Politicizing for the idol: China’s idol fandom nationalism in pandemic

ABSTRACT

Chinese idol fans have been identified among the main forces in cyber nationalist activisms in recent years, acting as the nationalist fans protecting the state as an idol in response to external political shocks. Their skills in acknowledging, involving, and even reinventing the image of the state and national pride in cyber nationalist activisms do not emerge in a vacuum. This article examines how idol fans involve and reinvent the nationalist discourse in their everyday fan activities – idol promotion. We focus on the pandemic in 2020 as it provides a specific social and political context that allows us to understand better the interaction between idol fans and the state in their mundane fan activities. We construct our analysis under the computational grounded theory framework with over 6 million fan posts collected from Weibo and 11 in-depth interviews with active idol fans. Our findings show that when engaging in pandemic-related discussion, idol fans actively borrowed official discourse on nationalism and strategically responded to key political and social events in their idol promotion activities. The idol images they built are not only positive but also nationalist. Therefore, they play not only the commercial logic commonly seen in the Japanese and Korean K-pop/idol culture but also the political logic propagated by the state in China.

KEYWORDS:

• Idol fan
• fandom nationalism
• China
• computational grounded theory
• social media

Acknowledgment (s)

We like to thank Aofei Lv for inspiring this research, Anfan Chen for sharing the Weibo-Cov dataset, and Bingchun Meng for providing valuable comments on the draft paper. We thank Zhe Chen, Jiawen Cui, Zhenyu Zhang, Juemin Zhang, and Yufan Li for their superb research assistance. Finally, we would also like thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this special issue, Stephen D. Reese, Wenhong Chen, Zhongdang Pan for their constructive feedback and comments on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Kknews, Yi Yang Qianxi’s 17th birthday is approaching, and the fans are crazy about the charts, and the support scene makes me amazed. (2017). [online] Available at https://kknews.cc/zh-my/entertainment/nvqb3k8.html [Accessed 28 November 2022].

2 E-commerce China, Chinese Idol Industry and Fan Economy. (2020). [online] Available at https://ecommercetochina.com/chinese-idol-industry-and-fan-economy/ [Accessed 16 June 2022].

3 There were a series of crackdowns on unhealthy fandom activities such as astroturfing and illegal fundraising on Weibo in the summer of 2021, and Weibo has since removed the celebrity ranking list. See Broersma (2021).

4 There may be concerns over the existence of bots, water armies, or astroturfing in the dataset. We consider this acceptable in our research object since the bots as data manipulation are among strategies of the datafication of fandom activities – idol fans would buy or manually control bots to boost the positive posts about their idols, and a larger proportion of positive posts means a smaller proportion of negative posts can be seen in the public sphere. Some related reports can be seen: Global Times, Illegal support: idol fan sentenced to five years in prison for app that artificially inflates popularity of social media posts, May 2021. [online] Available at https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202105/1224691.shtml; Borak (2020).

5 Contrary to common understanding, idol fans tend to be highly educated. According to the ‘Sina Weibo 2020 Entertainment Industry White Paper’, 79.8% of idol fans are studying for or already have a college or postgraduate degree. Our sample of idol fans selected for the interview matches this composition of idol fans on Weibo. Please see http://f.sinaimg.cn/ent/2020/2020WeiBoYuLeBaiPiShu.pdf, accessed November 5, 2022.

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the London School of Economics and Political Science (Research Infrastructure and Investment Fund) and British Academy (SRG21\210233).

Notes on contributors

Yan Wang

Yan Wang is Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Before she was a Research Fellow at School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research seeks to understand the issues of state legitimacy, public opinion, and the redistribution of public goods [email: [email protected]].

Ting Luo

Ting Luo is Senior Lecturer of Political Communication at Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Her research interests include comparative politics, digital politics, elections and democratization, and Chinese politics. She holds a Ph.D. in Government (2014) and an MSc in Public Policy and Administration (2007) from the London School of Economics and Political Science [email: [email protected]].