[Chinese Fandom Culture] The epic tale of how a virtual idol created by the Chinese government for propaganda purposes was turned into a feminist icon, in protest against the erasure of female medical workers during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Since we're doing Chinese internet culture posts, I thought I'd share one of the best things I've ever experienced within the Great Firewall of China. This is related to the sub's content guidelines because Chinese Fandom culture and weeb culture are both heavily involved.

The State creates its own extremely cursed anime characters

VTubers (Virtual Youtubers who usually use cute anime avatars) are a Japanese phenomenon that have become popular in China over the past few years. Don't ask me how people follow these YouTubers from a country that banned YouTube, I don't participate in that community and have no fucking clue.

The Communist Youth League of China had the brilliant idea of making their own VTuber-inspired virtual personas. They already had a very active and very annoying Weibo account which wasn't enough, apparently. Why a VTuber, of all things? Who the fuck knows.

So some time in early to mid February 2020 they released their official VTuber character designs:

Click to see the CCP's official VTuber designs!

Her name is Jiang Shan Jiao, "The Delicate Beauty of Mountains and Rivers". His name is Hong Qi Man, "The Glorious Sight of a Torrent of Red Flags". These are taken from a poem by Mao himself. I tried too hard with the translations here because two seconds of Googling didn't produce anything I liked, they're bad but bear with me please. By the way, the "Red Flags" here obviously refer to the flags of the PRC and CCP because they don't carry the meaning of being signals of danger in Chinese.

So these motherfuckers are released upon the public through all of the Youth League's official social media accounts, and literally nobody is impressed. The initial most popular critique was that politics is meant to be serious, with slogans easily relate-able to your average working class citizen, not this weeb shit. A much-reblogged post said something like: "Citizens are members of the Party and participants of the State, not 'fans'" (going by memory here, might be a bit off from the original). Anime fans and VTuber fans were extremely embarrassed about the whole thing.

It was also seen as an attempt to push idol culture-inspired Fandom stuff into propaganda, which many were disgusted by, idol fans or not. This also had to do with how extremely weird Chinese Fandom culture is - if you're interested in more, here's a post of mine from another thread. But anyway, for a short while it looked as though the weird state-created VTubers were here to stay regardless of what people thought about them.

How COVID-19 played into it

The events above happened in February and therefore coincided with the COVID-19 outbreak. Medical resources and personnel were shipped towards Wuhan at max speed.

Due to the sheer scale of things, there weren't enough masks, protective suits, or... sanitary pads. According to the statistics I saw once on some unsourced Weibo post, 90% of the medical personnel were female. So, the majority of people suddenly sent to Wuhan needed those products, yet nobody had the foresight to ship some along the other supplies. Why? My guesses include the consistent erasure of female workers, period shaming, lack of women in decision-making levels of management... You might see a tendency here to blame systematic things rather than the incompetence of individuals. That's because in my humble opinion, China suffers from a type of extreme systematic misogyny that arises from millennia of Confucian bullshit values, but that's beyond the scope of this post so just take my word for it please.

The workers suffering from the lack of sanitary products started begging for supplies from the public on Weibo. It became a pretty big deal, and you can imagine the shitstorm that acknowledging the existence of periods in public caused. So some brilliant user made a Weibo post asking:

"Jiang Shan Jiao, do you get periods?"

People thought this was a good idea and more questions in the same format followed:

"Jiang Shan Jiao, do you have kids?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, can you walk alone at night?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, must you marry before age 30?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, must your skirt cover your knees?"

Trigger warning, some of these get pretty personal:

"Jiang Shan Jiao, did you get this job by sleeping with the boss?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, are you a second-hand good after getting divorced?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, will you be kicked out of school if a teacher sexually harassed you?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, will the police care if your husband beats you?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, if you get raped will people call you a slut?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, did your parents force you to get married rather than apply for a Master's degree?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, did you have to score 200 more points higher your brother did to apply for the same job?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, did your family have two kids because they only wanted a son?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, whose surname will your children carry?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, are you polite and quiet? Are you bad at maths? Are you emotional? Do you wear makeup? Are you afraid of being followed? Are you scared of being kidnapped and trafficked even as an adult?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, will you lose your name and only be someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's mother?"

"Jiang Shan Jiao, will you cry like I did when I read these?"

There's like a fuckload of these that have been compiled somewhere, I can provide a longer list of translations in the comments if anyone's interested. A lot of them addressed very China-specific issues and news events that would be hard to understand without context, I filtered those out to make things easier.

Conclusion

As a result of this the VTuber announcements were removed within the same day they were posted, countless accounts were banned and comments deleted. The original post is long gone but people still quote it sometimes. I think it reached at least 100k likes based on memory but can't be sure and there's no way to check since it's gone.

My analysis of why they tried to scrub away the whole thing is:

The Youth League has completely lost control over their creations.
Activism of any form is frowned upon.
The misogynists that are everywhere in Chinese society, including ones in positions that gave them the power to delete things, felt uncomfortable about it.
Hobby-wise, Fandom culture grew larger and more obnoxious after having the state basically endorse them. VTuber communities took a while to recover from their very niche interest being discovered and paraded around. Internet feminist groups grew stronger as more were introduced to them.

Anyway, this is the story of how the Chinese state's attempt at using idol culture and weeb culture to their advantage completely failed, thanks for reading.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/g0liuh/chinese_fandom_culture_the_epic_tale_of_how_a/