How Fans Engage with State Propaganda through Celebrity Mobilization

• In Event: Authoritarian Survival and Governance in China

Abstract

Established research on authoritarian information control has extensively examined the top-down dissemination of political propaganda and its impact on public attitudes and behaviors. This research introduces a novel theory, “performative propaganda engagement,” which focuses on individuals who interact with state propaganda in a performative manner to benefit an individual or a group they align with, rather than genuinely endorsing or promoting propaganda. By combining BERT-based computational text analysis of large-scale social media data, causal inference approaches, and qualitative interviews of celebrity fans in China, this research empirically investigates performative propaganda engagement within the realm of Chinese online celebrity fandom, a rising cultural force on Chinese social media. This study finds that when celebrities engage with state propaganda, their metrics-driven fans are motivated to promote the same content. This engagement is performative, as the motivation is often celebrity-oriented and their engagement with the content is less effortful but more instrumental. By exploring the manifestations of performative propaganda engagement, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the downstream effects of authoritarian information control, contemporary fandom culture in China, and the metrics-driven nature of social media ecosystem.

Author

• Yingdan Lu, Northwestern University