From ‘positive energy’ to ‘chaos’: how China’s online fan clubs became a target of Beijing’s crackdown

China’s ongoing crackdown of online fan circles, or fan quan – informal virtual communities centred around an idol – has intensified government efforts to weed out opinion manipulation in the country’s cyberspace.

Internet watchdog the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) has removed 150,000 pieces of harmful content online and punished more than 4,000 accounts related to fan clubs as of last week, according to a Xinhua report last week. This has prompted online services and business models associated with fan clubs to close down.