This article describes how the Chinese state borrows from the culture of celebrity fandom to implement a novel strategy of governing that we term “fandom governance.” We illustrate how state-run social media employed fandom governance early in the COVID-19 pandemic when the country was convulsed with anxiety. As the state faced a crisis of confidence, state social media responded with a propagandistic display of state efficacy, broadcasting a round-the-clock livestream of a massive emergency hospital construction project. Chinese internet users playfully embellished imagery from the livestream. They unexpectedly transformed the construction vehicles into cute personified memes, with Baby Forklift and Baby Mud Barfer (a cement mixer) among the most popular. In turn, state social media strategically channeled this playful engagement in politically productive directions by resignifying the personified vehicles as celebrity idols. Combining social media studies with cultural and linguistic anthropology, we offer a processual account of the semiotic mediations involved in turning vehicles into memes, memes into idols, and citizens into fans. We show how, by embedding cute memes within modules of fandom management such as celebrity ranking lists, state social media rendered them artificially vulnerable to a fall in status. Fans, in turn, rallied around to “protect” these cute idols with small but significant acts of digital devotion and care, organizing themselves into fan circles and exhorting each other to vote. In elevating the memes to the status of celebrity idols, state social media thereby created a disposable pantheon of virtual avatars for the state, and consolidated state power by exploiting citizens’ voluntary response to vulnerability. We analyze fandom governance as a new development in the Chinese state’s long history of governing citizens through the management of emotion.
This paper examines how the state, neoliberal capitalism, and digital mass media converge to shape particular kind of Chinese “consumer-citizen” (Mazzarella 2013) public: the “melon-eating masses.” By examining how Chinese internet users participate in a genre of public gossip vernacularly known as “melon eating” when the state looms as the final arbiter of judgement, this study illuminates how the politics of “knowing what not to know” (Hillenbrand 2020) unfold in day-to-day (digital) lives in China. Through attending to the “social poetics” (Herzfeld 1988) of netizens’ performance of “rationality” and their understanding and stereotyping of each other, we show how domestic social imaginaries of the Chinese nation and the “rational” Chinese consumer-citizen are co-produced (Jasanoff 2004; Erickson et al 2013), and how they serve to deflect criticism from the Chinese state. Building on anthropological scholarship on gossip as a form of social control (Merry 1984), we explore how public gossiping becomes incorporated into the state’s panoptic apparatus. As Chinese internet users form “partial theories” about “relationships and events” (Van Vleet 2003) through public gossip, “melon-eating” can paradoxically normalize the unknowability of truth under an already-opaque governmental regime.
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