Curating Social Capital through Online Media under the Age of Credentialism: A Study of Chinese Rural Women on Online Social Media

Rural women in China have long been an invisible group since the years following the 1949 Liberation. Through pivotal eras from the Maoist period to the Contemporary Age, their social position transforms from the honorary labor model, docile housewives, floating hostesses, to factory Dagongmei (Ngai 1999; Hershatter 2007). They continuously negotiate and survive with the challenging identities received under the dynamic national structure change(Ngai 1999; Hershatter 2007). During previous decades, rural women’s social position was hardly known from their self-initiated voice. In the contemporary digital age, rural women start to present themselves on social media platforms with self-voice (Cao 2025). A new virtual space that allows people to articulate and curate their identity opens a space for the platform users to collectively re-shift and reconsider the identity constructs from particular social groups. Rednote, a digital platform with feminist voices rising and prevailing during recent years, has started to become a platform with women’s voices from diverse groups (Geng et al. 2024). However, the virtual space is juxtaposed with a credential-driven regime of cultural capital, which typically emphasizes credentials and elite women figures on the platform(S. Chen and Jiang 2025). With the entrenched stigmatization and overlooked structural inequality, tactic curation is required to shift rural women’s stereotyped social positions from the gaze of the platform users outside the rural areas. By bringing an analytical angle situated within Rednote virtual space, this research project interprets three videos made by rural drop-out women.