyond treating foreign participants in Chinese digital media spaces as co-opted instruments of propaganda, we take seriously foreign creators’ articulations, constructions and self-presentations of foreignness and acculturation in their efforts to earn social, cultural and economic capital in the competitive Chinese internet celebrity sphere. A mixed-method content analytical study of several hundred Douyin videos generated by 33 foreign wanghong reveals the adoption of calculated self-presentation and cross-cultural communication skills alongside a constant negotiation of an individual’s own foreignness and local constructs of the “typical foreigner”.