Precarious But Active: A Look At Privacy Behaviors in Chinese Transformative Fandom on a Censored and Surveilled Internet
Authors: Kelly Wang (Northeastern University), Ruochen Liu (Northeastern University), Ada Lerner (Northeastern University), Abigail Marsh (Macalester College), Tianshi Li (Northeastern University)
Volume: 2026
Issue: 3
Pages: 538–555
DOI: https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2026-0095
Abstract: Chinese transformative fandom has had to adapt to increasing censorship and surveillance on the Chinese internet in recent years, working around censorship on domestic platforms in order to continue participating in fandom. To investigate this phenomenon from a privacy perspective, we interviewed 10 overseas members of Chinese transformative fandom about their experiences with privacy and censorship, and we supplemented this with 153 social media comments from Weibo and Xiaohongshu (RedNote) on the same topic. We found that our data perceived the current state of Chinese online fandom as, at best, frustrating, and at worst unsafe. Fans could be discouraged as the platform prevented them from sharing their fanworks while within-fandom disagreements led some fans to silence or report each other. The censored state of Chinese platforms, however, could also make it difficult for the community to learn how to move to a blocked overseas platform. They responded to risks from both the state and their peers by leveraging precarious techniques of obscurity and anonymity, seeking strategies that would still allow engagement with fandom. We identify three key takeaways for privacy scholarship: the harms of censorship were felt at a community level, which created a tension with expected privacy solutions; faced with inevitable surveillance, fans nonetheless actively modeled threats as a community to inform their behaviors; and the sociotechnical environment of fans influenced how blocking and reporting other fans seemed necessary for curation, contributing to why they might expose each other to state-level harm.
Keywords: China, Transformative Fandom, Censorship, Surveillance, Social Media, Community Privacy, HCI
Copyright in PoPETs articles are held by their authors. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
