Open any social media app in North America or Europe, and the word “influencer” needs no explanation. We know the routine: build a following, land sponsorships, sell a personal brand. Many of the most visible of these creators also stand for something, promoting ideas about diversity, body positivity, or social justice. That model feels almost natural, as if it is simply how social media works everywhere.
A study in the Journal of Business Research asks whether that assumption holds up once you leave the systems built in California. By studying male beauty creators in China, the researchers offer evidence that “the influencer” is a product of a specific history, not a universal template, and that content creation can operate on different ideas and ideals altogether.
The question behind the research
Shuyu Yang of the University of Leeds and Jack Waverley of the University of Manchester set out to test how far the familiar influencer model actually travels. Their focus was on Male Beauty Influencers, or MBIs, in China. These creators do not call themselves influencers. In Chinese, the term used is Wǎng Hóng, which roughly translates as “Internet Red” or “Internet Fame.” The word overlaps with “influencer,” but it can also apply to a city, a dish, or a makeup routine, which the authors treat as a clue that the underlying concept may be different too.
What made China a useful place to look is a puzzle the authors describe. In much of the Global North, beauty creators who challenge gender norms tend to frame their work around explicit values like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, often shortened to DEI. Chinese male beauty creators, by contrast, rarely use that vocabulary, and there is no obvious backlash movement against them either. Yet they attract millions of followers and lucrative sponsorship deals. Simply by being men who publicly share beauty practices, the authors argue, they widen ideas about masculinity without ever labeling what they do as “diversity.”
To make sense of this, the researchers treat influencing as an “ideology,” which they define as a cluster of powerful ideas and ideals. They draw a distinction between the many competing beliefs individual influencers promote and a single, shared, background belief that all influencers buy into simply by using these platforms: that attention is valuable, that content should flow like a conveyor belt, and that everything runs through platform owners. Their goal was to see whether Wǎng Hóng sits inside that shared belief system or points to something outside it.
How the study was done
The authors used a method called netnography, which adapts ethnographic research for online communities. Instead of living among a group in person, the researcher immerses himself in an online culture over time, keeping notes, observing, and interviewing participants. Yang, whose personal interest in these creators sparked the project, carried out the immersive work; Waverley, who was not immersed in the culture, acted as a kind of outside questioner, prompting alternative interpretations. It was one of Waverley’s casual questions about how to translate “influencer” into Chinese that helped steer the analysis.
The fieldwork ran from December 2019 to October 2025 and pulled together several types of data. Yang kept an 84-page immersion journal. The team closely followed 15 focal male beauty influencers with audiences ranging from tens of thousands to more than eleven million followers, gathering their posts, comments, podcast interviews, and news coverage. The researchers also conducted 20 in-depth interviews, split between 10 lesser-known beauty influencers and 10 followers, producing 440 pages of transcripts. Because Chinese platforms are heavily monitored, the team mostly observed quietly rather than commenting, out of concern about drawing unwanted attention to the people they studied.
Three ideas that shape the culture
From this material, the authors identified three recurring ideas that organize how these creators present themselves. They label them Zhēn, Shàn, and Měi, and note a family resemblance to the DEI trio of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, while stressing that the fit is loose.
Zhēn refers to authenticity, honesty, and truth-telling. In practice, it shows up as creators sharing raw and “imperfect” content, admitting to self-doubt, hair loss, financial pressure, or the physical pain of cosmetic procedures. One creator described shaving his head after years of distress over hair loss, framing the act as liberating. The authors argue that Zhēn quietly introduces more varied ideas of beauty without naming “diversity” as a cause. But they read it as closer to a marketplace of individual choices than to the structural, group-based framing of diversity in the Global North. Notably, they found no anti-Zhēn backlash of the kind that surrounds DEI debates elsewhere.
Shàn means kindness and moral goodness. The researchers describe creators expressing care, offering hope, and building solidarity with marginalized groups, but rarely by naming a villain or calling for fairer treatment in the way an equity campaign might. Instead, kindness tends to be set against a vague opponent, something like “the world’s ugliness,” rather than a specific person or institution. The authors observe that this is where Wǎng Hóng seems to diverge more sharply from the Silicon Valley model, which they argue often thrives on antagonism and outrage. They also note the concept is slippery: some creators used coded, in-group language, which can quietly exclude outsiders even while preaching kindness to everyone.
Měi refers to beauty, including beauty found in non-normative bodies, in unconventional or “scary” makeup looks, and even in animals and nature. The authors compare it to the idea of inclusion, but again draw a distinction. Including more kinds of beauty is not the same, they argue, as reworking markets or institutions so that excluded people are integrated more fairly. In their data, followers were inspired to play with their own sense of beauty, not to campaign for the beauty industry to change.
Playing with the rules versus rewriting them
A concept the authors lean on throughout is the “ideological antechamber,” borrowed from earlier work. An antechamber is a room next to another room: nearby and connected, but not fully inside or outside. They use it to describe ideas that gesture toward change without clearly achieving it. Zhēn, Shàn, and Měi, they suggest, work this way. Each is a placeholder that can be filled with different meanings, letting creators make claims about being authentic, kind, or beautiful without ever having to prove or resolve them.
This leads to the study’s central interpretation. The authors distinguish between playing with ideas within a system’s rules and battling to change those rules. They argue that Chinese male beauty influencers mostly play. They experiment with masculinity, vulnerability, and beauty, sometimes for profit and sometimes for others, but they rarely challenge the platforms themselves or the wider social and economic structures around them. One creator is quoted describing how the platform deliberately keeps creators anxious so they keep posting, an observation offered without any call to resist it.
The researchers are careful not to overstate the contrast. They describe Wǎng Hóng and Global North influencers as relatives, “first, second, or third cousins, depending on the context,” rather than strangers. Their argument is that the influencer model is a set of choices that could have developed differently, and that studying China offers a vantage point from which to see this.
The authors present this as a case study grounded in one country and one type of creator, not a general rule about Chinese social media or about male beauty creators everywhere. Their interpretations of Zhēn, Shàn, and Měi are drawn from close reading rather than measurement, and they treat the ambiguity of these ideas as part of what they do rather than a gap to be closed. For an audience used to thinking of influencing as inseparable from either commerce or activism, the study suggests a third possibility: creators who reshape norms quietly, by living them, while leaving the machinery underneath untouched.
