Drawing upon “algorithmic ethnography” (Christin, 2020), this article enrolls algorithms to gather qualitative data to examine how Chinese social media platforms and their algorithms intersect with gay visibility. By looking critically into the ways that gay romance and HIV-related content are generated on Douyin and Zhihu, respectively, we argue that algorithmic gay visibility serves as a form of cruel optimism, which becomes a profitable convenience for corporate social media platforms and operates in an exclusionary matrix. The content that ordinary Chinese gay men are presented with (for example, the able-bodied, romanticized normative gay relationship and overly optimistic self-help advice for gay men living with HIV) is economically viable, which produces trending and monetizable items, including music tracks, viral dance routines and challenges, personas, medicine promotions, as well as commercial healthcare training and marketing. In contrast, non-conforming bodies, non-monogamous and queer relationships, as well as the depression, stigma and discrimination experienced by gay men living with HIV are algorithmically invisible.

Women have been enjoying new forms of visibility in post-2010 Chinese entertainment television, not just onscreen, but also in paratextual discourses about women as content producers. By focusing on the promotional and reception materials about a female director/producer, Yu Lei, and her authorship in National Treasure (NT), a current Chinese variety show, this article analyzes how extratextual material operates in relation to female authorship in Chinese television. By examining how gender politics are incorporated in the construction of female authorship, we identify the problematic aspects of how Yu Lei’s authorship is framed, which serve to promote neoliberal postfeminist ideas of women’s empowerment and are bound up with current iterations of official neonationalist ideology. While acknowledging its limitations, we argue that Yu Lei’s position as a woman in a male-dominated industry who has substantial visibility in media and enjoys some authority over a TV production still constitutes noteworthy if only partial agency.

This article examines consumer video activism tactics in China and their impact on Chinese consumers and society. Drawing upon 56 semistructured interviews and a case study analysis of Chinese online consumer protest in 2018, we argue that short-video-activism tactics have become an innovative repertoire of contention for Chinese consumers and Douyin, the “sister app” of TikTok, has become a real-time updated database of this repertoire. Using Douyin as a case study, we argue that it plays three key roles in mediating Chinese consumer activism: a techno-cultural construct that affords highly heterogeneous users to present everyday experiences via short videos; a multisided market that profoundly affects the tactics consumers choose to amplify their voices; and a governing entity that both moderates content for its users and simultaneously is subject to government regulations.

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