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Meredith Chen

Authorities in China are taking content creators, fan groups and online platforms to task as their aggressive pursuit of online traffic upends lives and public services across the country.
State media and local authorities have called on these parties to exercise restraint and stop attention-seeking behaviour from getting out of control.
The warnings followed a wave of public attention that hit a 75-year-old man and his wife in Shaoxing in eastern Zhejiang province this month.
Crowds of visitors, live streamers and photographers descended on the couple’s home to see seven gourds growing on their balcony, a scene reminiscent of Calabash Brothers, a popular Chinese animated series released in 1986.
The series follows seven magical brothers born from gourds and raised by their grandfather. Videos and images of the couple in Shaoxing and their gourds quickly went viral, with internet users dubbing the man “Grandpa Calabash”.
However, as more visitors began gathering outside the home, taking photographs, live-streaming, calling out “grandpa” and knocking on the door, what began as an expression of affection increasingly disrupted the couple’s daily life, eventually leading them to cut down all the gourds last Saturday.

The incident showed a need to maintain boundaries between public attention and private life, wrote People’s Daily, a Communist Party mouthpiece, in a commentary published on Tuesday.
“Without boundaries, even genuine kindness can change its meaning; care without restraint can become a burden that others can hardly bear.”
It cited other similar cases, including a tree in a wheat field in Xian, Shaanxi province that became an online sensation earlier this year for its scenic view. Visitors thronged the field and damaged crops, prompting a villager to cut the tree’s crown to protect the crops.
And in Wuhan, Hubei province, in 2022, a man dubbed “Grandpa Sugar Water” had to close his stall after his low-cost sugar-water business of 17 years went viral and questions surfaced about its hygiene.
The Zhejiang provincial publicity department made a similar point in a recent commentary, saying that once ordinary people were thrust into the spotlight by algorithms, “their lives could hardly completely belong to themselves”.
Posted on the department’s social media account, the commentary said traffic came with its own “cruel logic” and that the online world often left little room for ordinary people who did not seek fame to make a “dignified exit”.
The commentary called on local authorities to be more discerning in how they responded to online traffic, rather than embracing every burst of attention as a way to boost local tourism.
Viral attention could bring short-term tourism benefits, but private spaces should not simply be turned into tourist attractions and online popularity did not necessarily create lasting value for tourism, it said.
In recent years, a number of places in China had become overnight online sensations, drawing waves of visitors, the commentary said, describing them as having brought excitement and tourism revenue as well as congestion, higher prices, and disruptions to residents’ daily lives.
“Traffic cannot simply be regarded as a gift that brings benefits without harm,” it said.


The tension between online attention and offline capacity has extended to public services.
In Xuzhou, in eastern Jiangsu province, nearly 49,000 complaints were filed with a government public service platform over a 10-day period in late August, mostly regarding concerts by a boy band, as rival fan groups argued over the staging of performances.
Most of the submissions came from fans of the band, with a small number of parents of fans also involved, said “Xuzhou 12345”, a social media account affiliated with the official public service platform, in an article published on September 1.
The surge forced the Xuzhou 12345 hotline to activate an emergency response mechanism, with staff working round the clock to handle and follow up on submissions.
According to the article, all service operators were mobilised, while the number of night-shift operators was increased from 15 to 43 to cope with the spike in requests.
The article was taken down after it drew online attention.
In a September 4 article, People’s Daily said citizens had the right to use the channel to express legitimate concerns but lamented that the mass mobilisation of fans had turned a public service into a “battleground for fandom disputes”.
“This was far more than simple fan enthusiasm,” the commentary said of the Xuzhou incident, calling it “an aggressive intrusion of toxic fan culture into public spaces”.
On September 2, popular Chinese microblog service Weibo reported that accounts involved in mobilising fans to use government hotlines to pressure authorities over disagreements had been muted.
“Public resources are not a ‘wish pool’ for individuals or certain groups but a limited social ‘first aid kit’,” People’s Daily said.
The newspaper also warned that repeatedly or excessively occupying public hotline resources without legitimate reason could incur legal liability.
It urged greater public awareness and further discussions of the boundaries for using public resources.


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From content creators to organised fan groups, state media and local authorities urge greater awareness of boundaries and restraint


From content creators to organised fan groups, state media and local authorities urge greater awareness of boundaries and restraint.


Weibo

People’s Daily

China targets ‘toxic’ traffic as viral sensations upend daily life and public services

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}From content creators to organised fan groups, state media and local authorities urge greater awareness of boundaries and restraint

From content creators to organised fan groups, state media and local authorities urge greater awareness of boundaries and restraint