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Abstract

This article investigates the crucial political dimension of celebrity. Specifically, it examines celebrities’ great potential for governmentality in the Chinese context by tracing the history of celebrities in Confucian, Maoist, and post-Maoist governmentalities. It concludes that this type of governmentality, namely, celebrity as governmentality, displays uniquely Chinese characteristics in that it is a set of knowledge, discourses, and techniques used primarily by those who govern. It also highlights the central role of the state as the concrete terrain for the application of this mode of governmentality throughout Chinese history. Finally, it notes the always evolving nature of governmentality, as observed in the phenomena of governing from afar and resistance from below. These findings help us rethink the contingent and diversified nature of the phenomena of celebrity and governmentality and challenge Western norms and political theories that covertly employ them.

Keywords

celebrity China Confucian governmentality Mao

Introduction

Although celebrity studies have become an acceptable field of research in Western academia since the 1970s (Harmon, 2005), little attention has been paid to Chinese celebrity. However, celebrity has, in fact, become a pervasive aspect of everyday life in China, which is now no longer a kitschy and inconsequential subculture; rather, it is an emerging cultural phenomenon with crucial implications for modern China, making it a growing area of popular and academic attention (Deng & Jeffreys, 2019; Jeffreys, 2015; Jeffreys & Xu, 2017). Furthermore, the celebrity culture of China has its own trajectory and meanings in China’s specific political context; indeed, it is closely linked with China’s political system. But Chinese celebrity, especially its relationship to the political system and governing rationality in China, remains a relatively understudied field.

This study, therefore, positions itself in this specific understudied field to provide a contextualized analysis of Chinese celebrity, focusing on the political dimension, especially the governing potential of celebrity, to explore the interrelationships between celebrity and governmentality in China. The Foucauldian concept of governmentality refers to “the art of government” (Foucault, 1991, p. 87); it is art rather than coercion because governmentality “is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants” (Foucault, 1993, pp. 203–204) but the “conduct of conduct” (Foucault, 2000, p. 341) that seeks to guide human beings. Therefore, governmentality must be generated not from without but internally, by human will (Sigley, 2006). In addition, it has been argued that celebrity is rooted in the modern governmentality that underpins the operation of contemporary democracy (Marsh et al., 2010; Marshall, 1997; Street, 2012; Wheeler, 2012), especially in China, where it is inherently linked to Chinese governmentality. This is because the celebrity is harnessed by the Party-state as a governing apparatus for solidifying socialist governmentalities different from those of Western capitalist contexts (Jeffreys, 2012, 2015; Sullivan & Kehoe, 2019).

However, most previous studies have explored celebrity politics in the era of late modernity (Marsh et al., 2010; Street, 2012; Wheeler, 2013). Yet, celebrity has long been an influential phenomenon throughout history (Braudy, 1986; Gundle, 2008; Inglis, 2010; Payne, 2009). China has a long history of diverse heroes and famous persons, who were celebrities of a sort, whose lives were chronicled in literature, music, and folklore (McDermott, 2006). Therefore, this article specifically targets the “history of the present” (Foucault, 1977, p. 31), to propose a discourse analysis of various related historical archives and to trace how the phenomenon of the contemporary celebrity emerged from specific struggles, conflicts, and exercises of power in China’s history. A wide range of “texts”—books, speeches, stories, manifestos, reports, interviews, photos, posters, historical events, organizations, and institutions—are taken and examined in this article as objects of discourse dependent on a historically, politically, culturally, and socially constructed system of rules.

Literature Review

Traditional Approaches to Celebrity Studies

According to the “best-known definition of celebrity” (Petrovová & Eibl, 2019, p. 4), a celebrity is “a person who is well-known for their well-knownness, fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness” (Boorstin, 1963, p. 58). It has come to be viewed as a worthy research topic since the 1970s, following highly influential research in film studies by scholars such as Laura Mulvey (1975), Richard Schickel (1985), and Richard Dyer (1986). After this point, studies in this field have continued to expand and now contribute research from a variety of perspectives.

One of the most influential approaches to celebrity studies is the notion of reading celebrity and its various identities and manifestations as a form of textual representation. From this approach, celebrities are interpreted as made-up images and signs that serve as a kind of imaginary signifier for us to read, unpack, or deconstruct. This includes what they consist of, how they signify, and how they articulate the conflicts and contradictions of the contemporary social world (Dyer, 1986; Dyer & McDonald, 1998; Redmond & Holmes, 2007). This representation process can be described as a cultural circuit that involves the generation and identification of meaning and the dynamic exchange of ideology.

This approach of looking at the phenomenon of a celebrity as a textual, cultural, and social representation has led to the study of celebrity culture as a form of performance and, further, to a view of it as a metaphorical battlefield of identity-making. Richard Dyer and Paul McDonald (1998), for example, have studied the question of “performance,” including the performance of character, the performance of signs, types of performances, and how we read performances. David Marshall (2010) also argues that celebrity culture is a presentational culture, specifically a “performance of the self,” a conscious and composed construction of character and performance (pp. 39–40).

Another popular approach to celebrity studies is the critical political–economy approach, which focuses on the production and consumption of celebrity. These studies follow Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s (1979) critiques of the culture industry, highlighting the complex and contradictory forms and strategies of celebrity production and consumption (Gamson, 1994). Graeme Turner (2004), for example, interprets celebrity as a commodity that is produced and traded by “the promotions, publicity and media industries that produce these representations and their effects” (p. 9). From this perspective, celebrity has become a commercial product itself—the celebrity commodity—which can be manufactured, marketed, traded, so as finally to repay investment (Evans & Hesmondhalgh, 2005; Turner, 2004, 2010). Other scholars of this approach further criticize celebrity’s special roles of status within the spectacle of commercialized society (Marshall, 1997; Rojek, 2001).

Beyond Celebrity Politics: Celebrity and Governmentality

Besides the above traditional approaches, a relatively new approach, celebrity politics, focuses on the relationship between celebrity and politics over the past two decades (Bennett, 2011; Cooper, 2008; McKernan, 2011; Mukherjee, 2004; Street, 2004; van Elteren, 2013; van Zoonen, 2006; Weiskel, 2005; West & Orman, 2003; Wheeler, 2013). This approach is rooted in the wider context of the mediatization (Esser & Stromback, 2014; Hjarvard, 2013), personalization (Langer, 2012; Ribke, 2015), and celebritization of politics (Coen, 2015; Petrovová & Eibl, 2019) as well as the rise of populist politics (Moffitt, 2016; Street, 2019).

However, previous studies employing a celebrity politics approach have been criticized as “superficial and anecdotal” (Marsh et al., 2010, p. 322), because most of them excessively focus on classifying and categorizing different types of celebrities and their roles in politics. Darrell West and John Orman’s (2003) seminal work in this field, Celebrity Politics, first distinguishes five categories of “celebrity politicos” (pp. 2–4): political newsworthies, legacies, famed politicos, famed non-politicos, and event celebrities. Since then, many other scholars in this field have proposed different categories of and focuses on celebrity politics, with some scholars attempting to simplify the categories and others insisting on complexity. On one hand, scholars like John Street (2004) suggest simplification and focus on only two categories: celebrity politician (CP1), who uses celebrity techniques when seeking elected office, and celebrity politician (CP2), who is a celebrity who employs fame to engage in politics (also see Wheeler, 2013; Wood et al., 2016). On the other hand, scholars like Paul ‘t Hart and Karen Tindall (2009) criticize oversimplification and suggest four categories of celebrity: advocates, celebrity endorsers, celebrity politicians, and politician-turned-celebrity (also see Jeffreys, 2016; Marsh et al., 2010).

Regardless of the categories used, celebrity politics scholars attempt to examine the origins and resources of celebrities, the political actions in which celebrities are engaged or involved, and the nature of their relationship to politics. Some scholars from this approach investigate the possible impacts of celebrities on the democratic process, arguing that celebrity politics has become “an established element of democratic political culture” (Inthorn & Street, 2011, p. 479). Optimistic scholars believe that celebrity may enhance what John Keane (2009) calls “minority democracy,” because it may make more engaged in politics (Cowen, 2000; Jeffreys, 2016; West & Orman, 2003), while pessimistic scholars worry that celebrity politics lead to public alienation, becoming a constraint on democracy (Brockington & Henson, 2015; Moffitt, 2016; van Zoonen, 2006). Scholars have not yet reached an agreement on whether celebrities will enhance or undermine democracy in a supposedly “post-democratic” age (Wood et al., 2016, p. 582).

Although this strand of research may not be “superficial and anecdotal,” as some scholars have criticized (Marsh et al., 2010, p. 322), it is fixated on empirical inquiries into concrete political issues, such as political personas, campaigns and elections, advocates, and endorsers (Couldry & Markham, 2007; Jackson & Darrow, 2005; Nownes, 2012; Sheeran, 2001; Veer et al., 2010; Zwarun & Torrey, 2011). It also rarely directly confronts celebrity politics’ fundamentally political traits, which are the hidden outcomes of political struggles. Therefore, some scholars have attempted to link celebrity power to the political nature of power and to reveal the links between celebrity and the modern power structures of capitalism. They do so by examining the roots of modern governmentality that support the operation of contemporary capitalism (Marsh et al., 2010; Marshall, 1997; Street, 2012; Wheeler, 2012). They suggest studying celebrity in terms of emerging forms of governmentality within contemporary society, especially “how celebrity politics might be defined or how it might be integrated into late-modern governance” (Street, 2012, p. 351), because they believe that the political role of celebrities is inherently related to the features and problems of changing governmentality in late modernity (Bang, 2004, 2009; Marsh et al., 2010; Wheeler, 2012).

In particular, David Marshall (1997) employs a Foucauldian concept of power to interpret celebrity power as governmentality that integrates the individual into a modern capitalist society. Marshall argues that celebrity is developed alongside another modern political concept of individualism, which exists at the ideological center of capitalism. Accordingly, the idea of celebrity, as a concept parasitic on the modern political idea of individualism, moves effortlessly into a celebration of democratic capitalism, because it expresses a new form of valorization of the individual that is commensurate with capitalism and its associated consumer culture. In this sense, the celebrity has become a locus of formative power and discourse and an apparatus for capitalist forms of discipline and regulation, through which capitalism achieves its ends of mesmerizing, subduing, and exploiting the individual. In other words, celebrity is central to capitalism, serving to propitiate and reconcile the individual to acceptance of modern capitalist society. Therefore, Marshall (1997) argues that the discourse of celebrity is “a governing consensus”—or in a word, governmentality—of capitalism (p. 57), serving as a channeling device for the negotiation between the dominant and the subordinate.

Chinese Celebrities and Chinese Governmentalities

When celebrity politics and governmentality are considered, the studies are usually situated in the Western context, especially the United States and the United Kingdom (see Marsh et al., 2010; Street, 2012; vafn Zoonen, 2006; West & Orman, 2003; Wheeler, 2013). These Euro-American-centric studies have faced severe criticism. Studies of celebrity in non-US and non-Western-European political settings do exist. These studies have focused on celebrity and politics from a variety of vantages: the evolving role and changing nature of celebrity in Indian politics and the Indian public sphere (Mukherjee, 2004), the modern Indonesian notion of celebrity from the perspective of the discourses of legitimacy and charisma (Hughes-Freeland, 2007), celebrity political endorsement in Taiwanese political marketing management (Henneberg & Chen, 2007), the celebritization of politics and the attractiveness of celebrity populism in post-communist Eastern Europe (Bartoszewicz, 2019), the gradual increase of celebrity involvement indicating a fresh generation of Czech politicians (Petrovová & Eibl, 2019), and the revolutionary celebrity as an overtly political phenomenon in Syria (Kraidy, 2015).

In particular, although China has experienced significant development in celebrity culture, Chinese celebrities “rarely receive sustained academic attention” (Farquhar & Zhang, 2010, p. 2). Only more recently, in the past 5 years, have there been an increasing number of studies of Chinese celebrities (Deng & Jeffreys, 2019; Jeffreys, 2015; Jeffreys & Xu, 2017). Especially from the perspective of governmentality, scholars argue that Chinese celebrities may offer us a more complex and dynamic picture of celebrity politics because of China’s socialist legacy and one-party system (Jeffreys, 2015). For example, Elaine Jeffreys and Louise Edwards (2010, 2012) highlight the importance of the Chinese Party-state in China; celebrity, as a special state apparatus, is embedded within the state-led nationalist project and is employed for the purpose of scripting socialist governmentality.

To some extent, Chinese celebrities have been harnessed by the Party-state as “a vehicle for promoting socialist values and patriotism” (Sullivan & Kehoe, 2019, p. 242) and for achieving “orderly progress towards a modern society under the leadership of the Communist Party” (Sullivan & Kehoe, 2019, p. 242). In this sense, Chinese celebrities have become powerful instruments, which the Party-state uses “to promote regime goals and solidify new governmentalities” (Sullivan & Kehoe, 2019, p. 241); thus, celebrity is inherently political and closely connected to the state and its mechanisms of governmentality. This necessitates more localized studies in specific and complex contexts, especially the context of Chinese governmentalities (Sigley, 2006).

Based on the literature discussed above, this article will focus on the political dimension of celebrity, with attention to the governing potential of celebrity. In particular, it will situate itself within China’s special context to provide a discourse analysis of the historical trajectories of Chinese celebrity, especially in terms of China’s political contexts and governing rationalities.

Celebrities in Confucian Governmentality

In China, the concept of celebrity has always been inherently political. In Chinese, “celebrity” is ming ren (ming, fame/name/title and ren, person/people), a central disposition of Confucian thought and politics. Rhetorical slogans based on these connections have promised the production of order to reinforce the power of the sovereign (Geaney, 2011): “If the ming is straight, there is order”; “rectify the ming, thereby order the things”; “rectify the ming, improve the law, then there is no annoyance for the governors.” In this sense, in the Confucian system, the celebrity is the person who possesses the political meaning of order (ming), through which the governors dominated the people (ren), the governed, by assigning them different ming (roles and positions in the political system according to its governing rationality).

In traditional China, ming is always monopolized by the rulers, especially the emperors. As Confucius states,

[The emperor] must rectify the ming! Ming and qi are the only two things the emperor cannot absolutely give to another person. They must be held by the emperor. Ming is established externally, but it acts internally. Everything begins and ends with it. Therefore, the emperor must be very cautious about ming.

The emperor is usually the only individual who has the power of ming in his empire; accordingly, the emperor’s family name is also the only ming in his dynasty: for example, Li Tang means Li’s Tang Dynasty or the Tang Dynasty belongs to Li. Similar to Ernst Kantorowicz’s (1997) concept of “the king’s two bodies,” the Chinese emperor also had two ming (names), which identified the mortal emperor and the immortal dynasty. To some extent, Chinese history is a genealogy of these emperors—24 family names for 24 dynasties (Liang, 2014). Therefore, the greatest emperor of each dynasty, and especially the first emperor, are usually the most well-known for being well-known, the celebrities of their dynasties. For example, Qin Shi Huang, Han Wu Di, Tang Tai Zong, Song Tai Zu, were all well-known “celebrities” for most Chinese people and were also popular in Chinese poetry, literature, music, and folklore.

The emperors of Confucian governmentality not only monopolized ming but also granted rewards of ming to those who were obedient or helpful to the system through which the emperors, as governors, assigned different roles and positions to the people they governed. As Lucian Pye (1984) argues, regarding Confucian governmentality, “[t]he first step toward good government and the realization of a harmonious society is for each person to know his role and perform it well according to the strictest interpretation of that role” (p. 40). “Celebrities” from a variety of fields and official positions, famous for a variety of reasons, reified the emperor’s government through ming (McDermott, 2006); for example, Si-Ma Qian was famous in the field of history during the Han Dynasty; Li Bai and Du Fu in poetry during the Tang; and Cao Xueqin for his novel during the Qing. However, this does not necessarily mean that their status challenged the ming of the emperor; rather, their ming (well-knownness) was simply another way of reiterating the emperor’s monopoly over ming.

Under this governing rationality, ming, and its concordant celebrity, became a crucial aspect of governmentality in traditional China. First, it produced “sons of filial piety” (xiaozi) as traditional celebrities, serving the governors’ promotion of filial piety—the fundamental virtue of Confucianism—for the sake of stabilization and legitimation. For example, Twenty-Four Filial Piety Exemplars, written by Guo Jujing, a scholar of the Yuan Dynasty, was a set of popular tales about celebrities in different dynasties who were famous for their unquestioning obedience to their parents and their concern for their parents’ needs and wishes (Tseng & Hsu, 1972, p. 28). For example, the first one of these celebrities was Yu Shun, one of the Five Emperors of ancient China, who remained filial and obedient to his father regardless of how his father treated him. Emperor Shun set a good example for the other 23 celebrities of filial piety, who subordinated their own will and welfare to that of their parents, sometimes even making extravagant sacrifices, such as cutting flesh from their own bodies or killing their sons to feed their parents (Jordan, 1986).

However, these celebrities’ absolute obedience, subordination, and self-sacrifice were not just a family issue; rather, it was a crucial part of the project of Confucian governmentality. According to the Analects, filial piety is defined by Confucius as “not being disobedient,” which constitutes the exercise of governmentality:

It is a rare thing for someone who has a sense of filial piety and fraternal responsibility to have a taste for defying authority. And it is unheard of for those who have no taste for defying authority to be keen on initiating rebellion. Exemplary persons concentrate their efforts on the root, for the root having taken hold, the proper way will grow there from. As for filial piety and fraternal responsibility, it is, I suspect, the root of consummate conduct.

Another Confucian classic, The Classic of Filial Piety, regards filial piety as the foundation of all Confucian teachings and governmentality: “Filial piety, then, begins in service to your parents, continues in service to the ruler, and culminates in distinguishing yourself in the world.” There are also dozens of Confucian dictums concerning filial piety, such as “Of the hundred excellent things, filial piety is first,” “Parents are always right,” and “When your father wants you to die, you must die for him; when your emperor wants you to die, you must die for him.”

Furthermore, the discourse of filial piety concerning traditional celebrities is inherently intertwined with the discourse of loyalty. For example, Yue Fei was a famous patriotic general of the Song Dynasty who was famous for his loyalty and filial piety. This sort of general as a celebrity is different from General Eisenhower as a celebrity (Blake, 2016); Yue Fei was a representative of filial piety extending to the authority of Confucian governmentality, the ultimate parental authority. According to the discourse of filial piety, all officials of the Confucian governing system have become “parental officials,” and the emperor and queen have become the “father and mother” of all of the people of the empire (Tseng & Hsu, 1972). Indeed, his mother even tattooed four characters on his back: “jing zhong bao guo,” meaning, “serve the country with the utmost loyalty” or “boundless loyalty to the country and emperor.” Besides General Yue Fei, there were many other celebrities belonging to this category in different dynasties; for example, Qu Yuan in the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period, Zhu-Ge Liang and Guan Yu in the Three Kingdoms Period, and Wen Tianxiang in the Song Dynasty, all of whom were official, loyal celebrities. Most even became popular and influential deities, Guan Yu in particular, of imperial China because of their loyalty (Ter Haar, 2017).

To sum up, there are three general traits of celebrity in Confucian governmentality: first, the emperors were usually the supreme celebrities who monopolized the power of ming; second, celebrities from a variety of fields reified and reiterated the emperors’ monopoly over ming; and third, emperors were also proactive in creating and promoting celebrities to serve as exemplars for ordinary people, producing order and obedience in the name of ming.

Celebrities in Maoist Governmentality

Although the People’s Republic of China (PRC) embraced Marxism and Leninism, Mao’s government still inherited the legacy of Confucian ming governmentality. Like the emperors of ancient China, Chairman Mao Zedong, the founding leader of the PRC, was a genuinely charismatic leader and a godlike celebrity from 1949 until his death in 1976 (Jeffreys & Edwards, 2010). Many scholars have argued that most popular politicians are celebrities, even superstars (Moffitt, 2016; Wheeler, 2012), including Douglas Kellner’s (2010) study of Obama’s super-celebrity status and Street’s (2019) analysis of Donald Trump as a superstar celebrity politician. In particular, “all of China’s senior politicians are celebrities in the sense that they are household names” (Jeffreys, 2016, p. 61). Chairman Mao not only inherited thousands of years of emperor-worshipping tradition but also consciously promoted the Stalinist personality cult, the “godlike glorification of a modern political leader with mass media techniques” (Heller & Plamper, 2004, p. 33). This godlike glorification was based on the socialist discourse of truth (Leese, 2011), as the Second Plenum of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958 stated,

Following Mao Zedong from the bottom of our hearts is not worship of the individual or superstitious belief in the individual but the worship of truth. Decades of revolution and construction have proven that Chairman Mao is the representative of truth (Lin, 2005, p. 36).

Accordingly, Mao retained the Confucian emperors’ monopolization of ming; indeed, the phrase “live for ten thousand years”—a traditional phrase reserved for the reigning Chinese emperor—was commonly used to bless Mao. Yet, at the same time, Mao assumed a new status as the representative of truth and the godlike celebrity of the new socialist Chin, with many titles, such as “Great Leader, Great Teacher, Great Supreme Commander, and Great Helmsman,” “Savior of the People,” “The Reddest Red Sun in our Hearts,” and “The NeverSetting Red Sun” (Barme, 1996). In that sense, neither the emperors in Chinese history nor Stalin in the Soviet Union could have rivaled the scope and intensity of the Mao cult in China (Leese, 2007).

The Mao cult even became a specific political religion that was explicitly equated with traditional Chinese religions (Zuo, 1991). There was a series of day-to-day rituals of religious-like worship of Mao. The day of every ordinary Chinese person was structured and rhythmized around the ritual of asking for instructions in the morning and reporting back at night under the watchful eye of Mao’s portrait (MacFarquhar & Schoenhals, 2008). Everyone was expected to participate in these rituals and perform the “loyalty dance,” which was always directed toward the sky, showing respect to Mao and singing, “No matter how close our parents are to us, they are not as close as Mao.” In this sense, the deification of Mao produced a fundamental change within the minds and bodies of “the ruled,” creating a propagandistic cult of personality that existed at the level of both objective and subjective experience (Jeffreys & Edwards, 2010, pp. 8–9).

Along with the godlike celebrification of Mao himself, other celebrities were created and promoted in different fields as part of the techniques of socialist governmentality during the Maoist period. For example, there were the “soldier celebrities” like Lei Feng (1940–62), Ou-Yang Hai (1940–63), and Wang Jie (1942–65), who were continually promoted as moral and ideological exemplars for their loyalty and service to Chairman Mao and the Party-state (Edwards, 2010, p. 21). A Chinese politician, Jiao Yulu (1922–64), who devoted himself to the Party-state, was also celebritized as a symbol of the Party cadre to encourage Chinese people, and especially Party members, to work harder to overcome difficulties at that time. A model worker, Wang Jinxi (1923–70), from the drilling team at the Daqing Oil Field, was also celebritized as a socialist hero and worker celebrity to boost morale for difficult socialist construction. Louise Edwards and Elaine Jeffreys’ (2010) Celebrity in China proposes many more examples along this line.

One of the most representative examples during this period was Lei Feng (1940–1962), the benchmark of all subsequent role models, whose name is still among the most recognized celebrities in China today (Edwards, 2010). Despite some controversy about Lei Feng’ life story, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official story noted that Lei was born to a poor peasant family in a remote area of Hunan Province in 1940. His parents died in the civil war, leaving him an orphan. Lei joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and became a member of the CCP when he grew up. Lei was just an ordinary person who accidentlly died in a truck accident when he was 23 years old; yet, after March 5, 1963, he suddenly became a national celebrity promoted by the Party, the PLA, and the state. Chairman Mao called upon the nation to learn from Lei Feng, since he was “a quasi-mythical model of the perfect communist man . . . who spent his days overachieving and his nights reading Mao’s thought” (Willey et al., 1987 p. 40). From this point forward, Lei Feng became an instantly recognized and revered celebrity in China, characterized as a devoted Party loyalist for Chinese citizens to follow to achieve socialist ideological goals.

To sum up, Maoist governmentality inherited the legacy of Confucian governmentality and continued to employ celebrities to promote its aims. Chairman Mao, as the founding leader of the PRC, was the first and foremost celebrity, as the founding emperors were for their dynasties (Andrew & Rapp, 2000). However, compared to traditional Confucianist China, Maoist governmentality more proactively created and promoted celebrities (as a technique of socialist governmentality), as “role models” who served as proxies for the Mao cult (Leese, 2011), which had its own temporal rhythms and encountered various difficulties during different periods of socialist construction.

Celebrities in Post-Maoist Governmentality

In the late 1970s, China entered the post-Maoist era. Mao’s successor, the new supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, still gave Mao a pre-eminent place in the Party’s mythology, but put an end to the personality cult of the individual. Deng began to create a new politician celebrity style, the man of the people (Zhou, 2015). This new approach was inherited, appropriated, revised, and updated by Deng’s successors, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Each of these new Chinese leaders cultivated images as man-of-the-people politicians, yet with a certain personal charisma (Richburg, 2012; Yao, 2014), paradoxically being “like us” and “above us” at the same time (Wood et al., 2016, pp. 581–582).

Post-Maoist China also promoted role models as a type of celebrity in a way similar to that of Maoist China. It continues to utilize role models to form and transform the people into self-sacrificing citizens able to endure hardship and to inspire and inculcate in the masses such virtues as hard work, modesty, and patriotism (He, 2009). Every year the CCP gives awards to different kinds of “models,” and to model workers in particular, to promote the hardworking spirit of the ideal socialist worker. However, as China has developed economically and socially, the criteria for what defines a model worker has changed relatively rapidly. As a result, people from diverse fields, not just workers and peasants, have increasingly won the most prestigious honor of being model workers. For example, Yao Ming (an NBA basketball player), Liu Xiang (an Olympic champion), Yuan Longping (inventor of hybrid rice), and Yang Liwei (China’s first astronaut) have all been designated as model workers. The composition of model workers appears to have evolved to adapt to the changing governing needs of the CCP for promoting a more pluralistic society and to maintain political popularity. These new role models, especially the Olympic champions and astronauts, have been produced and treated as celebrities every 4 or 5 years in order for the Party-state to display its power and to gain governing legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of the people.

Aside from these state-sponsored celebrities, there are new genres of celebrity that have emerged since other dominant forms of power have emerged in the production of celebrities. The economic reform in post-Maoist China ensured that various forms of celebrity could coexist simultaneously (Jeffreys & Edwards, 2010). A typical case of this transformation was Jet Li, whose celebrification paralleled the Chinese celebrity culture’s transition from socialist and state-led models to market-oriented and media-led celebrities (Farquhar, 2010). Born in 1963, Jet Li became a national celebrity in 1974 when he became the All-Around National Champion in wushu. Because of this, he was one of China’s top 30 athletes who toured the United States as part of the state-led opening to the world through “ping pong diplomacy” (Marx, 2002). This made Li a state-sponsored hero and celebrity when he returned to China. In this sense, Jet Li was also originally a “role model” who illustrated the Maoist dictum of “serving the people” and who “served Party politics and national prestige” (Li & Yi, 1998, p. 47). However, in post-Maoist China, Jet Li achieved a successful transformation from a state-led celebrity to a market-led one, paralleling the transformation of the country as well. The vehicle behind his transformation was the first Mainland–Hong Kong coproduction, the Shaolin Temple, in 1982, which propelled Li to stardom overnight as the “Kung Fu King” of commercial film productions (Farquhar, 2010). After Li, more market-led celebrities emerged, developed, and prospered in China, indicating the prosperity of the market economy and thus the success of the reform and opening up in post-Maoist China (Jeffreys & Edwards, 2010). In a sense, even with the rise of market-led and media-manufactured celebrity, the Party-state had reinvented the past to serve the present and future, disguising itself in the new, commercial popular culture. To some extent, mass media celebrities in post-Maoist China still drove the Chinese people to learn and apply the changing governmentalities of the Party-state and its associated constructions of “modern China” (Jeffreys, 2012, p. 2; also see Sullivan & Kehoe, 2019).

Besides the two dominant powers of the state and the market in post-Maoist China, the emergence of new technologies—especially the internet—and the new spaces opened up by these new technologies, along with their rapid expansion, has added a new dimension to this process. Internet audiences and users have the capacity to become producers of blog articles and audio and video texts and to disseminate them on the internet. In this sense, the internet has facilitated the creation of a grassroots do-it-yourself type of celebrity, that is, the self-serving celebrity or microcelebrity (Grindstaff, 2009; Schickel, 2000; Senft, 2008). According to Jeffreys and Edwards (2010), this new celebrity process has accelerated the perceived shift toward the democratization of celebrity status in China.

The case of Furong Jiejie, an ordinary woman from a small quasi-rural town, is a representative case of internet celebrity in China. She has received national fame since 2005 because of her internet postings, in which she uses hyperbole to describe her artistic talents; in particular, she uses narcissistic descriptions to display her assertively sexual body through photos. Furong Jiejie’s first posting was made on May 24, 2005 and has attracted more than 100,000-page views. Internet users immediately showed their interest and curiosity in Furong Jiejie’s self-indulgent fashion, searching for any information related to her and then posting it online to mock her. A mock-religion was even founded, called the Furong Cult, to worship Furong Jiejie as a “God-mother” (Guo, 2012, pp. 133–134). Inspired by these postings, millions of internet users claiming to be loyal disciples of the Furong Cult, published a series of satirical essays and poems, which were posted and circulated along with Furong Jiejie’s words and photos. The internet users’ playful activities turned into a nationwide craze over Furong Jiejie. Reports and discussions on Furong Jiejie flourished in all of China’s major newspapers and magazines, and on television, the radio, the internet, and BBS. Furong Jiejie was the most famous celebrity in China at that time (Guo, 2012). Since then, Furong Jiejie has remained an internet celebrity and has been one of the top 10 celebrities searched on Baidu for several years (Roberts, 2010).

The Furong Jiejie phenomenon indicates a “democratization of celebrity” and a gradual “devaluation of meritocracy” (Driessens, 2013, p. 644) in the Chinese context. It suggests that a self-made internet celebrity, unlike a state-made or market-made celebrity, should not be prematurely dismissed as “hot ‘for another three minutes’” (Cody, 2005, para. 14). Rather, as Peking University professor Zhang Yiwu argues, the Furong Jiejie phenomenon may well indicate “the victory of common people” (cited in Cody, 2005, para. 12). In other words, the formerly dominant structure in which the celebrity was a sort of tool of governmentality, controlled and monopolized by the state for several 1,000 years, may be losing its preeminent role. After several decades of collusion between the state and the market, ordinary people—the people accustomed to being governed—seem to have begun to find opportunities to celebritize themselves for the first time.

Concluding Remarks

Different from the traditional textual, cultural, social, and economic approaches to celebrity studies, this article emphasizes the crucial political dimension of celebrity. In particular, it provides a historical introduction to the present-day phenomenon of celebrity in China. This historical analysis has examined the specific exercises and struggles for power from which the contemporary phenomena and practices of Chinese celebrity emerge. In this sense, this article highlights celebrities’ great potential for governmentality in the Chinese context. In conclusion, we might note three key characteristics of the relationship between the political and celebrity in China.

First, in Western capitalist society, the celebrity is thought to serve as “a governing consensus” between those who govern and those who are governed (Marshall, 1997, p. 57). In China, on the other hand, celebrity, for much of the nation’s long history, has not been a two-way consensus but instead a one-way tool—a tool utilized as a set of knowledge, discourses, and techniques employed by those who govern. Thus, celebrity as governmentality is not only the art of governing others; rather, it is the art of governing the self that shapes possible actions (Lemke, 2011, pp. 50–51). The ordinary people are not only to be governed; they must also learn to govern themselves by adopting virtues such as obedience, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and self-enterprise as exemplified by different celebrities.

Second, given the Western dogma of big market and small government, the role of the party, state, and government is almost totally absent in Western celebrity studies, even though the roles of media, industry, and audience have been quite adequately examined by these studies. However, within China’s special governing system of celebrity as governmentality, the state has played a crucial role and served as the main concrete terrain for the application of this governmentality throughout Chinese history. Especially presently, contemporary China’s one-party system has precluded the need for mediatized political competition and has a history of strict media control (Jeffreys, 2016), which makes Chinese celebrity politics quite different from those in the West. In this sense, “the Chinese Party-state is ‘regrouping’ rather than ‘retreating’” (Sigley, 2006, p. 489).

Third, although the interrelationships between celebrity and governmentality can be traced back through the nation’s history, celebrity as governmentality is always changing and evolving. In particular, the phenomenon of celebrity in post-Maoist governmentality suggests that, on one hand, the direct link between celebrity and governmentality is becoming more hidden, indicating, in Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong’s words, a kind of “governing at a distance” (Zhang & Ong, 2008, p. 1). On the other hand, grassroots celebrities can serve as a form of possible resistance, as ordinary people have begun to celebritize themselves with their own governing rationalities. This indicates a kind of “democratic entertainment” (Jian & Liu, 2009, p. 530), and potentially, “the victory of common people” (cited in Cody, 2005, para. 12).

Together, these characteristics prompt us to rethink the contingent and diversified nature of celebrities and to reflect upon what we mean by governmentality itself in the specific context of China. Furthermore, they also open up debates of global significance about celebrity status and governmentality, providing an applicable text with true imaginative power for us to rethink the political nature of being a celebrity. Therefore, to study celebrities and the accompanying governmentality in a non-Western context, such as China, can challenge Western norms and political theories that conceive of “the world as one” and politics as “being the same everywhere” (Chatterjee, 2004, p. 6).

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Yupei Zhao

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