From online to onsite: Wanghong economy as the new engine driving China’s urban development

Considering China’s ‘isolated’ digital ecosystem, this paper examines China’s ‘check-in’ activities to understand how the wanghong economy is driving China’s new rounds of urban development, with the purpose of supplementing existing research on digital economies from the Chinese context. Focusing on a representative case study area called Dongshankou in Guangzhou, which is regarded as one of the most popular wanghong places and an emerging commercial centre, I sought to enrich existing studies about digital economies and extend scholarship on platform urbanism from the cultural economy perspective. First, I argue that Chinese consumers’ check-in activities function as the data accumulation process, structuring Dongshankou’s digital capital through the assemblage of online posts and geotags. Therefore, Dongshankou’s urban development challenges the conventional view of creativity as the key factor in the cultural economy for urban development, given that digital capital is now the key driver for urban development in the digital age. Second, the growth of wanghong stores in Dongshankou reveals how the wanghong economy is materialised into urban cultural objects. Emotional value – a crucial selling point that these wanghong stores aim to provide to facilitate consumers’ check-in activities – illustrates how China’s highly participatory digital ecosystem extracts users’ emotions and bodily experiences into the process of capital accumulation, which structures the ‘platform urbanism’ through our daily lives. This paper broadens the horizon for an alternative theoretical agenda in platform urbanism: beyond focusing solely on platform algorithms, how digital platforms and emotions become inextricably linked in economic production should be further explored.