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AbstractThis study examines the platform governance of Kuaishou, a popular short‐video and live‐streaming platform that attracts many youngsters from rural areas in China. The platform's economy encourages these migrant youth to participate as content producers, offering them hope for upward mobility. Nevertheless, their cultural practices have frequently faced criticism for being vulgar and low‐brow. This article focuses on the evolving forms of platform governance, exploring how the state and the platform collaborate to devise new strategies for regulating users' cultural practices and how migrant youth creatively respond to increasing censorship measures. Drawing on over 4 years of field observation spanning from July 2017 to February 2022, this study investigates the dynamic process of the state's alliance with the platform. This alliance encompasses a range of approaches, from direct control to co‐optation and cooperation, as both the platform and its users actively engage with the state's political agenda to avoid punitive measures. The research suggests that migrant youth's platform practices cannot be simply characterized as a subculture subordinate to state‐approved narratives. Instead, they represent a complex negotiation involving the platform, the state, and subaltern subjects.

This article explores the platformisation of a popular short-video platform Kuaishou and its impact on Chinese migrant youth. Based on 4 years of field observations, this study examines how Kuaishou's platformisation process has paradoxically empowered and constrained the agency of migrant youth through the construction of 'hope labour'. This hope labour seeks to benefit from Kuaishou's attention economy at the expense of growing uncertainty and precarity. In particular, with the intervention of the state and fierce market competition, Kuaishou's operation is moving towards a Douyin model to attract more urban youth, resulting in less diversity and more uniformity. This article illustrates how the joint forces of the market and the state push the platforms towards increased homogeneity. It shows how Kuaishou configures a digital assembly line for migrant youth, reproducing the precarious hope that everyone can become his or her boss.

Citizens in China are exploring their own identities through various online practices. Different from the increased demand for social and economic rights, the opportunities to participate in social affairs and construct distinct cultural identities are the main concerns of cultural citizenship. This article explores crowdfunding as a practice of cultural citizenship by investigating the crowdfunding activities initiated by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China. Through investigating the cultural rights that are performed and their impacts on identity formation of citizens, this article reveals the emerging mode of public engagement and participatory culture. During the process of crowdfunding, a new environmental and youth identity is shaped, and a connection between online and offline worlds is forged. Furthermore, non-profit crowdfunding has facilitated popular civic participation in both virtual and physical spaces under the censorship of the Chinese government. In this process, creativity is performed by networked individuals and groups when practicing cultural citizenship.

Situated in Hong Kong's post-colonial context of political crisis, this article attempts to investigate the unfolding of cultural activism during the Umbrella Movement occurred in 2014. This 79-day occupy protest, triggered by the government's restriction on universal suffrage, has released protesters' creative potentials in performing their struggles through a variety of aesthetic forms and practices. Questioning the traditional way of conceiving protest movement in terms of violent confrontations with government or instrumentalism, this article addresses the performative role of cultural activism which has been largely ignored in the study of Hong Kong protest movement. Rather, we argue that the creative practices enacted during the Umbrella Movement constitute in themselves the message that contains its own politics and grammars. These practices have constructed the meaning of the movement through naming, and have created the collective joy and identity among participants in the formation of movement solidarity. This article suggests that cultural activism is the spirit and soul of the Umbrella Movement, which has opened up a temporary yet crucial political space for democratic struggle.