WeChat as an unavoidable research tool for fieldwork, and its problems

I did not use WeChat as my main method or main source of materials, but I realized that during my fieldwork in China, I did use WeChat very often to help me collect data, and I see the potential of using WeChat as an increasingly important method for further research in China. Since I did not dig deeper with WeChat data, this proposal is mainly served as a starting point to help me think about potential approaches about “WeChat ethnography” and I would be willing to join the discussion and learn from scholars about how they use WeChat as a method for their research projects. I would like to share some ideas of how WeChat were used during my fieldwork in Beijing and Zhangjiakou for my research project about the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. During my stay in Beijing in the first half year of 2022, I suffered from different forms of physical and digital restrictions, and therefore even I was on site, I did a number of interviews through WeChat, including video, voice, and text interviews, as well as informal chats, but I also encountered problems in terms of how to conduct effective virtual interviews, how to find useful informants, and how to communicate more deeply. Meanwhile, I also figured out differentforms of second-hand information collection approaches via WeChat, such as through WeChat official accounts and mini-programs, as well as private WeChat groups serving as an agency platform. I also relied on informal information shared through my local friends as I was blocked in Beijing and could not access my field during my stay. Lastly, there were of course some other functions of WeChat, such as payment that has been studied by many scholars, and in the Covid era, some important functions have been incorporated into WeChat, such as the health code system that is even used to detect people’s daily Covid test results, which I describe it as a new approach of digital regulation/surveillance. Thus, I follow Plantin & de Seta (2019)’s argument that WeChat is an infrastructure, which penetrates into people’s everyday life, and is unavoidable if we want to do research in/related to China.