From Village to Digital Spaces: Southwestern Rural Chinese Women’s Practices on Kuaishou, an Algorithm-Driven Digital Platform

Duan, Yixuan (2026) From Village to Digital Spaces: Southwestern Rural Chinese Women’s Practices on Kuaishou, an Algorithm-Driven Digital Platform. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Algorithm-driven products have increasingly impacted human lives and reshaped how people interact with the world, making this one of the most widely discussed debates in social science. The focus group in this study is from southwestern China, which is characterised by significant urban-rural economic and educational disparities and the coexistence of multi-ethnic communities. This study is situated at the intersection of gender studies and algorithmic culture. Previous studies investigating women and social media in China have focused mostly on elite-led feminist deliberations, while paying little attention to understanding the practices of marginalised rural women on algorithm-based digital media platforms. Furthermore, current studies on algorithms overwhelmingly focus on Western contexts, such as Facebook, X, Instagram, and Netflix. Even among the limited body of research on Chinese contexts, most has concentrated on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. Kuaishou dominates China’s short-video market, especially in rural areas, targeting mainly users from fourth-tier cities and remote areas, and boasting 408 million daily users as of the first quarter of 2025. Almost half of its users are women, highlighting the growing engagement of rural women in this digital landscape.

From an intersectional feminist lens, this doctoral research expands the existing theoretical framework of intersectionality by introducing platform contexts as an additional dimension for intersectional analysis, making it applicable in digital spaces. This research then centres on my participants, examining how potential intersectional oppressions manifest in both offline and online contexts. Specifically, it focuses on how gender, class, ethnicity, algorithms, and other platform contexts impact and shape the activities of Southwestern rural female content producers on Kuaishou. It also scrutinises how these producers employ strategies to navigate the digital environment. Feminist digital ethnography and semi-structured interviews were used to collect data. Notably, two research accounts in feminist digital ethnography for short video data collection were deployed at different IP locations (UK and China).

This study reveals that rural women’s self-representations are profoundly shaped by traditional norms and additional ethnic cultural customs in a patriarchal society, reflecting deep structural inequalities and social stratification. However, while traditional norms dominate rural women’s lives, alternative lifestyles also emerge, creating more complex dynamics among ethnic minority rural women, men, and urban men. Additionally, this research finds that Kuaishou’s algorithmic recommendation systems, while generating constraints against more marginalised rural women, also actively distribute specific content. In this context, these producers interact with, perceive, and understand algorithms through their ‘algorithmic imaginary’, thereby deploying tactics to achieve high engagement. This research ultimately reveals strategies in these rural women’s monetising practices in China’s platform economy, such as selling algorithm-based ‘knowledge’. Monetising practices indeed provide financial benefits for certain producers. While those successful producers achieve financial empowerment, they also produce multi-layered impacts and a more complex digital environment for average rural female users.

By centring underrepresented women’s voices in China and their everyday engagements with algorithm-based digital platforms, my research applies an intersectional lens to digital space. It offers an original contribution to Chinese digital feminism and the platform economy. It also provides a non-Western perspective on critical algorithm studies and algorithmic culture through both its methodological innovation and empirical findings.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy and Area Studies
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	20 Jul 2026 09:53
Last Modified:	20 Jul 2026 09:53
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/103921
DOI:

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