China's VTuber Fandom and the Rise of Virtual Idol Culture

China's virtual idols are easy to mistake for products. They are polished avatars rendered by motion-capture rigs and AI animation pipelines, deployed by brands to sell cosmetics, electric cars, and fried chicken. But the avatar is the least of what makes a virtual idol valuable. What gives one commercial weight is the dense web of affection, ritual, and meaning that fan communities build around it — largely unpaid, largely on their own initiative, and almost entirely outside the brand's control. The defining fact of China's virtual idol economy is that grassroots fan co-creation and commercial youth-marketing are not separate worlds but two faces of a single circuit. The figures that fan communities cultivate into objects of devotion are the same ones brands later rent as scandal-proof spokesmodels. Fandom manufactures the attachment; commerce harvests it; and the friction at the seam between them has become the industry's defining tension.

The engine of co-creation runs overwhelmingly through one platform. Bilibili — the video and livestreaming site that launched in 2009 as Mikufans before rebranding a year later — grew from a niche anime, comics, and gaming destination into a content ecosystem serving over 365 million monthly active users, and its dominance in China's VTuber landscape is near-total; a 2025 study tracking 4,900 VTubers across 2.7 million livestreaming sessions found virtual performers occupying all ten of the platform's top streamer positions by paid membership. What sets Bilibili apart is that its audience does not merely watch. The danmaku system, in which viewer comments stream across the screen in real time, turns solitary viewing into collective authorship, and around that core fans generate a continuous output of secondary creation — fan art, music covers, cosplay, fanfiction read aloud by the performers themselves — alongside a volunteer translation infrastructure that, in the early years, built the Chinese audience for Japanese VTubers before domestic talent took over. This is not passive consumption. It is the unpaid production of cultural value.

That value is monetized from below as much as from above. Bilibili's tiered Grand Voyage subscriptions, virtual gifts, and pinned-message payments channel fan devotion directly into revenue, and the community sorts itself into visible hierarchies in which fans who contribute more — money, technical skill, or reputation — accrue standing that scholars describe as cultural capital. The result is an affective economy fans largely run themselves: roughly seventy percent of users tip, most of them modestly, while a thin head of devoted patrons can drive a single birthday stream past 1.5 million RMB in a matter of hours. And the people doing the producing are not passive customers. They organize, contest practices they judge exploitative, and on occasion build alternatives — after one labour scandal, a group of fans launched an entirely new VTuber venture, the Wildfire Project, founded on transparent governance and a pledge to route all income to performers. The attachment this economy generates is not vague sentiment. It is measurable, sortable, contested, and — brands eventually realized — transferable.

The clearest proof that fandom and commerce form one circuit lies in the figures who move freely between them. Luo Tianyi, China's first virtual singer, was born in 2012 from Yamaha's VOCALOID voice-synthesis technology and grew through a decade of fan co-creation into a national figure who performed at the 2021 CCTV Spring Festival Gala beside pianist Lang Lang and went on to endorse brands from Pizza Hut to L'Occitane. A-SOUL, a virtual idol group launched in November 2020 as a joint venture between Yuehua Entertainment and ByteDance, was at first met with hostility by fans who saw corporate capital invading an organic community — until member Diana's first solo stream converted the skeptics, after which fans built an entire fictional universe around the group: a virtual city called Zhijiang, chart-topping songs, visual-novel games released on Steam, a four-square-kilometre virtual world for its third anniversary. By 2025 the group was performing on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala. These are co-created cultural properties and commercial assets at the same time, and the same hands shaped both.

Brands turned to such figures partly because human celebrities had become liabilities. A cascade of scandals made the point. In 2018, actress Fan Bingbing was fined CNY 883 million for tax evasion, costing her a roster of luxury endorsements; 2021 proved catastrophic, with Zheng Shuang dropped by Prada eight days after her appointment amid a surrogacy scandal, and Kris Wu detained on rape allegations that severed ties with more than fifteen brands, including Louis Vuitton and Porsche. Against this backdrop, virtual idols offered an irresistible proposition: they would, as commentators put it, "never collapse" — no scandal risk, no physical limits, full brand control for an indefinite lifespan. They also spoke natively to the audience brands most coveted. China's Generation Z, some 250 to 265 million strong, had grown up inside ACG culture, whose user base swelled from 354 million in 2019 to 503 million in 2024, and increasingly bought for emotional fulfilment rather than utility. Virtual idols sat exactly at the meeting point of that emotional spending and that media fluency.

The commercial rollout was rapid and wide. In April 2020, Luo Tianyi co-hosted a Taobao livestream with star streamer Li Jiaqi that drew roughly three million viewers; by the 2022 mid-year shopping festival, more than thirty brands were deploying virtual idols or streamers. Florasis launched the first virtual spokesperson created by a Chinese cosmetics company in 2021; KFC, Tesla, Vogue, and a roster of luxury houses signed on through figures like Ling, styled as a Beijing woman whose name nods to the headdress of Peking Opera. AYAYI, a hyper-realistic "metahuman" launched on Xiaohongshu in 2021, gathered Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, and Burberry before metaverse fervour cooled, while Tencent spun its Honor of Kings idol group out of the game and onto a GQ cover. The most successful figures became standalone intellectual properties: Luo Tianyi alone anchors an industrial chain spanning content production, distribution, and licensed merchandise. iiMedia Research valued China's core virtual idol and digital human market at CNY 3.46 billion in 2020, rising to CNY 33.92 billion by 2024 — a near-tenfold expansion in four years, built on attachment the fans had generated for free.

But running attachment as a business has a seam, and in May 2022 it tore open. When A-SOUL placed member Carol into indefinite "hibernation," claims surfaced that her performer had endured punishing hours and meagre pay despite the group's millions in revenue: from a 138 RMB monthly subscription, after the platform's cut, the human behind the avatar reportedly received around 0.60 RMB. The disclosure crystallized a question fans had long argued as the conflict between "skin" and "soul" — whether the avatar or the person inside it is the irreplaceable core — and the backlash cost A-SOUL hundreds of thousands of followers, feeding into ByteDance's eventual sale of the project to Yuehua for CNY 30 million in 2024. The episode laid bare the circuit's hidden cost: the same co-created affection brands monetize rests on human labour frequently paid a fraction of what it generates.

Regulators have only lately caught up to that seam. For years, virtual idols inhabited a legal void — China's Advertising Law defined endorsers as natural or legal persons, leaving virtual personalities outside liability entirely. That gap began closing through a sequence of measures that culminated on April 3, 2026, when the Cyberspace Administration of China published the first regulatory framework dedicated to digital virtual humans, mandating continuously displayed "digital human" labelling, banning virtual intimate relationships for users under eighteen, requiring consent before using a real person's likeness, and setting fines up to CNY 200,000. The arc from Luo Tianyi's 2012 debut to that draft traces an industry that grew from a voice-synthesis curiosity into a multibillion-yuan ecosystem, propelled throughout by a single mechanism. Fan communities manufacture the attachment; brands harvest it; performers labour, often invisibly, behind the avatars; and the state is now writing rules for the precise point where co-creation, commerce, and human cost converge.