The Code of WeChat: Chinese Students’ Cell Phone Social Media Practices

Social behavior in public places is changing in China’s urban areas, and such change is motivated in part by the increasing use of cell phones. Such devices impact and change ways that people walk, talk, communicate, and interact with others on a daily basis in multiple ways. In this chapter we focus our attention on one aspect of these changes, the rules, or communicative codes, that university students in China have developed when using WeChat (known as Weixin 微信 in Chinese), one of the most popular social media platforms in China. Launched in 2011 by the Tencent Company, WeChat has quickly grown in popularity (Hou 2014); by the middle of 2014 it had more than 400 million active users (Hong 2014). While the application is similar to Facebook, as users may exchange instant messages, and post and comment on pictures, it differs in a number of ways. Our interest in studying WeChat is not only in describing how people use the application, but also discussing an emergent set of rules, or social codes that users have developed for appropriate ways to communicate.