Idolizing the nation: Chinese fandom nationalism through the Fangirl Expedition

Soft nationalism and China: A case study of nationalism in short videos by US-Chinese rapper MC Jin

“…There is considerable overlap between user-participatory production and official production in this soft nationalism, which is in contrast to the forms of nationalism canvassed in recent accounts of 'techno-nationalism' and 'fandom nationalism' in China (Guo and Yang, 2019;Liao et al, 2022;Liu, 2019aLiu, , 2019bLuqiu and Kang, 2021;Plantin and de Seta, 2019;Wu et al, 2019;Zhuang et al, 2023), which focus on either state-driven online nationalism or outbursts of 'hot' nationalism. Manifestations of soft nationalism include, for example: short videos about Chinese landscape and food, such as the atmospheric food and cooking videos of Liziqi (李子柒), who has 17.4 million subscribers on YouTube; how-to videos on traditional Chinese ink brush painting on short-video platform Kuaishou; short videos about Chinese tea culture on Tencent Video; or video clips of the annual Spring Festival Gala produced by CCTV and shown on Weibo.…”

“…The 'Diba expedition' is one among many recent manifestations of online Chinese nationalism. Recent discussion has focused on 'techno-nationalism' (Luqiu and Kang, 2021;Plantin and de Seta, 2019), the question of whether nationalism is driven from the top down or from the bottom up (Chen et al, 2019), and the integration of popular nationalism with online popular culture and youth culture (Zhao, 2021), in particular 'fandom nationalism' (Guo and Yang, 2019;Liao et al, 2022;Liu, 2019aLiu, , 2019bWu et al, 2019;Zhuang et al, 2023).…”

Gendered Manifestations of Para-social Interactions between Female Fans and Male Idols in China

“…Even during the amendment protests of "Draft Hong Kong Extradition Ordinance" in 2019 and during the Covid-19 epidemic, female fan groups in China used their organised management experience and familiarity with social media platforms to successfully mobilise two large-scale cyber-nationalist actions. Constructing the country as an idol, they used digital Internet technology to form a powerful unorganised organisational force by accessing blocked foreign social networking sites and attacking posts critical of the Chinese government therein, making a significant contribution to defending the image and interests of the country as an idol [41,42].…”