A woman in her early thirties named Xu Xueyi gave me a tour of the premises, which looked like a Versailles-themed Vegas hotel—eight floors of ornate rooms and gilded corridors, shops and spas. A profusion of synthetic flowers, marble, and sparkling chandeliers served to distract from the procedures taking place out of sight. You might be having your jawbone sawed down, in order to give your face a dainty oval shape, but, just across the hallway, you could treat yourself to a jade-inlaid gold necklace, get a perm or a manicure, or pick up some body-slimming lingerie.

“We do everything here to make you happy and satisfied,” Xu said brightly, as she led me through a V.I.P. suite with a Jacuzzi. Bandaged women in striped robes passed by, guided by nurses who waved at Xu. The nurses were all notably good-looking, and Xu confided that she’d had several procedures. “I injected my chin with filler to make it pointier but didn’t like it, so I dissolved it two weeks later.”

Xu took me to one of the hospital’s senior surgeons, Li Bin, a man of fifty who spoke with scholarly placidity. “In the past, in conservative China, we used to prioritize a person’s interior to the exclusion of all else,” Li told me. “But, in today’s competitive world, your appearance is an asset that you want to maximize.” He mentioned that it is normal for a job applicant’s résumé to include a head shot, and, indeed, plastic-surgery patients in China are often more interested in the professional benefits of good looks than in romantic ones. The procedures are viewed as a simple investment that will yield material dividends.

Since the rise of Meitu, a different kind of client has become more common: young, impressionable women who bring pictures of their idols to his office and ask to be given this or that feature. He smiled and shook his head. “Expectations are higher than ever, and it’s hard to get through to clients about the recovery period and the risk of unforeseen results,” he said. “To change the shape of a face requires cutting into the jawbone”—a procedure that Western doctors are reluctant to perform except in cases of medical need, because of a significant risk of fatal complications—“but on Meitu the transformation is instant and completely controllable.”

In the afternoon, I met a loyal customer of the hospital named Li Yan. She was thirty and had had more procedures than she could remember, starting in college: double-eyelid creation, eye-corner-opening, nose job, chin implant, lips injected to resemble “parted flower petals.” Almost every feature of her face had been done a few times, but she still felt as if she were a rough draft, in the process of revision. “I don’t think my nose bridge is quite high enough, and the tip doesn’t have the slight upturned arch I want,” she said.

I asked Li, who works as an administrative assistant in a regional bank, how she managed to afford all the surgery. “It’s how I spend most of my money,” she told me, adding that, over the years, boyfriends had also chipped in. She said with satisfaction that no one who’d known her at school would recognize her now and that she’d destroyed every picture she could find of herself before the surgeries began. “The beauty of photos taken before the digital age is, if you destroy it, it’s gone for good.”

Li was devoted to Meitu, and used the apps to preview surgeries she was considering. Surgery and Meitu, she believed, “clarify each other.” Recently, she’d been approached by a wang hong recruiting agency about developing an online presence, but she worried that the livelihood would be too unstable, and, besides, she couldn’t really sing or dance or act. The recruiter had said that she wouldn’t need any skills, but she still wasn’t convinced. “I could never be as beautiful as a wang hong,” she told me, laughing.

“You should consider getting some work done, too,” Li said at one point. It was a comment I’d been hearing with disconcerting frequency as I hung around wang hong in China. One of the hospital’s doctors, Li Jun, said she would give me a consultation, but I’d have to wait till the evening; although it was a Sunday, her schedule was packed.

Our session lasted half an hour, during which the chalk pen she used to draw on my face was almost never at rest. By the end, my face resembled a military map in the late stages of a long battle. She began with structural problems. My jaw was too square, my cheekbones too broad, and my eyelids too droopy. My nose bowed outward—a “camel hump”—and I had a weak chin. After the half-dozen or so procedures that it would take to ameliorate these flaws, we could move on to smaller things, which could be dealt with by a combination of Botox (for my shrunken forehead, my jaw muscles, and the creeping crow’s-feet around my eyes) and filler (for my temples, the pouches under my eyes, my nasal folds, and my upper lip). The cost would be more than thirty thousand dollars. “There are still other things that could be done,” she said, as I stared at my chalked-up face in the mirror, but she was careful to manage expectations. It was clear that no amount of intervention could transform my face into that of a wang hong.

I arrived back in Xiamen in time for Meipai’s anniversary conference, which took place in a sleek hotel near Meitu’s headquarters. Around four hundred Meipai stars from all over the country were there. The youngest was four and the oldest seventy-two, but the majority ranged in age from late teens to mid-twenties.

A screen in the auditorium displayed photos of Justin Bieber and other global megastars who’d got their start online, while Meitu staffers explained to the young hopefuls what the future might hold if they kept up their assiduous posting. Neon-colored slide shows about e-commerce and the monetization potential of celebrity flashed by, but I soon realized that the audience wasn’t paying much attention. “At an event like this, it’s all about rubbing shoulders with stars who have more influence,” a man named Mark explained. Mark was a rarity: a Caucasian wang hong. He was South African, and had moved to China nine years earlier, in his mid-teens, when his father got a job there. With a mop of red hair, he looked like Prince Harry, but lankier. “It’s about breaking into the stars’ circles and maybe sharing a photo of you posing with a wang hong who has double or even ten times your fan base.”

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All day, the room hummed with nervous tension, and even the friendliest interactions carried a competitive edge. Wang hong discussed the difficulty of getting a hair appointment, as everyone was piling into the same few salons, and how two-hour makeup sessions had required them to skip breakfast. A woman with wheat-colored hair and a lacy white sheath dress, who went by the screen name StylistMimi, told me that she thought of herself as a late starter, having only been on Meipai for a year. With fewer than four hundred thousand followers, she was anxious to make up for lost time. Another, named Liu Zhanzhan, warned that there was currently an oversaturation of wang hong “incubators”—talent scouts like the one who had approached Li Yan. “They promise you everything, but you sign a contract and you are basically sold to them for six, seven, eight years,” she said. “They manage hundreds of people, and, at the end of the day, how many actually make it?”