Yiyang Xiao and Jinjin Zhang
New Media & Society, 2025
Abstract: This study examines the transnational place-making in the digital space through a case study of “TikTok Refugees” migrating to the Xiaohongshu platform. Employing a dual methodology of digital ethnography and auto-ethnography, we argue that this migration functions as performative resistance against state territorialization while evoking the tension of visibility on the destination platform. These dynamics generates a range of discourses and practices related to place representations and negotiation, shaped by linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries between self and other. We discovered algorithmic governance, depoliticized solidarity, cultural ownership, and neoliberal precarity as important themes in this digital place-making. By focusing on privileged and metaphorical refugees, their reception on the host platform, and the responses from state and corporate actors, our findings advance understanding of digital places as both contested sites of power struggle and as containers for cultural fusion.
About the author: Jinjin Zhang was a Science Technology and Society in Asia Training Program Visiting Fellow from 2025-26.