YouTubing Zhang Ziyi: Chinese female stardom in fan videos on video-sharing sites

This chapter probes the celebrity image of Zhang Ziyi on YouTube, of which users negotiate her debatable appeal, as situated in the politics of cultural nationalism, by sharing and commenting on Zhang’s notoriety on the Web. This chapter outlines the trajectory of Zhang’s star-making: her international fame began with her performance in the martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000); her English-speaking flair and her amourous encounters become a point of fan attention as she grows internationally well-known; she spoke broken English in front of press and public; her public personality is dogged by a series of quasi-sex scandals. This chapter, then, explains how these episodes give rise to viewers’ collective sympathy and antipathy of the star’s nationalistic presence. This chapter also postulates that Zhang’s hard work of improving her English, nevertheless, proves her upward mobility in global stardom. Taken together, the YouTube videos entail complexity of the star presence in ethnic, national and linguistic terms in the global visual circuit.