ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Culture and Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1661101
Digital Craftsmanship Spirit: Informal Tactics and the Negotiation of Platform Power in China
Provisionally accepted
- Institute of Art, Communication University of China, Beijing, China
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The platformization of social media has reconfigured creative labor globally, yet its dynamics unfold with distinct intensity in China's unique digital ecosystem, characterized by state-market hybrid governance and algorithmic collectivism. In this study, we draw on 19 months of embedded fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 20 content creators, to examine how young Chinese bloggers deploy informal manipulations —tactical practices that resist and repurpose platform constraints. The result reveals a dialectical dynamic wherein these grassroots tactics simultaneously sustain platformization and cultivate creative agency, functioning as critical mechanisms for mediatization. Crucially, We identify the emergence of digital spiritual artisanship — a psychosocial process through which creators reconcile labor alienation with self-actualization through culturally-inflected practices of self-cultivation and community-building. Our work advance platform labor theory by conceptualizing informal resistance as co-constitutive of platform evolution, theorizing "Digital Craftsmanship Spirit" as a culturally distinct survival strategy under algorithmic collectivism, and mapping China's unique governance model onto global digital labor debates.
Keywords: Chinese social media, platformisation, Empirical Research, content narrative, Digital Craftsmanship
Received: 07 Jul 2025; Accepted: 20 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 岳. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: 文文 岳, 2023101301z3154@mails.cuc.edu.cn
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