Previously accessible in China, the free literary repository, Archive of Our Own (AO3), was firewalled on 27 February 2020. Named after the date of the ban, the subsequent “227 Incident” (227 shijian 事件) witnessed fans of the Chinese actor-singer Xiao Zhan 肖战 protect him from his detractors’ furious attempts to discredit him. Although they grew out of China's political regime, the tactics seen in the incident nonetheless resembled those used in US cancel culture. To better describe the incident and its impact on the way we understand Chinese fandoms, we coin a new term, “cancel culture with Chinese characteristics.” We contend that the Chinese cancel culture 1) advocates the cis-heteropatriarchy; 2) transforms fans into digital vigilantes in defence of national ideologies;Footnote 1 and 3) occurs largely online.
Cancel culture describes the cultural phenomenon where norm-breaking individuals are named and shamed on social media and elsewhere. It receives both the approval and scorn of the public.Footnote 2 Here, cancelling someone means to remove that individual from their position and place (such as a corporate appointment or a job). Nile Rodgers and his band Chic first used the term in the 1981 song, Your Love Is Cancelled, to compare a breakup to the cancellation of TV shows.Footnote 3 Rooted in reading, “calling out” and other Black praxes of accountability in the US, cancelling enables peoples of colour, queers and other socially marginalized groups to critique systemic inequalities in a Habermasian public sphere dominated by elites.Footnote 4 Yet, cancel culture also corrodes freedom of expression and destroys lives,Footnote 5 despite Meredith Clark's argument that the pursuit of social justice sometimes warrants this destruction.Footnote 6
Intrinsic to cancel culture is online shaming, which emerged with the internet. As social control,Footnote 7 synoptic online shaming involves the many surveilling the few.Footnote 8 It manifests as digital vigilantism,Footnote 9 bullying, gossiping and other practices that humiliate those who violate laws and publicly held ideals.Footnote 10 These practices also include “clicktivism” (i.e. “liking” posts, upvoting messages or following social media accounts) and “metavoicing” (i.e. retweeting, reposting, commenting or sharing posts). Often, activists cancel perceived offenders via political consumerism. Simply asking people to align their consumption patterns with their political ideologies can attract large numbers of supporters because it requires the least political involvement. In contrast, users become far more engaged when activists dox transgressors by exposing unauthorized or private data.Footnote 11
So far, cancel culture has produced unequal results. The #MeToo movement successfully brought down the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, but Donald Trump survived; he remains a prominent political figure despite his deplatforming from Twitter/X.Footnote 12 These mixed results highlight the necessity of involving third parties to successfully cancel someone. After all, activists cannot fire transgressors; only the government, platforms, companies and other organizations can sanction norm-violators.Footnote 13
Legally speaking, cancel culture produces perpetual residual information about the perpetrator's acts and identity in tweets, search engine results and other internet documents, violating the right to privacy and human dignity.Footnote 14 Cancel culture can certainly limit freedom of expression. Nonetheless, the traditional perspective of this freedom assumes that better ideas rise naturally to the top in a liberal, laissez-faire society, making the concept of freedom of speech misleading and unhelpful for historically marginalized communities.Footnote 15 Indeed, since patriarchy pervades online networks to strengthen misogyny and violence against racialized individuals,Footnote 16 we cannot regard cancellation as a practice exclusive to specific political ideologies and positions.Footnote 17
In this paper, we focus on the emergence of Chinese cancel culture during the 227 Incident when users of the banned AO3 confronted fans of the popular entertainer Xiao Zhan. Xiao shot to fame in 2019 when he starred with Wang Yibo 王一博 in The Untamed (Chen qing ling 陈情令), a popular fantasy danmei 耽美 TV series. Danmei is the Chinese take on Japan's “boys’ love” (BL) genre of homoerotic and homo-romantic literature and is generally written by women for other women in their teens and early twenties. Among Xiao's 32 million fans on the microblogging site Sina Weibo, two subgroups stood out: the “CP fans” (CP fen 粉) who fantasized about Xiao and Wang being a romantically linked couple, and the “exclusive fans” (weifen 唯粉) who only adored Xiao. CP fans with a particular taste for BL often frequented AO3, a non-profit online repository for fan fiction and other fan works created by users worldwide.
In late February 2020, a CP fan updated her novel Falling (Xiazhui 下坠) on AO3. In the story, Xiao, portrayed as a teenage female sex worker with gender dysphoria, has a love affair with Wang, who is portrayed as a high school boy. The novel's themes of transgenderism, lascivious sex and under-aged prostitution outraged Xiao's exclusive fans. Then, on 27 February, AO3 was “firewalled” in China – allegedly the victim of online reporting (jubao 举报) by Xiao's fans.
AO3's disappearance affected not only Xiao's CP fans; the site also hosted the fan fiction of participants of other forms of popular culture that extend far beyond BL, such as comics, gaming and the Han clothing movement (collectively called tongren 同人).Footnote 18 Tongren fans would normally not bother themselves with what was essentially a petty squabble among Xiao's supporters, but AO3's firewalling enraged them.Footnote 19 These fans, whom we call 227ers, accused Xiao's fans of decimating their already small space of relatively free discourse. Their anger also stemmed partly from a widespread disregard for idol fans, whom they considered to be “brain damaged” (naocan 脑残) – i.e. illogical, fanatical and profligate.Footnote 20 The 227ers tried to cancel Xiao by flooding all of his productions listed on Douban 豆瓣 (China's equivalent of the movie site, IMDB) with negative comments. They did the same on Weibo for all of the products that he promoted, causing some brands to withdraw their endorsement deals. They even went offline in July 2020 to demonstrate at Shanghai's semi-annual comic fair, ComicUp. Subsequently, Xiao shunned public appearances for several months to avoid the controversy. On 25 April 2020, however, he released a new single. As of December 2023, the song had sold 54 million copies and generated 163 million yuan (US$23 million) of revenue, testifying to the 277ers’ limited success in cancelling Xiao.
This article explores how the 227ers viewed AO3's controversial disappearance and why their response was so extreme. By examining this clash of online fandoms we can enrich our understanding of Chinese cancel culture. Drawing upon online ethnographic fieldwork, we maintain that while AO3's ban deprived the 227ers of a rare space where they could previously voice their normally suppressed desires, they achieved only limited success in cancelling Xiao for want of organizational support. Furthermore, the backlash against the novel Falling exposes the cis-heteronormativity of the exclusive fans.Footnote 21 While there is a lofty social justice behind the original intent of cancel culture, both sides involved in the 227 Incident instantiate what we call “cancel culture with Chinese characteristics.” In fact, fan fervour has merged with the rampant cyber-nationalism brewing elsewhere in China, such that some Chinese fans now police non-Chinese fandoms to further complicate the region's geopolitics.
Having outlined our argument, we shall proceed with the remainder of this article as follows. First, we present brief histories of danmei, tongren and fan culture in China. We then discuss our online fieldwork methods before analysing our research findings. Here, the discussion is divided into three subsections that focus on how the 227ers and Xiao's fans perceived AO3, how they regarded the reporting function, and how both sides retaliated against each other. This analysis lays the foundation upon which we examine how the 227 Incident instantiates “cancel culture with Chinese characteristics” in the discussion section. Lastly, we discuss how Chinese BL fans attempt to censor fandoms outside of China before concluding with a conjecture about the incident's impact on Chinese fan subcultures.
Danmei, Tongren and Fan Culture in China
We start with a brief outline of the development of danmei. A localized version of the Japanese tanbi 耽美 cult of youthful beauty, danmei originated from Japanese and Taiwanese comic books banned by the state-controlled publishing industry in the late 1990s. Aided by the rapid expansion of social media in the 2010s, danmei fandom grew into fiction, anime, games, TV shows and other formats in the online literary repository Jinjiang wenxuecheng 晋江文学城, the microblog Sina Weibo, the video-sharing site Bilibili 哔哩哔哩, and other media outlets.Footnote 22 By the mid-2010s, danmei-themed movies and the tremendous purchasing power of their largely female fan base attracted the attention of investors.Footnote 23 Eager to bypass censorship, movie producers heteronormalized the original stories by encoding the main characters’ otherwise blatant homo-romance as a more politically palatable “socialist fraternal love” (shehui zhuyi xiongdiqing 社会主义兄弟情). The resulting “altered danmei” (dan'gai 耽改) genre quickly achieved commercial success by offering the dangerous pleasure of consuming something that constantly faced instant effacementFootnote 24 and a façade that melded both traditional and deviant cultures into an imagined global, modern and hip China.Footnote 25 Furthermore, the strategic invisibilization of homoeroticism enabled fans to imagine what might have actually happened behind the veil of brotherly affection.Footnote 26 Indeed, since mainstream media still predominantly features men-centred plotlines, this powerful women's imagination catalyses a massive tongren subculture where prosuming fans join offline clubs to meet their idols, and produce and circulate idol-related art, memes and hashtags online. The fans also practise self-censorship. This is because the state is quick to label danmei works as pornography and punish their creators with lengthy jail sentences.Footnote 27
Despite both tongren and danmei being highly active subcultures in China, tongren caters for a broader audience than does danmei. It is estimated that Lofter, one of the main platforms for fan fiction, serves as a hub for 12.85 million creators who publish approximately 100,000 works daily.Footnote 28 Originally a Japanese term written with the same characters but pronounced doujinshi (どうじん), tongren refers to a community of fans who create secondary cultural products based on existing creations, in the form of comics, novels, films, music, games, etc., which are called doujin (同人誌) in Japan and tongrenzhi (同人志) in China. In the Chinese context, the tongren subculture has experienced a developmental trajectory similar to that of danmei. Starting in the 1990s, tongren fans began generating cultural products for Japanese anime, comics and games (collectively ACG hereafter) and published their works on nonprofit forums like the bulletin board system (BBS) and personal websites. These interest-related communities revealed a vibrant creative energy and established selective criteria for new members; however, their limited outreach impeded the expansion of the subculture. After 2003, tongren fans moved their works to profit-oriented platforms such as Baidu tieba 百度贴吧 and Lofter, while also carving out cultural spaces on overseas social media platforms like AO3 and Tumblr. After 2012, the tongren subculture identified Weibo as its primary platform. The congregation of tongren works on several open-accessed platforms enabled these products to transcend their confined subcultural circles and reach the public, exponentially increasing the number of tongren fans and enhancing tongren's influence in broader society.
Among the diverse subcultures in China, fan culture has often been stereotyped as “an overly obsessed fraction of the audience” owing to the fans’ intense emotional expressions towards entertainment celebrities and their zealotry for idol-related consumption,Footnote 29 placing them at the bottom of the subculture hierarchy. Fan culture in China, also known as “fan circles” (fanquan 饭圈), emerged from the star-making campaign initiated by Hunan TV's talent show Super Girls in 2005. Since then, the individuated adoration of idols has developed into a vibrant online fandom community. According to the “2018 Weibo Fan White Paper,” the total number of fan visits on Weibo reached 16.7 billion in 2018.Footnote 30 In contrast to their negative stereotypes, fans are nomads who deal with the various forces at play in popular culture with clear understanding, rational thinking and coping strategies.Footnote 31 Furthermore, by resorting to self-selection and self-organization in their day-to-day online activities, fans leverage new media technologies to unite individual netizens into a powerful community. As a result, fans transform themselves into publics that wield a continually growing influence in the political domain.Footnote 32
Most strikingly, as a result of the intersections of danmei, tongren and fan culture, danmei- and tongren-invigorated imaginations also enable fans to shower their affections on idols in other ways. Fans know that digital platforms and social media track their online activities, so they adopt individual and collective strategies to manipulate metric and semantic information.Footnote 33 Some fans position themselves as their idols’ caring mothers, elder sisters or girlfriends, thereby transforming formerly para-social relationships into more intimate (albeit still heavily asymmetrical) para-kin ones.Footnote 34 They also uphold their idols’ reputation by, for instance, playing the idols’ songs online non-stop, speaking up against detractors, flooding forum threads with praise to drown out negative comments, and performing offline charitable work.Footnote 35 Fans know that their money and adulation keep their idols at the top of the popularity charts. Reflecting general fan impulses to mould the objects of their attention to better satisfy their desires,Footnote 36 they demand that errant idols change their behaviour to suit the fans’ own personal inclinations.Footnote 37 Hence, the increasing digitalization of danmei and tongren media dematerializes traffic data as the new affective object in fan–object relations, even as it reconstructs digital fan culture into an algorithmic one.Footnote 38
The brief histories of Chinese danmei, tongren and fan culture highlight the significance of social media platforms in providing a space for showcasing and disseminating subcultural works. In evading state censorship, tongren fans view AO3 and other overseas platforms as more crucial for preserving their subcultural activities and experiences, rather than as a platform for the free expression of all Chinese citizens. This centrality explains why tongren fans reacted fervently to the disappearance of AO3.
Research Methods
Having summarized danmei's development, we now discuss how we gathered our data. We conducted online ethnographic fieldwork from March to July 2020 in two phases. China's strict enforcement of a nationwide stay-at-home policy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic during that time forced the 227ers to conduct their protest mainly online.Footnote 39 Phase 1 (March and April 2020) involved participant-observation in 227 Incident-related discussion groups and threads on such major internet platforms as Weibo, the ubiquitous messenger app, WeChat, and the online literary website Jinjiang wenxuecheng. We noticed that Xiao's fans repudiated the 227ers’ accusation and initially made counter-claims online. Realizing the futility of their actions – the 227ers’ fury remained unabated – these fans instead switched to charity work to improve Xiao's public image.
In phase 2 (May to July 2020), we substantiated our field observations with interviews. We contacted and interviewed a total of 20 informants (18 women and two men), ten of which were Xiao's fans and the other ten, 227ers. All of our interviewees were tongren fans of some sort and participated in the 227 Incident to varying degrees. The majority of the 227er respondents frequented AO3 and expressed their anger through various online means. For instance, they established public WeChat accounts specifically to disseminate information about the incident. The minority who did not frequent AO3 and/or actively expressed their views still followed news of the anti-Xiao campaign closely and occasionally joined in. Both sides willingly spent money to express their devotion to Xiao. While Xiao's fans bought multiple copies of his newly released songs to bolster their positions in the national music charts, the detractors sometimes travelled long distances to protest in offline events on multiple days.
Our informants hailed from all parts of China and so we conducted all interviews online using the messenger app, WeChat. The interviews lasted one to two hours each and centred on how respondents resisted Xiao online and offline; their views about the ban on AO3; and their overall goals, organization and strategies. We intentionally did not reveal to our informants that this research solicited opinions from both the 227ers and Xiao's fans to prevent them from crafting a collective narrative to counter one another. Furthermore, similar to emails, interviewing by text and voice message presented discontinuities that might cause informants to forget what they had previously said.Footnote 40 Compared to traditional face-to-face interviews, however, this asynchronicity allowed informants more time to carefully ponder our questions before answering. This consideration gave informants greater ownership of their narratives by allowing them to alter the shape and structure of these answers to fit more closely with their constructions of reality. That they could do so in a time and space convenient to them arguably led to richer stories. Lastly, the flow of the conversation could make informants overlook certain questions or answer them only briefly. The time gap present in text and voice messaging thus enabled us to look back at the replies already given to check if all our questions had been answered sufficiently well.Footnote 41 Thus, while asynchronous interviewing has its drawbacks, here we argue that it produced data that were just as authentic as that derived from more traditional face-to-face interviews.
Analysis
This section analyses our research findings in greater detail. The following discussion has three subsections that focus on how the 227ers and Xiao's fans perceived AO3, how they regarded the report (jubao) function, and how they retaliated against each other. To protect our informants’ privacy, we use pseudonyms throughout.
Perceptions of AO3: “spiritual granary” or “carpark”
When reminiscing about the now-blocked AO3, 227ers described it as (in their terms) a “spiritual granary” (jingshen liangcang 精神粮仓) from which they drew restorative sustenance for their creative souls in China's highly censored mediascape. They valued the site because it treated every user equally, as creators who had the freedom to share literature with others with similar interests. In sharp contrast, Xiao's fans regarded AO3 as a “carpark” (tingchechang 停车场) where users could store all manner of literature. Writers of fan fiction usually published “healthy,” non-offensive content on domestic platforms such as Weibo, Lofter and Jinjiang wenxuecheng. Acts of love within these materials were typically limited to only kisses and caresses of the characters’ faces. Bolder writers also provided links to AO3-hosted narratives that contained pornographic, violent and other sensitive themes that censors would never accept.
Even for non-sensitive content, however, readers frequently found that some phrases and keywords would be substituted with unintelligible symbols by self-censoring domestic platforms eager to avoid the costly penalties for accidently breaching state guidelines. Take, for example, the innocuous sentence, “Bring me a thermometer” (Geiwo na yixia tiwenji 给我拿一下体温计), which contains the characters xia 下and ti 体. These two characters are part of different grammatical elements in the sentence but platform algorithms will read them together as “lower body” (xiati 下体), arbitrarily treat them as pornographic material and then censor them. Throughout our interviews, both 227ers and Xiao's fans lamented how arbitrary censorship negatively impacted their reading experiences and hindered writers from freely sharing their works.
Beyond the freedom it offered for literary creation, AO3 also impressed 227ers deeply with its sophisticated but reader-friendly age-grading system. It labelled stories with genre tags and had pop-up questions that reminded readers of the features of the literature that they planned to peruse. AO3 would inform under-aged users of any potential unsuitability, then suggest more age-appropriate stories. Given AO3's international readership, 227ers lamented the loss of opportunities for cultural exchange with their foreign counterparts. AO3's ban deprived Chinese users of a kindred belonging that stemmed from seeing foreign users creating and sharing related content. Similarly, foreign users also lost access to Chinese works of fan fiction.
Reporting (jubao) and claims to the right to create
When we asked about AO3's disappearance, Xiao's fans mostly ascribed it to censorship operations by the central regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). In China, the central government holds paramount authority over internet regulation, integrating commercial entities and civic organizations into its regulatory framework to ensure full alignment with state objectives.Footnote 42 China boasts the “Great Firewall,” an elaborate internet censorship regime that allows international tech companies entry only if they accede to state demands to filter content.Footnote 43 Censorship primarily targets content that can potentially mobilize offline collective action, even if it supports the government.Footnote 44 Such content may include movies,Footnote 45 social media postsFootnote 46 and articles.Footnote 47 The fragmented nature of the state bureaucracy means that as multiple agencies with jurisdictions over the internet compete with each other for greater control,Footnote 48 this struggle opens up interstitial spaces of relative autonomy to internet users. Before its ban, AO3 counted among these sites.
Although third parties ordered the firewalling of AO3, 227ers blamed the ban directly on Xiao's fans abusing the state's reporting (jubao) function. In the conversation threads that we collected from domestic platforms, 227ers provided textual summaries and screenshots to prove that Xiao's fans cancelled AO3 by encouraging others to report it as a pornographic site. To protect themselves, tongren fans (including the 227ers) “claimed the space as their own and gained pleasure from being there” (quandi zimeng 圈地自萌). Rejecting interference from outsiders, this strategy emphasized a desire for an uninterrupted space, even though it could sometimes shelter illegal activities.Footnote 49 Noticing the intensification of online surveillance in recent years, AO3 users adopted counter-censorship measures, such as providing links to external websites, turning objectionable texts into photos that platform algorithms could not easily discern and hiding such texts in the editing histories of otherwise innocuous posts. Thus, for many years, tongren fans enjoyed a sustainable, if precarious, existence under the state's watchful eye. Xiao's fans allegedly ruined this finely tuned equilibrium, rendering reporting intolerable to the 227ers. Had Xiao's fans not reported AO3, the 227ers opined, the site would have been too insignificant to ever attract the state's censorship.
In China's heavily restricted media environment, platform algorithms automatically detect blacklisted terms and other non-compliant content,Footnote 50 while legions of human censors monitor those posts missed or mislabelled by the algorithms.Footnote 51 To evade censorship, netizens commonly recode sensitive terms by, for instance, abbreviating “government” (zhengfu 政府) to “ZF,” or writing “harmony” (hexie 和谐, an euphemistic term for “censorship”) as the near-homophonic “river crab” (hexie 河蟹).Footnote 52 Since the list of sensitive terms remains unknown, netizens develop a “sensitive-word culture” as they formulate their own folk theories around algorithmic suppression.Footnote 53 Of course, netizen practices do not just revolve around censorship. They can also conduct “human flesh searches” (renrou sousuo 人肉搜索) to dox legal and social transgressors.Footnote 54
Hemmed in by internet censorship, the 227ers disliked anything that further threatened their right to express themselves freely. For instance, they particularly loathed how fans of entertainment idols collectively manipulated the online image of their favourite stars by “controlling the comments” (kongping 控评) to suppress remarks that besmirched their idol and “washing the public square” (xi guangchang 洗广场) to spam the comment section with supportive feedback to drown out any criticism.Footnote 55 Furthermore, 227ers attributed idol fan behaviour to the machinations of platform capitalism, which they anthropomorphized as “Capital,” that infiltrated and controlled all aspects of artistic creation. They reasoned that idol fans, under Capital's nefarious influence, wanted to inform others of their status as fervent supporters. Hence, these fans excessively consumed the goods and services promoted by their favourite stars. Concurrently, 227ers accused Capital of insinuating itself into tongren subcultures by violating the spirit of the original literary work (such as Xiao's The Untamed) and exposing these subcultures to a wider audience, shattering the pre-existing quandi zimeng arrangement. Like fans of other subcultures elsewhere, 227ers believed their motives to be higher than those of official producers.Footnote 56 This antipathy towards Capital largely prevented 227ers from regarding themselves as part of the same socio-economic system under which the official producers operated.Footnote 57
Mutual retaliation
At this juncture, one may ask why did the 227ers try to cancel only Xiao? He did not commission the pornographic novel that supposedly led to AO3 being blocked. Neither could he determine what his fans created in his name. Why did the 227ers not blame the authorities for censoring AO3, or Xiao's fans for allegedly abusing the reporting function? While the 227ers abhorred anyone who misused the reporting function, they did not oppose the state. Our informants pointed out that going after the state would have been pointless. A public protest at the CAC office in Beijing, for instance, would have landed them in trouble. Similarly, the 227ers could not go after Capital: a protest at the company that produced The Untamed would also have quickly involved the police. In addition, Xiao's fans acted collectively in reporting AO3, not individually, and the 227ers could not track down unknown fans to make them pay for their misdeed. That left Xiao himself. As a well-known public figure, he became the singular target for all of the 227ers’ pent-up anger.
As the 227 Incident dragged on, the once-lofty goals of fighting for the right to create and opposing Capital and its wicked idol fan culture gradually subsided into the singular goal of cancelling Xiao. The 227ers reasoned that his fall would send a clear warning shot to Capital to leave them alone next time. The planning and mobilization of manpower for this campaign all took place online. As one informant, Xueqi (227er), explained:
Planning the campaign online is different from doing it offline. Online, people are less inhibited and are much more willing to say things they normally wouldn't say. It's also faster to mobilize people online. China rarely has large-scale offline social incidents; you hardly ever see public protests, or people throwing eggs at government officials. Under these circumstances, it's already very courageous of people to speak their minds online. There are so many restrictions offline, so our online activities are our strongest resistance.
Indeed, the state has an array of administrative and legal apparatuses to manage collective protests. It can give in to the demands; appeal to the logics of market exchange, rule-bound games and interpersonal bonds;Footnote 58 or subject petitioners to long bureaucratic delays.Footnote 59 Online protests face fewer such obstacles, which explains why the 227ers made their plans online.
Ironically, while the 227ers detested how the idol fans operated, they used exactly the same fan tactics to cancel Xiao. It is important to note that social media platforms do not regulate transgressive symbolic attacks because they benefit from the traffic and attention generated by such conflicts. The 227ers established the hashtag #227 historic moment (227 lishi shike 历史时刻) as a “super topic” (chaohua 超话) on Weibo – it was read over 96.5 million times. Other tactics included supporting Xiao's rivals and posting “bullet curtain” (danmu 弹幕) comments such as “Xiao must fall” (Xiao bihu 肖必糊) across his videos hosted on Bilibili. Danmuku comments originated in Japan and fly projectile-like across the screen as videos are played. Other 227ers photoshopped the words “social death” (shehuixing siwang 社会性死亡) below Xiao's photos to turn them into funeral portraits. Regarding him as a “disqualified idol” who deserved no positive tongren works to his name, they verbally assaulted anybody who wrote such works, even as they themselves fashioned a story that featured Xiao in a romantic relationship with a real-life paedophile.
When the 227ers first confronted Xiao's fans online, the two groups engaged in heated arguments. Xiao's fans soon withdrew to better protect Xiao's reputation, but the 227ers pressed on with their aggression. Almost all of our Xiao fan interviewees had been verbally abused by 227ers. For instance, Huanxi wept as she recalled how she suffered:
Whether we're CP fans or exclusive ones, we all look like Xiao's fans. The 227ers say we're “enemies of civilization.” Even if we just leave comments like “Buckle up, Wuhan!” [a common phrase of encouragement during the COVID-19 pandemic], they'll cuss us out when they see Xiao in our profile photos. Whether they leave Weibo comments or send us private messages, they'll debate with us, or even make direct, personal attacks. They spill such venom, it's really terrifying. I changed my profile photo, made sure it had nothing to do with Xiao.
The 227ers’ indiscriminate attacks led to the 227 Incident gradually descending into violent zealotry. The 227ers believed that their enemies did not have the right to create fan works. Worse, their attacks made the entire incident look as if it were just a petty quarrel between two groups of overzealous netizens, thus distracting onlookers from its real cause.
The 227ers organized their anti-Xiao campaign online, but they also executed it offline. Friendships were abruptly ended with anyone who supported Xiao. If they discovered that they had unwittingly bought from a shop that carried Xiao-related goods, they would call its customer service to ask for a formal receipt. In China, there are generally two types of receipts: a proof of purchase, which cannot be used for expense reimbursement, taxation or other official purposes, and a more formal receipt that can. The 227ers’ tactic of asking for “invoice receipts” (kai fapiao 开发票) could involve a large number of people at low cost. Shops are legally obliged to provide official receipts, but (for the accountants at least) it is troublesome to issue them weeks or months after an actual purchase. As an exercise of one's legal rights that caused minimal harm to others (unlike, say, reporting), this form of protest was more likely to gain the support of the wider public. As such, it exemplified “rightful resistance,” or “a form of popular contention that operate[d] near the boundary of authorized channels, employ[ed] the rhetoric and commitments of the powerful to curb the exercise of power.”Footnote 60
The 227ers accused Xiao's fans of abusing their civic legal powers; the 227ers' other acts of resistance followed suit, but they viewed their actions as “reflecting the situation” (fanying qingkuang 反映情况) rather than “reporting.” For example, if they heard that Xiao was scheduled to appear in a TV variety programme, they would inform the broadcasting station that state media had once reprimanded him for encouraging fans to spend extravagantly on him. They would then demand that the station uninvite him. To them, “reporting” satisfied individual selfish desires; “reflecting the situation,” however, improved social well-being.
In July 2020, the 227ers took their grievances offline when they demonstrated at Shanghai's semi-annual comic fair, ComicUp. Figure 1 shows a 227er booth at the fair. The left banner reads “Smelly turtles and rotten prawns [i.e. Xiao's fans] don't deserve to join the fair,” while the banner on the right reads “White Lotus and Potato [i.e. Xiao] don't deserve to have tongren (products).” Reflecting the 227ers’ insular quandi zimeng attitude, the two banners are coded with obscure 227er terms. In the middle, the top banner says, “You know hu?” Here, hu can be read as the English “who,” so that the banner reads as “you-know-who,” referring indirectly to Xiao. The lack of punctuation marks means that this sentence can be read either as a question or a statement. By adding the first character hu, which is obstructed by the left banner, the banner below reads “[popularity] sinks so low that it pierces the earth's core.” Together, the two banners wish that Xiao's career will fail. The four pieces of white paper between these top banners openly invite passersby to take photos, but only someone sufficiently familiar with 227ers will know to whom “rotten prawns” and “White Lotus” refer. Such opacity hampered the 227ers’ attempts to gain sympathy for their grievances from passersby.
Figure 1. 227er Stall at Shanghai's Comic Fair, ComicUp 2020.
Source: The photo was taken from Weibo but has been so widely disseminated that we can no longer determine its owner.
Despite the 227ers’ provocations, Xiao's fans reacted with restraint. Initially, we observed a small number of fans arguing with the 227ers on the online forums, but these fights soon subsided into a silent disregard for anything the 227ers verbally hurled at them. One fan, Qiujin, told us:
Initially, there were calls to wash the public square. I went along, even though I had no idea what was happening at the time. The effects weren't great though. Some bystanders got irritated by our washing, so we were told to just disengage. We were to not say anything, not rebut the 227ers or resist them. If they wanted to scold us, let them. Occasionally, we'd block and report those who left bad comments, and that was our only way to retaliate. What else could we do?
Xiao's fans realized the futility of arguing with the 227ers, so they instead bought more of Xiao's songs and donated money in his name to charities to ensure his popularity.
Discussion: “Cancel Culture with Chinese Characteristics”
Understanding the global landscape of cancel culture can help us to gain a better grasp of the features of China's cancel culture, as exemplified by the 227 Incident. In recent years, cancel culture has evolved and intensified worldwide, through discourse and its subsequent practices, to reshape societies’ dominant cultures and mainstream values.Footnote 61 It silences dissenting views, erodes academic freedom of expression and contributes to the polarization of public opinion. According to a global cross-national survey of 2,500 scholars in over 100 countries, both right-wing scholars in countries with liberal social cultures, such as the US and the UK, and left-wing scholars in more conservative moral cultures perceive growing threats from cancel culture.Footnote 62 Within this global trend, China's state power in regulating ideologies, social media and individual citizens has spurred a divergent form of cancel culture, one that promotes cis-heteropatriarchy, defends national ideologies and is primarily played out in cyberspace.
The 227ers’ attacks against Xiao prove that the intervention of third parties is needed to successfully cancel someone (i.e. Xiao's managing company or the state).Footnote 63 Even if Xiao was cancelled, the entertainment companies could easily produce another idol to take his place. Worse, the 227ers could not prevent any further encroachment into whatever limited spaces for their creative freedoms they had. This impotence explains why the anti-Xiao campaign instead became an outlet through which the 227ers could vent their unassuaged frustrations.
More importantly, the above online ethnography demonstrates that Chinese fandoms practise cancel culture as part of their repertoire of celebrity-supporting activities. First, what we call “cancel culture with Chinese characteristics” differs ontologically from its US counterpart. While it can address social injustice, the Chinese version advocates the cis-heteropatriarchy.Footnote 64 In their online comments, fans of Xiao's The Untamed regularly align the show with such “core socialist values” as “democracy” and national “harmony.” The top-ranking comment on the official Weibo page of The Untamed reads:
The content tonight is very much in accordance with the core values of socialism and could bring positive values to the young. At the same time, what was shown tonight also represented Chinese traditional chivalrous feelings and heroism, which are required by contemporary society.Footnote 65
While such praise can be dismissed as false flattery, designed to distract censors from the fans’ penchant for homoeroticism,Footnote 66 the 227 Incident undeniably reflected the fans’ internalized viewpoints. Recall that Xiao's exclusive fans objected to his portrayal as a trans-female prostitute in the novel Falling. Xiao's future financial prospects and the fans’ fantasies of him being their perfect husband/boyfriend were threatened by the feminization of his masculine, heterosexual and cis-gender male public persona.Footnote 67
Second, given that cancel culture seeks to leverage digital media for particular socio-political ends,Footnote 68 this weaponization of visibility turns Chinese fans into digital vigilantes. As exemplified in the 227 Incident, the fans, as digital vigilantes, both navigate and reinforce state control, but their reliance on state power invites the state's monitoring and censoring of fandom speech and products.Footnote 69 Certainly, the fans use culturally specific means (such as online reporting and requesting formal receipts) to rectify the legal and/or moral offences their target is said to have committed. Such visibility is unwanted (neither AO3 nor Xiao solicited publicity during the 227 Incident); intense (both Xiao's fans and the 227ers produced texts that rapidly circulated among millions of other like-minded users); and enduring (the produced texts remain on the internet, and the vigilantism campaign itself may become a cultural reference).Footnote 70 With the circulation of misinformation hastening digital vigilantism, falsehoods circulate with greater volatility than the truth.Footnote 71 By seeking their own forms of justice, participants may supersede institutions and formal procedures.Footnote 72 In China, therefore, aggrieved fans will be more likely to seek the state's arbitration. In the 227 Incident, for instance, Xiao's exclusive fans invoked core socialist values so that they appeared to be supportive of the state. To morally and legally justify their retaliations, they painted their rivals’ actions as pernicious to juveniles and other vulnerable groups; the online novel that triggered the 227 Incident was undeniably risqué, even by liberal standards. To the dismay of the 227ers, however, their digital activism and efforts to call out Xiao only served to reinforce the all-powerful state control over their right to create.
Finally, while online cancellation in the US can spill into the offline world – the Black Lives Matter movement began through social media – China's highly restrictive laws on public assembly mean that Chinese cancel culture is far more likely to occur online only. In this largely cyber existence, fans in China take greater advantage of the internet's affordances to engender cancelling practices that differ from those used in the US. Beyond the political consumerism, call outs and doxing methods used by their US counterparts, Chinese fans also report breaches in legal and socio-cultural norms to the authorities; highlight their grievances via such means as “super topics” and instant “bullet curtain” comments; and swamp the target's associated social media with negative comments. In turn, the target's defenders counter this negativity with deluges of positive posts. If cancelling campaigns unsanctioned by the state do extend offline, they appear so muted (for example, insisting on formal receipts) that neither the authorities nor the general public are likely to understand what the fans are really doing (take, for example, the protest booth at Shanghai's comic fair).
Recently, Chinese fandoms in general have also adopted nationalistic sentiments. After the 1980s, China began promulgating nationalism as its legitimizing ideology.Footnote 73 While this nationalism remains largely designed by political elites,Footnote 74 it also assimilates the sentiments of netizens who, taking genuine pride in the country's performance and actively defending government policies,Footnote 75 use digital media technologies to spread nationalist discourses.Footnote 76 In his Year Hare Affair webcomics and animations, for example, Lin Chao depicts countries as animals (China as a generally harmless hare and the US as a powerful but arrogant eagle) to explain geopolitics to children and youths.Footnote 77 Over the past two decades, cybernationalists have shifted from online bulletin boards to Weibo and WeChat to various live-streaming platforms.Footnote 78 Exploiting decentralized digital infrastructure, non-state actors increasingly produce and disseminate pro-China discourses. For instance, in 2016, nationalistic netizens launched the meme war, “Diba Expedition” (Diba chuzheng 帝吧出征), targeting independence-leaning Taiwanese individuals and institutions on Facebook.Footnote 79 The Communist Youth League also actively utilizes fandom culture to produce and disseminate cultural content related to nationalism, forming a type of soft propaganda.Footnote 80
Chinese fandoms express nationalist sentiments by threatening to cancel anyone for perceived insults to China's national dignity. In April 2020, for example, fans discovered that the Thai model Weeraya Sukaram, the girlfriend of Thai BL actor Vachirawit Chiva-aree, commented in a now-deleted Instagram post that she dressed like a “Taiwanese girl.” The fans interpreted this comment as a denial of China's irredentist claim over Taiwan. Deploying the same data-manipulating tactics that they use against local celebrities, they lowered the rating of Chiva-aree's show (albeit only marginally) on Douban.
In the accompanying war of words on both Twitter and Sina Weibo, the fans demanded an apology from the couple but were ignored. They then bombarded the couple's Thai defenders with nationalistic insults. Much to the chagrin of the Chinese fans, the Thais not only laughed at their slurs but also manipulated them to form cleverer counter-attacking memes. For example, the fans hurled the crude epithet “nmsl” (an acronym of nima sile 你妈死了, meaning “your mother is dead”) so often that it became a recurring theme in the retaliatory memes. When they then tried to shame the Thai king and government, the Thais surprisingly nodded in agreement; they did not like their political leaders either. Widely regarded as too undemocratic and reckless, neither the king nor the government enjoyed much popularity. The Thais soon found allies against the fans. Netizens in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Philippines joined the fray as part of a newly forged and hashtagged #MilkTeaAlliance.Footnote 81 Unable to silence their critics, the Chinese nationalist fans could only retreat.
Conclusion: Implications for Chinese Subcultures and Beyond
This paper uses the 227 Incident to theorize “cancel culture with Chinese characteristics” as a form of social control that prioritizes state ideology over social justice, relies on state power as the final arbiter and exists primarily online but with practices that differ from those in the US. As we conclude, we now consider the incident's implications on China's fan subcultures and beyond.
By attempting to cancel Xiao in protest at AO3's disappearance, the 227ers claimed to promote the inviolable right to create; however, their efforts failed to achieve the broad-based goals they were targeting. The 227ers realized the necessity of making their grievances heard. This awareness is crucial to the survival and further development of all subcultures in China. In this paper, we demonstrate the embeddedness of online groups in the power structures of the offline world. Even as Xiao became a hated symbol of Capital, the 227ers’ radicalization created new structures of inequality. Where once subcultures maintained an overall subordinated position vis-à-vis mainstream culture through their quandi zimeng philosophy, the 227ers cast the fans of entertainment idols as the lowest of all subcultural groups. With the censorship regime silencing all fandoms regardless of their orientations, it was all but impossible for the 227 Incident to result in more space for expression and creativity.
Lastly, although this paper is clearly not the appropriate forum for a deeper discussion of the related geopolitics, the fan-nationalists’ over-reaching policing of non-Chinese celebrities could potentially complicate matters. By turning themselves into digital vigilantes, fans who engage in culture-cancelling activities can shut down opposing online opinions with the sheer volume of their cyber vitriol, but this suppression provides at best only temporary respite. Browbeating one's opponents into submission only breeds resentment and not genuine admiration and respect. Popular dissatisfaction can foment and exacerbate geopolitical tensions with neighbouring countries. For example, the #MilkTeaAlliance offers activists both a highly visible means of creating transnational alliances and a haven of support.Footnote 82 Hashtag activism “push[es] back against the notion promulgated by some that the real work of change only happens offline,” and begins to illuminate how movements in different territories that face disparate but parallel challenges can draw upon each other's experiences.Footnote 83
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Special Funds of Taishan Scholar Project (No. tsqn202211013) and from Shandong University (No. 23RWZD08). The authors thank Yuyang Deng, Xingxuan Li, Siyu Zhao, Jiaqi Shen, Qiujin Wu, Jiaqi Xin and Lingyan Li for their excellent research assistance.
Competing Interests
None.
Chris K.K. TAN is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University, Singapore. He previously worked as an associate professor in the Institute of Social Anthropology at Nanjing University, Nanjing, China. His research interests centre on new media, gender, sexuality, and their intersections. He has previously published in Urban Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography and Journal of Homosexuality.
Miao LI is a professor at the Center for Judaic and Inter-religious Studies and the department of sociology at Shandong University, Jinan, China, as well as a visiting scholar at Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University. Her research interests include youth culture, new media and education, and schooling of rural-origin students. Her articles appear in Information, Communication & Society, Journal of Cultural Economy and Journal of Chinese Governance.
