Short-video platforms are changing how traditional performing arts are encountered, interpreted and circulated. Yet audience engagement with digitised heritage cannot be explained adequately through platform usability alone because it also involves content authenticity, social participation and cultural identification. This qualitative study investigates the factors shaping Peking Opera audience engagement on Kuaishou. Twenty-five users with sustained exposure to Peking Opera content participated in semi-structured interviews conducted between April and June 2025. Twenty transcripts were analysed through open, axial and selective coding in NVivo 12, while five transcripts were reserved for theoretical saturation testing. The analysis generated 118 initial nodes, 50 concepts, 32 initial categories and 13 main categories. These categories show that engagement develops through the interaction of platform and access affordances, content and discovery quality, social and affective experience, cultural and learning value, and audience evaluation. Cultural identity and social interaction emerged as particularly important context-specific factors: users valued Kuaishou not only as a convenient viewing channel but also as a participatory cultural space in which knowledge, belonging and heritage responsibility could be negotiated. Attitude, satisfaction and future engagement intention represented the principal evaluative outcomes. The study contributes an empirically grounded, sociotechnical-cultural account of traditional-opera engagement and identifies practical priorities for platform design, content production and digital heritage stewardship.
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