Renren Yang

This project examines how digital platforms are reshaping both the concept and practice of literary authorship as they mobilize, scandalize, and capitalize on grassroots writers and their amateur creativity. It also explores how these grassroots writers, in turn, negotiate visibility, legitimacy, and livelihood within these platform architectures and economies. By situating the precarity of literary authorship at the intersection of technological affordances, economic imperatives, and political governance, the project sheds new light on digital corporate culture, grassroots creative labor, and the discourse of the “Chinese Dream” in post-socialist China.