Mystery box fever and symbolic value in contemporary Chinese consumer society

Mystery boxes are probabilistic consumer products with no practical utility, but have become a multi-billion-dollar phenomenon in China. Existing scholarship largely treats them through psychological and behavioural lenses without interrogating their significance within the changing nature of symbolic value in contemporary Chinese consumer capitalism. This study addresses that gap by drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s sign value in dialogue with Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism, Walter Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, Douglas Kellner’s critique, and Russell W. Belk’s extended self. Employing triangulated methods, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling of 1813 Xiaohongshu user comments and semi-structured interviews with 10 collectors, the analysis identifies three interlocking dimensions: structural mechanics of dissatisfaction, difference, and set completion; co-production of consumer identity through community and platform; and ritual reinvestment of meaning in post-auratic commodities. Findings reveal that consumers are neither passive sign-absorbers nor autonomous meaning-makers but occupy a condition of frustrated lucidity, exercising creativity and critical awareness within structures they cannot escape. Mystery box consumption represents an intensification of sign hegemony through platform-mediated social commerce, gamblification, and Chinese cultural logics, while consumers partly resist through culturally grounded symbolic sacralisation and singularisation.