Transcultural taste and neoliberal patriotic subject: A study of Chinese fans’ online talk of K-pop

Why are some educated youths continuously fascinated with K-pop despite the increasing anti-Korean sentiment in China? In this study, I explore this puzzle to address the relationship between fans’ contextualized subjectivities and their choice of cross-border fan object. Bridging transcultural fan studies with the sociology of taste, I draw upon the concepts of cultural homology and cultural distinction to conduct a thematic analysis of the taste discourses emerging in the K-pop groups on Douban (www.douban.com). The findings show how this transcultural taste arises from the symbolic fit between the polysemic K-pop text and Chinese followers’ neoliberal aesthetics of idol cultures that value idols’ professional self-development and fans’ consumerist autonomy. These aesthetics are reiterated in K-pop followers’ attempt to reconcile their taste and national loyalty in strategic patriotic performances that negotiate between the official and popular nationalisms in China. The online talk of K-pop is also a process of distinction through which those fans confirm their shared subjectivity by critiquing the domestic mass culture and distinguishing themselves from the nationalist C-pop consumers. Chinese fans’ taste for K-pop, as I conclude, symbolically articulates these educated youths’ condition as neoliberal patriotic subjects in China's transitions to authoritarian capitalism.