Aiman, one of the main survey platforms that monitors China's celebrity data, published what it called a Youth Interest Social White Paper last year, according to which 88.7 percent of young social media users have idols they follow closely. In 2018 alone entertainment star-related topics attracted 16.7 billion views on Weibo, where nearly 75 million fans were said to have been active throughout the year. In 2018 Wang Yibo began working for the Chinese reality television show Produce 101 as a dance instructor. The show's 10-episode season drew 4.3 billion views on Tencent Video.

"Older people can still find in these girls a shadow of the star-chasers they used to be themselves," says Guo Xin, a marketing professor at Beijing Technology and Business University.

"The difference is that the psychological mechanism has shifted from self-projection onto the idol to maintaining intimacy with the idol, which is why many of those who chased pop stars when they were young now regard these young girls not as fans but as fanatics."

The bar has been raised for anyone who wants to join the star clan with rising popularity of their idol. Knowing and using arcane language such as AWSL (short for a wo si le, I've just died a little) is but one requisite.