Digital sisterhood: Live streaming feminism and network resilience in China

This study examines grassroots feminist livestreaming on Douyin (China's TikTok) through Chinese feminist Wang Huiling's practices and community resilience after her suspension. We conceptualise “rooted affective publics” as digital feminist engagement characterised by sustained relational ties and experientially grounded solidarity, extending Papacharissi's (2015) affective publics framework to authoritarian contexts. Drawing on digital ethnography (June 2024 to January 2025), we analyse 30 hours of livestreams and 150 clipped videos. Findings reveal how Wang cultivated feminist community through kinship language, peer-to-peer support, and consciousness-raising practices that reframed personal struggles as structural patriarchy. Her confrontational rhetoric functioned as feminist pedagogy but also attracted censorship, illustrating the paradox of feminist visibility in authoritarian platforms: the same affordances that amplify reach contribute to de-platforming. Fan-operated “clipped accounts” (切片号) preserved and recirculated Wang's content through tactical remixing and censorship evasion, sustaining operations via affiliate marketing. Following her platform deletion, these accounts became crucial for distributed content preservation, demonstrating monetisation as pragmatic survival. This evolution from individual influencer to distributed network reveals how feminist communities adapt to platform restrictions through decentralised preservation. The study contributes to understanding digital feminism under authoritarianism, demonstrating how sustained synchronous interaction can generate deeper feminist engagement despite censorship and the restrictive environment.