盲目崇拜名人 mángmù chóngbài míngrén

Part of the puritan package imposed by a paternal party-state, correcting excesses it tolerated for decades. Along with abnormal aesthetics and vulgar scandals, this campaign has generated a new negative list of prohibitions.

High on this list are the wildly popular boy bands that are now condemned as insufficiently masculine, in a time when China is girding for troubled times ahead. Those 娘炮 niangpao, girly guns modelled on the K-pop coming from Korea, have enormous fan bases, since China has so far been  bunable to create a pop aesthetic anywhere near as fan friendly. Women can safely adore them without provoking jealousy, gays can admire without having to come out, advertisers of luxury products love them as perfect clotheshorses for myriad premium products. Now they have been cancelled.

The party-state, at a time of tension, uncertainty and intensifying competition with the US, has sided with those who criticise young Han Chinese men as insufficiently masculine. The wolf warrior snarl is in; girly men are out. The party-state has a long history of insisting on its primacy, jealously regulating those whose fame and popularity rival that of central leaders, from Buddhist teachers to boyband pop stars. Now the celebs will have to conform, sing the praises of the CCP, or risk not only naming and shaming but the explicit threat that, once on the negative list, their career is over, no comeback allowed.

This is a sharp turnaround. Hiring celebrity influencers has been standard practice for many years, for anyone, state owned or private, launching a new product, pitching to a new market. Even in remote Tibet Golok Jigdril, in 2019 a Chinese company planning to industrialise yak beef production for big city consumers, hired a famous Hong Kong film star as a matter of routine, tall and handsome, to pitch Tibetan beef to Shanghai consumers. His official title was “Qinghai Yak Highland Barley Poverty Alleviation Propaganda Ambassador”, 青海牦牛青稞扶贫宣传大使 .

China’s population is 25 times that of South Korea, so how come China’s fandom has been so influenced by Korean aesthetics? This Financial Times explainer nails the reasons: “In turns saccharine, brutal, and dazzlingly original, Korean content has since bulldozed its way into the global cultural consciousness. Until the 1990s South Korean popular culture went largely unnoticed beyond the country’s borders. That started to change as a wave of creative energy was released in the wake of South Korea’s post-1987 democratic transition. The bruising experience of the 1997-98 Asia financial crisis convinced successive South Korean governments to invest heavily in the country’s digital infrastructure and in the promotion of its cultural exports. What really mattered was not its efforts to subsidise the creation of content, but the creation of a robust broadband infrastructure that accelerated the disruption of the existing entertainment industry, paving the way for a new generation of producers and consumers…….inject Korean content ‘straight into the bloodstream’. Even before the rise of social media, K-pop groups enjoyed dynamic relationships with their digitally savvy fans. Producers would constantly experiment with a dizzying array of musical and visual genres, inviting fans to upload their responses and imitations. That in turn would create a fierce sense of community between fans as they praised, encouraged and quarrelled with each other, turbocharging online engagement. The timing could not have been better. Korean fan culture fitted perfectly with YouTube culture; Korea’s cultural moment coincided with the rise of technology that could deliver it to the world. ‘That’s the main difference with Japan and China,’ says a Korean industry executive. ‘For the Japanese, foreign markets were an afterthought. The Chinese cut their platforms off from the rest of the world. But for the Koreans, it has always been about exports.’”

China badly wants to grow its’ discourse power, yet China’s creatives have to conform to Xi Jinping Thought. The closing of China’s minds, by decree from above, is the reason China’s discourse power fails to resonate. Now China’s only though leader is Xi Jinping, and he has just attacked the celebs his regime for so long relied on.