| Sumario: | This article analyzes the genre of rented-room short videos on Douyin, a major Chinese short video and live-streaming platform, to explore how rural-to-urban migrant workers perform positive energy as a strategy to navigate state narratives, platform regulations, and algorithmic bias. These videos reveal how platforms function as both spaces of self-representation and engines of precarious aspiration. While they offer visibility and the promise of upward mobility, such promises are often unstable and precarious. Positive energy emerges as a contested affective and ideological site where state narratives meet neoliberal entrepreneurialism, shaping how precarity is lived and mediated. I argue that Douyin operates as a classed digital space, while the urban village—a frequent setting in these videos—functions as a liminal zone of migration and mediation. Together, these dynamics reveal how socioeconomic precarity and affective labor are intertwined in China's platform economy, complicating narratives of self-representation and digital empowerment for the country's most marginalized workers.
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