1. Introduction
[1.1] On February 29, 2020, Chinese users found themselves unable to access Archive of Our Own (AO3). Confirmed later by the @OTWComms on Sina Weibo (Weibo), it was not caused by any technical failure of the website but a deliberate interruption of internet access by China. AO3 users from a wide range of subcultural groups then suspected that the fan base of Xiao Zhan (the Chinese pop singer and actor) should be blamed because they had been publicly organizing a mass report of several real person slash fan fics involving Xiao Zhan to the censorship department of the Chinese government in the name of "toxic pornography" and "humiliation of celebrity." Since the Chinese government has long imposed strict censorship on online pornography, it is believed that a large number of reports might push the government to block access to AO3. The angry AO3 users in China then united themselves under the Weibo tag of "227 great union" and "227 historical moment" and launched a retaliatory campaign against Xiao Zhan's fan community, including boycotting brands and productions that Xiao Zhan speaks for and flooding Weibo and other social platforms with criticism of Xiao Zhan and his fans. The fans of Xiao Zhan immediately organized themselves to fight back. The clash between the two parties has lasted for more than one year and so far there is no sign of a settlement.
[1.2] The organized assault from Xiao Zhan fans caught the Chinese subcultural groups by surprise, as it only took days for them to have the website successfully blocked. However, it is not the first time that the Chinese public has had to acknowledge such a capability of the highly organized fan community of Chinese media celebrities. They are capable of exerting their influence on digital platforms by adopting collective strategies to manipulate data traffic. Media press has covered the stories about their growing influence: the month-long celebration of Karry Wang's birthday on an LED billboard in New York's Times Square (Shan 2019); the coordinated purchasing action taken by fans of Kris Wu leading to the top sales of his single on US iTunes ("Singer" 2018), and so on. The image of the newly empowered fan community in China seems to fit into the term creative "prosumers" (Toffler 1981, 266).
[1.3] Jenkins (2006) uses double-direction convergence to describe the current relationship between media companies and consumers: on the one hand, media companies learn how to make use of media data flows to expand their potential market and revenue; on the other hand, media users try to bring media contents under their control and collaborate with other users with the emerging new communication technology (18). This convergence has prevailed in China in the recent decade. On the one hand, the corporate sector has begun to pick up the idea of a fandom economy as fans become more visible and empowered with the help of social media technologies. On the other hand, fans become more aware of what they can do with online data traffic as they actively participate in social media practices. Zhang and Negus (2020) introduced the concept of "data fans," who understand how their online activities are being tracked and analyzed as metrics evaluating the popularity of their idols and who intellectually invent individual or collective strategies to manipulate the data collected by digital platforms (data manipulation). In this sense, fans are characterized as clearminded and active participants who have an insightful understanding of the logic of a data-driven entertainment industry and seek to challenge the traditional top-down structure of the industry. Therefore some Chinese scholars have suggested that the fans of young pop idols are no longer passive consumers but a new generation with "creative imagination, democracy, cooperation" who could contribute to the cultivation of civil society (Zheng 2017) and force the industry to abandon the traditional top-down structure (Zhao 2017).
[1.4] But questions are left to be answered: how can fans access professional knowledge about the industry while most of the information is in the form of confidential industrial secrets? Behind their seemingly collective strategy on data manipulation, does each individual fan equally grapple with the rules and ideology behind a variety of technical features and settings of digital platforms? On Weibo, a platform that is believed to be the major space where fans interact, fans learn to play with Weibo's algorithm to boost their idol's popularity. For instance, fans learn that the media and institutions can simply pay for trending positions for their posts, so in order to fight back, they change the data flow by "flushing" the unwanted trending posts of their celebrities (Yin 2020). But the exact rules behind the algorithm have never been published by Weibo. According to Yin, fans acquire this information from online consensus and some successive experience of collective actions. But this knowledge doesn't always come from their own experiences. When individual fans search for a celebrity's name or follow his/her Weibo Super Topic (Chao Hua), a special hashtag with its own web page which can be managed by its topic hosts as a centralized platform gathering all relevant information and discussion, they will see hundreds of thousands of posts about data manipulation flooding in. If they want to adapt to the community culture, they need to follow a series of instructions written by fan leaders, mostly about data manipulation. While Yin considers fan attempts at data controlling as "potential collective intelligence," I instead interpret them as cultivated acts by a group of fan leaders. Ordinary individual fans know little about the data mechanisms of Weibo or other social media platforms and how the media industry or commercial brands interpret the value of such data, while fan leaders teach the whole community the means of data manipulation as if they are concluded. And individual fans take it for granted and believe that fan leaders hold a correct view of the unspoken rules.
[1.5] When Zhu and Han (2017) analyzed the fan community of the famous Chinese boy band TFBOYS, they discovered that even though teenage fans account for a greater proportion of the population, the authority of the community lies mostly in the hands of adult fans, who are capable of demonstrating their purchasing power and collective strategies to promote their idol and of exerting their influence on decisions made by media industries. If the majority of teenage fans are under the command or guidance of a group of key opinion leaders, the autonomy of the fan community should be questioned. In addition, it should be noted that fan leaders might also lack a thorough understanding of the mechanism behind the media industries, which might lead them to a wrong decision. In the fraud case involving the fan-organized data team of Chinese idol Meng Meiqi (Xu 2019), fan leaders claimed they didn't fully understand the enterprise certification (blue V) of Weibo and got themselves into a fraud case, causing reputational damage both for the idol and for her fan base (Xu 2019; Tian 2019).
[1.6] In this article, with the case study of Xiao Zhan's fan community, I argue that beyond a loosely connected community that is the common perception of fandom, the Chinese fan community of popular idols could also be a highly centralized one, in which a majority of fans are controlled and exploited by a faction of fan leaders, challenging the optimistic view of fans' empowerment through convergence culture. I first clarify the identity of fan leaders and the evolving process as well as different identities within the Chinese media fandom. After that, I introduce the top-down structure of the idol's official fan club, comprising multilevel functional groups that are established to manage different fan practices and thus control a large amount of data traffic and direct it to help generate commercial profit for the idols and the brands they endorse. I then explore how fan leaders' management of fan gossip creates a discourse of a vulnerable idol and motherly fans that persuades individual fans to willingly devote themselves to their idol's popularity and follow the orders given by fan leaders.
[1.7] The findings are based on the posts and comments publicly accessible on Xiao Zhan's Weibo Super Topic, as well as a series of social media accounts held by his fan leaders, including his global official fan club and its subgroups responsible for different specialized tasks. Being a fan of Chinese media celebrities myself, I browse contents and search actively with key words that are frequently used by the Chinese fan community for their daily practices based on my personal knowledge of Chinese fandom, including those that are invented to avoid public scrutiny. I focus on Weibo because it is the most popular social media platform in China to foster virtual interaction for media fandom, from which a large amount of data traffic is generated and visualized. Also, the framework of Weibo ensures the visibility of the crucial part of the fan group structure.
2. Fan leaders and the influence of K-pop fandom
[2.1] In this essay, fan leaders are portrayed as individual opinion leaders or fan clubs (formal or informal) who set the agenda and organize the collective action of daily fan activities, while they also function as intermediaries maintaining a close communication with the idol's media companies and uniting individual fans. This part of Chinese media fandom is under the influence of K-pop fandom. The Korean Wave (Hallyu) hit China in the 1990s with popular Korean dramas; the subsequent Hallyu 2.0 drives Chinese consumption of Korean pop culture mostly based on social media (Won 2017). The second wave cultivated the Chinese fandom of Korean pop idols and contributed to the subsequent development of Chinese idol fandom.
[2.2] On the one hand, K-pop fans are considered a crucial factor for the global success of K-pop. On the other hand, they are deemed immaterial labor, producing the cultural contents of commodity without much financial reward (Sun 2020). In the fan community, a group of "big fans" are considered not only "cultural intermediaries" who bridge individual fans and media companies (Leung 2017) but also opinion leaders and economic agents who hold a higher position in the hierarchy embedded in fan groups (Zhang and Fung 2017). The fan activities organized by these big fans consist of a handful of practices that are later common in fandoms of Chinese pop idols, such as fans gathering at airports to greet their idols, delivering food support (or other presents) to film crews, crowdfunding for birthday presents for idols, organizing fans to contribute to the view counts of music videos or votes of online polling activities, and so on. These supportive activities had rarely been seen before the K-pop fandom exerted its influence on China. According to Lu Chen (2018), such fan practices were specially cultivated by Korean companies and their Chinese partners to market their idols in China. Chen believes that Korean media companies took over the originally self-organized fan organization in Baidu Tieba (a famous Chinese communication platform) and transformed it into a tool to promote idols; Chen specifically points out that some of the administrators of these fan organizations are staff of Korean media companies while others are "veteran fans" who cooperate with companies.
[2.3] It should be noted that the data in Chen (2018)'s book were collected before 2011. The ecology of Chinese media fandom has evolved a lot within the past decade as the local media industry has greatly developed with the opportunity window following the blockage of Korean artists in most Chinese public performances (especially in traditional media) in 2016. Some of the practices persist while new local characteristics have been developed. Local media industries and digital platforms have begun to recognize the potential of idol fandom and tried to leverage fan bases, while the fan leaders gradually have learned how to hold tighter control of their fan base and strategically make use of the algorithm of the platforms to boost idols' popularity. The data fandom has become so prevalent in China that it has spread from the fan bases of singing and dancing groups to TV and movie actors, musical actors, and all other entertainment areas. But I have no intention to claim that fan leaders including official fan clubs or other big fans are under the total control of idols and their media agents. There is little way to confirm whether fan leaders are employed by companies or are willing to collaborate with them because of financial rewards or other reasons. There are fans who, driven by love and the reward of being closer to their idols, establish fan clubs themselves. Meanwhile, there are also fans who are employed by media agents or self-employed to run the fan clubs or other informal fan groups for the sake of money. What can be confirmed is that they do maintain close communication with media agents, bridging idols and fans. But so far I have no evidence to conclude whether data manipulation or other online/off-line activities are under the direct order of media agents. From open records, fan leaders generally support decisions made by idols and their media agents and assist them in most activities. However, some fan clubs openly accuse the media agents or idols' managers of not giving enough support or dealing with fan activities inappropriately. In addition, some of the idols and their media agents have publicly asked their fan clubs to refund the money raised for supportive activities or even asked the fan clubs to dismiss themselves. The variety of interactions suggest that there is no single type of relationship between fan leaders and idols.
3. The Wei Fen community
[3.1] Before going deeper into the structure and hierarchy embedded in the fan community, I should first make clear that the fan practices I analyze here, though prevalent, do not represent the whole of Chinese media fandom. Not every fan joins certain fan groups or engages themselves in data labor. Fans connect themselves to contents and communities through diverse approaches. As Matt Hills admits, "fandom is performed differently and can mean different things in different micro-contexts, in different moments of social interaction, and even on different platforms" (quoted in Hills and Greco 2015). I would like to point out that the highly organized fan practices tend to be more common in some fan groups than in others.
[3.2] Two categories of fan identities account for a large proportion of fans in Chinese fandom: only stan/solo stan (Wei Fen) and fans who ship their idol with other celebrities as a fictional/real couple (CP Fen). This is the case of Xiao Zhan, since he attracted a large fan base with The Untamed (2019), a bromance-centered TV series adapted from an original boys' love (BL) novel. His fan base then consisted of both Wei Fen and CP Fen (who ship him and the other leading character Wang Yi Bo). In Chinese fandom, the identity of Wei Fen is mostly established on the excluding basis of other tastes in the big fan community because Wei Fen tend to believe that if fans really love their idols, they should focus on her/him alone. Additionally, even though the business model of BL (generally in the name of bromance to avoid censorship) pairings achieve some success, the media industry is still sensitive to homosexuality-related contents. Thus, in order to ensure their idol's long term success, CP Fen are generally deemed to be in a lower moral ground in the fan community and excluded from the Wei Fen community. In Xiao Zhan's case, his Wei Fen and CP Fen groups established two separate Super Topics. In his solo Super Topic, one of the rules is written as "no mentioning of other artists" or "your post or even ID will be blocked" (Xiao Zhan Online Promotional Team, March 26, 2020). Moreover, since his solo Super Topic is managed by members of his official fan club (that has been officially recognized by Xiao Zhan's studio), Wei Fen consider themselves in a more privileged position than CP Fen. The fan club assists Xiao Zhan in a lot of official activities mainly organized by his studio as opposed to fans' private gatherings, such as fan meetings sponsored by commercial brands. If fans want to participate in these activities, they first prove themselves to be a Wei Fen. That is, for individual fans who want to deeply involve themselves in the fan activities, they need to set up a clean profile as Wei Fen and avoid CP contents in their homepage.
[3.3] Comparatively, CP Fen of Chinese pop culture belong to a loosely connected digital community. They tend to have a more casual and spontaneous attitude toward their daily practices. Most of them allow real person slash to be published within their Super Topics and some of them are even open to a more diverse interpretation of the idol's image such as feminizing images of male idols or masculinizing those of female idols, while both of these are less tolerated in Wei Fen Super Topics. Part of the reason why Xiao Zhan's fans (mostly Wei Fen) reported the real person slash to government surveillance is that it portrayed him as a queer sex worker. Also, even though some of the CP Fen groups perform data manipulation as well, a large proportion of their daily activities are more spontaneous and less collective. The Untamed attracted a lot of CP Fen who ship Xiao Zhan and Wang Yi Bo; they upload the ship's cute moments from the behind the scenes or clips of TV shows or video interviews. Some CP Fen also add likes or watch them multiple times to strategically promote the video's popularity. But it can be observed from the comments that fans are having fun with it while they watch it; they make diverse interpretations of the video contents and contribute to the discourse of their relationship. However, the practices of Wei Fen are more organized and collective. The Xiao Zhan Planning Team of the official fan club recruited fan vids to promote Xiao Zhan's single "Guang Dian" with detailed requirements and financial rewards. The Xiao Zhan Promotional Team of All Platforms then constantly promotes fan vids on his Weibo homepage and organizes fans to boost the popularity of these videos with careful instructions about how to acquire membership in the video sharing sites, add likes, and leave comments. In the Wei Fen community, the most stressed principle is "follow the official." The term "official" is a broad concept: the idol and his/her company, business partners, the official fan club who is believed to maintain a close communication with the idol's company and to acknowledge the concept behind their decisions. Distinguished from other interest groups, Wei Fen groups are more accustomed to organized and collective actions; individually spontaneous acts are less common. Therefore, the highly organized and well-trained practices discussed in this essay better correspond to the Wei Fen community though I do not deny the fact that some CP Fen groups may have similar practices.
4. The centralized structure of the official fan club and its control on Super Topic
[4.1] The Xiao Zhan Official Fanclub describes itself as a self-organized fan club, but it has been verified as the only official fan club for Xiao Zhan and given an enterprise certification on Weibo. It has established social media accounts on several platforms, but its Weibo account is the one Chinese fans mainly interact with. Under the official fan club, several subgroups are set up to hold different responsibilities, each of them having one or more Weibo accounts. Xiao Zhan's official fan club comprises a series of functional groups, including the one for chart beating (Da Bang), which is to increase the views or votes to win first place on charts for their idol; comment manipulation (Kong Ping), which is to flood the comment areas with good comments or add likes to the good ones so the bad ones would be rarely seen by others; online promotion (Wang Xuan), planning (Ce Hua), philanthropic projects (Gong Yi Xiang Mu), and so on. For some of the subgroups, such as chart beating, comment manipulation, and online promotion, which require a large number of individual fans to contribute their labor, they set up numerous chat-groups on instant communication platforms like WeChat, QQ, or Weibo chat-group function, so that they can deliver tasks and provide detailed instructions in real time.
[4.2] Beyond Weibo accounts and chat-groups, the Weibo Super Topic of the idol is also controlled by the official fan club. Super Topic is a function introduced by Weibo in 2016, as an interest-based contents community. When people publish a post tagged with a Super Topic, the post pops up when someone searches for the same topic. However, different from hashtags, each Super Topic has its own homepage for people to join and follow updated posts. Also, users can apply to be hosts of the Super Topic, entitled to manage the topic, including blocking some of the posts or user IDs. Every follower of the Super Topic can contribute by posting or commenting to elevate his/her level in that Super Topic, from which a hierarchy within the community is imposed. Thus, even though it is built on a social media platform like Twitter, the Weibo Super Topic can be managed like a closed platform as a chat group or forum. But unlike any of them, all of its contents can be accessed by the public. Additionally, Weibo devised a ranking list to show the popularity of each Super Topic. Fans interpret the rank of the Super Topic as one of the metrics to evaluate their idol's popularity. In July 2019, the Super Topic of Xukun Cai fought with the Super Topic of Jay Chou for the top rank in the celebrity category, in order to show who is the most popular singer of Chinese pop music. Thus, from the fans' perspective, Super Topic is much more than an information-sharing space, and it should be properly managed. Rules of posting and the blocking policy are made clear there. In the Super Topic of Xiao Zhan, among the "rules of blocking" (Xiao Zhan Online Promotional Team, March 26, 2020), they write that any negative comment is forbidden; in the "double appeal" they ask fans to publish more posts with "high quality," including information about philanthropic projects, fan vids, task lists (data manipulative tasks), recruitment of the fan club, positive comments on Xiao Zhan's movies or songs, and so on. By being the hosts of the Super Topic, Xiao Zhan's fan club then control the discussion within it. Although, theoretically, established rules are made public and open to challenging opinions, it should be noted that hosts of the Super Topic, instead of any public discussion or open voting process, are the ones to make the final judgement. Once an ID is blocked by the hosts, one can never join the Super Topic or post anything there.
5. Fan club's control over individual fans on routinized data manipulation
[5.1] The centralized organization is built to collect individual efforts and put them on specific tasks; that is, in order to get the task fulfilled in time, the fan leaders will decide which task should be taken, and the rest of the fans follow. On a daily basis, the functional groups of the fan club post a wide range of tasks on their homepages tagged with the Super Topic. For the chart beating and comment manipulation, the tasks and hyperlinks to the destined web page are posted with step-by-step instructions to make sure everyone gets it right. Individual fans can publish similar tasks in the Super Topic, but fans usually suggest not to beat such "wild chart" (Ye Bang), which means charts that are not promoted by the fan club. The same pattern applies to anticriticism (Fan Hei). Making use of the reporting mechanism of Weibo, fan leaders organize a large number of fans to report certain negative comments to Weibo censorship claiming "rumor" or "personal abuse" and have them deleted. A list of hyperlinks to reported accounts are posted coupled with instructions telling fans which type of report should be chosen. Such collective activities are new to many first-time fans. They are gradually cultivated to be familiar with such fan culture by informative posts (Ke Pu Tie) in the Super Topic. These posts inform them about the structure of the official fan club and the instruction to follow these groups to fullfill the data task, ensuring new fans follow the guidance of the official fan club.
[5.2] As Zhang and Negus (2020) illustrate, in the data group, a team of skilled and knowledgeable fans strategically allocate other fans into a group to achieve the goal they have set. During the collective action, individuals surrender their independent thinking to the judgement of fan leaders. Most of the time, they are excluded from the decision-making process. They tend to believe the official club should decide what is the best for their idol. Most fans who vote with their time and money know little about what they vote for. It is well known that fans are "excessive consumers" who buy a large number of copies to boost the CD sales of their idols; they are also "ideal consumers," since their consumption behavior is highly predictable (Cavicchi 1998, 62). But in this case, they can also be manipulated. Two of the most popular charts of Chinese celebrities are "Xunyee" and "Star Right Chart" (Ming Xing Quan Li Bang). When the fan club assembled fans to vote for Xiao Zhan, they wrote that "Star Right Chart reveal celebrities' influence on different areas of entertainment industry based on real data and scientific methods" (Xiao Zhan Data Team, February 26, 2020), emphasizing the importance of the chart in the name of "revealing the influence of celebrity" but without explaining the detailed mechanism. The chart is an official account on WeChat; according to its rules of activity, the chart only reveals how many WeChat accounts come to vote on a daily basis (one account can vote three times for a specific category). Between March and June 2020, with the negative impact of the 227 event and the shutdown because of Covid-19, he had no TV program or movie on the air and lost most spokesman jobs for commercial brands, but he still topped the rank of Star Right Chart. In his Super Topic, some of his fans interpreted his rank as the persistence of his popularity in the entertainment industry and believed that the industry would not give up on him because of such "astonishing number" (@VoyagerSally, March 29, 2020). It seldom occurs to them that it remains unclear whether the industry takes the chart as a reference when they evaluate Xiao Zhan's commercial values. Fans strongly believe in those interpretations of data in the Super Topic, without questioning that most of them are published and screened by fans or the official fan club.
[5.3] As for another major activity of Wei Fei community, anticriticism, the fan club also posts without much explanation how those negative comments are judged as "rumors" or "libels." Because the hyperlinks they provide don't jump to the original posts but directly to the reporting page of Weibo, fans cannot read the words they report; they can only see the IDs and choose the type of report based on the instruction given by the anticriticism team (figure 1). Nevertheless, fans click in and report to the platform censorship without much thought. It doesn't take long for reports to reach the target number followed by the deletion of the message. When some opinion leaders like Xiao Tu Zan Bi asked fans to report AO3 to the surveillance department in China, they called for action in the name of defending Xiao Zhan's image from those who write corrupting homosexual fiction to disgrace him. Many fans didn't personally read the fan fictions they reported, nor did they know anything about AO3 beyond the fact that it is a website posting erotic fan fiction. Thus, in order to successively achieve the task, fan leaders provide detailed instructions, so that fans can describe those erotic fan fictions and AO3 to the surveillance department even though they haven't read them personally. Terms such as "open platform," "under-age," and "pornography" are recommended, because it will "push the government to take action" (February 26, 2020).
Figure 1. Screen capture of one reporting page (on Weibo iOS) posted by one anticriticism team of Xiao Zhan's fan club on February 29, 2020. Clicking on any link posted by the team, one would see the same interface as this.
[5.4] The same pattern also applies to comment manipulation. Rather than reflecting spontaneous expression and interaction, the comments in the fan community are meticulously screened and promoted. On a regular basis, the official fan club initiates manipulative activity, known as "team building" (Tuan Jian), a term originally used in company management that has been appropriated by fandom to refer to manipulative activities since it can also build up team spirit within a fan group. The fan club will determine a specific target, such as Xiao Zhan's Weibo posts or campaign posts of the commercial brands he represents. The fan club decides the exact number of comments everyone should achieve, provides a selection of positive comments for fans to copy and paste, picks up several comments for fans to add likes to, and keeps fans informed if they have successfully accomplished the task. It is all well organized. Thus, in the comment area under Xiao Zhan's own Weibo or others relevant to him, one can see repetitive terms and words as if they are produced by robots.
6. Fan club and intensified exploitation by the industry
[6.1] For fans, data manipulation can help their idol to stand out in the media industry while for the industry, it is something that can be exploited for their business success. The companies who recognize the great potential of fandom may even tailor their business strategies to leverage such force. They increasingly engage fandom as part of their production process and leverage the fan labor without payment.
[6.2] The value of fan labor is well recognized by many Chinese brands or even international brands taking their step to Chinese markets; they learn to incorporate fan leaders to set out a marketing campaign. As the older celebrities' influence on the general public continues to decline, the niche influence by a wider selection of celebrities starts to take its place (Daxue Consulting 2020). Beyond the traditional "brand ambassador," they are now using "brand partners," product- or line-specific ambassadors to target consumers in different circumstances (Wu 2020). Apart from the older celebrities, who have established their career in movies or music industries and whose public images are well accepted by the general public, brands gradually turn to younger idols because of the considerable traffic driven by their massive followings.
[6.3] Fan labor clearly has its dark and bright sides (Stanfill and Condis 2014). On the one hand, fans are believed to be exploited by the media industry; on the other hand, all activities can be seen as free choices. Sometimes, fans devote themselves to increasing the worth of mass media productions without financial reward in exchange for the relief of not being sued for the use of value (De Kosnik 2013). This negotiation model derives from the conflict between fans and producers involving copyright law. But in the case of Chinese media fandom, fans devote their labor not for the use of content materials but to proudly be part of the cultivation of their idols. They proclaim themselves as "female data worker" (Shu Ju NüGong). The term might imply fans' recognition of fan identity and the media industry. One the one hand, they recognize their labor is being exploited by the media industry as workers whose work is repetitious and uncreative. On the other hand they happily accept that because they know the data traffic they generate will be transformed into their idol's success and they will be the ones who determine that success.
[6.4] Much more than that, fans are organized under the command of fan leaders who adopt a more than welcoming attitude to cooperate with the strategy of production sectors (celebrities, their studios, performative companies, and commercial brands they endorse). Most of the data traffic directed by fan leaders are specially designed to cater to commercial campaigns. In August 2020, the body care sector of Olay announced their cooperation with Xiao Zhan on Weibo while its official Weibo account immediately followed his Super Topic. Since then, it regularly signed in the Super Topic and elevated its level in the Super Topic as if it is one of Xiao Zhan's fans. It invited Xiao Zhan to have live streaming and off-line meeting events with his fans. During the music microfilm campaign between February 23 and March 8, Olay engaged fans in sales promotion of facial care products, with a series of fan-tailored rewards: a four-episode music video filmed by Xiao Zhan as "Super Bonus for Fans" and gift boxes with "Exclusive Products of Xiao Zhan," including Olay products, coupons, and postcards with Xiao Zhan's images. During the online communication, Olay always called the fans "sisters" or "little cuteness" to create a sense of intimacy with the fan community. The interaction with fans became the spotlight of the celebrity endorsement.
[6.5] During Xiao Zhan's endorsement of Olay body care, the official fan club operated as an important role to bridge the brand and Xiao Zhan's fan base. The number of comments, reposts, and likes under Olay's campaign posts became the set target that should be achieved. Before the live streaming, the data team asked fans to send positive comments inside the live house, as a way of showing Xiao Zhan's popularity and quickly brushing off negative ones if there are any. Under the promoting posts on the Olay official account, fans commented with their own screenshots of purchasing orders that, on the one hand, could urge others to buy more; on the other hand, it was also more convenient for fans to check whether they had reached the target number or not. Beyond the data traffic, the fan club played an important role to coordinate the off-line activities. Before Olay's new year fan meeting, some fans reported they could not participate in the lucky draw of event tickets because of the restrictions on mailing service. The official fan club intervened and helped to add a new activity venue beforehand. Apart from the official event held by Olay, the fan club also sought cooperation with the brand and helped to promote its products. The northern China branch of the official fan club coorganized a promotional activity with the Olay counter of one shopping center in Shenyang: fans who came to the counter for a product testing would receive an Olay gift box and a free ticket to Xiao Zhan's movie Jade Dynasty (2019), which could be enjoyed later in the movie theatre in the same shopping center. The fan club was there to ensure the successful execution of these marketing campaigns.
7. Elaborate control of information by the official fan club
[7.1] Prevailing in the Chinese media fandom (especially among Wei Fen) is a discourse that consistently keeps fans' advocacy and loyalty for the idol, which I summarize as a data-oriented industry, a vulnerable idol, and motherly fans. Fans perceive that the entertainment industry is data-oriented; instead of individual talents and artistic performance, sales data is the most important parameter to prove an artist's value. What's more, sales data for the entertainment industry can be bought, which means that artists backed by big companies can achieve higher sales in exchange for greater exposure and further support. The idol chosen by fans, however, even with full talents and effort, might not get enough exposure because he/she is independent or from a small company. Here come the fans, a group of equally powerless individuals compared to the media industry, who are willing to devote all their passion, energy, time, and money to support this humble artist, to make him/her great, shiny, and successful. The dedicatory love doesn't come from nowhere; the center of this discourse is the "motherly gaze" which also exists in the Japanese idol economy (Karlin 2012). According to Jason G. Karlin, as virtual mothers, fans take pride in their idols' achievements, while they bear a sense of responsibility to take care of their "children" (2012, 79–80). In China, as the new generation of fans of "cultivated idols" emerges, fans tend to develop a parakin relationship with their idols, in which fans fantasize themselves to be their idols' kin and take responsibility for their development (Yan and Yang 2020). Thus, from the fans' perspective, buying a digital album or a product for their idol is not a choice of consumption but rather a responsibility to help their child achieve a better score in sales. When Xiao Zhan released his digital single "Guang Dian" after the 227 event, fans interpreted this as a moment for Xiao Zhan to revive after suffering a public reputation crisis. One self-proclaimed mother-fan wrote, "The music industry are looking into the sales data this time…Xiao Zhan is without background or support, who strives all by his own. The industry is practical, only profit can be the reference of further resources in commerce and production of TV and movies" (April 25,2020). Thus, fans called for at least 105 copies for one purchase in his Super Topic. They posted their screenshots to verify their own contribution and called for more people to act. Some of them even posted a countdown: before a certain time of the day, if the screenshots of purchases reached a certain amount, they would buy tens of thousands more copies. All these actions, seemingly fanatic actions from the perspective of outsiders, are seen as a responsibility by the fans. What they call for is no joy from overconsumption but their responsibility to support their childlike idol.
[7.2] The establishment of this discourse is partially the consequence of the elaborate control of information by the official fan club, especially in Weibo Super Topic. Before the illustration of the control of information by the fan club, I first present how Chinese fans normally access the idol's information.
[7.3] As Morin summarized, "the worshiper always desires to consume his god…The faithful want to know everything: possess, manipulate, and mentally digest the total image of the idol." (1961, 90). In a highly industrialized idol economy like the one in Japan, the industry tends to integrate their idols into everyday life, so people's lives are filled with idols' images on the morning news, tabloids, magazines, advertisements, TV shows, dramas, and so on (Galbraith 2012, 8). Comparatively, in China, the images of idols are not as fully industrialized as in Japan, which leaves much space for fandom to fill. Most Chinese idols do not have regular exposure on TV shows, magazines, or advertisements, so their fans roam from one platform to another in order to gather their idol's information, including the once anonymous or pseudonymous platforms like Douban, Jinjiang, and so on. Because of their anonymity or pseudonymity, information was more freely shared. However, since the government has strengthened its censorship on these platforms, such convenience is largely reduced. But still it is preferred by some fans to use a pseudonym to gossip on these platforms rather than to use their own Weibo identity, since they can better avoid censorship within the fandom or having their Weibo account reported to Weibo surveillance and suspended. In those anonymous or pseudonymous platforms, a lot of topics are discussed: personal conduct, such as suspected romantic relationships, family backgrounds, relationships between the stars and the companies they work for, suspected histories of law violation, and political orientation. But at the same time, such contents can easily cross the line and attract government censorship. On Weibo, under the guidance of the government, there are more restrictions on the information that can be shared. On April 27, 2020, several Weibo accounts who gossiped about Xiao Zhan's personal situation online were deleted, with notice sent from the Weibo management team saying that they were accused of "violating the right of reputation" by a company. According to the official record, this company is registered under the name of Xiao Zhan and his business partner. In fact, before Weibo deleted those accounts, on April 21 and April 23, his studio posted a claim in print and a letter from a lawyer, both of them about the negative consensus with Xiao Zhan. Three listed accounts on the claim were later deleted by Weibo. It is highly suspected by the consensus that Weibo tends to protect their celebrity users instead of the public. And the Weibo Super Topic, as mentioned above, is controlled by the fan club. The celebrities and companies thus can manage their public image by incorporating with the fan club, and there is little space for individuals to provide alternative opinions.
[7.4] According to Jenkins (1992), fan gossip builds a shared understanding within the fan community, and by talking about the same characters in popular culture, they can share common feelings and experiences with others whom they may have never met before (81–83). He later developed his idea as online fandom communities invited crowds from diverse cultural backgrounds into discussion. He suggested that as one reflects himself/herself by criticizing others, the public discussion of ethics becomes a mechanism that on the one hand informs members in the community about different ways of seeing the world and on the other hand has given birth to a collective moral standard within the community (2006, 86) What Jenkins portrays is the diverse nature of fan gossip, within which all ideas can be shared freely. But the same thing doesn't happen in Xiao Zhan's fan group. A lot of things are prohibited. According to the "rules of blocking" (Xiao Zhan Online Promotional Team, March 26, 2020) in Xiao Zhan's Super Topic, any discussion of the following topics will be blocked: discussion involving another celebrity, the private life and private schedules of Xiao Zhan, excessive imagination/interpretation (but without pointing out exact boundaries), undisclosed artworks or images, rumors from antifans, contents revealing Xiao Zhan's life before being an artist, and so on. Any information that will potentially discredit his image is banned.
[7.5] What is left in the Super Topic is affirmative comments about his works and his inspiring characters. Clicking in Xiao Zhan's Super Topic, one is overwhelmed by the applause for his TV series, movies, songs, his achievements on different charts, quoted comments from other celebrities or producers to prove his kind nature, fans' statements about how they fell in love with him, or simply blessings for him. Just like comment manipulation, with the repetitive positive language presented, the image of absolute correctness is then created within the fan community, which sets it apart from the normal consensus with a broad spectrum of perspectives. During the 227 event and the subsequent discussions, many Xiao Zhan fans took every piece of challenging information or negative comment as haters' speech assaulting Xiao Zhan, believing that the haters are hired by his competitors who want to destroy him and take his market share. After one self-proclaimed marketing researcher posted a data report on Weibo showing that since the 227 event, the online consensus tended to be more negative about him, one fan wrote, "These are professional haters who open Wei Task; every clicking is transformed to the uploader's revenue; the quotation of one post reaches 4000 yuan and more!" (SISSI, July 1, 2020). With the establishment of Xiao Zhan's absolute correctness, fans have little tolerance for any negative comment and interpret it as a deliberate attack. They then gradually develop an understanding that Xiao Zhan is constantly exposed to a hostile environment, and as an individual he is too weak to defend himself (or too kind to do it) from such hostility that permeates every single corner of social media. He is so vulnerable and powerless that only fans can protect him by performing anticriticism.
[7.6] Xiao Zhan's vulnerable image is also established by another kind of gossip in his Super Topic: the entanglement between him and his previous performing management company. Xiao Zhan left his previous company WAJIJIWA Entertainment and established his own studio in 2019. In fans' discourse, his previous company didn't provide enough support for his career and exploited him to an extreme extent. They came to such a conclusion partially based on writing records from self-proclaimed "old fans," who have followed Xiao Zhan since his debut and have observed WAJIJIWA's constant careless treatment of Xiao Zhan. According to their portrayal, when he was in the boy band of WAJIJIWA, the sales data of Xiao Zhan was much higher than that of other members, but his company mistreated him: he didn't have a chance to release his own single while other band members did; little work was arranged for him; the Weibo account of his boy band seldom posted his news, and so on. Also, his fans referred to the gossip disclosed by anonymous sources in the entertainment news, saying that Xiao Zhan had no manager but went to work on his own, and his company hadn't sent an official letter to inform the crew of The Untamed to add him to the official cast. Fans were deeply irritated and decided to confront WAJIJIWA on Weibo. They posted a lot of complaining posts tagged with "WAJIJIWA should treat Xiao Zhan fairly." This discussion about WAJIJIWA was popular in his Super Topic around July 2019, when he began to gather popularity through the airing of The Untamed. Because of the popularity of these gossips, it's easy for newcomers to believe that his management company has never treated him well and that it's the carelessness of his company that led to his unpopularity for years. Later, after he decided to leave WAJIJIWA and set up his own studio in September 2019, fans turned to focus on his penalty. They guessed the number was around 70 million yuan, which was too much to afford. Some of them even guessed that's the reason why he stayed an artist instead of being a designer or baker, which he claimed to be good at. They also assumed that since he was getting popular, a lot of social media accounts who sell entertainment news made up negative stories about him to attract attention and he had no money to properly deal with them, so he had no choice but to let the hate speech spread.
[7.7] Whenever an action is called for (e.g. chart beating, crowdfunding), the same discourse would be brought up, in order to remind his fans that he is a vulnerable grassroots artist who relies on no one else but fans to boost his sales, to increase his media exposure, to keep him from being disturbed by antifans, to deal with risks to his public image, and so on. Xiao Zhan himself or his newly established studio has rarely responded to any of these rumors, which creates a space for fans to freely interpret them. Also, even though a lot of gossip has not been verified, it is kept within the Super Topic for a long time, making the standard of "excessive imagination/interpretation" in the blocking rules questionable. Thus, within his fan community, this discourse constantly reverberates and is reinforced until it becomes the shared memory of the whole community.
[7.8] Beyond fan gossip, with fan-made data reports and analysis, the importance of data traffic and data labor is constantly emphasized within the fan community. The image of a data-oriented media industry is then reinforced. The data report team under the official fan club (called View) posted data reports on a weekly basis. In its report, without much independent research, it mostly referred to Xiao Zhan's current position in several public charts including the Baidu/Weibo index, counted the rising numbers of his brand campaigns in a given period of time, and pointed out the action that should be taken in the following week. The numbers are simple for each fan to understand, and the sole purpose of these reports is to motivate fans to contribute to the data traffic. In its fifth data report, it concluded that "Data is the main way of showing the value of a star to all parties, fans need to pay more attention to data support, enhance the interactive reading, bring up Xiao Zhan's full name as much as possible to increase his rate of being mentioned and captured by statistics" (View, March 26, 2020). Beyond the general conclusion, it also provides detailed solutions, including "Engage more on the Xunyee data, buy products from its webpage" (View, April 2, 2020) and "Fans should pay more attention to the data of sign-in and comments in Baidu Tieba" (View, March 20, 2020).
[7.9] Meanwhile, the data also visualizes the rewards of fans' daily efforts to intervene in the data traffic, which in turn inspires fans to have even more intensive engagement in the data intervention. As one of the comments under the report wrote, "He walks out from the big data, fans should learn to focus on data" (April 2, 2020).
8. Conclusion
[8.1] In this article, with the case study of Xiao Zhan's fan community, I have examined the top-down structure of his fan group. I then presented how a variety of their routinized activities are well organized by Xiao Zhan's official fan club, who set the data target for individual fans and direct data traffic to boost their idol's popularity, while their labor is exploited by the business sector, including the celebrity himself, his studio, the brands he endorses, and so on. I argued that instead of the loosely connected interest community, Xiao Zhan's fan group is a centralized and well-trained one, identical to a lot of fan groups in Chinese media fandom. Most of their concepts about data traffic, fan labor, and their collective actions based on those ideas are cultivated by fan leaders (the official fan club). By applying a meticulous information-screening strategy, the fan club helps to establish an idol image that is vulnerable to potential damage but absolutely positive. This image is then used to motivate the fan base to contribute to his success with full dedication.
[8.2] By presenting the highly organized fan community, I would like to call for a more cautious attitude toward the optimism on fan empowerment generated by fandom in the digital era and convergence culture. In addition, because of the perplexing relation among all agents—fan clubs, media celebrities and their media agents or studios, commercial brands, digital platforms, and so on—future work might examine a more detailed and implicit interaction among these agents. A more diverse perspective may also help to enrich the understanding of the dynamic phenomenon of Chinese media fandom.