Muzi Mei – Internet celebrity and pioneer of ‘body writing’

ABSTRACT

Muzi Mei (b. 1978), is one of China’s best-known first generation Internet celebrities. Due to her bold and graphic confession of sexual encounters with different men, including commoners and celebrities alike, published on her blog back in 2003, Muzi Mei became both famous and notorious overnight. After graduating from university in 2001, she first worked as a magazine editor and then became a freelance writer. Since the release of her erotic diaries, she has become the topic of intense debate and has attracted enormous attention from media outlets both in print and on-line, from inside and outside mainland China. Her anecdotes about her experiences and the controversy they have stimulated circulated on bulletin boards and Internet chatrooms across China, and featured in reports and articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and Time magazine, thus marking the Muzi Mei phenomenon as a key signifier of contemporary China’s sexual revolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet celebrity
• body writing
• Muzi Mei

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Shenshen Cai

Shenshen Cai is the sole author of State Propaganda in China’s Entertainment Industry (Routledge 2016), Television Drama in Contemporary China: Political, Social and Cultural Phenomena (Routledge 2016) and Contemporary Chinese Films and Celebrity Directors (Palgrave Macmillan 2017); and editor of Female Celebrities in Contemporary Chinese Society (Palgrave Macmillan 2019).