Using the governance of social eating (chibo) influencers as a case study, this article demonstrates the policies, practices, discourses, and politics of China's state-centric model of influencer governance. We argue that influencers in China are in a relatively precarious position due to various regulations and restrictions imposed upon them by the state, platforms, and industry associations. They are frequently targeted in China's internet governance campaigns "for a more sanitary internet" and coerced to participate in social governance "for the creation of a better socialist society." They are therefore vulnerable within China's state-controlled digital economy, caught between risks and opportunities this governance affords. Their position in this governance regime has consequently enabled their creativity, flexibility, and resilience to "play on the edge" of recurring platform crackdowns and capricious government policies to survive in the ever-changing influencer industry. The coevolution of regulatory policies and focuses, and the shifting performativity of influencers, also makes China's influencer culture fast evolving and the governance itself more complex than elsewhere.

This article investigates Chinese social eating livestreams (chibo) in the context of China’s 2020 campaign against food waste. It argues that the subgenre ‘big stomach kings’, a target of the campaign, evinces the moral implications of Chinese affluence, of which food waste is exemplary. The emerging affluence in China has normalized conspicuous, wasteful consumption and given rise to a local form of flaunting wealth called ‘xuanfu’. Chinese social media are inundated with xuanfu images, a symptom of the necessary psychosocial adaptation to affluence. Isolating the ‘big stomach kings’ livestreams from the social context of xuanfu, the anti-waste campaign glosses over the underlying social issue of the vast wealth gap between the affluent and the poor. To expose the ethical controversy of these livestreams, the article also analyzes their gender politics by parsing the mystifying image of female ‘big stomach kings’, whose slim bodies are in stark contrast to their enormous appetites.

Since its debut on China Central Television (CCTV), Shejian shang de Zhongguo (舌尖上的中国, known as ‘ A Bite of China’, hereinafter Shejian) has met with great fanfare, home and abroad, and become a celebrated geographical brand name of Chinese culinary culture. Shejian marks a distinctive attribute of China’s contemporary food media, which deploys glamourized food images, from ordinary staple food to lavish celebratory meals, to reify social prosperity and personal happiness. This article aims to demonstrate how despite its state-sponsored production and distribution, Shejian is more than an ideological artefact. The cultural phenomenon has thrived at the intersection of China’s media convergence and participatory culture. On the one side, Shejian’s unprecedented success and influence should be attributed to CCTV’s convergence strategies against the backdrop of media reforms. On the other, audience participation and re-creation on the Internet have invigorated the formation and spread of the Shejian phenomenon while problematizing the official interpretation and ideological construction of the documentary. Shejian’s savvy viewers and cynical imitators poach the florid documentary script to write their versions of reality, albeit disguised with profanity and laughter. How the widespread egao practices play with the establishment culture and how such online expressions are tolerated by the authorities shed new light on China’s Internet culture and censorship.