Women and fitness on Weibo: the neoliberalism solution to the obligations of Confucianism

This paper uses a social semiotic approach to analyse the posts of women fitness experts/influencers on Chinese Weibo. On the posts, we find a harmonized world where all parts of life can be managed by making the right choices and by having a striving attitude. Here, success and happiness become tasks to be worked on. Yet this is a decontextualized world, where there is no room for actual situations and dispositions. We discuss how these representations can be related to rising neoliberal ideas, values, and identities among the new Chinese middle classes, which, in these instances, are used to create a rather overdetermined stance against more traditional Confucian women’s roles with an emphasis on caring, knowing one’s position, and kinship obligations. But the one-size-fits-all rhetoric of empowerment, getting-ahead and choice leaves little room for sharing the actual restrictions, conflicts, and struggles faced by these women.