To Exaggerate Data at All Costs: Data-Driven Fan Culture, Platforms, and the Remaking of the New Poor in China

Abstract

Abstract Among Chinese fans of ‘traffic celebrities’ (liuliang mingxing 流量明星), generating excessive data either on digital platforms or various sales charts to inflate a specific entertainer’s popularity has become a normalized ritual to demonstrate their fan identity. The so-called fandom economy effectively mobilizes fans from diverse socio-economic backgrounds to consume and participate, thus generating tremendous revenue. Although some fans can easily satisfy their consumerist desire for being economically powerful and socially successful, many others – who are seduced by the communitas of fan activism and agency as consumers – cannot or are not yet fully able to afford this lifestyle. Based on data from an eighteen-month ethnography, this study unpacks how these fans are seduced and, to some extent, included but still exploited in the transitional Chinese consumer society as what Bauman calls the ‘new poor’, for whom digital platforms have become a new structuring nexus and transform the existing power dynamics.