😮#油宝知道 (Baby of Oil knows)#: Translanguaging in playing cute on corporate social media

Dicong Gou, Shengyu Zhao and Ya Sun
University of International Business and Economics | China Railway International Multimodal Transport Co., Ltd.

Playing cute has become a corporate branding strategy, but its integration with translanguaging on social media remains underexplored. This study proposes an analytical framework for playing cute as a pragmatic act on corporate social media and conducts a cross-platform analysis of how a leading Chinese corporation adopts translanguaging resources to play cute strategically. Findings show that the dominance of the strategy orienting towards playing babyishly cute across both Weibo and Twitter underscores its universal appeal, and the preference of playing whimsically and kindly cute on Weibo than on Twitter is attributable to linguistic-cultural proximity in intracultural communication and linguistic-cultural complexity in intercultural communication. Similarly, hashtag and text are employed more significantly on Weibo while emojis are deployed more significantly on Twitter, and mono-resource translanguaging pattern is more used than bi-resource and N-resource patterns. This study enhances understanding of playing cute and sheds light on globalized digital governance of Chinese state-owned corporations.

Publication history

Date received: 6 May 2025

Date accepted: 23 January 2026

Published online: 2 June 2026

Table of contents

In China’s social media fandom, fans cutify idols and in turn idols play cute. Social media influencers also heighten likeability and approachability by engaging in more informal language use when communicating with fans or viewers (Bhatia 2023, 32). Playing cute, originating from kawaii and sajiao respectively in Japan and China, has been adopted as a strategy by Chinese government agencies to court adoration and public engagement through social media (Wong et al. 2021). Corporations have similarly embraced this strategy to build trust, positively influence consumer perceptions, and win public forgiveness in online crises (Marcus et al. 2017; Su et al. 2024; Yang 2023). However, there is limited research on how corporations discursively play cute across multiple social media platforms.

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