China is often regarded as being a society of hierarchies, whether those be spatial, religious, social, cosmological or familial. This paper, based on 15 months ethnography conducted in a rural Chinese town, examines how hierarchies become overtly expressed on China’s most popular social media platform — QQ — in the form of level status conferred upon users. The paper outlines the complex bureaucracy behind the level system, before turning to discuss the changing attitude of rural Chinese townsfolk towards these levels, showing how desires to accumulate them influence their practices of internet use in everyday life. The paper draws a parallel between level accumulation on QQ and prior literature on gambling to argue that social media user’s accounts of level accumulation cross between emphasising honest effort and intentional distortion, and in so doing emphasise the practice’s self-cultivatory aspect.

This paper forms part of the Global Social Media Impact Study (www.ucl.ac.uk/global-social-media), an ERC funded, cross-cultural comparative ethnographic study based at UCL Department of Anthropology dedicated to understanding the implications of social networking sites for global humankind and society, and explaining their significance for the future of the social sciences.