Transnational Bloggers in China: Geographical Imagination, Territorial Subjectivity and Digital Geopolitics

In recent years, an increasing number of transnational bloggers have emerged on Chinese social media platforms, creating a distinctive media landscape of ‘foreign wanghong’. However, the journey of transnational bloggers to stardom in China’s digital space is far from smooth, fraught with various contradictions and tensions, which have not been sufficiently explored in existing studies. By analysing videos posted by transnational bloggers on the Bilibili platform, this study reveals that these bloggers who possess multi-layered territorial subjectivities, along with their audiences of multi-scalar territorial subjectivities, construct digital geopolitics through the expression of global, regional, and bodily geographical imagination. In this process, scale functions as a discursive resource that is collaboratively produced to construct and reinforce digital geopolitics, thereby enhancing their capacity to profit within the context of platform capitalism. This paper contributes to the literature on digital geopolitics by theorising how geopolitical friction is constructed in digital spaces, highlighting their entanglement with the broader context of platform capitalism.