Pan Nini on Little Pinks

Pan Nini, “How the ‘Little Pinks’ were Born:  Analyzing ‘Fan Patriotism’ in the Internet Era”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Pan Nini is Associate Professor of Journalism at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and works on issues of pop culture (or mass entertainment) and communication in Japan and China. 
 
In the text translated here, Pan seeks to explain how fan groups, generally focused on an “idol” from the mass entertainment industry, came to be “political,” by which she means patriotic, because these fan groups are now known to be vocally nationalistic, the Chinese nation functioning as a super-human “idol.”  Part of her argument is that fan groups began to become popular before China had a well-developed mass entertainment industry, which meant that most idols were not Chinese.  With the rise of online nationalism, fan groups were vulnerable to attack, and this sensitivity led the fans to defend their patriotism (and eventually to opt for Chinese idols, when the industry provided them).
 
But Pan’s larger argument has to do with the structuring effects of online life.  As China’s mass entertainment industry has grown, idols and their managers, the industry itself, brands, and the fan groups have come together to construct an online economy in which the fans provide much of the “labor” (memes, votes, purchase of idol-linked branded goods) needed to protect, defend, and grow an idol.  In Pan’s view, this is the process which has transformed fans from private individuals indulging their passion for a particular celebrity to political actors in a larger drama involving issues of national sovereignty and pride.  And Pan insists that this is not entirely top-down, that the fan groups have their own agency, even if much of the messaging comes from the group economy and is monitored by state authorities.  Indeed, Pan seems to suggest that the agency displayed by fan groups might be a model of a broader agency that might emerge has online life takes on even broader implications in China and throughout the world.
 
Because I am not immersed in China’s mass entertainment industry, I would have appreciated a bit more ethnographic detail to supplement Pan’s arguments, which strike me as somewhat abstract.  Her text remains nonetheless another interesting effort to examine and explain youth culture and online life in China.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
In recent years, and throughout the world, as the Internet has expanded the meaning and boundaries of political participation, we have also witnessed more and more unexpected consequences. The Internet medium has been transformed from a flat "virtual tool" permitting direct political participation into an autonomous social space, and the social basis of online political participation may also need to be found in online space, especially for young people who are immersed in Internet life on a daily basis. My goal in this paper has been to offer a preliminary reflection on the structural process of youth transformation from "private" to "political" in the online world through a study of the specific case of fan patriotism. 
 
Clearly, the specific political and cultural attitudes of young Internet users cannot be fully explained by online factors, but instead have a deeper grounding in current society, domestic and foreign political issues, traditional mindsets and senses of cultural identity.  However, as far as political participation is concerned, as important as analyzing the constitutive origin of political cultural content itself is how such attitudes can emerge as explicit daily public issues or public events.
 
Indeed, when we reach out to individual fans or small groups, we find a diversity of identities, which involve cultural identity, gender, political issues, etc., all of which can be analyzed, but not all of them lead to visible political participation in the Internet public sphere. And the variability in the translation of different cultural attitudes into political participation involves the driving forces within the social structure of the Internet.
 
For this reason, I chose to examine the theme of fan patriotism, first of all, because "fan" is an identity based on private entertainment and consumption interests, which makes it easier to illustrate the process by which the "private" is incorporated into the political sphere. Second, "fans" are generally treated as a subculture, meaning that they are often considered to be “anti-narrative,” but patriotism is a "grand narrative" topic, and this "anomaly" helps us to understand the autonomy of the Internet structure. Since this paper does not aim to judge the cultural value and social impact of fan patriotism, but instead to examine why this theme has emerged, it focuses on the "common interests," "organization," and "issue participation" of fans. 
 
From this approach, the first conclusion we can draw is that the massive formation of China's fan base is entirely a product of Internet society, and the group economy model it supports is a large and still expanding mainstream business model. Therefore, fan groups are not "subcultural groups" but rather part of the mainstream economy. At the same time, fan groups are at a disadvantage in the economy, and the profit-driven model of the group economy pushes fans to constantly engage in unpaid "digital labor," which stimulates fans' spontaneous awareness of their own rights and interests.
 
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Translation 
 
The “Fan Path” Transforming “Private Interests” into “Political Participation”
 
Since its inception, the Internet has been reshaping the meaning and boundaries of "political participation." Young people, in particular, while often indifferent to the normative process of participation, nonetheless actively engage with political issues online. If we say that the Internet was initially a virtual tool employed by elite youth to give voice to an already existing agenda, with the increasing penetration of the Internet into the lives of youths as a whole, the Internet has established the ground rules for public interaction among young people, becoming a culture unto itself. In other words, the Internet plays a role not only in end results, but more importantly, it has profoundly influenced the process transforming youth from "private" to "political" persons. For example, the "fan patriotism" (or "fan nationalism") that has attracted the attention of researchers and media observers in recent years can be understood as a reflection of this process of online transformation. 
 
What we call "fans" generally refers to people who admire and “consume” particular celebrities, and the phenomenon of “fandom” is often considered to be a reflection of "the domination of a shallow, flashy consumer culture." Fan patriotism generally has two levels of meaning: the initial level is youth involvement in a patriotic agenda in the name of this or that fan group; the second level is the reconstruction of the content of patriotism through the "fan mentality." This act achieves the "anomalous" combination of the "private" identity of the fan in the sphere of entertainment with issues drawn from the "political grand narrative," in which entertainment reconstructs rather than deconstructs the "grand narrative." If we start from what is "anomalous," then the point of fan patriotism is not limited solely to its performative content, but also reflects the unique online process that transforms entertainment demands in the private sphere into "grand narratives" in the political sphere. 
 
Simply put, the Internet's group-based business model has transformed fans from private consumers into groups of "digital laborers." The economic structural contradictions faced by the group lead them toward organization, collective expression, and acts of conscious self-empowerment. This constitutes a unique "social foundation" for fan participation, and is a key part of the transformation of entertainment demands into political themes. On this basis, external conditions push the fans' agendas to dovetail with established online patriotic agendas, leading to a mutual reconstruction of the two. This process, in which a “private person” shaped by entertainment and consumption comes to be a “political person” is based on the interaction of multiple forces and factors, which inherently reflects the structural autonomy of youth political participation in the Internet society. As the historian Niall Ferguson (b. 1964) put it graphically: "The political consequences of the networked world are not at all what Silicon Valley expected…only the network can defeat the network." 
 
Structural Perspectives on Fan Patriotism 
 
As emotional consumers who display an “impulsive” or “irrational” attachment to personalized “stars,” fans are a product of highly developed mass entertainment culture. The general impression we have of mass entertainment is that entertainment is king and politics do not matter, and fans are generally viewed as being alienated from participation in public events.  While some research has characterized fans as parts of participatory and productive subcultural groups, they are usually seen as opting out of the “grand narrative.” This is why fan patriotism, which brings fan groups and political narratives together, appears to be "anomalous" and has drawn the interest of researchers.
 
Generally speaking, we think about two categories of events in the context of fan patriotism: one is externally oriented actions, for example on major issues related to national unification, netizens organize themselves through fan groups to disseminate information and protest on overseas media platforms, and use symbols such as memes to deconstruct their opponents’ discourse—in Internet parlance this is referred to as “going out to battle 出征.”

The other type of action is criticizing the inappropriate words and actions of celebrities or individual fans (or groups of fans) within the larger group; examples of this type include the "boycotts of Taiwan or Hong Kong artists supporting independence" that occurred frequently after 2010 and the "Jie Jielang" incident[2] in 2018.  On the basis of these practices, the union of fan groups and patriotism has further reshaped the cultural ecology of Internet patriotism or nationalism, “giving rise to a unique phenomenon of ‘fan nationalism’ in which the country takes on the role of the idols in fan culture.”
 
Current research has tended to focus more on the content of fan nationalism as a reflection of the fact that political attitudes of Internet youth follow those of the authorities, and thus has mainly explored the cultural qualities inherent in fan nationalism. Other studies have also explored in depth the "internalization and mapping of social structural emotions (in fan culture)" and analyzed mechanisms such as political entertainment, cultural identity, consumer nationalism, and official guidance, highlighting the "construction" of specific cultural attitudes in patriotic directions. 
 
However, while cultural studies mainly elucidate the cultural construction and cultural psychology of the content of fan patriotism, an underlying cultural attitude does not necessarily translate directly into large-scale collective participation. Therefore, I will attempt in this paper to shift the focus to the process by which individual fans are led to participate in group actions such as fan patriotism. From a practical point of view, the issues of fan group participation also include expressions that seem to be completely separate from patriotism in terms of "cultural expression," although the participants in the two activities overlap to a large extent.

However, the different expressions all reflect a common thread, which is that entertainment needs constitute a strong motivation for Internet political participation. In other words, we are not talking about groups that already have a clear sense of how to participate and how to ask for what they want, and are simply using the discourse or form of entertainment to shape the way they participate (this is often called "political entertainment"), but instead groups that were originally alienated from politics that have come to be actively engaged in political participation, reconstructing rather than deconstructing the "grand narrative."

Thus, the question we need to address is how the demand for individual entertainment consumption in the private (or even hidden) sphere of "fan activities" is transformed into a collective demand for "rights" and then connected to particular political issues. By analyzing the path traveled by the fans from individual private interests toward collective participation, we may further explore the logic of the emergence of Internet youth groups and their convergence with specific political issues. 
 
Following the spread of Internet 2.0 technologies and the appearance of the Internet 3.0, the Internet is no longer simply an alternative tool for dealing with real world issues, but has itself become an environment capable of generating new issues. As a media technology, the Internet’s "innate material structures and symbolic forms play a prescriptive role, shaping what information is encoded and transmitted, how it is encoded and transmitted, and how it is decoded", thus constituting "a set of systems whose organization reflects the worldview promoted by this technology.”  Internet 2.0 thus becomes a socialized space that accommodates the entire process from "demand" to "participation."

In this way, it is possible for "entertainment" to break away from the fixed position assigned to it by the real world and become a structural "rule and resource" for new behaviors. The complete dominance of entertainment content in online life has elevated the social meaning of "entertainment" from an individualized "leisure" to a group-based fundamental "right." The idea that entertainment is a right is reflected in two aspects:  first, how we classify entertainment content, the extent to which we possess entertainment resources, and the ability to use entertainment symbols have all become core criteria for defining our Internet identity and marking our group affiliation. In addition, due to the great revenue prospects of Internet entertainment and its potential influence on youth, powerful forces in today’s society are also actively involved in the production, distribution, and management of entertainment content.

However, these powerful forces are mediated by the pluralistic and decentralized Internet media environment and cannot impose their reality onto Internet entertainment, and are instead dynamically reconstructed. This allows youth to confront complex structures of social power directly through their participation in entertainment life, but at the same time, they can participate in the ongoing interactions, and the entertainment life space thus becomes a practice space for Internet rights awareness. Youth organization and participation are subject to the "structural constraints" of the entertainment life space, yet at the same time "the new demands they constantly generate through their actions modify the rules of behavior and social institutions, thus changing the social structure". It is in this structured dynamic that youth political participation agendas, such as fan patriotism, "emerge” (instead of being created).
 
The Daily Transformation of Fan Identity in the Group Economy
 
As mentioned above, Internet entertainment resources may theoretically constitute the core standard for determining the "social identity" of Internet groups, and the special "group economy" business model of the Internet fan economy brings this theoretical possibility to life in the person of the fans, who are transformed into "digital laborers" with a common identity and behavior patterns, thus changing from passive consumers to active productive "laborers."  What I am calling the group economy is the result of Internet entertainment investors' conscious use of fans' "interest groups." In the pre-internet era, fans would spontaneously join "communities of interest" based on objects of shared emotional interest, but such communities were inward-facing, closed, and subcultural in nature.
 
Subsequently, Chinese Internet investors have consciously exploited the tendency of fans to group together to build fan-based communities as the core component of the fan economy structure. In short, in this model, by strengthening the interaction between celebrities and fans, the fan community is shaped into a "business platform that connects idols, fans, consumers and businesses…Fans, idols, businesses and the general public can directly connect to demand resources, products and services, thus creating a more diversified and effective way to cooperate with the industry."
 
Consequently, fans are no longer a marginal subcultural group, but are embedded in the mainstream commercial culture by external forces, and their behavior is no longer spontaneous and inward-looking, but structural or "(semi-)institutionalized," driven by the commercial model. At the same time, the replication and expansion of this business model and culture expands the fan base, reaching more and more young Internet users. A "fan" is thus no longer merely an identity linked to a personal interest, but a universal economic identity. In other words, a fan is pulled from the private sphere into the economic and social sphere.
  
When fans move from being consumers to producers in the economic and social sphere, this involves the issue of producer initiative. In the United States, where mass entertainment culture is flourishing, it is not uncommon to see studies attempting to tap into the productive and participatory political potential of fans. Some scholars even argue that due to the "convergence culture" of the Internet media environment (the interactive integration of multiple media platforms, media industries, and audience migration behavior), audiences not only share more access to media, but also accrue more initiative to participate in cultural production.
 
However, these studies tend to emphasize the "subcultural" identity of fan groups, i.e., how they challenge the "grand narrative" from a "marginal" position, in a "nomadic" way.  However, under the conditions of the widespread and "(quasi-)institutionalized" group economy found in China's Internet society, fans are no longer a "nomadic" subcultural group, but workers who operate in an orderly manner on a huge commercial platform characterized by multiple power relations. What they are most likely to feel on a daily basis is not so much profound cultural conflict as a more straightforward labor-capital relationship.
 
The rapid development of the fan-based "group economy" in China's Internet entertainment sector relies on the tension between the huge capital market and the relative lack of professional content production capacity. On the one hand, the scale of the "fan economy" is soaring and lucrative; in 2018, on the Weibo platform alone, "the number of active entertainment fans throughout the year numbered nearly 75 million". And according to another organization, "the market size of idol industry reached 60.45 billion RMB [approx. $8.9 billion USD] in 2018 and…is expected to reach 100 billion RMB [approx. $14.9 billion USD]  in 2020…In 2018, the market size of the fan economy reached 45 billion RMB [approx. $6.7 billion USD]."
 
On the other hand, as a late-developing industrial country, China's huge Internet business capital lacks a strong content production capacity like that of Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea. In contrast, investors are also aware that fans, who are supposed to be passive consumers, have a certain "professional" potential: 71.2% of active Weibo users are university graduates, and 5.6% have a master's degree or higher, which means that they are "organized, disciplined, and have a clear division of labor. Their skills and professionalism are no less than those of celebrity teams." Therefore, it has become a natural choice for China's "fan economy" to promote fan consumption while also stimulating their active production.
 
From “Labor” to “Expression:”  Fan Organization and Daily Participation
 
The structure of the Internet "group economy" transforms fans from private consumers to workers in the economic and social spheres, thus transforming fans' entertainment needs into an expression of "workers'" interests and preparing them for public participation. On the one hand, this manifests itself in the high level of fan internal organization, and on the other in the ability of fan organizations to set independent agendas and actively seek interaction with powerful commercial forces.
 
As mentioned earlier, the fan base is the key to the functioning of the "group economy," and the unnatural imbalance of the “professional capacities” of investors and fans in the production of entertainment content—the fans having more—inevitably requires the continuous and enhanced unpaid labor of the fan base.
 
Under such conditions, part of the driving force for the development of fan organizations comes from the guidance and shaping of investors and managers. Typical methods include directly establishing official fan associations, incorporating grassroots groups that have already achieved scale and influence, and stimulating competition among fan groups to improve their organizations, thus improving the efficiency of "labor" with the help of effective organization and division of labor. On the other hand, as a means of "labor" resistance to investors and managers, some fan groups will also spontaneously emphasize their subjectivity and self-empowerment by strengthening their organizational capacity.
 
Although fan groups are still a novelty, several close observations and ethnographic studies that have been conducted largely agree that organizational behavior is already one of its major structural features, providing an indispensable capacity base for fans' self-empowerment and interest expression. First, as a large amount of content production and distribution tasks are officially entrusted to fan organizations, individual fans have a strong motivation to participate in the organization, thus making it expansive. Second, fan organizations can build the organization internally and interact externally through a rich and easy-to-use Internet platform, thus creating a regular internal power structure, functional distribution, and rules for collective action. Finally, organized power will actively radiate outward to interact with the forces of the group economy in a daily and complex manner.
 
While the positive outward-looking nature of the organized actions of fan groups cannot be separated from the conscious promotion of investors, entertainment industry players, and "elite fans," we can also see that, on the one hand, there indeed exist spontaneous fan organizations that consciously resist incorporation and tend to set their own agendas, while, on the other hand, even within the system of officially certified celebrity fan organizations, the massive pooling of emotional resources and the sense of responsibility developed in the high density of daily organized actions make it difficult for the fans to genuinely set their own agendas.
 
Table 2 [not reproduced] attempts to list some common daily fan actions and classify the strength of fan initiative in different actions according to the relationship between fans and capital/commercial platforms. If the agenda (topics and specific activities) is entirely set by entertainment capital/network platforms, this produces passive labor and weak fan initiative, while if some topics are set by the platforms and the fans are allowed some leeway on the choice of actions to undertake, fan initiative is somewhat stronger; when platforms and fans compete and negotiate over issues and tactics, fan initiative is even stronger; fan initiative reaches its peak when fans choose their own agenda and organize to act in opposition to the platforms and celebrities. 
 
In short, there are notable differences in the content of the actions undertaken by fan organizations, from total subordination to the profit mechanism arrangement to the assertion of group rights as "producers (of celebrity content)". "In order to engage in long-term online debates in defense of their idols in the Internet, the interviewees have honed their experience in online struggles and related media literacy. Groups that have advocated, strategized, and organized…are precisely the groups that deeply engage fans in their daily lives." The transformation of "economic labor" into "public participation" creates the conditions for fan groups to further engage in political issues.
 
How Habits of Daily Participation Link up with Political Issues
 
As mentioned earlier, within the structure of the "group economy," the daily interaction between investors, professional teams, stakeholder business organizations, and diverse fan organizations leads fan groups to pay particular attention to their own and their idol’s overall "social image", and they will actively seek a wide range of external resources to enrich and strengthen these images. This daily self-consciousness becomes the "social foundation" for fans to eventually move beyond the group economy and become more involved in the public agenda. At the same time, this also constitutes a limiting condition, in the sense that consensual elements of pre-existing “grand narratives” linked to the overall images fan groups are seeking to defend are more likely to be internalized by fan groups.
 
Given this, there are two specific mechanisms in the interface between patriotic issues and fans that deserve attention. One is that fans see their material interests in expressions of grassroots online patriotism, which is the trigger mechanism directing attention to certain public events; the second is that some official organizations appear on social media platforms, attempting to transform the standard one-way transmission of information into a more flexible and diversified form of two-way communication, which makes fan patriotism more visible in daily life. 
 
First, in terms of online patriotism, fan groups who once attacked one another now make common cause against shared targets.  In 2019, fan groups merged with the "Li Yi Bar 帝吧"[3] on specific issues concerning national sovereignty and unification, and engaged in debates, expressions of patriotism, and displays of cultural symbols on overseas social media, which is now widely known as “sending out the army,” which is a hallmark of fan patriotism.
 
But going back to the beginning, the first time the Li Yi Bar sent out the army in 2010 was to "attack" the irrational behavior of Korean celebrity fans in China; it was during this same period that the negative concept of "brain-damaged fans" also appeared on the Internet, reflecting the rejection of fan identity in the online public sphere. This rejection was all the more notable in issues relating to patriotism, because before China developed its own online celebrities, Chinese fan groups were mainly passive recipients of powerful cultures from abroad, which created a stereotype in public opinion that fan groups were opposed to "national/state identity" and patriotism.
 
However, it is precisely for this reason that the political "grand narrative" of patriotism became the public issue closest to the fans’ hearts, and it subsequently became the issue fan groups used to shape the positive image of themselves and their stars, especially in the era of the group economy as Chinese online celebrities multiplied. Especially in the international context of recent years, fans' daily exposure to global online culture has put them at the forefront of contradictions. Thus, online patriotic issues that are mature and increasingly incorporate the characteristics of Internet youth culture naturally have the power to absorb fan groups, turning them from objects to allies in public events.
 
Newsworthy public events such as the "sending out the army" reflect the genuine interests of the fans and merge with the already existing patriotic context, which in turn is related to various emergencies related to national sovereignty and unity. The interaction between the social media accounts of official government organizations and fan groups produces a continuous daily output of such content, which is especially true of the online presence of the "Central Committee of the Communist Youth League" (this online presence is hereafter referred to as the "Tuanwei"). Although many studies and media accounts have argued that in the relationship between the Tuanwei and fan patriotism is one in which the former “mobilizes” (or “manufactures”) the latter, a closer examination reveals on occasion the two are in a two-way "interactive" relationship, with the former joining in after the latter “sends out the troops.”
 
First, we should note that much of the patriotic content published by the Tuanwei, especially items with high number of hits and positive feedback, are actually re-posted from netizens' works or use elements of fan culture. Second, fans use the Tuanwei as a regular channel to monitor the bad behavior of celebrities or groups. This is reflected in the fact that in their daily review of the behavior of celebrities and groups, when fans find that someone has violated the principle of national unity or used words that insult the country or the people, they tend to include "@Communist Youth League Central Committee" in the text they send out, hoping to attract their attention and response.
 
Finally, not all patriotic content posted by the Tuanwei elicits positive feedback, but must also be contextualized to the event. These daily events reflect the role played by the Tuanwei and how it succeeds in obtaining significant positive feedback from online youth—the key is its transformation from acting as the “authoritative guide” in the real hierarchy of governance to a "special participant" in the social structure of the Internet.
 
As the organization responsible for regulating the political participation of China’s young people, the Communist Youth League noticed the turn toward online patriotism and the potential influence of pop culture on young people's political participation as early as 2008, and ever since has attempted to approach the cultural feelings and daily life demands of Internet youth in terms of issue selection, language rhetoric and content integration.
 
The coexistence of official identity and youth cultural adaptation strategies enables the Tuanwei to participate in the interaction of fan groups on the one hand, while its official identity provides an incentive and a justification mechanism for the expression of patriotism among fan groups on the other. However, the active interaction strategy can also weaken the authority of the Tuanwei, so it is merely a key component in the emergence of fan patriotism, and not the central decisive factor.
 
Concluding Remarks
 
In recent years, and throughout the world, as the Internet has expanded the meaning and boundaries of political participation, we have also witnessed more and more unexpected consequences. The Internet medium has been transformed from a flat "virtual tool" permitting direct political participation into an autonomous social space, and the social basis of online political participation may also need to be found in online space, especially for young people who are immersed in Internet life on a daily basis. My goal in this paper has been to offer a preliminary reflection on the structural process of youth transformation from "private" to "political" in the online world through a study of the specific case of fan patriotism. 
 
Clearly, the specific political and cultural attitudes of young Internet users cannot be fully explained by online factors, but instead have a deeper grounding in current society, domestic and foreign political issues, traditional mindsets and senses of cultural identity.  However, as far as political participation is concerned, as important as analyzing the constitutive origin of political cultural content itself is how such attitudes can emerge as explicit daily public issues or public events.
 
Indeed, when we reach out to individual fans or small groups, we find a diversity of identities, which involve cultural identity, gender, political issues, etc., all of which can be analyzed, but not all of them lead to visible political participation in the Internet public sphere. And the variability in the translation of different cultural attitudes into political participation involves the driving forces within the social structure of the Internet.
 
For this reason, I chose to examine the theme of fan patriotism, first of all, because "fan" is an identity based on private entertainment and consumption interests, which makes it easier to illustrate the process by which the "private" is incorporated into the political sphere. Second, "fans" are generally treated as a subculture, meaning that they are often considered to be “anti-narrative,” but patriotism is a "grand narrative" topic, and this "anomaly" helps us to understand the autonomy of the Internet structure. Since this paper does not aim to judge the cultural value and social impact of fan patriotism, but instead to examine why this theme has emerged, it focuses on the "common interests," "organization," and "issue participation" of fans. 
 
From this approach, the first conclusion we can draw is that the massive formation of China's fan base is entirely a product of Internet society, and the group economy model it supports is a large and still expanding mainstream business model. Therefore, fan groups are not "subcultural groups" but rather part of the mainstream economy. At the same time, fan groups are at a disadvantage in the economy, and the profit-driven model of the group economy pushes fans to constantly engage in unpaid "digital labor," which stimulates fans' spontaneous awareness of their own rights and interests.
 
I have even noticed that a good number of fans (both individuals and organizations) consciously use the concepts of "capital" and "exploitation" to describe their own situation. Under the pressure of the "group economy," and with a sense shared emotional interests and labor self-empowerment, the organizational capacity of fan groups has grown to a high level, and the interaction between commercial capital, professional teams, fan organizations, and other actors has become a daily competition.
 
As a result, fans also have become participatory groups based on the attributes of economic groups. Yet the self-perception of fan groups as disadvantaged (the sense of being a group of laborers) and the daily sense of crisis (the fierce image competition faced by their favorite stars) drive them to engage in a wider range of public participation issues in search of identity.
 
In early interviews, several respondents used the phrase "those who act morally receive the help of others, while those who do not find themselves alone 得道多助失道寡助" to describe their participation choices. This would lead fans, as an organized group, to more readily choose larger narrative issues that reflect consensus opinions. Patriotism, as a "grand narrative" with a general social consensus, aligns with the pressing interests of the fans, and the adaptation strategies and interactions of official social media accounts to the culture of fan groups make this issue consistently prominent.
 
It should be noted that this paper emphasizes that the starting point for fans' participation is in entertainment, which is not the same as seeing patriotism as a tool for the expression of private interests. This is because under the group economy model, fans move from private individuals to economic groups to participatory groups, and their interest agenda is transformed from individual private interests to group public interests with a certain degree of universality.
 
This is the latent prerequisite for their interface with political issues such as patriotism, and the social basis for the continual emergence of fan patriotism. The autonomy of fan groups, which are formed on the basis of the online group economy, determines that the interface between them and existing narrative issues is not simply a binary relationship of using and being used, incorporating and being incorporated, but reconstructing each other in the course of interaction. In the case of fan patriotism alone, we have seen that as more and more fan groups participate in this issue, the specific composition and behavior of the emotional content of online patriotism has taken on significant new characteristics.
 
This process, in which the social structure of the Internet transforms "private people" into "political people," shows us that the Internet should be seen as a complex structure that is equivalent to the real society and that also affects the expectations of the future development of the real society. "The social effects of the Internet are released, and the real society is colonized and reconstructed by networking…This leads to a logical corollary: the governance of the Internet is the key to the of governance of society." Therefore, if Internet youth are "immature" in social terms, they are also the main force of political participation in the online world, and changes in how we thinking a out governing of their online political participation is also a preparation for the future improvement of governance in the real world.
 
Notes

[1]潘妮妮, “’小粉红’是怎样诞生的：解析互联网时代的’粉丝爱国主义,’” published online on Exploration and Free Views/探索与争鸣 on July 5, 2022, originally published in the 2021.3 print version of the same journal. 

[2]Translator’s note:  “Jie Jielang” was the Weibo account name of Tian Jialang 田佳良, a graduate student at Xiamen University who made online comments seen as “insulting to China” and thus created an Internet firestorm.  See here for more information.

[3]Translator’s note:  The Li Yi Bar, or Di Bar, is a sub forum of the larger Baidu Tieba forum, the rough equivalent to a sub-Reddit.  It was created in 2004 in order to criticize a soccer player named Li Yi, and has subsequently been part of any number of online incidents and forays.  See here for more information.