Are China's stars leading fans to be more nationalist - or the other way round?

A controversial image is posted on Liu's Weibo account / Captured from Liu's Weibo account

Grass-roots enthusiasm has played the main role in shaping China's online nationalist narrative and has pushed celebrities to follow, according to a study published in the American peer-reviewed journal Science Advances last week.

Contrary to the common perception that nationalism on Chinese social media space functions more top down and that Beijing uses social media to influence or control public opinion, the study jointly done by researchers from leading universities in the United States and Britain offered a different story.

"Our findings reveal that fans exert a stronger influence on celebrities than vice versa in spreading nationalism. Fans often shape the nationalist narratives that celebrities amplify, with those aligned with specific political leanings, such as those within the state-conformist camp, having a greater influence," it said.

The study was carried out by four scholars from the University of Michigan, Texas A&M University, Brown University and Cambridge University. They used a statistical method called vector autoregression to look at how celebrities and fans influenced each other through their posts over time.

The researchers gathered more than 8 million microblogs and comments - dating from the start to the end of the anti-government protests in Hong Kong in 2019 - from Weibo, the go-to Chinese social media platform for public discourse, and found that "fans' nationalistic expressions exert a stronger and more consistent influence on celebrities."

The anti-government protests took place in Hong Kong in 2019 at a time when nationalist sentiment surged on China's social media.

The protests initially opposed a proposed extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong to transfer fugitives to mainland China but escalated into a much wider and prolonged anti-government movement that resulted in violent clashes between the city's police and protesters.

For example, Chinese-American actress Liu Yifei, known in the US for her role in the Disney movie Mulan, posted her support for the Hong Kong police, which was praised in mainland China. But it sparked controversy in Hong Kong and led many from her international audience to boycott Mulan, the study said.

The study suggests that fans whose political positions align with Beijing's views can strongly predict the direction of celebrities' future posts, reinforcing patriotic sentiment online. But this correlation did not appear among fans and celebrities who were more sympathetic towards protesters, or "non-state conformists", the study said.

"We tend to think of influence as flowing from the top down - from elites to ordinary people," lead researcher Ji Yeon Hong, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan, said in an interview published on the university's website on Monday.

"Our findings suggest that in China's social media environment, the flow can also go upward. Celebrities are responding to what their fans want to hear," Hong said, according to the report.

China's celebrity-obsessed fan culture has become a big factor on Chinese social media. Beijing has, from time to time, stepped in with government measures when it considers fan culture may be harmful to society or does not align with the official narrative.

Read the article at SCMP.