A stylish young woman steps through the door of her home, the “welcome back” chime of her smart doorbell system ringing in the background. The camera pans through her tastefully decorated apartment as she begins her post-work routine: cooking fresh food, playing with her pet, a skincare regimen, and streaming TV. Her home is cozy and filled with fancy equipment: It’s the apartment of a “refined girl,” as the vlogger describes herself, living a refined single life.

Such videos are common on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform sometimes referred to as “China’s Instagram.” Part of a genre I call the “living alone vlog,” they show young women conducting a range of activities — such as cooking, cleaning, entertaining, and resting — in comfortable domestic spaces free of the influence of men.

Although the genre is not exclusive to Xiaohongshu, the platform, which caters to a largely feminine audience, has been central to these videos’ popularization in recent years. In stark contrast to the earlier discourse of shengnü, or “leftover women,” they frame women’s single lives as happy, high-quality, and materially fulfilling.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, shengnü came into wide use in China to refer to women who remain single into their late 20s and beyond. A derogatory term, shengnü were derided for having “unrealistic standards” in choosing a potential husband and being too selfish to consider the needs of their parents or society. The term implied that single women were a social problem that needed to be fixed.

Although official bodies like the All-China Women’s Federation have largely avoided the use of shengnü since 2017, the term and its underlying stigma remain visible in media discourses and everyday life. Even today, female characters in movies and on TV find their happy endings through men, who offer the love that every single woman apparently needs — whether she realizes it or not.

To an extent, living-alone vloggers on Xiaohongshu challenge the negative stereotypes attached to single women in China. Rather than longing for marriage and a husband, these women frame singledom as freedom.

Indeed, the idea of freedom is central to living alone vlogs, which are often predicated on the opinion that marriage, at least for women, means an end to freedom. In the written introduction to her vlog, one user writes: “People say living by yourself is lonely, but compared with messy married life, I enjoy the freedom.” Similar descriptions, such as “living alone has the smell of freedom, and life is clean without men” or “living alone is lonely… but no love is freedom,” are common on the app.

To demonstrate that living alone is both desirable and freeing, living-alone vloggers on Xiaohongshu tend to emphasize two themes: economic independence and self-care and self-discipline.

Living-alone vloggers on Xiaohongshu typically represent themselves as professional women who have achieved or are on their way to achieving economic independence through their careers. This independence is presented as key to women’s happy single lives, allowing them to eschew marriage while still enjoying the trappings of bourgeois life.

In a representative living alone vlog, the video starts with the vlogger doing aerobics at home after work, then cooking dinner for one in her oven, and finally watching a movie using a projector. The video is only 96 seconds long but features numerous nods to high-end urban living, including a high-rise apartment, high-quality household appliances, and a home entertainment system. Not only does the spacious place shown in the video substantiate the vlogger’s claim at the beginning of the video — “Monthly income of 30,000 yuan ($4,250) and happy living-alone after-work time” — but so does the home equipment and the space’s exquisite decorations.

Some living-alone vloggers claim that they have purchased their own homes through hard work. To them, home is no longer a place where women provide domestic labor but an exhibition of financial capability, enabling them to avoid marriage and its associated domestic tasks. As one living-alone vlogger puts it, homeownership is “a source of security” for young women.

The other major theme in living alone vlogs is the idea of “self-care and self-discipline.” In Chinese, the term is zilü, which literally translates to “self-discipline” but which also has a positive connotation synonymous with self-care. In living alone vlogs, some common routines that are categorized as self-care and self-discipline include exercise, skincare, and cooking healthy food. These practices are used in living alone vlogs to indicate that staying single allows women to take better care of themselves than they would in marriage or a relationship.

It’s worth noting that these practices, at least as they are depicted on Xiaohongshu, usually uphold a kind of normative femininity constructed by beauty norms and consumerism. A single woman’s income is important not only because of the independence it grants her, but also because happiness is accumulated through abundant commodities; having these commodities thus becomes necessary evidence that a woman takes good care of herself.

In another living alone vlog, the vlogger showcases her workout at home, which she performs wearing clothes from a well-known activewear brand; her skincare routine, which relies on high-end skincare products; and a healthy home-cooked meal that includes two pieces of sourdough bread, boiled vegetables, and seafood with a soy sauce dip, as well as a small bowl of blueberries.

In the written description, the vlogger writes: “This is the meaning of working hard and making money… (so) I can have a comfortable life.” Here, economic independence and self-care and self-discipline are closely linked, though her rigid workout and diet arguably reflect the strong gendered discipline imposed on women through prevailing beauty standards.

Both themes — economic independence and self-care and self-discipline — enable living-alone vloggers to insert advertisements in their videos. In living alone vlogs on Xiaohongshu, sponsored products range from home appliances to beauty and personal-care products and clothes. Thus, while the videos do represent women’s increasing autonomy and discourse power on Chinese social media, they still reflect the hyper-commercial essence of Xiaohongshu and the Chinese social media industry more broadly. While consumption culture targets everyone, the power it exerts over young women is particularly strong.

Not all living alone vlogs focus on the positive side of singledom. In one video, the vlogger highlights her exhaustion from working overtime. Even here, however, the tiredness is framed as a side effect of the effort needed to achieve economic independence and to practice self-discipline. “Use work to beat up work… it feels so great to only care about my career’s future and to like nobody,” the vlogger writes in the description.

This compulsory optimism — universal in the living alone genre — suggests the need for caution in evaluating the vloggers’ claims of “freedom.” The single women these videos showcase may be independent, glamorous, and happy rebuttals to the degrading discourse surrounding shengnü, but they remain subject to the underlying logic of consumption and commercialization that pervades Chinese social media. Women’s fulfillment is no longer found in love, but in an idealized consumerist lifestyle.

This article is based on a paper the author published in the journal Global Media and China.

Editor: Cai Yineng; portrait artist: Wang Zhenhao.

(Header image: Screenshots from a “living-alone” vlog. From @你心中的小可爱 on Xiaohongshu)