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As Chinese performers have become more visible on global screens, their professional images – once the preserve of studios and agents – have been increasingly relayed and reworked by film fans. Web technology has made searching, poaching, editing, positing, and sharing texts significantly easier. Moreover, by using a variety of seamless and innovative methods, a new mode of personality construction has been developed. With case studies of high-profile stars like Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, and Michelle Yeoh, this ground-breading book examines transnational Chinese stardom as a Web-based phenomenon, and as an outcome of the participatory practices of cyber fans. By grounding the theory and praxis of Chinese stardom in a cyber-context, this book proffers a critical intervention of Chineseness and redress some inadequacies of the current scholarship on the subject by advancing the exploration of the dynamics borne out of technological apparatuses, cultural discourses, and network culture.

Chapter 5 focuses on the half-Taiwanese (Chinese), half-Japanese Takeshi Kaneshiro and his star image on fan forums, where his mixed ethnic identity becomes a central feature of his transnational stardom. This chapter pursues to show how such an identity renders the Chineseness and how the icon embodies onscreen ambivalent and unstable. As the chapter continues to elucidate, the impact of fan manipulation on Kaneshiro’s fluid persona is shown by the exploitation of his half-Japanese identity for charity by some Japan-based fan sites. This chapter, eventually, anchors its argument on the malleability fans find in Kaneshiro’s star persona, which embody either Chineseness or Japaneseness.

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Amateur-produced, web-based videos have become an emergent locus of emulating, multiplying, and reinventing the appeal of martial arts stars, which was once a product of professionals of industrial mechanism. The constellation of user-generated practices on platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook that depend on amateur content has become a vital force driving popular construction that blurs the line between the professional and the amateur. Celebrated transnational Chinese actor Donnie Yen, who has gained huge fame thanks to his work in martial arts hits, was cast in the Star Wars feature Rogue One (2016). An analysis of two videos on YouTube that (re)narrativize Yen's persona in Rogue One shows how video makers working outside the film industry open up new aspects of articulating and understanding the star. Amateur video producers unsettle Yen's status, which is principally anchored on his martial authenticity and acrobatic skills, by either mixing the active body with other generic components like sci-fi or virtualizing the warrior figure in other media contexts, such as video games and virtual reality. The outcome is a composite, multidirectional intertext that engenders novel dimensions of a star text, negotiating and refashioning the martial arts personality. Digital creative texts have discursive power that changes and challenges the industrial structure of cultural production in a volatile media environment.