No Beta 09: Cixi Hysteria

The Week of 12th of May

Hi there. Welcome to Active Faults.

This week, fanquan is talking about…

On Weibo, trending at #1: 韩红请战歌手

Han Hong asks to join Singer 2024

The always-melodramatic “Singer” is back for another season. Produced by Hunan TV, this more pretentious version of the Voice of China returns to neiyu while, again, proving my predictions right. This year’s lineup of powerful vocalists is probably their most culturally and ethnically diverse yet - over half are from abroad, including the American singer Chante Moore and the Moroccan-Canadian singer Faouzia Ouihya. During the first few episodes of the show, the “foreigners” immediately “cooked” neiyu with their top-notch performances.

The only mainland diva in the roster is Na Ying, who’s seen by the viewers as the “sole defender” of neiyu’s image of competence and the last woman standing who represents the nation’s ability to belt high notes. Netizens are actually comparing her to Empress Dowager Cixi (falsely rumoured as her great-grandmother) fending the last dynasty of China from Western powers, with live audience members calling her “叶赫那拉” the Manchurian surname of the Empress during the broadcast, to which Na Ying replies: “YOU go on that stage and see what’s it like!”

meme of Na Ying with the Qing-dynasty headwear and caption “I want foreign people dead”

Today, several mainland vocalists “heroically” rose up to the challenge, including the half-Tibetan singer Han Hong and ex-Super Girl (China’s original reality competition show that gave Li Yuchun her fame) contestant Ji Minjia. They wrote on Weibo that they would willingly “join the battle” (this is a literal translation) with the foreign singers. This is what Ji Minjia wrote:

I want to solo-battle/duel those foreign friends (外国友人)…

I haven’t posted on Weibo in a while and I can’t calm my mind after yesterday’s episode. Where is the dignity of Neiyu? Chinese football (no idea why she said this here because it doesn’t make sense as a sentence) It’s not like we don’t want to defend the Chinese football goals but it’s honestly xxxxx, hard to describe in a single sentence (???) As a member of the national team I! Want! To! Fight!

Like wow. Calm down, it’s not that serious. And I don’t need to ramble much about Han Hong for you to grasp the subtext. She was born in Tibet. She sings about Tibetan landscapes. She’s a regular at CCTV. She graduated from the People’s Liberation Army Arts School.

It seems to me right now that fanquan is just finding it really funny: a collapsing neiyu being so outlandishly outrun by “foreign influences”, and then celebrities, perhaps under directions of Singer’s marketing team, escalating the matter to a corny, cringey level of a battle between nations for views, while some jingoistic mass actually joins in on the discourse.