China’s Pathway to Digital Wanghong : A Diachronic Framing Analysis of the Chinese News Media, 2015–2024

Since 2015, the wanghong (microcelebrity) phenomenon has rapidly evolved into a defining feature of contemporary Chinese digital culture, sitting at the intersection of commercialisation, grassroots expression, and state power. Despite its cultural prominence, however, the mainstream Chinese media’s discursive construction of wanghong remains understudied. This study addresses this gap by employing a media-framing approach to analyse the evolution of wanghong discourses in Chinese newspapers from 2015 to 2024. Drawing on more than 1,000 news articles sourced from 10 state and provincial newspapers via the CNKI database, the study traces a decade-long transformation in the media’s representation of wanghong. Rather than being stigmatised as morally suspect figures, they have been repositioned and actively recruited as instruments of governance, nationalism, and consumer culture. Crucially, the term itself has grown semantically fluid, functioning as an adjectival marker applied to commodified objects, curated spaces, and aestheticised experiences, signalling the deep normalisation of wanghong culture in mainstream Chinese society. These findings illuminate how the Chinese state, market forces, and patriarchal norms have jointly shaped the ideological terrain of digital celebrity, offering new insights into the dynamics of cultural governance in an increasingly platformised media environment.