After a slew of superstar scandals, it seems China’s leisure business has entered a brand new part: The Nationwide Radio and Tv Administration — the nation’s leisure watchdog — issued a notice on September 2 to additional rein within the idol leisure sector.
In response to the announcement, idol survival exhibits are getting the axe, and no extra will likely be made sooner or later. The administration additionally mentioned that it might proceed to crack down on superstar tradition and poisonous fandom and attempt to domesticate a patriotic ambiance within the leisure business.
The Chinese language time period fanquan refers to extremely organized fan teams loyal to their chosen idols. A lot of the members of those fan teams — 81.6% — are born after 1995, according to state-backed media Jiemian. Amongst them, almost half are college students with no steady revenue.
Superstar followers do many issues to help their idols, together with buying giant billboards to have fun their idols’ birthdays and buying merchandise endorsed by their heroes.
Followers submit images of #JacksonYi, a member of Chinese language pop idol group #TFboys, everywhere in the world in celebration of his sixteenth birthday. pic.twitter.com/N6KM5GsBSm
— ShanghaiEye (@ShanghaiEye) November 29, 2016
The super-intense fan tradition at the moment within the highlight in China first emerged in South Korea, a nation that has exported idol teams resembling BTS and Blackpink worldwide. In Korea, superstar stalkers are referred to as sasaeng fans, whereas in China, they’re dubbed sisheng followers, which means ‘non-public life followers.’
So-called non-public life followers have been behind a number of cringe-worthy incidents lately. In 2016, Jackson Wang, a member of widespread Korean idol group GOT7, was injured in a car crash in Xiamen brought on by followers chasing his automobile.
In 2017, an 18-year-old girl was thrust into the highlight for being a celeb stalker. Gong Yuwen, also called the ‘Hongqiao Diva,’ spent numerous hours stalking and photographing celebrities at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport.
Gong was singled out as a bad example of China’s fan tradition, together with her poor academic performance highlighted by the media.
Earlier this summer time, two obsessed followers of Chinese language singer-actor Wang Yibo have been arrested by Beijing police for illegally putting in a monitoring gadget on his automobile.
Associated:
Wang Yibo Fans Arrested After Placing Tracking Device on His Car
In Could, the Chinese language streaming website iQIYI was criticized for its idol survival present Youth With You after the favored program pushed a voting promotion that resulted in overzealous followers buying vast quantities of milk products. The promo reportedly resulted in a colossal waste of milk, and the present was suspended earlier than its finale consequently.
However nonetheless, China’s fan tradition is tremendously profitable: China’s idol business was price 130 billion RMB in 2020, according to a data monitoring agency.
The final season of Youth With You was a huge hit, with almost 2 billion views on the platform. Additionally, the highest three most-watched packages from 2018-2020 on Tencent Video, one other main streaming website in China, have been all idol survival shows.
Along with clamping down on idol survival exhibits, regulators will take additional motion to limit celebrities’ excessive payouts and stifle tax evasion. This element of the crackdown is already nicely underway: Famend actress Zheng Shuang, who was concerned in a surrogacy scandal earlier this 12 months, was banned from social media and fined 299 million RMB (46 million USD) for tax evasion final month.
Zheng is the newest in a rising checklist of celebrities to be focused for failing to pay their justifiable share of taxes — a crackdown that goes again a number of years and has seen a number of high-profile celebrities fall from grace (right here’s you, Fan Bingbing).
Cowl picture by way of Weibo
