Daxiang Gonghui: How a Serious WeChat Account Got Big | 100 People With Ideas

In the world of Moments, Daxiang Gonghui's writing is serious and "deep" — a little abnormal. Its founder, Huang Zhangjin, set that style, and it has "pierced through" a great many people.

The WeChat account Daxiang Gonghui — Elephant Guild — likes to headline its stories with questions. Why does the Taiwanese accent sound so effeminate? Why are Hong Kongers the most superstitious? Why are official seals round? Why are Chinese people so obsessed with boosting male potency? Why did Xi Jinping choose Qingfeng Baozi Shop?

Founder Huang Zhangjin set this headline style: pick a topic the public genuinely cares about, then build in suspense. It "pierces through" people, he says — they can't help clicking in to find the answer.

Since it started at the end of 2013, more than 600,000 people have been thoroughly "pierced through": they subscribe to the Daxiang Gonghui account. Its daily posts routinely draw more than 100,000 readers who can't resist clicking in for the answer.

If Huang Zhangjin has guessed right, these are the lively ones at the dinner table — people who like to air an opinion but look down on tablemates who ramble without substance. Daxiang Gonghui meets their need. "The best dinner-table conversation material," runs one of its slogans. And not only that: it also enriches your knowledge, your insight, your worldliness.

That is not how the typical big WeChat account works. The big accounts depend on Moments to spread. In a Moments world where every two sentences call for a picture, Daxiang Gonghui's content looks "serious," even "deep" — a little abnormal.

It takes on smoking, drinking, food, football, relations between men and women, clothes, language, rumors, medicine, architecture, discrimination, crime and politics. It touches on breaking news now and then, but in the end it is "devoted to explaining every extendable field of human behavior."

These scholarly pieces run about 3,000 characters, and sometimes read like nonsense delivered with a perfectly straight face. In "Why Did Xi Jinping Choose Qingfeng Baozi Shop?", which raced past 100,000 reads, the author explained the national leader's choice through political science and communication theory, and along the way took in stewed liver, the Manchu language, and the eating habits behind them.

"It may not have the certain answers the natural sciences have, but it may be more interesting," Huang Zhangjin says — like the prototype meter in Paris.

For a long stretch Huang Zhangjin was a traditional media man. He was deputy editor-in-chief of Youth Reference, executive editor-in-chief of Phoenix Weekly, and deputy director of NetEase's news center. Now he goes out of his way to separate the sensational headlines of the portals from what Daxiang Gonghui does.

"Completely different," Huang Zhangjin says. "[The portals] are there to make you want to consume."

He wants more than consumption.

Huang Zhangjin was born in Gaoquan, in Wusu, Xinjiang, and after graduating worked as a bank clerk in Loudi, Hunan. Like many young people in the same position, he was not satisfied with the life he had: "It's like the film And the Spring Comes — life in a small place made me feel out of place. I knew that if I stayed I'd turn into a monster, so I kept looking for a way out."

BBS forums gave him a sense of belonging. From 2000 on, under the handle "Devil Drill Instructor," Huang Zhangjin was busy on forums such as China Youth Online, NetEase's Beijing community and the Vanke forum, describing himself as "a fairly senior news laborer, a veteran netizen, a long-term bystander who doesn't know the real story." He wrote about current affairs, history and the border regions.

There he was in his element, and he made a good number of friends — among them Tang Yan, who founded Momo. At the time both were in a Loudi chat room called Shentongwan, Child Prodigy Bay, and in a crowd of literary types who all but needed a white scarf around the neck to feel lyrical enough, the two quickly "took a liking to" each other.

Huang Zhangjin and Tang Yan both got their NetEase jobs off BBS.

On BBS, whenever Huang Zhangjin saw something that annoyed him, he attacked it. Once he wrote a letter running to tens of thousands of words attacking Li Fang of China Youth Online for promoting anti-science and pseudoscience. The fight made them friends: Li Fang came to admire him instead, and recommended him for a job in Beijing. When NetEase was setting up its Beijing operation, Li Fang asked Huang Zhangjin to suggest candidates, and Huang named Tang Yan.

Later Huang Zhangjin would often say that he had wanted out of the media early on. What he loved most was always writing on BBS, a place for sharing knowledge and experience — a "guild." He thinks BBS also trained him: he learned early to watch how readers reacted. "Unlike a lot of media people … BBS is like Weibo or WeChat, you notice how things spread back and forth."

Luo Yonghao says Huang Zhangjin has "unbeatable procrastination." By the time Huang formally quit, got married, cycled through Xinjiang on his honeymoon and came back to set up Daxiang Gonghui, he had spent 13 years in a media business he was never keen on. During those years he also planned to start a magazine with Luo Yonghao — "Luo would do the talking up, I'd do the content" — but nothing came of it.

In April 2013, Luo Yonghao, Tang Yan and another childhood friend of Huang Zhangjin's put up 3 million yuan in seed money for Daxiang Gonghui.

The Daxiang Gonghui app

At first Huang Zhangjin meant to build an app, because Tang Yan thought an app had more of a future. But the WeChat account, meant only to give it a push, caught fire faster. In its first three months the Daxiang Gonghui account had 1,000 subscribers and 20,000 shares. It now has 600,000 subscribers, and more than 100,000 reads a piece is the "norm."

"If you have a reputation among your peers, things spread faster," Huang Zhangjin says, explaining how the account got big. By "peers" he means well-known media people and "public intellectuals" — the people in his own Moments.

On the cover of Daxiang Gonghui's collection My First Day on Earth (《来到地球第一天》) you will find blurbs from Chai Jing, Luo Yonghao and Liu Yu. Liu Yu says Daxiang Gonghui's function is popular science. Chai Jing wrote: "A good piece of writing has knowledge, insight, scope and wit — Daxiang Gonghui has all four."

Huang Zhangjin thinks both are right: "We overlap with Zhihu and Guokr, and with QDaily. But we are further from Shixiang and Southern Weekly, from the emotional and the literary."

By rights, that second kind of writing should be easier to resonate with, and safer too.

The most-read piece Daxiang Gonghui has published is "Why Chinese Firefighters Die So Easily," posted after the August 12 explosions in Tianjin's Binhai New Area. It spread fast, then it was taken down.

In March 2014, Daxiang Gonghui was barred from posting for seven days. The cause was a serialized piece by the Xinjiang writer Ilham on the state of ethnic affairs and his views on it.

Huang Zhangjin had once been quite defiant, but that day he was worried anyway — afraid that "I'd made trouble and dragged the whole team down with me."

The team began censoring itself, steering clear of subjects that could bring trouble. Before that, they had spent more thought on avoiding subjects unfit for Moments: sex, for instance, looks like good material, but in Moments nobody will take the risk of sharing it.

His friend He Caitou once wrote a definition of Daxiang Gonghui that traveled widely: the taste of an intellectual born in the 1970s. Think of Luo Yonghao, Liu Yu and Chai Jing, and that is about right.

But Huang Zhangjin is working to fade the marks that earlier decades left on Daxiang Gonghui and on himself. He has built a team of people born after 1985 and in the 1990s, and treats working with them as a source of drive. He envies the way they acquired what they know: their "level," he says, "is completely normal."

His own youth, Huang Zhangjin says, was a stretch of "unlucky" years. He and Luo Yonghao once went on Old Friends, a Youku interview show, to talk about what they had read, and brought up The Great Qigong Master, a sensation in its day. Luo Yonghao asked whether he had believed it at the time. Huang said, "For a little while."

That has left him deeply bothered by his dim past, bothered by stupidity and ugliness. Ambition and weakness are sometimes hard to tell apart.

He Caitou is probably someone who really understands Huang Zhangjin. Speaking of him, he said:

"He's too tall and imposing, and bald on top of it. Put a big bronze earring on him and have him come at you at night out of the mist carrying a lantern, and you'd think you had met a Kunlun slave or some monstrous beast. But once he opens his mouth I think he has taken a Seven-Injury Fist — the voice is low and short of breath."

Like an elephant.

On August 30 this year, in a recruitment post, Daxiang Gonghui announced a Series A round of 6 million yuan from Xu Xiaoping's ZhenFund. The money will go into a different kind of product, in video.

Huang Zhangjin on Daxiang Gonghui, and on big WeChat accounts

Q: When someone shares something good in Moments, can that also be read as a kind of showing off?

H: Showing off is one part of it, but it has a downside too. Three months after we started, for instance, the numbers stopped climbing. Before that it was one screen-flood after another, because people were in a hurry to tell everyone, I found this thing. There's a psychology that goes with wanting to recommend something. But once everyone knows about it, I stop sharing it, because always sharing the same account looks stupid — people will say you're a diehard fan. So shares in Moments drop. Unless someone senses that the attention in Moments has come around again, and then they'll share it once more.

Q: What kind of content is most likely to be shared widely?

H: Content that explains something in daily life you know extremely well and makes it feel unfamiliar — that spreads a lot. The key is that it is made entirely of things I already know. The core of it has to sit very close to ordinary people. That's how empathy works. Take "Afraid of too much internal heat? Aren't you afraid of kidney failure?" — that pierces through a lot of people, because a lot of people really do worry about it and are genuinely interested. Even if I don't drink herbal tea, I'm interested.

But Moments has a filter on it. There was a reporter who wanted to start an account about sex. He thought some of the headlines would be shared a lot on a web page, but in Moments, who would dare share something about sex? It isn't technical, it's the setting. People don't dare.

Q: How do your story ideas usually come about?

H: We hold a topic meeting once a week; sometimes an idea comes from sitting in the office thinking. We don't meet every day. Sometimes it goes like this: the idea comes from an outside contributor and we rewrite it. He can explain it clearly but can't write it. Sometimes it's friends. I have a lot of good friends with a bellyful of material that could become a piece, but they don't know how to turn it into a product.

Q: What does it take to count as a "product"?

H: It has to be concise, efficient, and the meaning has to be exactly right. Any writer slips easily into a certain essay-writing tone — complete, accurate, clear, but not crisp. And keeping someone from drifting off for 3,000-odd characters is hard to begin with.

Q: Do you have a slogan?

H: "The best dinner-table conversation material." That's a description of the function; we were afraid people wouldn't know what this thing was for. Now, whatever explanation you think fits best is the one. Online it usually gets summed up as knowledge, information and ideas.

Q: Compared with making a magazine, what's satisfying about doing Daxiang Gonghui?

H: Most magazines have exactly the same structure — news items up front, the cover story, a few observation pieces or whatever, then the long investigation, culture, finance, columns. All the same. Or say I made a current-affairs magazine: then everything I produce has to revolve around that, I can't mix things up.

Q: Do you think of Daxiang Gonghui as new media?

H: Daxiang Gonghui is neither traditional media nor new media. It's clearly different from the way new media works. Technically, the production process is very traditional, and I don't think the effort behind a single piece is any less than in traditional media. By the standard of taste, it carries the marks of traditional media.

Q: How long does one piece take to write?

H: The cycle for each piece is very long. One a day is hard to manage; in the past it was sometimes one a week. Sometimes someone asks a question, it turns into a topic, and then we start work and find it isn't that easy. We've spent one or two months on something and scrapped it. That happens too.

Q: Are your readers roughly who you expected?

H: Roughly. There are some we want to win over. Female literary-and-artsy readers like us, for instance, and Feng Tang's readers like us. We're pretty pleased about that. Six months ago we ran a survey with 7,000 respondents. The male share isn't as high as it used to be. Women used to be under 10%; now they're 30%, 40%. Also, 80% of readers are in the country's top ten cities.

Q: Are you a team of straight men?

H: Can't help it — the office is a room full of men. The one female intern is very masculine too. But even though we're a gang of "straight-man cancer" cases, we do pay attention to Chinese men's "straight-man cancer" culture. Why Chinese men like wearing prayer beads, for instance — that one is really moronic. It took forever, and we've finally got it down.

Q: You're a big WeChat account, but you never use internet slang?

H: Our team can't do that. Reading it gives me a physical reaction.

Q: What about so-called diaosi culture, then?

H: As a phenomenon it's worth watching. Maybe it's an age thing, but we don't follow the culture itself. We don't make value judgments about it.

Q: You published a print book, My First Day on Earth, with CITIC Press. Who led the design?

H: CITIC has good channels and a strong brand, so basically they did the design and they decided which pieces went in. The more sensible approach, actually, would have been to rewrite some of them in a form better suited to a book — a lot of our pieces are compressed to fit reading on a phone, even though the time we spent on them was the time you'd spend writing a book. As a product, it wasn't one we put much care into.

Q: Which pieces were taken down that you didn't expect?

H: "Anti-Japanese War veterans' memories aren't reliable" being taken down was a surprise. "Firefighters" we more or less expected. There was also "Which country's army is most likely to mutiny" — didn't expect that one either. With a lot of pieces, you know just by thinking about it that they can't run. As we take on more people and add full-time staff, safety will improve a bit, and we'll add more non-political, non-military subjects. That side is relatively safer, but there's a cost: political pieces will always reach a far wider audience than arts-and-culture ones.

Q: What do you make of people born in the 1990s?

H: I'm badly afraid of saying anything about that group. Because from 1990 to 2000, the most valuable years of my life, much of what I read was garbage, and the only benefit is that I built up an immunity to garbage. I can plainly feel that the kids younger than me, the post-80s ones, are at a completely normal level, and the post-85s and post-90s only get better the later you go. I know a lot of post-85 PhD students studying abroad, and they're very good. People my own age, in their forties, are worse than these post-85s — much worse. My own drive comes from this: the people I like working with are all post-85s and post-90s. Every media person I admire is like that.

Q: What went wrong with your generation?

H: Bad luck. Born in the wrong era. I didn't read as a child, and at 25 or 26 it dawned on me that I was very stupid. The food we ate made us what we are, and I want to flush that food out, but it's very, very hard. We're unlucky people. Who are we to talk about the young?

Q: You used to write letters attacking people on BBS. When you see something that annoys you now, do you still do it?

H: A lot of it isn't worth the trouble. Living in this country, it isn't the reactionary side of things you hate most, it's the stupidity and the ugliness. That's the biggest problem, and you can't say so.

Cover image from Pixabay.