Liu Minxia

    mllmx@msn.com

    ZHANG CHENCHEN is a mother of two. She has never had a job. She barely has time for herself between childcare and housework. But she created a stir among a million WeChat users with a short story she wrote in July. The story about a woman who jumped to her death after losing her wealth in the stock crash brought her instant fame and popularity. Before that, she had been writing every night for nearly half a year.

    Tong Cuiping was a lecturer at one of the best colleges in China. She was later a PR manager at a big firm. She quit her dream jobs twice to become a full-time mother. People said she was wasting her talent. But she said she survived her darkest days by sharing her stories on WeChat. This year, she returned the favor by offering low-cost health checkups to fellow full-time mothers across the country.

    Liao Siling is a reporter. She is a mother. She is a volunteer in Shenzhen. But she said her most recent role as a WeChat account operator gives her more feelings of worth. She is hoping to bring more Shenzhen families together for fun activities.

    These three women are most well-known through the WeChat personalities they have created: Tiger-skin Mother’s Night-sailing Boat, Full-time Mothers’ Stories and Giraffe Mum.

    With anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 followers, these accounts are among the relatively influential ones. WeChat currently has more than 10 million registered users, Gu Hui, a Tencent spokesperson, told Shenzhen Daily earlier this week.

    WeIndex, a company that focuses on WeChat data analysis, said in a report that 97 percent of public WeChat accounts have less than 10,000 followers, and less than 0.3 percent of accounts have more than 100,000 followers.

    Influential or not, women seeking a large audience like Zhang, Tong and Liao abound. Of the 10 million WeChat accounts, a sizable portion are run by individuals, according to WeIndex, and about 40 percent of WeChat users are female, according to Tencent’s analysis of its 600 million WeChat users.

    Like Zhang, Tong and Liao, most WeChat users manage their accounts in their spare time, either after fulfilling their duties at home or work. And they do it despite the absence of financial reward.

    “Having a WeChat account is kind of addictive,” said Tong, 33, who was a teacher at Sun Yat-sen University and is returning to the same college this fall as a doctoral student.

    “You get a feeling of accomplishment when your writings are read by others, your followers grow and your thoughts and views get responses from readers.”

    Zhang, 30, who said that for years she has dreamed of seeing her writings in print, is seeing her dreams come true after publishing her works on WeChat.

    “Publishers approached me after the short story ‘Wang Zimei: A Woman Who Jumped to Her Death’ circulated on WeChat, and I may soon publish a collection of my short stories,” said Zhang, a Shanghai native who moved to Silicon Valley after marrying a classmate right out of college. Zhang, who majored in journalism, is also heading back to the classroom this month for a Juris Doctor law degree.

    “A growing number of women, especially full-time mothers, are joining the trend of running a WeChat account,” said Liao, 36, a reporter for an influential Chinese-language newspaper in Shenzhen. “Traditional media, where I’ve been working, is searching for its new place as mobile technology is redefining the world. As an individual, I’m searching, too, in this way.”

    Liao uses her WeChat account to gather Shenzhen families together for offline activities, including a citywide charity bazaar for families and a children’s doodling competition. She said she has made many friends through WeChat.

    Tong turned her cyberspace attention into real life attention too. She solicited support from a private health care institution, which agreed to offer her followers low-cost physical examinations at its outlets across the country.

    “People who are employed have the benefit of receiving a free health checkup every year, but full-time mothers don’t have access to that kind of health care. That’s why I started this program,” Tong said. The ongoing program has received a warm response, and more than 200 people have had a checkup, according to Tong.

    “People ask me how I have the time to do this and take care of my family, and I tell them that my thirst for personal growth and self-realization drives me to find the time,” Tong said.

    Full-time mothers are not mainstream in China, although an increasing number of women with higher education are choosing to sacrifice their careers for their family, Tong said. “The rise of social media yields unprecedented opportunities to women looking for a larger audience as well as themselves,” she said. Some, according to Tong, can earn a small income by running such a platform, but it’s hard for WeChat account operators to earn big money unless they have a huge number of followers and a clear business model.

    “If one day nobody wants to read what I am writing, I would lose the motivation to work so hard,” admitted Zhang, who said the biggest obstacle she faces while running a WeChat account is the lack of time.

    She said she has to make full use of every little bit of time she can find and synchronous software to write whenever she can. She also writes every night after her two daughters go to bed at 10 p.m., often writing until 1 a.m.

    The biggest challenge for a woman who turns household chores into her job is whether she can get a clear understanding of what she is worth, according to Zhang.

    “If more families benefit from this parenting platform I set up and I myself can grow in different ways while running it, I would feel fulfilled,” said Liao.