Chinese livestreamers are hypnotising the West

In a square in Chongqing, China, a phalanx of besuited men with floppy hair and thick, white foundation marches forwards and backwards. At the front is a couple dressed in dazzling white; the girlfriend faces away from the camera. The pair bark catchphrases to the unseen livestream audience, thanking the watchers of Douyin, Kuaishou and RedNote (Xiaohongshu) ― the Chinese equivalents of TikTok, which is banned in China ― for their generous donations. When a certain threshold of engagement is reached, the woman will turn around and show her face. All the while, a trance-like song plays: “When the bass gets bumpin ’ up in the club / Pour another shot and show me some love.”

The star of these Chongqing streams is Long Haotian, an internet celebrity who competed for China in breakdancing at the Youth Olympics. His girlfriend-slash-streaming colleague is Yao Yao; she talks in a squeaky baby voice and emotes like an animated character on a video-game loading screen. The couple has enjoyed a strange TikTok virality in the West in recent weeks, spurring imitations and parodies and racking up millions of views. Many clips taken from their videos on Chinese sites receive tens of thousands of likes; one has half a million, and its comments overflow with baffled enchantment. “Understood nothing but could not stop watching,” says one. “This is so bizarre but I will watch them in full,” says another. “Why do I keep watching these,” asks a third. Over the course of these streams, precisely nothing of note happens. Regardless, China watches. The revenue of tuanbo , meaning “group or team livestreams”, is expected to leap from 15 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) last year to 40 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) this year. And now, we watch too.

‘The couple has enjoyed a strange TikTok virality in the West in recent weeks.’ (TikTok)

The Chongqing dancers aren’t a one-off: whenever tuanbo makes it over to Western TikTok, we are rapt. The format is finely tuned for hyperstimulation: bright colours, catchy music, constant interaction with a hidden viewership. Elsewhere, the livestreaming models are even more overt in their roles as meaningless revenue-generators. In one video, pavements are studded with ringlights, each illuminating a pretty Chinese woman who speaks into her phone , collecting donations from viewers or selling plastic products. In some streams, performers float surfboards on wave machines ; viewers spike when they fall off. Some have line-ups of four or five girls in their teens or early twenties, each of whom can be made to perform the same dance again, and again, and again. Occasionally they pass out or cry from exhaustion , fake or otherwise; this in turn keeps viewers watching. Other videos stage high-stakes scenarios, such as nonsensical factory work under the scowling gaze of a hated boss . In many cases, the audience is mesmerised by the satisfying repetition. Often these “livestreams” are in fact recorded loops: viewers rarely notice, so unvarying is the format.

The appeal is rarely that these streamers are especially sexy, or outrageous, or original — it is that they are absurd and perform on demand. The emptier the logic of the streams, the more engagement they drum up. We are accustomed to Western influencers behaving like miniature celebrities — the principles of authenticity, glamour and charisma are piped in directly from Hollywood — whereas Chinese idol culture is about cohesion. Tuanbo performers make themselves generic and perform robotically, often literally moving like automatons. There is no interest in intimacy or sincerity. Like our baby-voiced Yao Yao, they are stock characters. On the Western internet, the individual is the star; on the Chinese internet, success means operating as a highly efficient whole. And so the two forms of content reflect the philosophies of their alien worlds.

Still, it takes a lot of effort to look that flat. China’s streaming stars are working their arses off to come across as catchphrase-bleating idiots while carrying out meticulous and highly choreographed set-pieces. The finished product more closely resembles a call centre or production line than a television show. In this, the streams mirror the country’s industrial and military prowess. There is often something borderline martial in the videos’ regimentation. No other country attracts foreign viewers with the spectacle of men marching in a city square.

“The appeal is rarely that these streamers are especially sexy, or outrageous, or original — it is that they are absurd and on demand.”

Since the Nineties the West has watched, enthralled and aghast, as China has churned out vast factories, corralled hyperefficient workforces and thrown together cities seemingly overnight. Online, a similar thing is happening to pop culture. If the Californian dream of the internet was about liberating creativity, creating a boundless Eden of artists and independent agents, tuanbo offers an alternative future: content that res…