Inside China's New Creator Class and What They're Building
The influencer economy in China is maturing into something more sophisticated — and more powerful — than anyone in the West has fully understood.
The word “influencer” does not translate well into Mandarin. The closest equivalent — wanghong, literally “internet celebrity” — carries connotations that are simultaneously more and less than the English term. More, because the scale of what Chinese content creators can achieve dwarfs almost anything in Western markets. Less, because the most sophisticated practitioners increasingly resist the label as too shallow, too commercial.
The new creator class in China is building media businesses, cultural brands, and intellectual properties that operate at a scale and sophistication that has no real Western equivalent.
The Scale Problem
Any discussion of Chinese content creation runs immediately into a scale problem. Li Jiaqi, the “lipstick king” whose livestream sales sessions have generated billions in single-day revenue, is a frequently cited example — but he is the extreme end of a distribution that includes hundreds of thousands of creators with audiences that would be considered enormous by any Western metric.
Douyin has over 700 million daily active users. Bilibili has 340 million monthly active users with an average age of 25. These are not niche platforms. They are the primary cultural infrastructure of the largest consumer market on earth.
Beyond the Livestream
Gu Ling runs a channel on Bilibili dedicated to “slow knowledge” — long-form documentary content about Chinese history, archaeology, and material culture. Her videos average forty-five minutes and regularly exceed ten million views.
Zhang Wei is a former financial journalist who left his newspaper job to build a personal media brand. His WeChat subscription account has 2.3 million subscribers who pay a monthly fee for his analysis. He employs six researchers.
The Pu Collective is a group of eight visual artists who built a shared creative studio that operates simultaneously as an art practice, a design consultancy, and a content brand. They are twenty-six years old on average and collectively earning more than any of their professors.
What’s Coming
The trajectory of the most ambitious creators in China suggests an evolution toward something that looks less like “influencer” and more like “media company.” The language of influencer marketing is increasingly inadequate for the complexity of what the best Chinese creators are building.
They are building the future of media in the world’s largest market. On their own terms.