Everyday negotiation and affective displacement in China’s wanghong gentrification

In contemporary China, the entanglement of social media and urban space has generated new urban-digital spectacles associated with wanghong (internet-famous) urbanism. Research has shown how viral visibility reshapes consumption, spatial aesthetics, and, in some cases, gentrification. Much less is known, however, about what follows when virality becomes embedded in ordinary urban life, or why comparable forms of online attention produce different local consequences. Addressing these gaps, this article compares three wanghong destinations in China, drawing on semi-structured interviews, field observations, and documentary materials. It examines how residents experience, interpret, and negotiate wanghong-driven transformation, and why its gentrifying patterns vary across urban settings. Our findings reveal that viral attention generates diverse affective experiences and repertoires of negotiation across three trajectories: boom-triggered gentrification, wanghong-intensified gentrification, and limited gentrifying pressures. Viral visibility, the study shows, acquires gentrifying force through its conjunction with particular socio-spatial fabrics, property relations, governance strategies, and broader market dynamics. These configurations further condition how deeply residents feel displaced and how their scope for everyday negotiation evolves. By bringing residents to the analytical foreground, the article recasts wanghong urbanism as an uneven lived process and illuminates the situated possibilities and limits of agency within China’s authoritarian context.