Fast and furious Chinese fan clubs
Organised groups of celebrity followers are universal, but in China fan clubs are becoming an industry of its own
The internet chatter gets fast and furious when a celebrity invites the anger of fans in China. The latest to face this misfortune is American actor John Cena, who stars in the newest sequel of the Fast and Furious movie.
Entertainment and sports celebrities getting caught in media storms is not new. Given their mass following, every word they utter is lapped up, and something unpalatable to some group leads to a hullabaloo.
Some celebrities have tried to avoid talking to the press, as did Frank Sinatra during his 1974 Australian tour. But that didn’t go well either. As interviews with Sinatra were not possible, angry local newspapers started generating stories on Sinatra, mostly on his spicy life and links to America’s underworld.
Then, a furious Sinatra went on stage and called the reporters “pimps and hookers.” Hell broke loose, making Sinatra apologise (this ABC look back is worth a read), cancel his Melbourne concert, and return to the US.
Back in New York, he said:
“A funny thing happened in Australia. I made a mistake and got off the plane.”
The Cena incident is nothing like this. Very few in China, knew about his achievements or claim to fame. But the situation changed beyond anybody’s imagination when Cena uploaded an apology in Mandarin for referring to Taiwan as a “country” in a television interview.
It set off a storm of allegations back and forth, with international politics spicing up the fuss.
With the rise of the internet and social media, celebrities’ lives have become daily fodder. Still, for many stars, social media following became one of their main revenue streams. So, they constantly endeavour to boost the fan numbers. It is standard across the world.
In China’s case the numbers, as with everything, are mind-boggling. The country’s 1.3 billion population – 980 million of them with internet access – is particularly alluring for companies eyeing the huge market.
While most mainstream global media characterise the Chinese cyber world as one dominated by mindless trolls, bots or a paid army of keyboard warriors kept on strings by the government machinery, the actual situation is a lot more layered and complicated.
A deep dive into the fan economy will reveal how far-reaching and complex the scene is despite an overarching control by the authorities.
As talent competition shows like America’s Got Talent and Master Chef flourished in the West, their copycat versions surfaced in Asia, leading to fans going online to praise their favourites.
Again a dominant perception outside is that China just copies of what is already available and lag behind the West in innovation, because the political system is not conducive to independent thinking.
True, Chinese companies did copy the model of e-Bay and Facebook to create their versions of these platforms. But they also embarked on the fast track of innovation, while companies like Facebook or Amazon remained, more or less, in the form in which they started and adding just a few tweaks to entrench their status.
For example, look at the growth of cashless payments in China. Alibaba, WeChat, and others have blazed ahead on this front, taking economic activity in the country to a higher level. In contrast, most developed countries with access to the same kind of technology still rely on traditional banks to aid even small businesses.
Nothing illustrates the fast-paced changes technology is bringing to China than the field of entertainment.
Minting new idols through talent shows has long been popular in China. The format of these new programmes was to assemble a few youngsters, weed out some of them every week through audience vote based on their performance, and form a group of ten or so singers at the end who will be promoted as a band, usually for a year or two. It quickly led to a virtual economic revolution creating what they call “fan economy.”
By 2018 this went in to an overdrive as major online entertainment platforms like Tencent and iQIYI started beaming programmes that minted new idols.
The first episode of iQIYI’s programme in January 2018, called Idol Producer, attracted more than 100 million views within the first hour of broadcasting, and the number of voters had almost doubled by the end of the season.
Tencent soon followed with a show. It racked up more than three billion views, according to What’s on Weibo website.
The result? The floodgates opened for similar programmes with huge audience participation. Programmes aimed at finding all-boy bands, all-girls bands, and others, like above 30 women singers and dance competitions, soon started while satellite TV stations also joined the queue to tap into the fan economy. Some tried to attract contestants from other countries for an international flavour.
The race to expand the fan-base led to an array of staggering innovations in the entertainment sector – serial producers encouraging public participation in costume design in periodical dramas; authors writing plots; serial producers discussing characters with fans and singers inviting fans to help with lyrics. The popularity of these new programmes generated fans outside the country also which, in turn, spawned more money-making avenues.
Fans provided translations of TV dramas for their overseas counterparts on condition that they are not uploaded on YouTube to avoid piracy charges. Translation of modern novels, on which some serials were based, became another attraction.
Programme makers also found ways to enhance revenue. Online video platform Youku which launched a dance competition, offered those who paid subscribers the option to choose specific camera angles from which to view performances.
Head spinning yet? But this is just one level of this rabbit hole. It is way much more and layered if you want to go down this route.
Okay, back to the growth and power of fan clubs.
The fan club economy has continued to thrive. A report by Entgroup estimated that the fan economy generated US$14 billion by 2020 “with fans contributing about half the total through consumption of products and services related to the stars.”
The ever expanding market led to corporatisation of these fan clubs.
In January 2019, the Shanghai-based Radii, an independent platform covering China’s art scene, said in a report:
“While at first glance appearing to be a phenomenon limited to teenage fans and their limited pocket money, China’s Fan Economy has in fact grown into a standalone business — even an industry — that is built on fans’ fickle love of their favourite idols, as well as a complex network connecting talent, agents, social media channels, and major online video platforms.”
These clubs generate millions of yuan from concerts and merchandise sales, proving economic power. The forums are no longer loose alliances of like-minded fans but proper corporate structures, though most members receive no salary.
Says the Radii report:
“These … highly efficient online fan clubs, which have company-like structures usually consisting of formal departments such as Core Management, Art Design, Copywriting, Data, Comment Control, Public Relations, Finance, and Frontline — the last of which deals with direct, offline engagement.
“Hundreds of fans in these clubs concertedly coordinate online and offline efforts to support their idol of choice, and to make him or her appear more attractive and influential to viewers and brands.”
The fans plan voting strategy to ensure their idol’s popularity is ranked high, and often target rival campaigns against other fan clubs.
Some of these overzealous clubs overstep the line and authorities immediately spring into action. This could spell doom for their idols, as actor-singer Xiao Zhan found out.
Zhan, once a very popular star whose star power was sought after by luxury brands like Cartier, Gucci, Estee Lauder as well as beer and yoghurt companies, was dropped by them after one of his fan club started a fictional version of his popular TV series with more gay content than what was telecast.
The authorities banned the site; still Zhan was blamed by other fans for not reining in the wild fans. An online campaign started against him, and his ratings plunged.
Analysts tracking these events say fans are becoming increasingly influential in the industry. They can organise major promotions for their idols, from bus panels to advertisements in foreign media and even billboards in New York’s Times Square to celebrate their idol’s birthday.
They also boost sales of sponsors’ products, as most shows offer extra votes to fans who buy them. It has led to fans buying cartons of milk and yoghurt, and scanning the QR codes to activate their voting rights, then dumping the products which led to official warnings as President Xi Jinping had ordered a campaign against food wastage.
The authorities do, though rarely, tap into these fan clubs openly for political purposes. For example, an online campaign against Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest was started, purportedly by fans of popular actor Jackie Chan and Mulan actress Liu Yifei, when the pro-democracy camp began denouncing the movie idols supporting the government.
There was no evidence, of course, that it was an orchestrated campaign, but the Communist Party organs did hail the campaign with a hashtag #We all have an idol called China#
Unlike fans elsewhere, who would follow news about their idols closely, Chinese fan clubs go that extra mile to make sure their heroes remain popular and protected. And this can go to crazy levels. Like making songs of a singer who is hardly known outside China the top downloads on iTunes.
Writing in the newsletter Chaoyang Trap, Jaime Chu, a contributing editor of Spike magazine, saw a resemblance between the activities of fan club members in China and “some Western electoral politics as sports and a highly covert form of sports betting.”
An astute observation, indeed.
When information flow and internet campaigns have become major components in deciding the direction of societies, is this a dark horse that could raise a challenge in China where the authorities firmly control mainstream narratives?
Mark Young, entertainment business professor at the University of Southern California, told Nikkei Asia that these clubs provide an outlet for “pent-up energy” in societies where people cannot freely discuss politics, officials, religion, social issues or even current events.
China showed in 1989 its way of dealing with rebellious youth. But that was well before the advent of the internet.
As the Swedish schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, showed, in today’s globalized world, a protest by a lone kid can flareup rapidly into a mass rally across the world.
Teens are unpredictable, and China’s fast and furious fan clubs have shown they don’t obey the road rules all the time.