Doing infrastructure: RedNote and the everyday lives of Chinese networked migrants in Australia

This article examines how the Chinese social media platform RedNote (Xiaohongshu) becomes an everyday infrastructure for Chinese networked migrants in Australia. Drawing on 22 interviews, online ethnography, and offline fieldwork, we conceptualize Chinese migrants as networked migrants and their use of RedNote as a “doing infrastructure” process that is relational and processual. We identify three dimensions of this infrastructuring process: provisioning, where migrants generate vernacular knowledge to navigate bureaucratic and everyday challenges; assembling, where RedNote supports livelihood strategies, affective expression, and community formation; and regulating, where algorithmic curation shapes visibility and taste hierarchies and reproduces classed and cultural divides. We argue that RedNote’s infrastructural status is not given but made, negotiated, and contested through networked migrant users’ active engagement and creative practices. We also argue that infrastructuring is not static or neutral; it simultaneously enables and constrains expression, introducing new tensions into everyday lives due to conflicting interests and orientations among users and transnational platforms.