Representing settlers: Fan Yang, Jessie Liu, Yijia Zhang, ‘Chinese Diaspora-Settler Gazes on Rednote: How Platforms Reinforce Colonial, Relational-feminist, and Middle-class Representations’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Representing settlers: Fan Yang, Jessie Liu, Yijia Zhang, ‘Chinese Diaspora-Settler Gazes on Rednote: How Platforms Reinforce Colonial, Relational-feminist, and Middle-class Representations’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2026

20Aug26

Abstract: This paper studies how contemporary Chinese diasporic settlers represent their experiences of Australia on Rednote (Xiaohongshu), a visually oriented social media platform with a predominantly young, female user base. Analysis of 248 Rednote posts by Chinese migrants in Australia reveals recurring portrayals of Australia as an empty land of leisure, a site of Chinese female liberation, and a space of upward mobility, framed through colonial imaginaries, relational feminism, and middle-class privilege. These representations, which echo settler colonial narratives of Australia, raise critical questions about how colonial representations are reproduced on contemporary platform cultures, and how migrants are situated within Australia’s settler colonial structures and visual regimes. Bringing Australian studies, settler colonial studies, and platform studies into dialogue, we argue that Rednote’s ostensibly apolitical, consumerist orientation, with its algorithmic privileging of monetizable, middle-class, feminine lifestyle content, works as a key vector for normalising and reinforcing colonial visual imaginaries of Australia, feminism, and middle-classness among Chinese diasporic settlers, while obscuring the material and historical realities of Australia.

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