03. Chinamaxxing
entertainment and fandom in a very Chinese time of their lives
Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.
The scene is this: I am queuing for a Steak Bake at Gregg’s. It’s lunch hour and the noises of the city drone on behind me, suitcases bumping on tactile pavings, sirens and horns cutting conversations up into slices. I pause the music in my headphones, anticipating a brief exchange with the cashier. Then I catch it, an almost inaudible snippet from the radio that the shop stereo has tuned into, announcing a new series on streaming platforms called “Young Sherlock”.
I got home that evening and opened my laptop like I was about to perform a religious ritual. In the past 15 years I have not missed a single Sherlock Holmes related franchise like there’s some kind of loyalty programme. Yet, I was stunned to find after forty minutes that I have no intention to continue watching. The visuality and colour gradients felt so airbrushed and soulless I want to call AI foul-play. The brisk dialogues and plot lines were meant to feel exhilarating enough to sustain our attention span, but it ended up being too broken for anyone to properly attach and process. The most visceral reaction I had for this underwhelming adaptation was when Sherlock, working as a porter at the University of Oxford, flaunted his Mandarin skills to a Chinese guest. His accent and pronunciation was so atrocious I burst out laughing.
This is not a fluke. I saw “Project Hail Mary” three weeks ago and the spaceship commander, played by a supposedly Chinese actor, also had lines in Mandarin with stiff intonations that I couldn’t understand at first. So what exactly is the deal with everybody being in a “very Chinese time of their lives?” What is up with this constant evocation of Motherland in Western media?
And most importantly, how does entertainment and fandom fit into the picture?
The trend didn’t start with who’s admittedly the most heartthrob Sherlock to have ever appeared on modern television. It started on TikTok in an improbable way, with IBS sufferers praising the Chinese trick of drinking a glass of hot water first thing in the morning. It threw me off, because I’m old enough to remember the racially charged taunting of Chinese tourists ordering hot water in American restaurants merely a decade before. My own family was on the receiving end of these micro-aggressions not so long ago, and apparently someone now decided the scripts should be flipped. Then, there are sound bites of Cantonpop oldies going viral left and right, all the while non-Chinese users film themselves strenuously lip-syncing (and failing) to the lyrics. Traits and customs that were once ridiculed—indoor shoelessness, using a proper rice cooker, boiling a pot of red dates and white fungus—have become exonerated, even celebrated.
My unease with this is how none of it translates into real-world interest about the country, its histories, cultural intricacies, strife and political dynamics beyond the Economist headlines. It is appealing only insofar as it is the antithesis, the Other Side with greener grass in the sense that we go to bed without hearing gunshots and Meituan delivers your food in twenty minutes. There’s little to no concrete intention or action in actually respecting the ethnic group and its intragroup multiplicities, granting them more opportunities in the work place, or ridding the daily discriminations they face in a hundred different subtle ways. All we see is that the country is the Opposite of the United States, Big and Safe and Convenient, Modern and Glassy and Powerful. It is Exotic and Theatrical and you can’t look away.
Over on the homefront, netizens are aware that everyone wants to be like them. Compilations of Tiktoks have been reposted onto Bilibili to gather millions of views. Some comments believe it’s harmless, it’s soft power that doesn’t cost us anything, and we should be proud that we’ve earned more street creds after the pandemic. Others point out the voyeurism—how this sudden curiosity feels derisive, if not effectively exploiting Chinese as an act in a circus performance.
A possible repercussion is that Chinese fanquan would become a spectacle more misconstrued than ever. Depictions and descriptions of Chinese entertainment and fan behaviours would become even more hyperbolical, fanciful and misinformed, all to serve as click baits for virality. Look towards a recent controversy on K-Pop Twitter, where a Chinese girl was sitting in the VIP section at a concert taking “check-in” photos (which came from the “인증 샷” culture in SK) for other fans for pay.
This is a relatively common practice in modern fanquan, where a fan who couldn’t make it to the show would pay another fan with a good seat to snap a pic of the stage with their WeChat ID in the shot. They would then post it on their own social media pretending they were there. Ridiculous and a little childish? Yes. But note that these are now the fanquan facets being cherry-picked for Western audiences. The most outlandish corners of the fan community are being put on blast because it sits nicely in a circus performance.
Another example is the song “Blueprint Supreme” by Canton rappers SKAI ISYOURGOD (揽佬) and AR Liu Fuyang. You won’t know who they are but trust me, you have most likely heard the tune.
“大展鸿图” is so much more than an earworm reel track, although the way it pastiches both China’s mainstream worldviews and rap culture goes over most foreigners’ head. Behind the grandiosity of “singing karaoke in my mansion” is a painful obsession with wealth that is decidedly unhip, which gives the song its poignancy. 揽佬 repeatedly references local superstitions and rituals that reflect an expediency typical to the region, a running joke among the people themselves. He adopted the opposite aesthetic to the Rednote-famous “old money”, a tacky and almost embarrassing hunger for social ascension that hints at a scarcity, a state of unbecoming and a desperate seek of nonexistent fortune. The refrain 来财 i.e. “money comes” is not a flex but a prayer.
Elle Men wrote a brilliant piece on him, which describes his discography as a representation of real “underground” that so many Chinese rappers falsely claim they endorse: horse-betting, poe-throwing, mahjong and petty gambling, less-than-a-dollar herbal teas, outdoor food shacks or the dai pai dong—middle class poverty. He sings about briberies, under-the-table manoeuvres, and the cryptic power struggles during “酒局”, networking drinks between businessmen. He lays out the opacity of the governing principles that puppeteer Chinese society.
This is the kind of unflinching authenticity that granted Wu Tiao Ren and Varihnaz their appeal. It is the same truth that “Ants” by 散人乐队 was trying to articulate: we’re living in a fucked-up world operating on a corrupted system that pushes us to climb and toil like ants. We are confused, disoriented, begging and manifesting, trying our hardest to survive and finding glimpses of joy in the impossible wasteland. Like his stage name connotes, 揽佬 is fully aware that the sky, “老天”, will forever be the god that determines our cosmic happenstances. He talks about the Buddist concept of “因果”, cause and effect, and says that the rules of the world are like the scoring boards of poker. Some kind of checks and balances are at play, but they’re fogged up and inconceivable through cheap cigarette smoke and the smell of cow innards stew. In the midst of it all he is but the “活络油” of Chinese rap, a kind of traditional massage oil from the corner shop that fraudulently alleviates muscle strains, a lie, a vague sense of hope and a means to get-by.
All of these nuances are lost on TikTok and Instagram to “POV: Day 1 of Being Chinese”. The top-voted Youtube comment on the song reads “Understanding: 0%, Vibe: 1000% ”. But I am certainly not accusing the casual listeners of their ignorance. The way 揽佬 sampled Cantonese opera “帝女花”, Chaoshan nursery rhymes and Hokkien folk tunes; invited a celebrated Hong Kong equestrian to star in his music video; and stuffed a range of Southern coastal dialects that are spoken across Taiwan, Macau and the wider Southeast Asia diaspora regions into Memphis rap beats is a lot to unpack. My point is that the algorithm game has flattened 揽佬’s complexity into a catchy hook and a marketable facet of Chineseness that’s convenient, when he’s clearly attempting to do more. In a short span of time he has somehow become the signature sound of everything Chinese on overseas short-video platforms, amassing over 4.7 million listeners on Spotify, a number that surpassed Jay Chou the original Mandopop King.
The same level of success is enjoyed by one “Master Wen” on TikTok, a “老登” looking Sichuan native who sings Euroamerican hit songs in front of clueless, disinterested elderlies in local teahouses. The comedic contrast of how Chinese he and his surroundings look versus how Western he sounds has garnered millions of views for him, including numerous direct acknowledgements from singers and celebrities. He got his own CGTN op-ed, after official outlets discovered his “organic” cultural exportation and rode on his coat tails. I find it fascinating how he is the complete opposite of 揽佬, reeling foreign audiences in with an element of familiarity versus piquing their interest with alienness. One pulls and another one pushes, but tension is created either way towards which attention flocks. They both have much wider followings and better reputation overseas.
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Thanks to TikTok, Master Wen’s home town Chongqing has become the synonym for “Cyberpunk” and Shenzhen has made a name for itself as the City of the Future. Where I see and hear unemployment and record low wages and overtime-induced heart attacks, a Chad in Tennessee sees “poverty eradication” and robot drivers and facial recognition payments and hears 揽佬 or 一剪梅 or John Cena saying “ice cream” in Mandarin. The average TikTok user in the United States would know “more” about China and simultaneously drift further away from its reality. My people, my language and my city skylines started to pop up on my algorithm in a way that’s unrecognisable to my eyes.
Meanwhile, foreign celebrities are breaching the Chinese market which subsequently fed back to the oversimplification of the country, the culture and its entertainment on the global stage. JVKE has an active Bilibili account, and so does Tyla. The week he was dragged by every single opera house, ballet company and fine art institution on the face of the planet, Timothee Chalamet was in Chengdu having a Ping Pong playoff with Chinese grandmas, promoting the release of Marty Supreme. He wore Mandarin-adorned film merch, drank tea on plastic low stools, and sold moldy tofu (a local snack viral on TikTok) in a street market. Likewise, the Devil Who Wears Prada crew went to Shanghai for the grand finale of its Asia press tour. When the footage of these stunts finds its way back to Western platforms, it will reinforce the flattened and oversimplified impression of Chineseness, championed by faces like Eileen Gu who attended the press tour despite having nothing to do with the film.
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Part of me is certain that flatness is what They want. A polished China is the safest to serve on a platter to the prying eyes of “境外势力”, almost as a way of rubbing it in when illusions of Western civility and integrity start to crack. This would explain why Chinese entertainment has become so self-conscious it rendered all internal criticism half-hearted. The recently published “偶像与我” was another disappointing fanquan analysis to read, where the author does not have any fan experience herself and dabbled in fan culture from an “objective, scholarly” standpoint. It makes mention of the “system” that encouraged “irrational” fan behaviours, but stops short at calling company names or elaborating on how the system functions. Other hot-off-the-press fanquan studies include “编织故事的人” and “饭圈纪实”, which probably contain the same core message: fanning practices exist in isolation and they should remain that way. Not dissected in conjunction with politics or the capitalistic economy, not justified, and most importantly of all not broadcasted internationally to embody Chineseness. I hope I am wrong when I get my hands on these two titles.
Coincidentally, I’m also noticing this kind of window-dressing in places I wouldn’t normally expect. Months prior to the release of their long-anticipated reunion album, BTS kickstarted a publicity campaign at such a scale that you would think they’re running for president. The most controversial by far was their Gwanghwamun concert, an outdoor urbanscape takeover at the capital’s historic landmark that was obviously vying for the same level of theatricality as SEVENTEEN’s Jamsu Bridge show.
HYBE reportedly spent over 180 million won on site rental alone. What’s interesting is how the administration colluded. Seoul authorities projected a crowd of ~260,000, and allegedly spent at least 10 billion won in taxpayer money to cover the costs of deploying 22% of the city’s police force, as well as stationing fire department personnel in the surrounding area, implementing traffic control, etc. The real attendance number is around 40,000 according to the Seoul police (HYBE claimed it was over 100,000), and even then Twitter suspected that some of the audience members were stand-ins.
With over 33 hours of major road closures and station curfews for over 8 hours (during rush hour), the Gwanghwamun concert achieved the exact opposite of what it set out to do. It infuriated a good portion of the general public and fans alike, with how much disruption it incurred for a fraction of the supposed “impact” it promised. All I saw online that day was outrage at how the shenanigan forced attending fans to go through an uncomfortable body search and even forced a couple to cancel their wedding because of the restrictions. It also shut down tourist attractions, and caused massive waste in the surrounding convenience stores who over-stocked their shop anticipating a much higher footfall.
Some criticised the insensitive song choice of “Fire”, a day after a tragic fire broke out in Daejeon. Of course, other corners of the internet including the Rolling Stone will tell you that BTS has still got it, the turnout was ginormous, and it was another instance of South Korea establishing its dominance on an international scale. I saw group dynamics that felt off and awkward, a middle-of-the-road album and a splintered, disappointed fandom. A chat with a Army friend informed me that their album name “Arirang” was a direct order from Bang Sihyuk, the CEO of Hybe, who wanted them to highlight Korean heritage from song production to music video despite protests from the members. It is clear that groups like BTS are being co-opted to appear as South Korea incarnate. I had thought that celebrities from a democracy would not have to carry such a burden.
I had the honour of being interviewed by Collin Smith for the Guardian recently, which culminated in this fascinating piece. When I said that people are exhausted of BTS and Blackpink, this is what I mean: fanquan is fatigued by theatrics and glam, especially when they smell a whiff of manipulation from the top. It is not the inconveniences posed by the Gwanghwamun incident that rattled the citizens, but how the government could be twisting arms and pulling strings to extract a national identity from entertainment.
Let’s remind ourselves what the people have been craving instead. The viral handyman I’ve written about has ushered in a trend on short-video platforms. Other working class content creators have started to use the same background track for their videos as they go around the villages tending to sick animals, or selling groceries from their truck, attracting 6 and 7 figure engagements. The song has become an anthem for hard-working manual labourers, hidden like ants by the way this country has folded inward, holding up “Chineseness” from a darker corner that will never reach TikTok. One of my favourite accounts in the past couple of months is this stir-fry vendor that cooks quick lunches for construction workers from his van. The way his meals looked so appetising, nutritionally balanced and heartily portioned gave one of his videos 11 million views. He’s shown such easy kindness to every single worker, and so did the guy that uses a Glambot to film his renowned “working class heroes” series.
The rise of content like this should be answer enough as to why fandoms everywhere no longer have any patience or respect for celebrities. They now stalk and hunt down idols like NCT’s Haechan who broke the dating ban in a “pig-catching” mission, and curse him out in front of his face. The violence streak I predicted earlier this year is already playing out.
What they want instead is something earthy, tacky, the way 揽佬 wanted to come across. Something on the ground, under the ground, looking towards the sky that is our god.
The 揽佬 section is my favorite observation. The algorithm doesn't just flatten the music, it inverts it — a song about scarcity and desperate prayer becomes a vibe, the hunger becomes aesthetic. What you're describing with "来财" being a prayer not a flex is exactly the kind of nuance that can't survive the format it's being distributed in. The TikTok version of Chineseness is always going to be the one that's convenient to consume. The harder question is whether enough people will eventually follow the thread back to the real thing, or whether the flattened version just becomes what Chineseness means to the people who only know it from outside.
I know this is not your main point, but hard same on Young Sherlock.