This article examines Chinese male netizens’ backlash against Ding Zhen, a young Tibetan man who suddenly gained popularity due to his exotic, handsome appearance in 2020. Through the lens of urban masculinity, this article analyses 41 posts made by Chinese male netizens on Zhihu , a popular question–answer social media platform in China. Discourses among these posts reveal that the legitimacy of the urban hegemonic masculinity is affirmed not simply by a man’s wealth and fame but by one’s entrepreneurial spirit and the honoured socialist subject position of ‘working people’ endowed by post-socialist state’s discourses. In the end, this article argues that these Chinese men exhibit a cruel, optimistic attachment to urban masculinity as active subjects rather than passive recipients of hegemonic masculinity. Their affective investments reaffirm the structural social inequalities of gender, class and ethnicity that simultaneously reproduce their struggle in contemporary urban China.
Meihua Lu (Wed,) studied this question.