Yingdan Lu, director of the Computational Media and Politics Lab at Northwestern University and CCPP faculty affiliate, has published a new article in Political Communication examining how celebrity fan communities engage with state propaganda on social media platforms in China.
The article, “Performative Propaganda Engagement: How Celebrity Fans Engage with State Propaganda on Weibo,” offers a novel account of how propaganda circulates not only through official state channels but also through popular culture and participatory fan practices online. Importantly, the study shows how fans actively engage with propaganda content, influenced by celebrity-related motivations and platform affordances.
From Propaganda Exposure to Performative Engagement
Focusing on Weibo, China’s largest social media platform, the paper demonstrates that celebrity fans often engage with state-sponsored messages as a form of performative engagement. Fans like, repost, and comment on propaganda for celebrity-related reasons. This performative dynamic helps explain why propaganda messages can travel widely, even among users who are not primarily politically motivated. Political content becomes embedded within entertainment-centered networks, blurring the boundaries between fandom, nationalism, and political communication.
Implications for Political Communication Research
The findings have broader implications beyond the Chinese context. They highlight how contemporary propaganda operates through networked publics, platform incentives, and identity-driven engagement, rather than relying solely on persuasion or coercion. The study also contributes to growing scholarship on information politics in authoritarian settings by showing how bottom-up user practices can unintentionally reinforce top-down messaging.
For scholars of political communication, digital media, and international politics, the article underscores the need to take popular culture and participatory media seriously as sites of political influence and governance.
This research aligns closely with CCPP’s broader agenda on information integrity, platform governance, and the evolving relationship between media systems and democratic and non-democratic political power.