East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2025

What does humour do to us and our relationship with the society? This article examines political humour in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and asks how hegemony is mediated through political humour in China. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two Spring Festival Gala sketches, 春晚小品 (‘chunwan xiaopin’), is applied not only for its ontological fit with the literature of hegemony but also because of its potential to unravel the hidden power relations. I argue for the social and psychological significance of xiaopin to the general public because they reveal the fragility of the intellectual hierarchy that places the rural population at the bottom, play with the heavy historical episode of the Great Leap Forward, and create the illusion of empowerment. Furthermore, it reveals that humour can be subversive on the textual level and simultaneously hegemonic on the discursive level.

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics birthed a cultural phenomenon in China: Eileen Gu, an 18-year-old half-white, half-Chinese ‘skiing genius’ who left the United States to join team China. In this article, I explore the ways in which Gu’s online presence informs understandings about class, women, race, ‘Chineseness’ and the complex entanglement of the neo-liberal self and collective nation. First, I provide an introduction to sports nationalism and neo-liberal feminism to situate Gu in the post-socialist neo-liberal Chinese context. Then, I turn to Gu’s social media posts, self-made videos and online commercials during the Winter Olympics. I argue that Gu is presented within (1) a neo-liberal feminist moment characterized by individual empowerment and (2) a nationalist and cosmopolitan moment framed by the national pride towards her and her self-framing of a flexible citizenship and ‘apolitical Chineseness’. I conclude that the ‘Eileen Phenomenon’ is an illustrative instance of the shifting demarcations in a global political economic field, in which a desirable Chinese identity and a marketable femininity are both crucial for the Chinese state under globalization. Gu’s case shows that the interplay and contradiction of the neo-liberal self and the nationalist collective continue to play out in contemporary Chinese culture and society.

Originating in Japan in the 1970s, Boys’ Love (BL) has since become a ‘transnational apparatus of love’ for women to explore their sexuality away from societal stigma and sociocultural gender inequality. The genre has garnered both commercial and academic attention, but a common point of contention within existing scholarship is its ability to either challenge or reinforce heteronormative power hierarchies. To that end, much of the previous research has examined the discourses among female fan communities or the portrayal and subversion of masculinity within the works. This article aims to address the oft-ignored representation of femininity and female characters within BL works by focusing on Moxiang Tongxiu’s Tianguan Cifu (Heaven Official’s Blessing), a popular Chinese BL or danmei novel. In examining the roles of five major named female characters in the novel, I argue that the characters fall under the common feminine stereotypes of Mother, Maiden and Monster. While the female characters’ narrative function is affected to some degree by the novel’s focus on a central gay romance, the author nevertheless appears to adhere to the traditional and modern Chinese gender ideologies regarding femininity, restricting any attempts to challenge gendered expectations to male bodies and characters.

In SMAP’s post-break-up social media output, there was a shift in the kind of masculinity embodied by the performers: from the beautiful, sexually desirable mode of masculinity associated with their Heisei heyday to a more vulnerable mode of masculinity that emphasized intimacy and authenticity. I call this more recent mode of masculinity ‘entrepreneurial masculinity’, drawing on Akiko Takeyama’s study of male hosts, who use romance, emotion and intimacy to connect with customers. From an object of desire, particularly sexual desire, the male body changes to an entity associated with vulnerability. This article explores different kinds of vulnerability in SMAP’s post-break-up output, particularly in social media posts by member Katori Shingo: vulnerability to loneliness, vulnerability to social and economic precarity and vulnerability to violence. This shift with regard to the body and masculinity in idol culture reflects trends of increased social and economic precarity in neo-liberal Japan.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused people worldwide to spend more time at home, looking for entertainment on the internet, including video on demand services. In Japan, the growing popularity of Netflix resulted in an increased consumption of Korean content, a trend that manifested itself particularly in the massive popularity of a South Korean drama Crash Landing on You, the most watched programme of 2020 on Netflix Japan. This article analyses various manifestations of Crash Landing on You’s popularity, focusing primarily on fan digital practices: online fan meetings, drama food recreation video sharing and virtual tourism. Based on the data gathered via online content analysis, digital ethnography and interviews, the author argues that these practices allow deeper immersion into the narrative world and intimacy building with the characters, offering entertainment, safety and comfort. Moreover, even though digital practices are not limited by national borders, thus often associated with transnational fandom, provided case studies suggest that intimacy building with the object of fannish affection has close ties to the national focus of presented practices.

K-pop groups and artists have been localized to appeal to the lucrative Japanese market since the early 2000s. However, the two successful girl groups, TWICE and Iz One, exhibit a new direction in K-pop, by being members of both Korean and Japanese origin within the same groups. By drawing upon the literature on localization strategies and contentious Japan–Korea relations, ethnographic fieldwork and media sources, this article examines two locations in Tokyo in which K-pop consumption takes place. Contrary to the polarization tendencies that signify current Japan–Korea relations in the political realm, the gendered K-pop spaces and Japan–Korea collaborations such as Iz One signify benign hybridity and localization.