Who is Xiao Zhan?

An extremely popular celebrity. A young Chinese man born in 1991. The center of a major publicity crisis. A person who plunged the Chinese Internet into heated social and political debates. A successful idol with over 24 million fans (as on Weibo) whose celebrity is now destroyed, thanks to those who made him.

With 24.4 million followers, Xiao Zhan is considered a “Top-Tier Traffic” (顶流) in the Chinese entertainment industry.

Today, we want to share with you the story of Xiao Zhan, how the reporting culture (举报文化) in today’s China ruined his career, and the ways the incident elevated into a meaningful, powerful discussion about politics, capitalism, and youth culture.

How the Star was Born

The construction of an idol is never an accident. In the case of Xiao Zhan, his successful career was a blend of various ingredients, cooked up together by a team of smart capitalists and, most importantly, his fans.

In 2015, Xiao Zhan debuted his entertainment career on the Chinese reality TV show X-Fire, which showcased the journey of young boys training to form a boy-band. At that time, Xiao was a completely raw piece of meat with some solid quality to start cooking with: extremely handsome by today’s mainstream Chinese aesthetic standard (big, Bambi-like eyes, pale skin, delicate face features, tall and slim), decent singing skill, relatively well-educated (a college graduate), good manner and gentle personality. After several rounds of competitions, Xiao Zhan debuted alongside eight other trainees in an idol group called X NINE , taking the position of main vocal. The group released their first album in 2016.

Xiao Zhan (center position) in X NINE.

From 2016 to 2018, Xiao Zhan’s career evolved around X NINE. Although certainly loved within its own fan base, the idol group never really broke through (出圈 – literally “broke the circle”), missing wide public recognition.

Then came 2019, a TV drama series titled The Untamed changed everything, propelling Xiao Zhan to become the most popular Chinese idol of the year.

Poster of The Untamed.

The Untamed’s huge success was rather unanticipated when it went on preview; yet it makes total sense from today’s perspective. If for nothing, the series managed to include two key elements that young Chinese audiences absolutely adored: fantasy (an imagined Jianghu) and BL, “Boy’s Love”.

Yes, Boy’s Love, a theme that had long been popular in China’s underground youth culture, and in recent years brought up to big screens through careful adaptations. The storyline of The Untamed evolved around a pair of “soulmates” (what they are really up to is for the audience’s imagination), played by Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, another beautiful-looking, young male actor. In the series’ 50 episodes, the pair traveled around to solve a number of murder mysteries; they eventually defeated the evil mastermind together, all the while developed a strong bond as intimate friends (they fell in love in the original fiction, as you probably have guessed).

Wang Yibo and Xiao Zhan as “brothers”.

Although the nature of the two characters’ relationship was officially defined as friendship, everyone who watched it believed, or was led to believe that there was something more. Homosexuality is still a subject strictly banned in Chinese TV shows and movies, nonetheless young Chinese audiences, especially females, have always loved the idea of two gorgeous-looking young men developing a love story. Having noticed such public taste, marketing staffs for The Untamed and for the two actors, Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo, came up with endless promotional campaigns along the line of BL (“炒CP”), leading fans to fantasize about the two actors’ real-life relationships. Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo quickly became the most popular on-screen CP (couple) of the year, both attracting endless brand endorsements in 2019.

“Xiao Zhan+Wang Yibo” stayed as the NO.1 CP couple on Weibo's ranking for many months.

From last August until a week ago, Xiao Zhan glided along the road of fast-rising fame. He gained over 20 million additional followers on Weibo, went on all the mainstream shows including China’s Central Television’s national Spring Festival gala. With more fans came bigger, more lavish brand endorsements, with more brand endorsements came greater publicity and even more fans.

Xiao Zhan in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala.

However, while Xiao Zhan kept his carefully-cultivated public personality as humble and quiet, his fans went the opposite way. They wanted their love for their boy to be heard, and more importantly, they demanded more people to love their boy just as much as they did. Through various self-mobilized, extremely well-organized campaigns, Xiao’s fans, mainly young females who are highly skilled with social media, worked relentlessly on a daily basis to make sure the name of their boy was always trending on the internet, and was only mentioned in positive news. As much as these campaigns are run by volunteers, Xiao’s agency, just like every other company in the celebrity business, played a tacit role in encouraging these conducts behind closed door. It’s free and good PR at the end of the day so who could resist it anyway?

An “innocent”, “pure” boy idol; a team of highly skilled staffs who monetize on his fame; a group of devoted fans with endless love; together they became the image of Xiao Zhan, a delicate dish made from the ingredients of fan economy, love, and a twisted society where capitalism encountered youth mobilization not for politics, but for entertainment.

The “227 Jihad” and Beyond

Up until a week ago, the future of Xiao Zhan was still looking bright and radiant. Despite the hit taken by the entertainment industry from the coronavirus, Xiao remained the most popular male idol with 14 brand endorsement deals in his hands (many are international, first-tier brands). Sure, his fans’ massive PR campaigns annoyed the public sometimes, but fans for other Chinese idols have been doing the same things at competing levels of aggressiveness anyway. As active users of Chinese social networks, we were all used to the overbearing “fandom culture”(饭圈文化), and thought we had already developed the immune system for it.

“Fans have built a strict organizational system. Once they encounter challenges and attacks on their idols, they would counterattack by means of technology like a violent machine.” - definition of Fandom Culture from Baidu.

But then, something disastrous happened.

Here’s a little background –

As Xiao Zhan gained his initial popularity from a borderline BL drama like The Untamed, one should not be surprised by the amount of related BL fan-fiction out there. But take note, not all fans like this sort of content. Among the huge population of Xiao Zhan’s fans, people are divided into camps such as “CP (couple) fans” (in this case those who like to fantasize Xiao and Wang as a couple), “exclusive fans” (those who only like Xiao), “girlfriend fans”, “mother fans” and more. CP fans who had a particular taste for BL content are mainly active on an English website called Archive of Our Own (AO3), a nonprofit open source repository for fan-fiction and other fan-works contributed by users from all over the world.

The incredible amount of tags related to BL stories of Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo on AO3.

On February 24th, fan-fiction writer Didi (迪迪出逃记), who also was a self-proclaimed “CP fan” for Xiao and Wang, published the AO3 links for a new chapter of her work “Falling” (下坠) on Weibo. In this work, Xiao Zhan was portrayed as a girl with gender dysphoria, working in a brothel disguised as a hair salon, where she ran into high school boy Wang Yibo and with whom she had a love affair. Having personally read a few chapters for research purpose, we must admit it is not for everyone’s taste. From transgender, under-aged, prostitution to sexual abuse, the fan-fiction itself crossed so many red lines in terms of ethics and legislation.

A fan-art based on Falling, which Xiao is portrayed as a sexy prostitute in red dress.

Here’s the thing about underground culture such as BL: they are not designed for everyone and are in nature offensive to established norms. Over the years BL fans have kept their fantasies within their niche, not forcing their peculiar taste on anyone else. Unfortunately, “exclusive fans” of Xiao Zhan didn’t think the same way; the moment they learned the content of this particular piece of fan-fiction, they immediately felt shattered and outraged. In their eyes, the author’s portrait of their beloved idol as a transgender person was an intentional stigma, an affront, a crime.

When there’s a crime, you start a war. With such belief in mind, fans of Xiao Zhan quickly came up with warfare strategies not just against the author, but against AO3 and other platforms for fan-generated content. Their main weapon? Report (举报). “Freedom must have boundaries,” as a fan vowed, “we are reporting these platforms (to the Chinese authority) today not just for Xiao Zhan, but for the many other celebrities whose privacy and dignity were severely violated.”

Declaration of War from a fan.

Fans sharing ways to report AO3 to the government.

So Xiao’s fans did what “fandom circle” youth today are particularly good at: escalating a celebrity’s personal matter to the level of social injustice, and fight for their own agenda through the ultimate tool for justice: the “report” button on every Chinese website and app. Fans gathered in an organizational structure, shared step-by-step reporting manuals, drafted reporting letters, and trained others to use wordings that would specifically trigger the authorities’ nerve receptors. The relentless online reporting finally worked; as of February 27th, AO3, Lofter, and other related BL content-sharing platforms were censored one by one, blocked by the Great Firewall of the Almighty Chinese Internet.

Fans sharing screenshots of successful report.

“We have done nothing wrong. What we did (filing report) was to exercise our rights as citizens and to uphold justice.”

Unfortunately, fans of Xiao Zhan didn’t have much time to celebrate their self-declared victory. Drunk with success, they completely overlooked a major fact: the disappearance of AO3 from the Chinese Internet was a huge insult to the millions of Chinese youth who didn’t bother with Xiao Zhan, but shared a passion with fan-fictions and BL. In recent years, as the Chinese Internet got smaller and more restricted, sites like AO3 became the last free haven, the hidden paradise kept secret within the underground circles. As long as the censorship radar didn’t come around, these sites would continue to serve as free platforms for those who like to create and share content. These websites were safe places; they were symbols of freedom for millions who need an outlet for expression.

AO3 made an official apology regarding its server's “unexpected disconnection” after the site was censored.

BL lovers quickly marshaled online. They decided to teach Xiao Zhan’s fans a lesson, and they even gave it a cool name: “227 Jihad”. (227大团结)

An eye for an eye. Furious rebels targeted what Xiao Zhan’s fans cherished the most - their idol’s public reputation. They hit Douban (the Chinese equivalent to imdb but so much better), marking extremely low scores on productions that Xiao Zhan was cast in, and then moved on to Weibo, flooding the accounts of all the brands that Xiao Zhan is currently endorsing with negative comments.

List of all the brands associated with Xiao Zhan.

In an e-commerce livestream, netizens protested against Xiao Zhan during the segment of OLAY products.

The boycott went on for several days with an incredible number of participants. Apart from BL fans, people with niche interests, from the LGBTQ communities, or even just those who were fed up with the crazy fan circle culture all joined in this huge online slaughter of Xiao Zhan. The incident became so big that it finally “broke the circle” (出圈); In just a few days, people who hadn’t been familiar with Xiao Zhan were paying attention to this case, learning about him through the frenzied online discourse.

The hashtag #boycottXiaoZhan was viewed over 380 million times.

On March 1st, Colgate and OLAY, two brands with Xiao Zhan as spokesperson, quietly took down posters featuring Xiao Zhan on their Weibo accounts. The same evening, Xiao Zhan’s agency issued an official statement regarding the recent incident. Trying to sound apologetic to the public yet not wanting to offend either side, the statement was interpreted by most as insincere to say the least. Dissatisfied with such response, netizens continued railing against Xiao Zhan and his fans at an intense level, creating greater online disorder.

Various self-made posters for the online campaign.

In popular Chinese we would say, at this stage, Xiao Zhan as a public figure is officially burnt. (糊了)