On 27 August 2021, all tv shows and movies featuring the actress Zhao Wei were removed from the internet without any explanation, it was as if she never existed, and she isn’t the only celebrity whose works were vanished from the internet. This all is part of a wider crackdown on Chinese media and culture
What exactly is happening in China?
Beijing has waged a war against China’s celebrity culture. Names of celebrities are vanishing from the credits of TV shows. American Idol-style competitions were banned and shows which featured men in an effeminate manner were banned by authorities. The Chinese government has taken dramatic steps to curb the growing celebrity and “stan culture”, amid growing concerns among officials that a culture in which celebrities are glorified and worshipped by fans is corrupting the Chinese youth. The authorities are calling for greater regulation of the chaos of fan clubs and the kind of content they are consuming
This escalated because a certain person, Kris Wu, a popular Canadian singer, was detained on the suspicion of rape. On social media, fans of Mr. Wu came out and ardently defended him from all allegations, and even demanded that he should be released. For the Chinese government, this was the tipping point for what they saw as a culture of “crazed fandom” and decided to initiate a crackdown on all forms of fan forums online.
The need for this crackdown was made even more extreme by behavior on fan forums, like mudslinging between rival fandoms and doxxing, which is digging up personal details of individuals and publishing them online. Another reason is that a secondary economy is emerging because of fan culture, fans only buy the products their favorite celebrities represent. More than half of the marketing budget of major companies is now spent on getting celebrities to promote them online.
Why exactly is China doing this?
The crackdown isn’t something limited to the internet and media, this is part of a wider attempt to reform Chinese society and culture, it is an attempt to change the very fabric of Chinese culture. It would not be an understatement to say that this might be the second cultural revolution china is witnessing, although with radically different methods.
China’s multibillion-dollar private education industry was destroyed by a ban on for-profit tutoring, while a lot of regulations wiped more than $1 trillion from Chinese tech stocks. Elementary schools now teach the “Xi Jinping Thought”, which focuses on China's rightful place in history books, capitalist nations being strategic rivals, and strict adherence to the goals of communism and “socialism with Chinese characteristics”
Calls for corporations and wealthy individuals to donate more for the “common good of society” have occurred, especially at a time when the Communist Party is suffering as the economy slows down. Tech giants have tried to respond, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, Pinduoduo, and Xiaomi all have donated millions to charity in the name of the “common good”.The narrative is simple: corporations must do their part for the society, or face the wrath of the communist party.
The government is trying to justify all of this in the name of the general welfare of society. For the authorities, banning the private tutoring industry is being done to level the playing field in highly competitive schools and lessen the financial burden on families, who often suffer from high costs of private tuition, thus disincentivizing them from having more children. China’s biggest tech companies are being cracked down to protect competition and consumer data because they are often accused of violating people’s privacy and engaging in anti-competitive practices.
But why popular culture specifically?
Other recent regulations targeting the country’s youth appear aimed at asserting control over the popular culture of china, but why does the communist party feel the need to do that?
President Xi Jinping declared in 2014 art and culture should be “in the service of the people”, and for him, art and culture isn’t something that people decides for themselves, it is a battle of ideologies, a battle china can’t afford to lose if it wants to maintain its hegemony.
The party does not want expressions of individualist thoughts that are in many ways transgressive to norms that it puts forward. The party wants to have the first and last word in what is permitted in the mass culture that defines its people
The vice-chairman of the Chinese Film Association has aggressively lobbied filmmakers to make more patriotic films about the state and “further promote” Xi Jinping Thought rather than making films that inherently promote ideas of consumerism and hedonism.
Another reason that widespread crackdown on internet culture is taking place now, is because it is something that came about recently and now it has become sizable enough that the state is noticing it and realizing this is something that needs to be regulated as well. Just as Beijing has reined in other industries that were long given wide berths, regulation is beginning to catch up to China’s online fan culture now. The progress of its technology had surpassed the extent to which China could regulate, so now this is an attempt at control. An attempt at controlling what they once couldn’t, because, since the inception of the party, it has strictly tried to regulate everything that its people can do, regulating celebrity and fan culture is just an extension of that, that came about recently
The larger impact that’ll occur is quite simple. It sets up a precedent, that there is no longer any room for celebrity misbehavior. If someone wants to pursue a career in arts, they must follow state morality and be an ideal celebrity for the people, one that promotes patriotism and Chinese culture, rather than liberal thoughts and ideas of hedonism. If they don’t, the state has already shown that it can make celebrities disappear without any explanation, no matter how liked by the public. Once you go against the state, you shall face the wrath
Will there be any use of it at all?
There are two targets the CCP is trying to achieve, the first target is part of Xi’s new “common prosperity” campaign to narrow the gap between rich and poor. But it looks more like a strategy for purification than a strategy for economic reform. The party wants to reform the society of greed, corruption, and moral failings they view as threats to socialism. Capitalists and Western influences have become targets, but there is still uncertainty whether this will address inequality. Structural issues such as inefficient state-owned companies and a weak social welfare net will still exist. Reducing inequality requires much more. There is a need to cut spending on infrastructure and inefficient state enterprises and redirect it to social protections.
While the crackdown on tech is good for consumer welfare because of better privacy and fewer chances of monopoly, it could harm the Chinese economy, scaring companies that create the most jobs at a point when China needs them the most. Urban unemployment among Chinese ages 16 to 24 is at an all-time low, and the economy isn’t achieving its peak growth rates of the past
The second target is more nuanced and directly related to mass culture, CCP knows the country’s working-age population is shrinking, threatening its long term prosperity of the country, and wants to forge a healthy, educated, obedient generation, well versed with the Xi Jinping thought and values of socialism to step into the breach. It wants its next generation of workers to be more patriotic and wants to develop an anti-consumerist mindset, that can only be done by removing all aspects of capitalism in popular culture
For the party, if ideas of capitalism are allowed to expand into the literary and art world, art and literature will lose their purpose of serving the people and socialism, and the spiritual spirit of the Chinese nation will collapse
This isn’t only an attempt to ban artists and certain movies or songs, but a much larger attempt to control what people think
How these reforms play out will only be clear with the advent of time but it is clear that China is currently undergoing a monumental change in its Economic, Political, and Cultural spheres in quest of becoming a superpower.
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