China's Livestreaming Local Officials: An Experiment in Popular Digital Communications

In 2020, hundreds of sub-national government officials and Chinese Communist Party cadres undertook a months-long experiment in livestreaming and social commerce. These sectors are among the most dynamic in the Chinese internet economy and culture, yet Chinese officials have generally resisted engaging with popular and celebrity cultures, even as institutions have begun to expand and modernize their digital operations. Why, then, did a substantial cohort of local officials undertake this experiment? The proximate reason was that they wanted to help local producers hit by the pandemic and to meet their own pending poverty alleviation targets. However, the significance of the case is broader, reflecting the central state and Party's revised thinking on political communications in an era of internet celebrity and self-media and the propensity for local officials to innovate and experiment in the field of digital and popular communication. Investigating empirically how and how effectively livestreaming was employed at the local level helps us to illuminate these dynamics. To facilitate the study, we investigated how officials understood and performed internet celebrity through in-person semi-structured interviews and a three-month virtual ethnographic study.