Who's Really Manufacturing Traffic Stars? | QDaily Anthropology

Fans have become the thing a star's survival depends on. Where does their power come from, and what produced this kind of competition?

Look away for a moment and you may not recognize a single one of the stars now being celebrated on social media.

Weibo ranks stars every day by read counts and engagement. Since Weibo is currently the only Chinese social network that isn't largely closed off, that ranking doubles as the test of who counts as a traffic star. On the mainland celebrity chart for February 2019, No. 1 was Cai Xukun and No. 2 was Zhu Yilong — both became known in 2018, Cai through the web variety show Idol Producer and Zhu through the web drama Guardian. No. 4 and No. 9, Luo Yunxi and Deng Lun, both came out of the web drama Ashes of Love. TFBoys members Wang Junkai and Wang Yuan took No. 3 and No. 10. Also in the top ten: Wu Lei, Wu Xuanyi, Xu Qing and Xiong Ziqi.

On the same chart, Luhan — hailed in 2014 as one of the mainland's "four young leading men," and the person whose rise produced the phrase "traffic star" in the first place — ranked 14th. Yang Yang was 21st, Li Yifeng 28th, Kris Wu 49th.

In a reading of the Luhan phenomenon published on Valentine's Day 2015, the business writer Wu Xiaobo called traffic stars like Luhan "a product of social movements."

"The old path to stardom ran through a three-step sequence: performance work, then mass-media attention, then topic marketing. But the Luhans of the world have sharply shortened that fermentation process. They first gather their fans precisely, on social media — through Baidu Tieba forums, QQ groups, WeChat Moments, Weibo celebrity rankings and the like — and once a substantial fan base has formed, they detonate outward into the mass media. The path closely resembles the 'Xiaomi model' of a few years earlier. In this ecosystem stars and fans talk to each other directly, and the old agent-and-management model is likely to be discarded."

Wu Xiaobo's claim that stars like Luhan sharply shortened the fermentation process isn't quite right. Luhan entered a trainee program in South Korea in 2008, debuted four years later, and did not become a genuine phenomenon in China until 2015. Set against Zhao Wei, who appeared in My Fair Princess early on, or Zhang Ziyi, who starred in Zhang Yimou's films, the fermentation the Luhans went through wasn't necessarily any shorter.

But the change in the communication model that Wu Xiaobo identified does hit the mark. The old "star — media — public" model has been replaced, in the internet era, by "star — fans — public and media." The biggest difference is that the power to set the conversation has moved out of the media's hands and into the fans'.

Before, a star first had to produce work convincing enough to draw coverage; the public then formed its impression of the star through that coverage, and out of the public came fans. In the internet era, fans come first, ahead of both the public and the media. They generate enough volume that the volume itself pulls in the public and the media.

Zhu Yilong's rise through Guardian is the textbook case. When the web drama premiered on Youku in June 2018, it drew little attention. Word of mouth spread first inside the danmei (boys' love) community, which set off an enormous wave of discussion on Weibo; only then did mainstream media and the general public start watching, and Zhu Yilong became one of the hottest stars of 2018. Without fans embracing the show in social spaces first, none of it would have happened.

Fans have become the thing a star's survival depends on. Where does their power come from?

You have probably heard phrases like "fan economics," which pick a star's following apart the way you would any precision-built organization. And compared with 2014, when fandom culture first took off in China, fans today are organized in far more complicated ways.

From the outside, a typical fan group anchors itself in an online space — a Baidu Tieba forum, a QQ group, a Weibo fan group. Members collect information about the star, then compile and publish it on Weibo and elsewhere, taking over from traditional media as the channel through which fans learn about their idol.

Inside the organization, the division of labor is much sharper. Li Yanfei is a fan of one member of Rocket Girls, the group that debuted out of Produce 101. When she first fell for this idol she was what fans call a "loose fan" — supporting the idol quietly on her own, tapping "like" on Tencent Video to help her win a spot in the lineup.

The ferocity of the competition soon convinced her that staying a loose fan meant not using her full strength. Out of curiosity, and out of the simple wish to help her idol, she joined a fan group that ran mostly on QQ and began learning how to boost chart rankings and cast votes — "da tou," in fandom shorthand.

The labor inside a da tou group is clearly divided. Some people set the strategy for boosting and voting. Some register how many people are taking part. Some buy the accounts the work requires. Every night Li Yanfei collects 100 secondary QQ accounts from the organizer and binds them to her phone. Switching between them at speed, she does what the boosting requires: tapping the "heartbeat index" under the idol's page on Tencent Video. The more heartbeats, the more exposure the idol is given. When she is finished, Li Yanfei goes back to the QQ group and checks in to show she has done her shift.

Grinding through the same mechanical work every day, fans like Li Yanfei look less like devotees than like laborers on a traffic assembly line — and organizing fans the way you would organize an assembly line is now routine for fan groups of every kind.

One widely criticized tactic is "kong ping," short for controlling the comments. Weibo's default comment display ranks by heat, and heat is measured by how many replies and likes a comment gets. So if fans, while leaving comments of their own, also like one friendly comment that is already high up, they can push that comment into the most visible position.

Much of this comment work is likewise organized by fan groups. Some members are assigned to watch the big Weibo accounts: the idol's own account, the brands he endorses, the leading news accounts in his field. The moment one of them posts anything about the idol, a call goes out in a private QQ group for fans to comment and like. And plenty of fans who never deliberately sign up will still "like whatever comes their way" when they happen to see a relevant comment.

The result is a particular phenomenon: the comments under a star's Weibo posts today look almost identical, mostly fans declaring affection or joking around. Comments of any other kind, lacking the same tight organization, are drowned out.

The counterpart to controlling the comments is "fan hei" — fighting back against people who attack an idol. Not long after Fan Chengcheng debuted from Idol Producer, his sister Fan Bingbing's tax-evasion scandal broke and he took a wave of attacks by association. That was when Yuan Ting started doing anti-hate work.

Every day the Weibo account of Fan Chengcheng's anti-hate squad posts the negative remarks it has found, along with the names of the accounts that made them. What fans have to do is follow the links the squad provides and report those remarks and accounts to Weibo's moderators. The squad also supplies the specific grounds for each report — harmful information, obscenity, personal attack — to walk fans through the process.

Once the day's anti-hate work is done, the squad asks fans to check in under its own Weibo post. It sets a daily target for the number of check-ins. In a sense, this is the fans' KPI.

Fans have worked out many strategies fitted to how Weibo displays things. If bad news about an idol reaches the trending-search list, organizers ask fans to search for the idol alongside other positive keywords, pushing new content onto the list so the bad news is demoted. Weibo has Super Topics, so fans are asked to check in on the idol's Super Topic page every day to keep his content in a visible slot.

Just as the assembly line raised output across manufacturing, this upgrade in how fans organize has made boosting and voting far more efficient. Their organizations are precise enough that, whenever something happens, they can converge into one enormous force.

These spontaneous, perfectly synchronized movements display a kind of power — one that leaves the public baffled, brands frightened and the media fawning. What's worth noticing is that while fans prefer to keep the focus on the star, framing everything they do as adoration of him, the power does not actually come from the star. It comes from the fan organization.

What lets fans amplify their own volume and shape opinion is that the internet changed a person's place and function in the chain of communication. For a long time people were, on the whole, passive recipients: they could not speak in their own voice, and when they could, the voice carried only a few dozen people around them.

On the internet they are recipients, distribution channels and speakers at once. The 100 million comments under Luhan's Weibo posts are themselves a form of volume — and once 100 million comments become news, the fans become the people making the news. GQ's January 2016 report on Luhan's fan organization took the fans as its subject, but it also introduced many more people to Luhan.

The internet changed the structure of mass communication, putting a means of speech once held by a few into the hands of the many. In that sense communication has gone from one-directional broadcast to a multidimensional set of interactions — which in turn has made communication a product driven by human labor.

When hundreds of thousands of fans post on Weibo, reshare information about a star, and control comments or beat back attacks under other people's accounts, it resembles the way people decades ago gathered in public places to hold forums or march in protest. And in the internet era they can use secondary accounts and bot scripts to multiply, tens of times over, the energy one person can put into the process.

Once fans choose to become makers of volume, the energy they can generate far exceeds anything a star could have generated speaking alone a decade or more ago. Under these conditions, the more people take part, the more volume is created — and volume converts into value.

Look at the formula again: "star — fans — public and media." It means the ground on which stars debut and promote themselves has shifted. Stars used to depend on media bookings for exposure. Now, on top of taking every booking going, what matters more is running a second layer of operations on that exposure, to hold onto fans and attract new ones. And that operational work centers on social platforms.

Before the cleanup, Weibo's trending-search list was an important battleground for talent agencies and celebrity studios promoting their artists. Beyond Weibo packaging some trending slots as ad inventory, the list also spawned an industry in rank manipulation. One report put the price of buying a spot on the Weibo trending list at 50,000 yuan for the top three, 45,000 yuan for the top five and 40,000 yuan for the top ten. Before regulators ordered Weibo to clean up the list in January 2018, Weibo had already published a list of trending topics it suspected of having been gamed.

Beyond relatively open platforms like Weibo, stars have made use of narrower channels too. Lin Gengxin, known as the "internet-addicted teenager," regularly streams PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on game platforms; Luhan and Chen He do much the same. And in early 2018, when Xiaohongshu was booming, stars including Fan Bingbing, Zhang Yuqi and Lin Yun built themselves personas there — fashionable for some, thrifty and bargain-hunting for others.

Using social platforms to raise a star's profile comes down to finding the online channel that best matches the star's persona.

This may be the biggest difference between today's entertainment industry and the one of ten years ago: persona is now what a star's career rests on. One view holds that this has everything to do with how alike everyone in the industry has become.

The people who first set off China's discussion of fandom culture, around 2015, were Luhan, Kris Wu and others like them. Before that they belonged to the Korean idol group EXO and became famous through it. Each then chose to move his career to China, and the fan communities that had already formed around them brought Korean fandom culture along.

South Korea has the world's most complete idol industry. It runs on a mature trainee system: years of training in dance, singing and other performance skills guarantee that everyone who debuts clears a professional baseline. The other face of that system is that Korean idols come out looking somewhat alike.

Fans who know them can tell at a glance which member of a group is the dancer, which the vocalist, which the rapper, and can even name the different personalities. To anyone who doesn't know them, the differences between Luhan, Kris Wu and the rest are not obvious at all — never mind picking them out of an EXO that debuted with 12 members.

Persona becomes the way to tell them apart. Among the four Chinese members who came out of EXO, Luhan was given a sunny, wholesome image; Kris Wu was handed the rapper identity; Zhang Yixing became "Little Sheep"; and Huang Zitao was for a time a target of mass mockery online. These are all labels — personas — and they have nothing to do with how good a singer or how good an actor any of them is.

All of this has changed what stars produce. Where do you see traffic stars now? Their usual work isn't quietly releasing an album or acting in a drama, but variety shows, brand endorsements, fashion runways, entertainment events, interviews of every kind, social platforms. Activities that can build a persona have become a star's main source of screen time.

Take Da Zhangwei and Xue Zhiqian, who suddenly took off in 2016. They turned up constantly on variety shows and built themselves personas as comedians, while their original identities as musicians faded almost to nothing. The veteran entertainment reporter Meng Jing, writing about the star Bai Jingting on her official account Meng Da Mingbai, put it this way: "That's how the era of web variety shows won me over as a Bai Jingting fan — high IQ, quick on the uptake, always game to play up a scene. Before that — and, fine, I admit it, after that too — I had never properly watched a single film or TV show he was actually in."

That popularity is not meaningless. If it works, the film and TV offers follow. It explains why Luhan, in his first years back in China, was cast in films like 20 Once Again and The Witness, and invited onto Running Man China. Kris Wu's invitation to appear on The Rap of China as a mentor also owed something to the halo his fans gave him.

In the most extreme cases the production itself becomes an appendage of the star. After becoming famous through Running Man China, Angelababy joined the cast of General and I. Once the show aired, viewers noticed that every scene she appeared in carried obvious traces of green-screen compositing. Media reports later said that her schedule during filming had been too tight for her to take part in the on-location shoot at all; every one of her shots was composited afterward.

Inside the industry, this mechanism works. If you treat a star as a product of the entertainment business, then everything from birth to ongoing operation requires a mechanism that can quantify production. And after Idol Producer and Produce 101 swept the country, that mechanism began to run wild.

It largely follows the Korean idol industry's process. China now has dozens of idol agencies, which scout artists, put them through concentrated training, and send them out to debut in groups. Web variety shows have given the agencies an even faster way to win fans. In the first half of 2019 alone, iQiyi ran the second season of Idol Producer under the name Youth With You; the second season of Produce 101 was renamed Produce Camp and announced its lineup of mentors; and Youku, which had stayed out of the fight until then, rushed out The Name of the Group.

Outside the idol-training system, stars still have to work hard to find a persona and a position. Devoted, high-IQ, star student, or playing up homoerotic subtext — hardly any star can stand on good acting alone anymore. Even actors known for keeping their heads down, like Huang Xuan and Zhang Yu, have a persona on social media that fans assigned them.

The mechanism can feed the entertainment industry new stars without pause. But production on that scale, to that formula, also means the turnover comes faster.

Quite a few outlets called 2018 the first year of the traffic star's death. Sweet Combat, the drama starring Luhan that aired in Hunan TV's summer slot, drew an average CSM 52-city rating of 0.833, below other shows in the same slot. Europe Raiders, the film starring Kris Wu, took only 150 million yuan at the box office. Martial Universe, starring Yang Yang, fell short of expected viewership. And Li Yifeng's Animal World, despite a huge budget, lost money.

Yet just as the four big traffic idols were being written off as having met their Waterloo, new stars rose on the same wave. Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu, who shot to fame together through Guardian, saw their asking prices double, and the two recently appeared in ads for KFC and Pizza Hut respectively, both owned by Yum! Brands. Cai Xukun, who debuted in the center spot on Idol Producer, quickly became a partner for L'Oréal, Levi's, Bulgari, the NBA and more.

We'll take up the life cycle of a traffic star in the next piece.