iQiyi said it would stop hosting popular talent competitions including Youth With You and The Big Band, a kind of madcap, heavily sponsored game show plus American Idol-style competition for rock bands. NetEase’s Cloud Music and Tencent’s QQ Music nixed all artist rankings unrelated to songs’ stream counts.
TikTok parent company ByteDance created a “youth mode” on its Douyin video app that limits users under 14 years of age to 40 minutes per day between 6 am and 10 pm. Streaming apps responded quickly to the new guidance. He says the regulations reflect age and rural-urban divides between upwardly mobile citizens and graying officials. “These draconian cultural policies are bound to alienate a younger generation in China who grow up in urban, popular, and celebrity cultures and who see them as part of their identity,” Bao says. This is especially true of fans who flock to male Chinese pop stars who are seen as too effeminate or gender nonconforming, says Hongwei Bao, a scholar of LGBTQ issues and art in China and author of Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism. “If you look at how the government is trying to regulate different aspects of the internet, they always have a vision about how society and the internet should evolve.”Ĭritics say these restrictions are too extreme, and could hurt young Chinese fans seeking out community and exploring their identities through fandom. Management companies were directed to control fan groups and stem squabbles between rival factions. Platforms were told not to induce fans “to consume” or require people to buy something to vote in talent shows.
The Cyberspace Administration of China banned the ranking of celebrities by popularity on social media and told platforms to control the participation of people younger than 18. The government issued expansive guidance to control the “chaos” of celebrity culture and fan clubs. In August, Chinese officials said they had had enough. Even more notoriously, a group of fans mused online about ways to spring Kris Wu, a China-based Canadian singer who’s being held on suspicion of rape, from detention. Followers of the site then called for a boycott of Xiao Zhan-endorsed products, and both sides were accused of doxing and cyberbullying the other. Last year, devotees of actor Xiao Zhan provoked authorities to shut a fan fiction site by complaining it was “pornography,” the BBC reported fans were upset that a piece depicted the actor as a cross-dressing teen pining over a male celebrity.
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