Transnational white masculinity on Chinese social media: Western male vloggers’ self-representations during the covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article explores how white Western male vloggers have sought to maintain their positive images among Chinese netizens on the Chinese video-sharing platform Bilibili during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the West and foreign migrants in China were lampooned and scorned due to rising Chinese nationalism. By analyzing these vloggers’ self-representations and the Chinese audience’s responses to them, the article discusses how white male identity is negotiated on China’s state-regulated social media platforms in this critical time. It shows that while Western male vloggers carefully represent themselves as ideal foreign migrants in China, they are subject to criticisms from their Chinese audience. In this process, the meanings attached to white male identity have become increasingly debated.

Keywords:

• white masculinity
• vloggers
• Chinese social media
• Covid-19

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a surge of nationalism and xenophobia across the world. Under the Chinese Communist Party’s rule, China’s state-regulated media successfully boosted Chinese national pride during the pandemic by strategically “praising China, blaming the US, and lecturing the EU” in various news reports (Yang and Chen 2021, 110). In line with these narratives, Chinese netizens not only applauded the CCP’s stringent measures to flatten the curve of Covid-19 infections but also looked down upon Western countries’ “sloppy” responses to the outbreak as is apparent in social media (De Kloet, Lin, and Chow 2020). In addition, stories in Chinese media about misbehaving foreign migrants during the pandemic stirred up Chinese people’s xenophobic sentiments towards foreign migrants in China. One of the most telling examples is the wide circulation of a comic on Chinese social media, in which foreigners in China, referred to as “foreign trash” (洋垃圾) who do not follow the quarantine rules, are thrown into garbage bins by Chinese people in hazmat suits (Jinliqingnian 2020).

While the West and foreigners in China have been stigmatized on Chinese social media, a handful of Western male vloggers on Chinese video-sharing platforms have not seemed to be negatively affected. During the pandemic, vloggers such as Scor (Germany), Teacher Mike (US), Nathan Rich (US), Guo Ruijie (US), Shaun-Gibson (UK), Noel (Spain), and Thomas (Germany) actively posted videos and gained more followers. In their videos, they brand themselves as just, compassionate, and ordinary Western men who stand for China and the Chinese against the virus and the West’s negative views of China. In doing so, many have successfully transformed the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic into an opportunity to boost their online fame in China.

Since 2015, vlogging, or posting videos on social media, has gone through a process of professionalization and institutionalization. Estimated to be worth over three trillion yuan in 2020, vlogging has become a crucial economic foundation for the Chinese internet in recent years (Guanyan 2020). With an increasingly diversified group of foreigners migrating to China as international students, English teachers, and freelancers (Pieke 2012, Leonard and Lehman 2019), some have also “migrated” to Chinese social media and thrived as a niche in China’s vlogging scene. Like millions of Chinese vloggers, foreign vloggers’ central imperative is to gain viewer traffic and, in many cases, monetize viewer traffic through viewers’ tips, platform rewards, and advertising. These foreign vloggers are highly proactive in exploring the rewarding opportunities that China’s vlogging economy offers. Nevertheless, unlike the elite foreign migrants in China who receive institutional support, these vloggers’ statuses in China’s vlogging economy rest heavily on their own reputation. To advance their vlogging career in such a competitive environment, foreign vloggers often play with their foreignness vis-à-vis Chineseness to attract a Chinese audience. Chinese or foreign language-learning, daily life in China, and the cultural differences between China and foreign countries are the most common themes in their vlogs. Interestingly, although “the foreign” in this case signifies a diverse group of vloggers and countries, white-looking male vloggers from Euro-American countries have so far been the most visible and popular group.

Research has shown that white males from North American and European countries often experience a higher social status when migrating to China. Affirmative meanings in the Chinese context, such as modernity, financial affluence, and sexual attractiveness, are often ascribed to their racial and gender identity (Farrer 2011, Stanley 2012). However, recent research also suggests that this pattern has been disrupted following the recent changing power-relations between China and the major Western countries, resulting in white Western male migrants’ increasingly contradictory positionalities in China (Farrer 2019, Lan 2022). Building upon these insights, this article explores the changing meanings ascribed to white male identities in China by analyzing white-looking Western male vloggers’ self-representations and the Chinese audience’s reactions to them on Chinese social media during the Covid-19 outbreak. The analysis shows Western male vloggers are proactive in navigating the geopolitical and cultural tensions between China and Western countries. Before the Covid-19 outbreak, these vloggers typically portrayed themselves as friendly, caring, and respectful Western men in China. After the outbreak, they have done more to represent themselves as just, compassionate supporters of China and Chinese people. While many Chinese praise these vloggers, some challenge their legitimacy as allies of China. Such a phenomenon attests to the instability of whiteness-based privilege during the Covid-19 pandemic: while white male identity might still be a popular racial and gender category in China’s media consumption, the meanings ascribed to this identity have become increasingly debated.

Whiteness through the lens of transnational Western masculinity

Transnational migration is to varying degrees both a process of racialization and a gendered phenomenon (Lundström 2014). Earlier studies focusing on men show that the kind of masculinity that defines white, middle-class, early middle-aged, heterosexual men can often be hegemonic in a transnational context, since it may marginalize non-white men in Western societies and prove advantageous to white men in non-Western societies. Studies of Western males in China and other East Asian societies show that white Western men are often positively associated with Western modernity. Kelsky (2001) reads the educated and ambitious Japanese women’s desire for Western men as their way to transcend traditional gender regimes in Japan. In this sense, white men are fetishized as part of Western modernity and a means of Japanese women’s liberation. Such racialized fascination is exemplified in some conversational English schools in Japan, in which Western male English teachers are heavily branded to attract Japanese female students (Appleby 2013). In the case of China, Stanley (2012) uses the term “superheroes phenomenon” to describe how Chinese women consider Western men more sexually attractive and financially affluent than Chinese men. Similarly, Farrer’s (2011, 756) study of Shanghai nightlife shows that white Western men in China often have easy access to sexual intimacy with Chinese women since their masculinities are often associated with “glamour and sex appeal” and economic prestige in the local context.

Concurrent with recent shifting power relations between Asian and Western countries and the acceleration of transnational flows of people, objects, and ideas, some more recent scholarship shows a declining status of white men in China and other Asian countries.

In researching how “Asian ascendency and Western decline” manifests in Ho Chi Minh City's sex industry, Hoang (2015) shows how non-white clients such as local Vietnamese male elites and other Asian businessmen who frequent the city’s upscale sex clubs emulate a pan-Asian masculine ideal that challenges longstanding hegemonic white masculinity. Echoing Hoang’s findings, Farrer’s updated research suggests that white Western men no longer hold the highest sexual status in Shanghai nightlife, given the rise of a new class of wealthy Chinese men (2019). Notably, along with the increasingly prevalent narrative of China’s rise as a global superpower, Chinese people’s social imaginations of Western males have been diverging. While white males continue to be associated with modernity, progress, and cosmopolitanism, they are also stigmatized as badly behaving “foreign trash” who are “losers” in the West yet become socioeconomically and sexually better off in China because of their whiteness (Fulankeqi 2021).

Building upon this research, this article further investigates the changing status of white males in China. However, instead of exploring white Western male migrants’ lived realities, this article studies the cultural construction of white male identities on Chinese social media. Following Hall’s (1994) conception of cultural identity, this article treats white male identity not as an essence but rather as a positioning evident in Western male vloggers’ claims about who they are and the Chinese audience’s responses to these claims on Chinese social media.

As both agents and objects of their representations, Western male vloggers have considerable autonomy to perform who they are and decide how they want to be seen on Chinese social media. However, like foreigners who are active in China’s TV programs,¹ foreign vloggers who wish to stay visible and popular in Chinese social media need to perform in a way that coalesces with China’s top-down state-led ideological work. On the one hand, the state encourages foreigners in China to make patriotic videos about China by organizing foreigners’ video-making competitions such as “Looking at China in the third eye” (Xinhua 2020). On the other hand, the state’s information control regime (Zhu and Fu 2021) strictly censors foreigners who verbally attack the CCP. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the Chinese authorities banned German Internet influencer Christoph Rehage (老雷) and American entertainer Lele Farley from Chinese social media due to their criticisms and mockery of the CCP. Thus, Western male vloggers' self-representations are subject to the power of the Chinese state. Beyond this, vlogging is a form of self-commodification and self-branding. To sell oneself on social media, vloggers not only need to strategically promote their “authentic self” but also have an “always-on” work mode, which entails their constant vigilance and monitoring of their self-images to appeal to their audience (Khamis et al. 2017). Western male vloggers on Chinese social media must anticipate and meet various Chinese people’s tastes and expectations to gain attention and likes. Thus, the Chinese audience also plays a crucial role in disciplining Western male vloggers’ self-representations.

Researching white masculinity on video-sharing platform bilibili

This article foregrounds Western males’ self-representations on the Chinese video-sharing platform Bilibili, one of the most popular social media platforms where foreigners post videos and interact with their Chinese audience. Established in 2009 as a video-sharing community, Bilibili has been famous for ACG (animations, comics, and games) content. In recent years, Bilibili has developed into a site providing multiple forms of entertainment content, including documentaries, TV programs, films, user-generated videos, and live streams to attract a wider user base.² Like many other video-sharing platforms, Bilibili allows vloggers to monetize their online fame by offering them financial rewards.³ Vloggers can also collaborate with a third party to advertise its products on Bilibili. There is a comment section under each vlog for Bilibili where users leave remarks. It also features a “danmaku” interface that allows users’ comments to appear as streams of scrolling subtitles overlaid on the video. Such “pseudo-synchronicity” (Zhu 2017) has allowed me to observe users’ “real-time” reactions specific to certain details in vloggers’ videos.

To carry out this research, I located 30 white foreign male vloggers who have more than 10,000 followers on Bilibili (see Table 1). I followed them on Bilibili between June 2020 and October 2020 and watched all their vlogs and read users’ comments published between August 2019 and August 2020, roughly six months before and after the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. For some vloggers, I also watched their vlogs published before August 2019 to be familiar with their personas and styles. In this article, I present a selected visual-textual analysis of Mike and Noel’s published videos. Mike is an American English teacher in his early forties based in Shanghai. He is married to a Chinese woman and has a one-year-old son. As Mike mainly focuses on freelance English teaching, most of his videos involve English-learning tips, which help him promote his self-organized English courses. By contrast, Noel is a young student from Spain who studies at a university in Beijing. His relationship status is unclear, but he has never shown any romantic partners in his videos. His motivation to be a vlogger on Bilibili remains ambiguous. The reason to present the cases of Mike and Noel among the 30 vloggers I followed is twofold. On the one hand, the cases of Mike and Noel offer a glimpse into the diversity of Western male vloggers on Bilibili in terms of their age, country of origin, occupation, and vlogging style. On the other hand, these cases reflect the homogeneity of these Western male vloggers regarding how they present themselves as foreigners in China. Like most of the vloggers I have followed, Mike and Noel take great efforts to integrate into Chinese society, such as speaking fluent Chinese in their vlogs and making jokes specific to their local contexts. Additionally, the two vloggers’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, including vlogging about anti-Chinese racism in the West, controversy over China’s measures to contain the Covid-19 virus, and xenophobia in China, correspond with the most common themes in the vlogs produced by the 30 Western male vloggers in this period.

Table 1. 30 white foreign male vloggers followed between August 2019 and August 2020.

Name on Bilibili	Country of origin	Number of followers on Bilibili
京城小雷Alex	Italy	180,000
Barrett看中国	UK	454,000
钟逸伦要继续努力	US/Italy	279,000
非正式会谈的宁大人	South Africa	176,000
阿福Thomas	Germany	1,596,000
Real麦克老师	US	923,000
红袋鼠小明	Australia	55,000
贝乐泰是冠军	UK	469,000
西班牙小哥儿德明	Spain	150,000
Scor奥熙	Germany	323,000
肖恩Shaun-Gibson	UK	667,000
我是郭杰瑞	US	7,050,000
不是柯桑德	Netherlands	1,340,000
拂Ẇ坊	UK	1,060,000
NathanRich火锅大王	US	1,551,000
小马在纽约	US	585,000
Noel苏诺伊	Spain	439,000
荷兰老司机Rein	Netherlands	241,000
伏拉夫	Russia	79,000
Daniel Dumbrill	Canada	460,000
美国犹太重庆大足人	US	12,000
功必扬队长	Argentina/Spain	289,000
高佑思不是皮克	Israel	286,000
德国小伙吴雨翔	Germany	207,000
光头哥EVAN	US	38,000
爱笑的艾杰西	US	196,000
小文楷Kevin	Spain	44, 000
杰里德Jared	US	1,926,000
口语老炮儿马思瑞	US	1,991,000
小萨666	Russia	389,000

Teacher Mike

“Real Teacher Mike” (Real麦克老师) has been active on Bilibili since the beginning of 2016 and has had more than 900,000 followers. (Mike’s as well as Noel’s videos are public, and Asian Anthropology readers can access the videos I discuss in the article without Bilibli membership. The links to Mike’s and Noel’s videos are in the reference list.) As his name suggests, most of his videos are about English teaching tailored to the Chinese market, with advertisements that promote his private English classes. Unlike the formal English courses in Chinese schools and universities, Mike’s English learning videos are highly entertainment-oriented. Many feature comments on Chinese celebrities’ English skills and “fun facts” about cultural differences between China and the US. With his excellent command of English and Chinese and rich local knowledge of contemporary China and the US, his English teaching videos speak to the daily lives of Chinese youth.

Besides using his knowledge of the Chinese language and local pop culture, Mike is, echoing his name, a “real” man. He illustrates this point by blending his fatherhood into the videos and sometimes referring to himself as “nanny daddy” (奶爸). For instance, in November 2020, Mike posted a short video about his one-year-old Chinese-American son Xiaomai, which received 23,000 views (“Xiaomai beautified,” 2019). In the video, he carefully cuddles Xiaomai on his home balcony in China and teases Xiaomai with a loving tone. Song and Hird (2014, 215) note that in line with recent trends in Western parenting debates, “the caring, engaged father” has become a prominent ideal among the Chinese middle class. Echoing this trend, many followers celebrate Mike’s image as a caring father, and comment that baby Xiaomai and Mike are a cute “father and son”(父子). By displaying his fatherhood, Mike constructs a positive image of an English teacher that involves promoting his intellectual skills and a presentation of who he is in daily life – a breadwinning, loving father married to a Chinese woman.

Mike took his son Xiaomai to visit his parents in the US in early January 2020. During the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, they were stuck at his parents’ house in the US. From February to August 2020, Mike continued to post videos from the US on Bilibili. Compared with his videos posted from August 2019 to January 2020, there are two noticeable changes.

First, Mike’s role of “caring family man” becomes increasingly visible. In February 2020, Mike posted a video just before Valentine’s Day (“Why I have a Chinese wife,” 2020). He compares Chinese and American views on marriage and romantic relationships while walking in his parents’ American middle-class neighborhood. This video received 200,000 views and nearly a thousand comments. For the first time, he explicitly speaks about the challenges and cultural barriers in intercultural romance. In addition, he also expresses his admiration and respect for his wife. By portraying himself as what he calls a “conservative family man,” Mike successfully distances himself from the stereotypical images of Western men who embrace a “hedonistic lifestyle” in China, casually picking up Chinese girls in nightclubs (Stanley 2012, 217). In addition, there are also several videos centered on his son Xiaomai. Among these, the one with the most views (440,000) is of him filming himself bringing his sick, crying son to the hospital (“We are in the emergency room” 2020). In the video, he carefully holds his son in his arms and tells him funny stories to cheer him up. Seeing Mike’s tired face behind his face-mask, his followers responded sympathetically: “please take care of yourself” and “I hope Xiaomai gets better soon!”

Furthermore, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Mike posted fewer light-hearted English teaching videos and more “serious” videos featuring him sitting in front of the camera at home and sharing his concerns over the social problems caused or intensified by the pandemic. His joyful English-teacher look is replaced by a calm yet somewhat worried and helpless face in these videos. For instance, in a video published in early February, he sends regards to the people of Wuhan (“Free courses for Hubei students” 2020). He states that to help with the situation in Wuhan, he is willing to offer his “fellow students” in Wuhan English classes without charge. Many of his followers leave comments to thank him.

In another video with 100,000 views titled “Let’s talk about the issue of racism” (2020), Mike expresses his concerns about racism in both the US and China. His followers’ responses are somewhat mixed. Mike criticizes racism towards the Chinese and Asians in the US, which evokes his followers’ approval. They describe Mike as a very “sober” and “understanding” man. However, when he criticizes Chinese racism towards foreign migrants in China during the pandemic, his followers’ comments are less uniform. While some agreed with Mike’s view, many questioned the validity of Mike’s criticism. Some followers explained the reasons behind Chinese discriminating against foreigners by saying, “but foreigners do not wear masks”; “if they had followed the Chinese government’s measures, we would be nice to them”; and “do you really think you can blame us—how can we always be nice, be a ‘Virgin Mary’ (圣母)?” A few blame American politicians by suggesting that Mike “ask Trump to stop bashing China first.” In addition, some attack Mike’s social position in China by asking if he has experienced privileges in China. They seem to imply that as long as foreigners enjoy certain advantages in China, they are not entitled to criticize China and Chinese people.

Student Noel

Noel (苏诺伊) is a Spanish male vlogger who has been active on Bilibili since July 2018 and has some 460,000 followers at present. Noel did his bachelor’s degree in East Asian studies and Chinese language at a Spanish university and later moved to Beijing for further education. Like Mike, Noel mostly speaks Chinese and uses various popular Chinese songs and slang elements in his videos. However, in contrast to Mike, whose primary purpose for vlogging is to promote his English-teaching business, Noel’s motivation to vlog in China is ambiguous. According to Noel, vlogging helps him gain insights into Chinese culture and make friends with Chinese people. Although a few of Noel’s videos indirectly promote food brands such as Chinese instant noodles and Australian oranges, most of them center around Noel’s daily life, such as his school and leisure activities in China and Spain. The settings in Noel’s videos are familiar to many Chinese youth. Often, Noel films himself taking classes, eating food at the canteen, drinking bubble tea on the street, and chilling with his cat at home in his pajamas. In doing so, Noel presents himself as a boy-next-door, easy to befriend.

Noel embodies the recent niche male ideal of “little fresh meat” (小鲜肉) in China with his cute and delicate physical appearance. In the Chinese context, the term “little fresh meat” describes men who have young and attractive faces and bodies and seem innocent and pure due to a lack of experience (Li 2020). This type of man is prevalent in Pan-East Asian pop cultures and is known as a “pretty boy” (kkot minam) in South Korean and “flower boy” (bishonen) in Japanese. In one video viewed 66,000 times titled “What does it feel like to have a foreign boyfriend?” (2019), Noel stages himself as that “foreign boyfriend” and performs several dating scenes in front of the camera. Applying a second-person perspective, Noel invites viewers to imagine themselves as his romantic partner. In the video, Noel sends warm WeChat messages to the imagined, second-person girlfriend/boyfriend, taking her/him to eat ice cream and letting her/him rest on his shoulders. His voice and body movements are gentle and elegant, showing a lack of aggressiveness and sexual dominance. Noel’s self-portrayal echoes what Jung (2010) calls “pan-East Asian soft masculinity,” a kind of male image that is “exceptionally feminine to western eyes” but is highly visible and celebrated in pan-East Asian TV romances (Song 2016, 3).

In China, qualities of self-discipline, hard work, and perseverance are widely believed to be what a man should have. Echoing this gender norm, many of Noel’s other videos demonstrate that he is not only a playful “flower boy” but also a hard-working, modest, and warmhearted young man. He says he worked hard to receive a scholarship to study in China and frequently shares knowledge that he claims to have learned in his Chinese university. In addition, Noel films himself inviting his Chinese neighbor, an older woman living alone, to the cinema to watch the recently released patriotic Chinese movie My People, My Country (2019) during a national holiday (“My grandma neighbor” 2020). After the movie, Noel shares that both he and his neighbor broke into tears while watching the film, since Chinese people’s “deep love for the country” is incredibly “touching.”

This warm side of Noel’s character became more clearly foregrounded in his videos after the Covid-19 outbreak. Unlike Mike, Noel stayed in Beijing during the Covid-19 outbreak. Nine of 26 of his videos posted in this period touched upon the social problems brought on by the pandemic. In these videos, Noel often criticized Spain while praising China.

In March, Noel published a video titled “I wrote to the most prominent Spanish newspaper to protest against racism towards Chinese” (2020), which received around 500,000 views. In the video, Noel informs his Chinese followers that the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia decided to publish his article condemning the biased reports about China and Chinese people in Spanish media. He firmly looks at the camera and says that he hopes people in Spain will stop being racist towards Chinese. He also praises Chinese people’s seriousness and solidarity in facing the crisis by saying, “Chinese people strictly follow the quarantine rules to protect their family, their country, and the world.” Almost all the comments left by his followers are positive, mainly showing their gratitude towards Noel’s efforts to speak up for Chinese.

In a video posted in April and watched 93,000 times, Noel compares the Chinese and Spanish governments’ measures to contain the virus (“The severe situation abroad,” 2020). He suggests that compared to the Chinese government, the Spanish government reacted too slowly and that its measures were not comprehensive enough to effectively contain the spread of the disease. Many Chinese commenters express their worries about Spain, and some point out the superiority of the Chinese system. A few comment that they are glad to see that Noel is rational and does not blame China for everything.

In another video titled “Chinese netizens asked me to leave leave China” (2020), viewed 1.6 million times, Noel talks about Chinese people’s xenophobic attitudes towards foreigners. The responses to this video are mixed. In contrast with Teacher Mike, Noel avoids talking about how foreign migrants, especially black people, are discriminated against by the Chinese authorities and Chinese people during the pandemic. Instead, Noel shows a disappointed face and emphasizes that he has stayed in China to fight against the virus together with Chinese. In addition, instead of directly confronting Chinese for their racist speech and behavior, Noel turns his blame to the so-called “foreign trash” in China and claims that they defame good foreigners like him and his classmates.

Many of his followers feel sorry that Noel is hurt by both “xenophobic Chinese” and “foreign trash.” Some comfort Noel by writing that, unlike those who refuse to follow the rules in China, good foreigners like Noel are always welcome. However, some commenters are suspicious of Noel. For instance, some claim that it is “too artificial” that Noel tries to distinguish himself from other foreigners. Others state that they are afraid that Noel might be a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” who shows his love for China on Bilibili but “speaks ill of us behind our back.” These comments reflect the Chinese audience’s increasingly skeptical attitudes towards foreign vloggers. On Chinese social media, Chinese audiences have invented the internet slang “fortune password” (财富密码) to mock how praising China can be lucrative for foreign vloggers. At the same time, they also condemn those who make money by “defaming China” (抹黑中国) on Western social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter (Yingguobaojie 2019). A similar mistrust is shown in these more critical Bilibili users’ responses. To them, Noel’s vlogging is perceived as a profit-driven performance to gain benefits in today’s economically prosperous China.

Discussion

The above two cases show how vloggers have sought to perform the images of ideal Western male migrants in China in the eyes of their Chinese audience. Mike presents himself as an English teacher who is humorous and knowledgeable, as well as a breadwinning, caring, and hardworking family man. Noel shows that he is a handsome “soft boy” and a hardworking, respectful student. By performing these gendered roles that are widely celebrated in the Chinese context, both vloggers evoke positive reactions from their Chinese audience.

Furthermore, both vloggers have gained Chinese viewers’ favor by emphasizing their equality with Chinese people. Mike does not overtly show his prestigious status concerning his affluent social class and American citizenship. Instead, he presents himself as an ordinary migrant who tries his best to learn about Chinese society and make a living in China. Similarly, underlying Noel’s narrative about how he has worked and studied hard to be able to come to China is the subtext that his comfortable position of being a well-financed international student in China is by no means unearned. After the Covid-19 outbreak, both vloggers displayed their struggles and worries in facing crises stirred up by the pandemic, highlighting their vulnerability as foreigners in China. By doing so, the two vloggers have sought to avoid being seen as what Kimmel (1994) calls “a man in power, a man with power, and a man of power” (125). A white male identity here is thus not positioned as a privileged “superhero” (Stanley 2012) but rather as an ordinary resident in China who faces challenges just as Chinese people do.

In addition, both vloggers actively perform the images of foreigners who are politically correct in China under the CCP’s rule. Before the outbreak, both vloggers adopted a foreigner-loves-China attitude by showing their fondness for China and Chinese culture. This attitude parallels many Chinese TV programs featuring foreign guests, in which they wear Chinese clothes, recite Chinese poetry, practice Chinese calligraphy, and sing Chinese pop songs.⁴ The hybridity of their foreignness and stereotypical Chineseness boosts the Chinese imagination of China being a proud, confident, and cosmopolitan country (Gorfinel and Chubb 2019). After the Covid-19 outbreak, the two vloggers retell the Chinese authorities’ narratives about China’s success and the West’s failure in containing the Covid-19 virus and, in doing so, highlight their roles of being compassionate, just allies of China and Chinese.

While many Chinese react positively towards the two vloggers’ views, some viewers remain suspicious of the two vloggers’ stances and intentions when it comes to politically sensitive issues such as Chinese racism. Mike’s critical view towards the mistreatment of foreigners in China has received mixed responses. While some followers appreciate the “soberness” and “objectivity” with which he approaches social problems in China, others accuse him of being a condescending, privileged outsider who does not truly understand the complexity of Chinese society. Similarly, blaming foreigners’ misbehavior on anti-Chinese racism does not help Noel avoid criticism from members of his Chinese audience; his pro-China attitude is viewed by some Chinese as inauthentic and profit-driven.

Due to surging Chinese nationalism, white male identity in China can quickly become the subject of suspicion and rejection. At the same time, however, the continuous and increased online attention given to the two vloggers by their Chinese audience seems to indicate that Chinese also long for Western males’ recognition and appreciation of a progressive, rising China. White male identity is thus neither recognized by Chinese as purely superior nor as purely inferior vis-à-vis a Chinese identity but rather as fluidly shifting between these poles depending on the situation.

Conclusion

This article has explored how white male identities were negotiated on Chinese social media during the Covid-19 outbreak, when China’s relationship with the West became increasingly strained. It shows that despite the increasingly hostile and politicized online environment, Western male vloggers continued to receive attention and likes on Chinese social media. However, peering into these vloggers’ self-representations, one notices that they have navigated the tensions between China and the West by carefully representing themselves as just, compassionate opinion leaders who support China and Chinese people. Despite these efforts, their transnational white male identities are still scrutinized, and their stances are often criticized. This phenomenon attests to the instability of white-based privilege in China. Primarily, it supports the argument that white males’ positions in China are diminishing (Farrer 2019). Informed by the larger geopolitical dynamics during the Covid-19 pandemic, the powers ascribed to white male identity seems increasingly contested. White identity now works as a racial and gender category that simultaneously attracts and arouses suspicions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme, European Research Council (CHINAWHITE 817868).

Notes on contributors

Ke Ma

Ke Ma is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, Department of Anthropology. Her research focuses on Westerners’ racialized experiences, positionalities, and performances in China’s media, fashion, and entertainment industries. Ke obtained her M.A. in Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and B.A. in English literature at the Minzu University of China. Her e-mail is: [email protected]

Notes

1 Since the 1980s, Chinese television has produced many programs with foreign participants. Most of these are similar in content due to strict regulation by the China National Radio and Television Administration. In these programs, foreigners typically express a sense of fondness for China and Chinese culture, helping to solidify in viewers a Chinese national identity under the CCP’s rule. Canadian entertainer Da Shan (aka Mark Henry Rowswell), who was invited to perform in comedy routines on China Central Television’s New Year’s gala in 1988 and later became active in variety Chinese TV programs, is one obvious example of this.

2 According to Bilibili, there were 1.72 billion active user accounts in 2021, with 78% of users between 18 and 35 years old (Zongshen 2020). Thus, it is likely that most Western male vloggers’ audiences are young Chinese.

3 Specifically, Bilibili rewards users who create original content with three yuan for every 1000 views that they receive. In addition, content creators can gain economic benefits from viewers’ tips or by inserting advertisements into their content.

4 TV programmes of this kind include The Competition for Foreigners to Sing Chinese Songs (Beijing TV), Competition of Foreign Talents (Beijing TV Station), Avenue of Stars (CCTV), and Popular Chinese Songs (Jiangxi TV).