Waving Chinese national flags and singing the military anthem are sights more commonly associated with state-sanctioned patriotic rallies. Yet on the night of August 18 along Chongqing’s Nanbin Road, young men used these patriotic symbols while marching against a seemingly bizarre enemy: teenage idol trainees of a boy-band talent agency and their female fans.
What began as a localized dispute outside the headquarters of Shidai Fengjun (also known as “Time Fengjun,” or TF Entertainment), an agency that helped pioneer China’s idol-trainee industry, rapidly escalated into a prolonged public disturbance. For days, the area around the agency saw escalating street violence, culminating in a heavy police presence and roadblocks.
The confrontation offered a glimpse into a broader dynamic in contemporary China: how online male grievances can spill into the streets, how nationalist symbols can be mobilized in gender conflicts, and how authorities struggle to contain the resulting unrest.
The trouble began on August 15, when groups of male short-video livestreamers and “anti-fans” (黑粉) repeatedly gathered outside Time Fengjun’s office building. Many appeared to be seeking online traffic and attention. They burned and tore down fan posters, blocked company vans, and confronted the company’s young trainees, some reportedly as young as 11. They livestreamed the confrontations while shouting “jiahao” (嘉豪), a derogatory internet term mocking young men who try too hard to appear “cool.” The chant appeared intended as a deliberate provocation.
The incident took on a broader gender dimension after a viral video clip circulated on August 17. The footage captured a female fan throwing a small object (variously reported as a power bank or water bottle) at a male provocateur, who responded by splashing water at her and appeared to move toward her aggressively. When police on site immediately detained the male provocateur but did not detain the female fan, online male communities erupted in fury.
Accusing police of giving women preferential treatment, commenters began using terms such as “maternal law enforcement” (秉母执法, bingmu zhifa), a pun on binggong zhifa (秉公执法, “impartial law enforcement”), and “Chongqing maternal public security” to portray local authorities as biased in favor of female fans.
Driven by this digital rage, crowds of young men marched down Nanbin Road on August 18, demanding the release of the detained men. They wrapped their grievances in the language of patriotism, waving Chinese national flags and singing the national anthem and the military anthem “Strong Army Song” (《强军战歌》) as they marched.
Patriotic rhetoric gave the confrontation a broader political frame. Some protesters portrayed the predominantly female fan community as a symbol of what they saw as a feminized and “decadent” youth culture, casting their confrontation with the fans as a fight to “realize justice.”
As the marchers gathered around the building, the confrontation turned physical. Livestreamers chased, kicked, and assaulted female fans. Videos circulating online showed ordinary women and girls caught in the confrontation. In some footage, female fans were surrounded, cornered, shoved, kicked, or splashed with liquid. Chinese-language media also reported that a mother and daughter were among those assaulted, although their relationship is difficult to independently verify from the footage.
In response, Time Fengjun suspended its trainees’ offline sessions on August 18, but faced intense criticism from female fans for failing to protect them and remaining silent about the violence.
As the physical crowds swelled, the conflict spilled back online into more serious digital harassment. Online vigilantes doxed female fans on site, leaking their personal identities. The harassers used AI tools to splice the victims’ faces onto non-consensual pornographic images, which were then printed on flyers advertising prostitution and distributed both online and in person.
Facing several days of increasingly visible unrest, local authorities moved to contain the confrontation. Physically, police blocked roads and used municipal buses to disperse and evict the male protesters. Online, videos about the incident, and posts and searches containing terms such as “bingmu zhifa” appeared to face censorship on major Chinese social-media platforms.
On August 20, the Chongqing Public Security Bureau released a brief statement. It downplayed the gender-targeted physical and digital violence, dryly framing the multi-day unrest as a minor “fandom dispute” involving “water-throwing and chasing.” It offered “legal education” to participants and called for “civilized fan activities.”
By reducing the confrontation to a fandom dispute, authorities restored temporary order while leaving the gender grievances that fueled the conflict largely unaddressed. The Chongqing confrontation illustrated how online male grievance can move rapidly from digital spaces into the physical world, especially when it becomes entangled with broader anxieties over gender and masculinity.
Meanwhile, censorship on Chinese social media platforms makes it increasingly difficult to document and verify such incidents domestically, leaving overseas platforms such as X and Threads as important sources of evidence and further widening the information gap between China and the outside world.
