[1] The viral surge of Chinese nationalism has swept across global social media platforms not through state propaganda but through decentralized user participation: trolling, denouncing, canceling, but also memes and content creation. The repertoire of this new wave of Chinese nationalism often resembles fandom practices more than traditional propaganda. Indeed, while fan studies has long celebrated the participatory culture of fandom, recent studies have shifted attention to the more negative or toxic aspects of fandom, such as culture wars and fandom police (Proctor and Kies 2018; Wang and Ge 2023). Following this trend of scholarly inquiry, Chenyang Song explores nationalism as another case of the less rosy manifestation of fandom. Song examines fandom nationalism as a form of digital political mobilization in which fans apply the emotional intensity, organizational strategies, and aesthetic logic of celebrity fan culture to nationalist calls. How do we understand the complex fan cultural logic that drives nationalist mobilization?
[2] Song's monograph, Nationalist and Popular Culture Practices on Social Media: A Digital Ethnography of Chinese Online Fandom Nationalists, examines the expansion of Chinese nationalist fandom discourse and maps out practices to provide a full picture of the emerging yet critical conjunction between culture and politics. Song explores how the aesthetics, labor, and organizational structures of celebrity fandom have been repurposed into a potent form of digital political mobilization. Critically, Song distinguishes his work from other studies of Chinese nationalism by emphasizing the users' internal ideological tendencies, rather than just state manipulation. He acknowledges that while the Chinese state co-opts nationalist fandom movements, the initial impulse often comes from the fans themselves. As Song notes, "authoritarianism is not just an external pressure but an inner tendency" within communities that value "unity, identity, and the protection of the idol" over liberal pluralism (183). Through mixed-method digital ethnography, Song provides rich empirical evidence of the agency, however problematic, of young nationalists who view themselves as protecting their idol-land. In the broader context of fan studies, this book serves as a vital companion to works that aim to unpack the complexity and negative sides of fan practices (Driessen et al. 2025). Song's perspective asks us to recognize how the very tools of participatory culture celebrated by early theorists can be used to entrench nondemocratic values (Delwiche and Henderson 2013).
[3] Song received his PhD from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Tübingen and is currently a lecturer in the institute of Foreign Language at Fujian Normal University. This monograph is a significantly expanded revision of his doctoral dissertation, which itself was built upon a master's thesis examining "Little Pink," who, unlike the Fifty-Cent Army paid by the state to disseminate state propaganda online, are young mainland Chinese netizens who voluntarily express patriotic stances and defend the national image online. The book represents the culmination of a sustained research trajectory in which Song has progressively scaled up both his empirical scope and theoretical ambitions to move from discourse analysis of case studies to a full-scale multisited ethnography.
[4] The book is published by transcript Verlag and organized into six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion chapters. The book spans approximately 240 pages and contains 47 figures, including demographic data charts and screenshots of viral posts on Weibo—the equivalent of Twitter and the biggest social media platform in China—digital memes, and other analytical materials.
[5] The book is situated primarily within the tumultuous period of 2019–20, using the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement—a pro-democracy campaign opposing a proposed law allowing criminal suspect transfers to mainland China—as its central empirical anchor. Song explores how young Chinese netizens, specifically fangirls (fanquan nvhai), mobilized to defend the Chinese state using the logic and aesthetics of celebrity fandom. By framing the nation as a personified idol often called Brother Azhong (Azhong Gege), fans transformed political discourse into a competitive, affect-driven performance of fandom loyalty and appropriated fan practices and platform affordances.
[6] Chapter 1, "Introduction: Chinese Digital Pink Tsunami," establishes the 2019–20 Hong Kong Anti-ELAB movement as the primary catalyst for a new wave of Chinese online nationalism. Song begins with the Fu Guohao incident, where a mainland state-run press reporter's detention by Hong Kong protesters sparked a massive countermobilization on Weibo. This moment marked the official entry of fangirls into nationalist mobilization, as well as the entry of Brother Azhong into the political arena. Rather than framing this as a departure in Chinese political culture, Song situates it as a culmination: The chapter traces a lineage from the Little Pink nationalists of 2016 to the fandom-inflected mobilization of 2019, demonstrating how fan cultural logic progressively dominated nationalist discourse. Song frames the central research question: "How do pop-cultural online practices intertwine with online nationalist practices of political opinion formation on Chinese social media platforms?" (16). He argues that this phenomenon is not a simple top-down state operation but an entanglement of fan cultural logic and political activism. The chapter's key contribution lies in establishing the iZhong (China lovers) identity not as a stable political category but as a dynamic, affect-driven formation whose coherence depends on the continuous practice of idolization, which is the theoretical foundation that underpins every subsequent chapter.
[7] Chapter 2, "Literature Review and Theoretical Basis," provides a comprehensive review of the technological, cultural, and political foundations for understanding fandom nationalism. Song introduces practice-affordance theory as the primary lens to argue that social media features like visibility and scalability can be weaponized through specific fan cultural routines. Song expands the scope of Hailong Liu's conceptualization of fandom nationalism (2019) from users who participate in nationalist expeditions to all users who "display online fan-cultural practices while holding nationalist views" (60). Song defines "Chinese online popular authoritarian-nationalism" as "a set of online practices that prioritize the autonomy, unity, and identity of the Chinese nation through popular and authoritarian state-political mobilization…[and] emphasizes territorial integrity, the performance legitimacy of the Chinese communist-authoritarian regime, and a victimhood narrative rooted in China's modern history" (61). This redefinition allows Song to capture the full spectrum of fandom nationalist activity, from passive content consumption to coordinated cross-platform campaigns, rather than limiting the category to only the most visible or aggressive actors.
[8] Chapter 3, "Methodology," details Song's multisited mixed-method digital ethnography, which encompassed approximately 1,200 hours of online participant observation on Sina Weibo, supplemented by private chat groups on Tencent QQ, a major Chinese instant messaging platform, and international platforms including Facebook and Instagram. The data also consists of eighteen in-depth semistructured interviews with nationalist fans, ranging from high school students, early-career employees, and fan club administrators. For interviews, Song identified potential interviewees from active fan chat groups and Weibo super-hashtag communities (chaohua) that act as dedicated, high-engagement forums for specific topics, celebrities, and fandoms, selecting fans born in the 1990s and 2000s who had engaged in nationalist practices across at least three political debates. In the recruitment process, Song encountered suspicion from potential interviewees as some of them tested his authenticity by quizzing him on mainland Chinese comedy skits and advertising slogans. He navigated this by strategically adopting group rhetoric and emphasizing shared political positions.
[9] Chapter 4, "Idolizing the Nation and Politicians," investigates idolization in the Chinese political context through three main questions: Who is idolizing? What is idolizing? What is the object idealized as? The chapter's central contribution is demonstrating how fandom nationalists construct the Chinese nation as an idol-star figure, not through state instruction but through the spontaneous application of familiar pop-cultural templates from celebrity fandom. Song shows that the personification of China as Brother Azhong, a "tough-but-soft" masculine figure depicted as handsome, resilient, yet victimized by foreign hostile powers (115), does not emerge arbitrarily; rather, it draws on a contested landscape of contemporary Chinese masculinity, including the feminized aesthetics of male idol culture and Boys' Love traditions. The verb to idolize involves digital fan practices such as creating fan art, writing fan fiction on the popular platform Lofter, and ultimately forming emotional attachments to the Brother Azhong character. By rendering abstract political concepts intimate, relatable, and fiercely defended, fandom nationalists create the affective preconditions for the political mobilization Song documents in subsequent chapters.
[10] Chapter 5, "Mobilizing in Idol-land's Name," moves from affective formation to organizational infrastructure. Song outlines a tripartite organizational structure sustained by platform infrastructures that allow fandom nationalists to mobilize with efficiency: Supporting Groups, whose goal is to boost visibility, Copywriting Groups in charge of creating memes and slogans, and Anti-Hater Groups that aim to neutralize dissent. This complex division of labor, which mimics celebrity fan clubs that operate in a professional way, turns data labor into political capital and appropriates fan tactics as political tools to produce a highly coordinated, bottom-up network that the state often praises and co-opts. Song's most counterintuitive finding in this chapter is the "porous echo chamber" effect (145): In the case of nationalist fans who choose nationalist content even when other content is available, the sheer volume of cross-platform information flow paradoxically reinforces ideological closure, as users selectively consume aligned content even where alternative media remains accessible. This concept challenges both cyberoptimist assumptions about the democratizing potential of networked communication and simpler accounts of information bubbles, offering a more dynamic model of how political self-reinforcement operates in high-traffic environments.
[11] Chapter 6, "Idol-land's Pink Guard," focuses on the aggressive dimensions of fandom nationalism. This chapter provides a granular account of two understudied tactics, coordinated trolling and jubao, that is, reporting content and users to the platform for violating community guidelines, and their role in what Song calls the "weaponization of digital regulation" (180). The chapter demonstrates that these tactics are choreographed "expeditions" that are "organized intensive wave-like cross-platform hostile online communication" designed to weaponize platform algorithms (18), complete with multilingual trolling strategies intended to maximize global visibility. Song traces the genealogy of jubao, showing how a state-originated monitoring mechanism has been repurposed as a fan cultural tool for canceling political opponents by triggering platform censorship and, in some cases, state intervention. By documenting these tactics in ethnographic detail, Song shows how anti-harassment infrastructure originally developed to protect celebrities becomes a vehicle for political suppression.
[12] In chapter 7, "Internet Memes as Ammunition," Song argues that playfulness and satire are the emotional affordances of memes as technologies. Through a typological approach, he categorizes fandom nationalist memes into campaign slogans, satirical jokes (duanzi), and image-based arguments. The rhetoric often reflects a Confucianist paternalism where the state is seen as a benevolent but firm parent, and dissenters such as the Hong Kong protesters are portrayed as ungrateful children. Fans use memes to ridicule the perceived moral or intellectual deficiencies of opponents while celebrating China's achievements. Song highlights the use of cynical irony and exclusive fan (du wei) rhetoric, where adoration for China is paired with disdain for unpopular Western nations such as Britain. The memetic discourse recognizes and endorses "established political norms and hierarchies, advocating for law and order, and expressing grievances towards social elites and foreign entities" (201). Memes reinforce a shared identity among fandom nationalists by creating a visual language that is both playful and exclusionary.
[13] The conclusion chapter synthesizes the book's findings to highlight Chinese online popular authoritarian-nationalism as a particular cultural phenomenon embedded in the intersection of fan culture and politics. Song concludes that this phenomenon is a synergetic complex driven by "the post-communist political environment, the development of the Chinese fan-culture industry, and the datafication of social media platforms" (204). He reflects on the limitations, such as the difficulty of accessing high-level administrators, while emphasizing its contribution to digital anthropology. The book's primary argument is that the participatory turn in digital media has not led to liberalization in China but has instead empowered a new form of sentimental authoritarianism. Song notes that these practices of idolization and content creation will likely evolve alongside new platform affordances. He urges scholars to move beyond an oversimplification of nationalist discourse to understand the messy and bizarre ways pop culture mediates modern ideology.
[14] Song's monograph arrives at a moment of intensifying scholarly and public attention to Chinese fandom and its entanglement with politics, including studies of Hallyu (which is banned by the state) fandom in China (Wang 2022) and the rise of fan philanthropy (Yang et al. 2024). Scholars have approached Chinese cybernationalism from political science and communication studies and often highlight the connection between fandom and nationalism (Liu 2019; Liao et al. 2022), but the specific entanglement of fandom infrastructure with nationalist mobilization has remained comparatively understudied at the ethnographic level. Song's book fills that gap, offering a practice-oriented account that complements existing work on state media and digital authoritarianism.
[15] The book also intervenes in a rapidly evolving debate within fan studies itself. The field has, in recent years, moved decisively away from the celebratory frameworks associated with early participatory culture theory, increasingly attending to the darker aspects of fan community: harassment, radicalization, reactionary politics, and the instrumentalization of fandom's organizational logics for hostile ends (Driessen et al. 2025). Song's work is exemplary in this regard. By treating Chinese fandom nationalism not as a pathological deviation from normal fandom but as a logical extension of its practices, affective economies, and platform affordances, he offers a case study that should reorient how fan studies scholars think about the political valences of fan labor and community formation more broadly. While the manuscript focuses on the 2019–20 period, its findings remain highly relevant as Chinese nationalist fandom continues to shape the Chinese and global media ecosystems. The book is a great resource for not only scholars of China and digital nationalism but anyone working on the relationship between participatory culture and political mobilization in an era of platform capitalism.