On social media and platforms, value is extracted from how users scroll, click, post, like and share. Time, data, visibility and affect become key outputs, even when these activities are framed as leisure rather than work, and they constitute a new form of labour. Yet once the focus pivots to China's digital aesthetics, even this broadened notion of labour proves insufficient. In China's digital economy, labour is not only a matter of generating content, data or engagement; on social media, it is coded by nationalist aesthetic and emotional scripts.
Patriotic discourse, images and digital artworks do not simply monetise user activity, they stage particular ways of seeing and feeling the nation, fixing who counts as a legitimate member of the national collective and who is cast as its adversary. In this sense, digital nationalist aesthetics operates as a regime of sensibility that organises how nationalism becomes visible and affectively compelling on screen. To grasp labour in this context, the analysis must therefore begin from aesthetics, from the digital nationalist images that organise how the nation can be seen and felt, before turning to the platforms and practices through which this sensibility is enacted as labour.
Aesthetics is not a theory of beauty but a distribution of the sensible (Rancière, 2004): a partition of what can be seen, heard and said, and of who is recognised as a speaking, perceiving subject. On this view, China's patriotic digital aesthetics can be understood as a contemporary configuration of the sensible, a regime that decides which bodies may appear as part of the political community and in which roles and with which voices. Rather than merely decorating pre-given ideas, images participate in what Rancière calls a police order, an apparently natural mapping of places and capacities that allocates loyalty and culpability, distinguishing protectors from those to be protected and rendering others grotesque, dangerous or expendable. In doing so, they also pre-empt dissent by defining in advance which voices and affects can count as legitimate.
In Wuheqilin's widely circulated social media works, for instance, the nation is repeatedly staged as an already unified, righteous body, while external figures are fixed as terrifying or hypocritical. Moreover, Sara Ahmed's account of the cultural politics of emotion helps to clarify how this visual ordering becomes affectively compelling. For Ahmed, emotions are not simply inner states but social practices that circulate between bodies and signs, binding some together and pushing others apart (Ahmed, 2014). Nationalist images do not only sort bodies into positions; they organise what she calls an affective economy in which love, pride, outrage, fear and disgust repeatedly stick to particular figures, ranging from the flag, the soldier to the foreign intruder, and not to others. Through this circulation and attachment of feelings, patriotic digital aesthetics is consolidated as a regime of sensibility, making certain ways of seeing and feeling the nation available and attractive, while rendering alternative attachments and affects difficult to inhabit or even to imagine.
This configuration becomes particularly visible in the patriotic digital grotesque of Wuheqilin, whose images circulate across Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat. A Chinese political illustrator repeatedly amplified by state media accounts, Wuheqilin produces hyper-saturated digital paintings where the Chinese nation appears as an innocent yet righteous collective, while foreign soldiers, politicians and protesters are rendered monstrous, deceitful or morally corrupt.
In Returning Vessel (Fig. 1), produced to celebrate Meng Wanzhou's return to China, a colossal deep-sea creature painted in the colours of the US flag erupts from a whirlpool beneath a glowing dollar-sign lure, while a helicopter marked 'China Rescue' hoists a woman in yellow to safety. In Virgin Mary is Going to Steal the Baby (Fig. 2), made in response to Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan, a muscular man stands between a sleeping infant and a hooded intruder at the bedroom window, whose halo of stars evokes a blasphemous Virgin Mary. When these images are placed in juxtaposition, they enact what Rancière calls a distribution of the sensible: China is cast as a benevolent rescuer and protective father, while Western actors appear as predatory or duplicitous aggressors; similar oppositions structure many of Wuheqilin's digital political cartoons (Shen et al., 2023).
Read through Moreno-Almeida's notion of the digital grotesque, the hybrid fish-beast and the obscene intimacy of the attempted abduction overload the visible with excess in order to make disgust, fear and righteous anger feel self-evident (Moreno-Almeida, 2024). Ahmed's account of affective economies helps to clarify how these scenes attach pride, relief and tenderness to national symbols and domestic interiors, while directing disgust and hostility towards foreign figures. As such images are liked, reposted and captioned on Chinese social media, this tightly scripted way of seeing and feeling the nation is reiterated and solidified as a reusable template that fits neatly with platform incentives for visibility and engagement.
On Chinese social media platforms, nationalist aesthetics is folded into recommendation feeds, trending lists and search rankings, which together define what can be seen, repeated and forgotten. As Manovich argues for Instagram, feeds teach users to internalise platform-specific visual norms in pursuit of visibility (Manovich, 2017); in the patriotic context, similar norms govern what counts as a 'good' image of the nation. The value of a post is less tied to the individual creativity of its author than to how smoothly it can be taken up within these metrics of attention and engagement. Research on online labour shows how such metrics operate as a form of algorithmic control. Studies of crowdwork platforms suggest that workers experience reduced autonomy and heightened pressure to remain constantly available when opaque algorithms decide ranking and rewards (Van Zoonen et al., 2025).
A parallel dynamic shapes patriotic participation: users quickly learn that posts which offer clear enemies, righteous outrage and gratitude towards the state travel further than hesitant or ambivalent expressions. Ratings, tiers and response-time indicators on platform-mediated services quantify workers' capacity to perform friendliness and emotional support (He & Agur, 2025); on Weibo and related services, likes, reposts, hashtag activity and dwell time similarly quantify the intensity and alignment of patriotic affects. As in quantified workplaces, where tracking helps to constitute which forms of affective endurance are valued (Moore, 2018), these metrics render particular styles of nationalist feeling legible and desirable. Seemingly neutral platform data, then, actively manage and shape patriotic emotions, deciding which anger, gratitude and enemy images count as 'correct' and worthwhile feelings.
This affective ordering is reinforced by political communication strategies that enrol users as collaborators. Analyses of 'participatory persuasion' show how state and party actors cultivate patriotic influencers and invite netizens to assist in thought work by creating, circulating and policing approved content (Repnikova & Fang, 2018). At the same time, tightly interconnected alt-right style communities on Weibo propagate exclusionary narratives of cultural crisis and supply a repertoire of xenophobic and misogynistic tropes that resonate with mainstream patriotic feeds (Yang & Fang, 2023). Under these conditions, creative, circulatory and emotional efforts around nationalist images are real forms of labour, but their value is increasingly captured at the level of platform governance and nationalist attachment rather than at the level of individual authorship.
Creative work is sacralised as patriotic virtue rather than recognised as exploitation: designers, illustrators and platform professionals in China's internet industries already endure long hours and weak protection, even as their jobs are coded as middle-class 'creative employment' (Xia, 2014). Once attached to nationalist projects, this overuse of time and expertise is veiled by the heroic aura of defending the nation, turning the image-maker into a model patriot rather than a worker whose skills are extracted as cheap, flexible resources for platforms and state-linked actors. A similar logic governs the affective labour of users. Emotional labour theory notes how 'bad feelings' such as exhaustion or anger at injustice are individualised and pathologised, even though they possess critical force (Veldstra, 2020).
In digital nationalism, legitimate feeling is tightly scripted: pride, gratitude and righteous anger at external enemies are amplified, while doubt or fatigue about constant mobilization is displaced into the private sphere. Opinion warfare around works such as Wuheqilin's Peace Force (Fig. 3), taken up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a diplomatic clash with Australia, relies on unpaid waves of reposting, sloganising and comment-thread defence (Yin, 2021). Accounts that tirelessly attack foreign and domestic 'traitors' are celebrated as spontaneous patriotism, yet their work lies in performing and policing the 'correct' emotions on demand. Under these conditions, visibility becomes a moral currency. Metrics that reward aligned patriotic content turn participation into a kind of moral tax: to be seen as a good citizen, one must repeatedly contribute affect, time and creativity in forms that match platformed nationalist scripts.
Although digital media can in principle foster more reflexive labour subjectivities among young people by supporting awareness of rights and exploitation (Qiu et al., 2022), within patriotic feeds this potential is often channelled into opinion warfare rather than collective critique. Digital labour is not simply an external expenditure of effort; it is a process of subjectivation in which users' expressive capacities are drained, formatted and rewritten as moral posture, so that exploitation takes the form of internalised obligation rather than visible coercion.