When peripheral cities go viral: Platform interception, digital participation and the reconfiguration of city branding

The rise of ‘internet-celebrity cities’ ( wanghong ) has become a new emblem of platform urbanism. Yet existing platform studies offer limited insight into this phenomenon as a product of digitally enabled city branding, an oversight that obscures the new dynamics that digital platforms introduce into entrepreneurial governance. To address this gap, this paper proposes a physical–virtual complementary framework for examining how platforms’ operations and local practices coalesce to (re)shape the image of cities. The framework is illustrated through a case study of Rongjiang , a peripheral Chinese city distinguished by its dramatic internet virality. In Rongjiang ’s digital branding endeavour, digital platforms reconfigured the composition, roles, and power dynamics of the stakeholders involved in city branding, extended the co-creation of city branding by enabling massive and unsupervised participation, and consolidated their own unbalanced control over selective online visibility. These findings highlight a paradox of digital empowerment in city branding: platforms enabled more extensive and decentralised branding participation while introducing and reinforcing a new, algorithm-dominated pattern of participation that redefined local agency in city branding. This research extends platform-urbanism scholarship beyond its predominantly economic and cultural discourses to engage with city branding as an integral part of the urban entrepreneurialism literature. The findings advance understanding of urban entrepreneurialism with particular attention to transforming local practices around plural participation in a platform-mediated urban age.