China’s VTuber Fandom and the Rise of Virtual Idol Culture on Bilibili

The VTuber fan community in China has evolved into one of the most vibrant and complex digital subcultures in the world, rooted overwhelmingly in a single platform and shaped by a distinctive fusion of cultural traditions, technological affordances, and grassroots creative energy. At the center of this ecosystem stands Bilibili, the video-sharing and livestreaming platform that originated in 2009 under the name Mikufans before rebranding a year later. What began as a niche destination for anime, comics, and gaming enthusiasts has grown into a comprehensive content ecosystem serving over 365 million monthly active users, with daily active users spending an average of 99 to 106 minutes on the platform. Bilibili's dominance in China's VTuber landscape is near-total. Large-scale academic measurement studies have confirmed that virtually all entertainment-oriented VTubers in China stream on Bilibili, and a 2025 study tracking 4,900 VTubers and 2.7 million livestreaming sessions found that VTubers occupied all ten of the platform's top streamer positions by paid membership. Competing platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou host virtual streamers, but these are overwhelmingly AI-driven e-commerce presenters rather than the entertainment and idol-type performers that define VTuber culture. Weibo and Xiaohongshu serve auxiliary roles for publicity, fan discussion, and community coordination, but Bilibili remains the gravitational center.

One of Bilibili's most defining features is the danmaku system, in which viewer comments stream across the video screen in real time during livestreams or appear overlaid at specific timestamps during pre-recorded video playback. This mechanism, adapted from Japan's Niconico platform, creates what researchers have described as a pseudo-synchronous viewing experience for pre-recorded content, while enabling genuinely real-time collective commentary during live broadcasts. The platform accumulated over 20 billion danmaku comments by 2024, and VTuber livestreaming danmaku interactions alone reached 560 million in 2020, doubling year over year. The effect is a shared textual atmosphere that transforms solitary viewing into a communal event, binding audiences together through a constantly scrolling chorus of reactions, jokes, and emotional outpourings.

Fan engagement on Bilibili extends far beyond passive consumption into an elaborate ecosystem of secondary creation. Fan art, music covers, cosplay, and literary composition all constitute core community activities. Independent fan artists and secondary creation enthusiasts are explicitly recognized within the VTuber ecosystem's informal taxonomy, and major agencies like Hololive Production have maintained official derivative works guidelines to accommodate this creative output. Music covers represent a particularly deep tradition on Bilibili, where several of the platform's most prominent VTubers, including the well-known cover singers who later adopted virtual avatars, built their followings through this form. Cosplay culture thrives both online and at major offline gatherings such as Bilibili World, which in 2024 attracted 270,000 attendees over three days in Shanghai with a dedicated Virtual Paradise zone. Fanfiction occupies a somewhat less visible but still significant niche, most notably through essay collection contests in which fans compose elaborate literary works that VTubers then read aloud on stream, creating emotional feedback loops between creator and audience.

The tradition of fan translation constitutes another vital dimension of the community. Chinese VTuber fansub culture has developed its own distinctive terminology: untranslated Japanese content is called "raw meat" and translated material with Chinese subtitles is "cooked meat," while the translators themselves are known as "BBQ men." Translation groups operate with specialized roles including clippers, timers, translators working at advanced Japanese proficiency levels, proofreaders who spend painstaking hours researching obscure cultural references, and encoders. Three distinct modes of translation coexist: officially recognized subtitle groups, independent translators operating informally, and simultaneous interpreters who provide real-time translation directly in the danmaku stream using bracket notation. This translation infrastructure initially channeled Japanese VTuber content to Chinese audiences but has expanded to cover English-language content as well, and it played a foundational role in building the Chinese VTuber audience before domestic talent came to dominate.

The cultural character of China's VTuber fandom reflects a deep synthesis of Chinese and Japanese pop cultural traditions. Academic analysis has noted the strong associations between VTuber culture and Japanese ACG culture, while simultaneously observing that the Chinese tradition of cultural inclusiveness has enabled a distinctive hybrid to emerge. Bilibili itself is a product of this synthesis, having adapted the danmaku format from Niconico. The platform's VTubers are designated "VUPs," or Virtual Uploaders, rather than the Japanese-derived "VTuber" label, reflecting conscious platform-level adaptation. Luo Tianyi, China's first Vocaloid virtual singer who debuted in 2012, exemplifies this cultural fusion, having been born from Japanese Yamaha VOCALOID technology but developed with distinctly Chinese branding and content. Groups like A-SOUL incorporated Chinese traditional cultural elements, including classical dance styles and mythological storytelling, alongside Japanese-derived aesthetic conventions. The cross-cultural flow has not been unidirectional: a 2020 Bilibili concert simultaneously broadcast to Japan's Niconico platform achieved a 95.1 percent satisfaction rate among Japanese viewers, representing a cultural export back to the tradition's country of origin.

Financial patronage forms a critical pillar of the community's structure. Bilibili's revenue ecosystem for VTubers operates through multiple channels: highlighted pinned messages comparable to YouTube's Super Chat system, virtual gifts purchased with a platform currency, and a tiered subscription system called Grand Voyage, in which fans pay monthly fees ranging from 198 RMB for basic membership up to 19,998 RMB for the highest tier, receiving escalating privileges including chat badges, entrance effects, and priority interactions. Merchandise sales, brand collaborations, music album releases, and live concert tickets extend the revenue streams further. Industry surveys have found that while roughly 70 percent of users donate to VTubers, nearly 90 percent spend under 300 RMB per month, with the majority comfortable below 100 RMB, indicating that patronage is widespread but mostly modest in scale. Extreme spending events, however, regularly generate headlines: individual birthday streams have earned over 1.5 million RMB in a few hours, and debut streams by popular talent have crossed the one-million-RMB threshold within their first broadcast. The spending distribution follows a sharp power curve, with head VTubers capturing the vast majority of revenue while more than half of tracked VTubers in one audit earned nothing at all in a given month. The typical independent VTuber earns between 4,000 and 6,000 RMB monthly despite streaming eight or more hours daily.

This economic structure generates pronounced hierarchies within fan communities. Bilibili's fan medal system creates visible stratification across 40 levels based on intimacy points accumulated through gifts and subscriptions, and the Grand Voyage tiers grant escalating privileges that extend to moderation powers such as the ability to bypass chat muting. Academic research has described how fans who contribute more resources, develop greater technical skill, or accumulate reputational standing accrue cultural capital that gradually positions them as internal community leaders. This competition for recognition and status is not merely passive: fans have repeatedly demonstrated their capacity to influence community direction. A-SOUL's fanbase successfully organized opposition to practices they viewed as exploitative, including competitive donation-baiting mechanics and handshake ticket sales. The most dramatic demonstration of fan agency came in the aftermath of the Carol incident, when 120 fans organized the Wildfire Project, an entirely new VTuber venture built on transparent governance principles and a commitment to directing 100 percent of income to performers.

The Carol incident of May 2022 stands as a watershed moment in Chinese VTuber culture. When A-SOUL announced that the member Carol would enter livestream hibernation, social media posts attributed to her performer surfaced alleging forced extreme working hours, workplace harassment, and low compensation despite the group's substantial revenue. Leaked internal claims suggested a base salary of approximately 7,000 RMB per month with a one-percent commission, meaning that from a 138 RMB monthly subscription, after the platform's 50 percent cut, the performer received roughly 0.60 RMB. A-SOUL lost 329,000 Bilibili followers within weeks. The crisis exposed the fundamental tension that scholars and fans describe as the conflict between "skin" and "soul," the question of whether the virtual avatar or the human performer constitutes the irreplaceable core of a VTuber. Fans articulated this through the analogy of mech warriors, arguing that the most powerful outcomes emerge only when pilot and machine combine.

A-SOUL's broader impact on Chinese VTuber culture, however, extends well beyond its controversies. The group debuted in November 2020, a joint venture between entertainment company Yuehua and ByteDance's gaming unit, and initially met overwhelming hostility from existing fans who perceived it as corporate capital invading an organic creative community. The turning point came during member Diana's first solo stream in December 2020, when her full-body 3D motion capture performance and genuine emotional presence converted hostile skeptics, who described their change of heart using the term "defecting to the enemy." A-SOUL established new technical benchmarks with real-time full-body motion capture, facial expression tracking down to individual fingers, and high-quality virtual environments. The group's fan community developed a distinctive cultural universe centered on "Zhijiang," a fictional virtual city, for which fans created viral songs that topped Bilibili's trending charts, visual novel games released on Steam, and a four-square-kilometer virtual open world built for the group's third anniversary. Diana became a cultural phenomenon whose memes and copypastas spread far beyond VTuber circles, reportedly read in over 20 languages. A-SOUL's performance on CCTV's 2025 Online Spring Festival Gala alongside mainstream television personality Wang Bingbing marked a significant milestone for the VTuber form's acceptance into mainstream Chinese media culture.

The earlier departure of Hololive from China in late 2020 and early 2021 had set the stage for domestic VTubers to fill the vacuum. When two Hololive members referenced Taiwan in ways that provoked a political backlash among Chinese viewers, Cover Corporation's inconsistent apology statements across Chinese, Japanese, and English inflamed the situation further. Virtually all Hololive fan translation groups on Bilibili disbanded, and the agency's six Chinese members graduated by year's end. The so-called "whale fall" effect redirected massive audience attention and spending habits toward domestic VTubers, accelerating a shift that Bilibili's own policies would later amplify through aggressive VUP promotion initiatives beginning in February 2022. These promotional policies, including preferential treatment and cash incentives, more than doubled VUP numbers by mid-2024, but they also triggered market saturation: of 23,000 VUPs registered between 2019 and 2024, only approximately 8,000 remained active. Non-ACG streamers adopted virtual avatars opportunistically, diluting quality and eroding audience trust among a core demographic of students aged 15 to 30 with limited spending capacity, 70 percent of whom supported only two to five VTubers.

The VirtuaReal project represents the most significant remaining bridge between Japanese and Chinese VTuber cultures, operating as a joint venture between Bilibili and ANYCOLOR, the parent company of Nijisanji. Launched in April 2019 with Bilibili managing operations and ANYCOLOR providing technology, VirtuaReal had grown to approximately 64 members across its main project and sub-projects by early 2026, with combined Bilibili followings exceeding 12 million. Some Nijisanji EN talent, notably Vox Akuma, debuted on Bilibili with extraordinary commercial success, generating over one million RMB in revenue during a debut stream that lasted under two hours and attracting 560,000 new followers in a single week. Meanwhile, the independent VTuber sector on Bilibili, while large in number, faces persistent structural challenges including platform-imposed minimum streaming requirements, scam operations, emotional manipulation tactics, and the economic precariousness of a profession in which the majority earn below subsistence-level income.

Community interactions extend well beyond the digital realm into physical spaces. The BML-VR holographic concert series, launched in 2017, has drawn tens of thousands to venues like Shanghai's Mercedes-Benz Arena, with online viewership peaking at nearly 11 million for a single 2020 event. Bilibili World has grown into a major annual convention with dedicated VTuber programming, and A-SOUL's fan gatherings have attracted nationally traveling audiences bringing decorated cars and cosplay. Luo Tianyi's holographic concerts have drawn audiences of over 10,000, with premium tickets selling out in minutes. These offline convergences reinforce the bonds formed through online interaction and demonstrate that the communities built around virtual performers generate tangible social formations with real geographic reach.

The regulatory environment surrounding VTubers in China has grown steadily more complex. No VTuber-specific legislation exists, but overlapping frameworks governing livestreaming, digital humans, artificial intelligence, and content moderation create an increasingly structured operating environment. Since May 2022, minors have been prohibited from livestream tipping, and platforms must enforce real-name registration and block cash top-ups by underage users, with mandatory youth modes and forced offline requirements after 10 PM. A 2022 code of conduct for online anchors lists 31 prohibited behaviors and requires professional qualifications for streamers discussing specialized topics. A 2024 mandate requiring influencers with 500,000 or more followers to publicly display real names poses a direct challenge to VTuber anonymity, a foundational element of the art form. Draft regulations released in December 2025 targeting AI anthropomorphic interactive services would require prominent labeling stating that such services are AI-driven and do not possess human emotions, mandatory pop-up alerts after two or more hours of continuous use, and special protections for minors and elderly users. Simultaneously, government support for the broader virtual human industry is substantial: 21 provincial-level and 40 city-level governments have issued approximately 300 specialized policies supporting the sector.

The market surrounding VTubers in China is significant but difficult to measure precisely because Chinese research firms typically use the broader category of "virtual humans," encompassing AI customer service agents, digital employees, and virtual e-commerce hosts alongside entertainment VTubers. Under this expansive definition, the core virtual human market in China reached an estimated 20.52 billion RMB in 2023. Narrower estimates focused specifically on the VTuber segment project a market of approximately 6.8 billion RMB by 2025, while international research firms estimate China's VTuber market at roughly 1.2 billion USD in 2025, representing approximately 22 percent of the global VTuber market. The global market itself is estimated in the range of 2.5 to 5.4 billion USD as of 2024, with Asia-Pacific commanding 55 to 65 percent of the total and the three largest companies, AnyColor, Cover Corporation, and Bilibili, holding roughly half of global market share.

A growing body of academic research has begun to map the dynamics of Chinese VTuber fan communities with increasing sophistication. Foundational studies have analyzed VTuber fan engagement through forum analysis and interviews on platforms including Bilibili, while more recent work has introduced concepts such as "parakin reciprocity" through extended digital ethnography. Survey-based research has examined how interpersonal attractiveness and loneliness drive parasocial relationship development and community participation. Large-scale measurement studies have provided the first rigorous quantitative portraits of the VTuber ecosystem on Bilibili. Chinese-language scholarship has conceptualized the VTuber-fan relationship as a form of bidirectional emotional labor, analyzed hierarchical formation within fan communities through the lens of cultural capital accumulation, and applied interaction ritual chain theory to Bilibili's VTuber spaces. Studies of A-SOUL specifically have examined its distinctive "abstract culture" and the linguistic codes that fans have developed, as well as the affective co-production that occurs through danmaku interaction. The emerging consensus across this literature is that VTuber fan communities in China have transitioned from a subcultural phenomenon into an increasingly mainstream cultural formation, one in which the boundaries between consumption, creation, emotional labor, and economic participation have become deeply intertwined.

[Apr 2026]