Between ‘audience lords’ and ‘rich fathers’: Triadic relational labour and contingent moral improvisation among Chinese tech creators on UGC platforms

This article examines Chinese technology creators on Douyin and Bilibili as a peripheral creator culture situated outside institutional safeguards and professional ethics. Drawing on fifteen in-depth interviews, it conceptualises their work as triadic relational labour: the continual negotiation of ties with audiences and advertisers under platform mediation, whereby creators remain structurally subordinate. Their peripherality stems from the misalignment of moral economies – between user and creator commitments to sincerity and fidelity to self, and the monetisation and marketing logics of platforms and brands – rendering ethical ambiguity and precarity endemic. To navigate these tensions, creators rely on practices of maintenance, tactical resistance, and what this article terms contingent moral improvisation: situational, revisable repertoires of disclosure, boundary-work and selective sincerity. While these improvisations stabilise ties in the short term, they individualise responsibility and reputational risk, enabling platform moral economies to consolidate advantage. The article argues that platform-based creator work is not only emotionally and economically precarious, but also ethically ambiguous, as individual creators shoulder the burden of reconciling conflicting expectations without institutional support. The study contributes to debates on digital labour, platform governance and the moral dimensions of platform-based cultural production.