Prologue

Managing Expectations

Hi there. Thank you for subscribing to Active Faults. 

Let’s start with the idea of the “fault”, or duanceng (断层). 

This is a jargon coined by Chinese celebrity fans to describe their favourite star’s unparalleled influence and their supposedly drastic lead in the industry. Their clout is said to be without equal, so much so that there is a “chasm” or a “fault” between them and their competitors. Perhaps it’s the Chinese equivalent of Twitter fans’ overuse of “main character energy”. 

With how frequent this term is evoked, you’d think Chinese fandom is a site of geological marvel. In reality, the greatest rift exists not between celebrities. 

There is a considerable gap between research and the present when it comes to China’s now almost fully digitised media and entertainment industry, as well as Chinese celebrity fandom. Academic discussions lag behind the constantly evolving and, at the same time, rapidly disappearing phenomena in the virtual world of entertainment. This is a field of study where the relevance and validity of findings decays and mutates by the hour like it’s radioactive. Chinese aca-fans like me often find ourselves standing on and sinking into active fault lines where the landscape we observe swallows us whole into its tectonic shifts. 

We need to move faster if we want to capture what we see. 

There is likewise a chasm between canonical, hence Western, understandings of Chinese celebrities/fans and its actuality. They are often aligned with, and partially subsumed by the attention paid (if any at all) to (East) Asian case studies as a whole, while nuanced differences in social, cultural, and political contexts are completely disregarded. 

As you can tell from the name of this Substack, I write with the intention to address these temporal and perceptual gaps. These ramblings of mine that you’ve so adventurously subscribed to read will delve into the Chinese entertainment industry and its fans, which can be jointly referred to using the umbrella term fanquan (饭圈), fan circles.

I will share with you the most intriguing or noteworthy incidents in fanquan, alongside the latest updates in fanquan studies written in the Chinese language. 

What this will not be is a definitive conclusion of any sort. Think of me as a campus tour guide, wearing tacky logo shirts (most likely manufactured in China) and over-enthusiastically handing out freshers’ pamphlets with too much text that most won’t read.

I’m no professor, but I know my way around the neighborhood. I started to read Harry Potter fan fiction before I was old enough to own an iPod. I want to stir up conversations about what’s happening in and to Chinese fanquan, as an insider and an observer. Why?

Because I am and will be arguing, in everything I put out, that fanquan is a space of emergent discursive opportunities, sprouting civil action and changing consciousnesses. Its significance is often trivialised and undermined by its entertainment undertones. The following issues of this newsletter will cover the debates, protests, and habitual practices in fanquan to dispute this oversight.

As I weigh my words in this piece, I can’t help but feel as if the most glaring fault lies between me and every single one of you. I’ve been online long enough to know how meaning gets distorted when its building blocks are ghostlike alphabets made up by 0 and 1s. I might as well be speaking into the void, but I’m willing to shout until the rocks echo and I hope I’d get to hear your voice across the fractured land.

With that, let’s give ourselves a hug for a long, long year. 

Wishing you nothing but the best and see you soon!