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The Chinese government’s unlikeliest standoff

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The Chinese government’s unlikeliest standoff

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The Chinese government’s unlikeliest standoff

Celebrity, in any country, comes with its fair share of hardship. In exchange for fame and stardom, stars give up normal levels of privacy; endure invasive scrutiny from fans, paparazzi, and the media; and mold themselves to inhuman standards of beauty and perfection in order to climb the ladder of success.To get more china entertainment news, you can visit shine news official website.

In China, however, those stressors pale beside the unique pressure of being a star in a hyper-consumerist culture that’s also tightly controlled by a state autocracy. Stars are expected to be poster children for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — to be wholesome, promote good values, avoid vice, and never, ever, get involved in a major scandal. At the same time, celebrities are virtually required to monetize their brands through sponsorships with huge corporations: The more products they can sell, the more they earn their spot on the A-list.

That incessant need to compete in the entertainment marketplace extends beyond the celebrities to their fans — and this is where things get thorny. While content can be controlled and celebrities can be taught to mold themselves into model citizens, human behavior remains wildly unpredictable. And in China, fans who’ve been trained by corporate interests to see fandom as a competition can be the most wildly unpredictable creatures of all.
To ensure their favorite is the best and biggest star of all, Chinese fans have built an entire industry-adjacent system of competition. Most have learned to gamify rankings and competitions, with many regularly buying hundreds of items they don’t intend to use, just to boost their idol. Some fans empty their bank accounts for the cause of proving their idol can sell the most products. An entire online cottage industry exists to bolster competing fandom rumors, with gossip-mongers and superfans getting paid by shady sources to smear their idol’s rivals — and such rumors can develop into real, reputation-ruining scandals.

In recent years, China’s online fandom and the chaotic lengths fans go to in order to promote their celebrities have increasingly drawn the attention of the Chinese government. The CCP has heightened restrictions on fans, from banning crowds to eliminating celebrity rankings, restructuring fan clubs, and censoring queer fan-friendly media.
But fandom is never easy to negotiate, and fandom in China is especially complex. Fan communities are known as “rice circles” — a name conjuring an image of a group eating from one another’s dinner plates, hinting at the complicated codependency between fan groups and celebrities. The CCP’s efforts to regulate online fandoms — known as its Qinglang, or clean and clear, initiative — are really part of its larger efforts to wrangle a complex online ecosystem of celebrity culture, social media influence, queer media, and what it perceives as pernicious foreign corruption. Individually, these things might seem trivial, but collectively they’ve presented persistent complications to President Xi Jinping and undermined his vision for an idealized China — even as he consolidates his power and secures an unprecedented third term.

To understand why the CCP wants to control all these things is to understand the fascinating paradox of China’s growing cultural currency and why zealous fan bases might be one of the peskiest thorns in the government’s side.
To understand how we got here, we have to jump back a few years — specifically, to 2016, when the Chinese government first cracked down against a baffling enemy: K-pop. The Chinese government has utilized media censorship as a cultural tool for decades. In recent years, however, the rise of K-pop has proven to be a cultural wild card for the state.

The growth of Korea’s idol culture has been closely intertwined with China’s own. In idol culture, pop stars, whose personas are created with the help and reach of studios, cultivate intense dynamics with their fans, who in turn consume the idols’ content and their sponsored products in staggering numbers. Think Disney using its networks to cultivate a long string of stars from Justin Timberlake to Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato, developing their fandoms from childhood. Now magnify that by an entire country’s entertainment industry, and you have the model for studio star systems across East Asia. Many studios have cultivated dual-language idol groups and sent would-be Chinese K-pop stars to train in Seoul. In 2016, however, China formally banned K-pop, abruptly cleaving these relationships. The ban, ironically, turned many former K-pop stars back into Chinese celebrities whose K-pop influence is still being felt.

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