“Let’s Go, Baby Forklift!”: Fandom Governance and the Political Power of Cuteness in China

Abstract

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.

“What's going on with my China?”: Political subjectivity, scalar inquiry, and the magical power of Li Wenliang

“…Throughout this article, I have examined messages posted on "China's Wailing Wall" over the year following Li Wenliang's death. Chronotopic contrasts (e.g., then/now, surface/depth, performance/reality) emerged as participants enacted scalar intimacy in utterances that swiftly drew together personal feelings and broader patterns in public life (Delfino 2021;Pritzker and Perrino 2020;Wong et al 2021). In questions posed by participants interrogating the personal and social present at various scales-often vis-à-vis comparison with lived pasts and anticipated futures-participants further enacted a form of scalar inquiry, in which they interrogated their intimate sense of themselves as embodied, relational agents located within and along a shared and emergent spatiotemporal and moral national trajectory.…”

“…Describing a sense of temporal disjuncture, they point (at least indirectly) to the kinds of playfulness—engagement with “Baby Forklift,” for example—that emerged early in what was then an epidemic (Wong et al. 2021). They feel, specifically, as if “the whole world” has shifted from playfully engaging with “us,” describing this feeling as “bad.” Underscoring the complex relationship between political subjectivity and desire for agency, if not agency itself, the message closes by framing the situation in China as a personal problem that the author has the desire to “fix.” Individual agency is thus simultaneously imagined and, at least discursively, enacted.…”

Civic Engagement Intention and the Data-Driven Fan Community: Investigating the Motivation Behind Chinese Fans’ Online Data-Making Behavior From a Collective Action Perspective

“…The unique social environment in China may further bridge the civic engagement intention and fan community interaction. The fan communities initiated many beneficial public actions (e.g., fundraising, charity) to gain recognition for the fan subculture, which attracted fans who wanted to engage in civic actions (C. Liao & Fu, 2022); as idolization has become a new propaganda strategy in China, the state and idol are so closely related that fans passionate about serving the state may also join fan communities (Peng et al, 2022;Wong et al, 2021). Therefore, H3 and H4 are posited as follows:…”

Love your idol in a ‘cleaned’ way: Fans, fundraising platform, and fandom governance in China

“…While the digital platforms where fans live allow for diversified forms of cultural participation, the behaviour and values of fans are also reshaped by the functions of these new media technologies, which eventually contribute to the economic profit of these platforms (Hills, 2012; Livingstone, 2019). Furthermore, political authorities are also becoming more familiar with the ecosystem of fandom and the media tools fans use, and as a result, they can imbue their ideologies into fandom activities more efficiently, mobilising fans to devote their labour to politics-related campaigns (Wong et al, 2021) or urging fans and the platforms they reside to carry out censorship on behalf of governments (Pang, 2021). In China, with the power of the state being extremely centralised, the influence of political intervention on fans and platforms are much more profound.…”

“…In the case of Chinese media fans, these cultural enthusiasts participate in the process as well. An increasing number of fans, contrary to the assertion of scholars who regard them as democratic vanguards, actually manifest high levels of pro-state sentiments (Wong et al, 2021; Wu et al ., 2019), which motivates them to actively take part in various governing activities like content censorship (Zhao & Ni, 2020), adding a new dimension to the co-opting governance structure.…”