As netizens woke up on the fourth day of the lunar new year — a day dedicated to welcoming the gods back into one’s home and earning their blessings for the year ahead — a viral new video on the Chinese short video app Douyin (抖音) showed a more troubling kind of home visitation.
In the clip, uploaded by influencer Lu Jiujiu (鹿酒酒), a young woman named Xiao Li (小丽) wakes up to find her room filled with relatives and a strange man, bearing gifts, looming over her bed. The man, we are told, is a blind date she previously agreed to be set up with by her family.
As the story was picked up by Chinese media, the shock value was on full display. “I was completely baffled,” Xiao Li was quoted as saying in one interview. “I didn’t expect him to turn up in my bedroom.” In another unsettling detail, she added that she had no idea how he got in, as her door was locked. The next day, however, as a wave of netizens called the clip’s authenticity into question, Lu Jiujiu confessed in a comment that it had all been a staged performance “for entertainment only.”
Not everyone was laughing.
Commenters wrote that the “performance” played on serious violations of personal privacy and security for a cheap laugh, as well as the often-triggering topic of parental pressures to marry and have children that many young Chinese people during trips home over the Spring Festival holiday. “Is this a blind date,” asked one clearly unamused Douyin user, “or a horror movie?”
Chinese media were similarly po-faced. The Beijing News (新京报), a newspaper under the Beijing municipal committee of the CCP, but also known for occasionally pursuing substantive reporting and discussion, cited the incident as an example of what the country’s latest internet cleanup campaign had targeted. Launched by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) in the leadup to the holiday, the campaign focused its crosshairs on staged videos and rumor-mongering generally, and — in particular — content that uses sensitive issues like marriage and child-rearing to go viral online.
Shanghai Observer (上观), part of the state-run Shanghai United Media Group empire, similarly threw it in the litany of “self-directed deceptions” pulled off by individual content creators known as “self-media” — a topic that exactly one week before had been the focus of a comical skit during the annual Spring Festival Gala on China Central Television.
Lu Jiujiu’s video was a smash hit — at least initially. Within hours it had clocked millions of views, the negative backlash a testament to the success of the rage-bait model of online content so successful around the world. Look at her Douyin account today, though, and you’ll find it missing. The holiday now past, Liu’s case is a cautionary tale about the dangers of fakery for entertainment.
