China's Rising Youth Culture Hub Bilibili Partnered with Rolling Stone China to Celebrate the 100 Most Notable Content Creators in 2020

Although it has been half a century since the era of classic rock & roll, the vigor and transformative power of popular music and youth culture never faded away. With the importance of this cultural impact in mind, Rolling Stone officially launched Rolling Stone China in early 2021, with the aim of amplifying the voices from China’s booming popular-culture scene. In its March issue, the magazine landed an exclusive partnership with Bilibili — the Chinese video platform featuring massive amounts of original, youth-oriented, user-generated content — and will reveal the winners of “Bilibili Power Up” which awards 2020’s top content creators.

Much like YouTube, Bilibili’s closest Western equivalent, the platform enables users to upload video content, create their own channel, and build a community through various functions, including real-time comments and livestreaming. Despite their similarities, Bilibili has established itself as a more youth-oriented content service in the 11 years since it was founded. Starting off as a platform for animecomics-game lovers, Bilibili in the past few years became home to thousands of different fandoms and youth-subculture communities by empowering content creators, also known as “Uploaders.” Now, the platform boasts 200 million monthly active users and 1.7 million monthly active content creators, and is consistently chosen as Chinese Gen

Z’s favorite app, according to a survey conducted by QuestMobile.

Compared with their older counterparts, Chinese millennials and Gen Z have grown up with the burgeoning Chinese economy since the 1980s and are more individualized and expressive than ever. The demographic’s early access to the global internet and digital devices fundamentally shaped their worldview, as well as the way they interact with the world. They are unprecedentedly open-minded, educated, creative, and dedicated to what they love. The viewing, commenting, and creating processes that take place in the Bilibili community have been key in that experience.

Ever since visual media appeared in the form of moving pictures and television, video has become the dominant way that media is consumed by the general public. This past decade, creating video content has become more accessible than ever. By capitalizing on increasingly available methods of shooting and editing, the Chinese youth are reimagining interest-based communities and updating an established paradigm to embrace new digital entertainment experiences.

When considering the rapidly changing Chinese contemporary society, many wonder what the future holds for popular technologies that specifically help individuals develop new interests, acquire new knowledge, and help build the next frontier of youth culture. Bilibili will support these endeavors, as an online community where young people express their individuality and unleash their creativity. As a digital culture pioneer for Chinese Gen Z, Bilibili celebrates all niche subjects equally, while harboring an increasing amount of content of mainstream subjects through youth perspectives.

While Chinese youths do not come off as rebellious as their Western counterparts, many have differentiated themselves from previous generations. On Bilibili, the serious and formal manner that prevailed on Chinese TV for decades is no longer. Instead, a down-to-earth, humanized, and relaxed approach to creative content is celebrated, whether the creator is reviewing a product, giving an opinion, making a mash-up of different TV shows, or simply documenting a day of his or hers.

Driven by their love and dedication to their subjects of interest, more and more content creators on Bilibili have emerged as key influencers in their own fields and independently curate conversations within and beyond their subculture communities, further blurring the boundary between amateur and professional.

Luo Xiang, a criminal-law professor who broke the record for the fastest growth in followers last year, is an educational content creator on Bilibili. With his uniquely witty teaching style and charismatic personality, “Criminal Law with Luo Xiang” has become one of the most popular channels that rose to prominence in 2020.

To celebrate the creators on the platform, Bilibili partnered with Rolling Stone China to announce the 100 creators who best captured the essence of youth culture in the past year. The large panel covered a range of subjects and formats, from travel vlogs and workout guides to gadget reviews, gaming commentary, and meme mashups. Together, the array of creators form a dynamic spectrum mirroring China’s diverse youth culture: from the traditional to the avant-garde, from local to international, from indie to mainstream, from classic to innovative, and from the individual to the communal.

Through danmu, also known as “bullet chats,” a signature function of Bilibili that allows real-time comments to slide through the screen, users are able to participate in the viewing experience by adding their own color to their favorite content, participate in a collective viewing ritual and express their opinions in a tightknit community. Through features like this, pluralism is able to flourish on Bilibili.

After taking a close look at the unique culture on Bilibili, Rolling Stone China has compiled a highly condensed set of traits that define China’s youth community compared with the rest of the world. Much like baby boomers, the Chinese youth have experienced a booming economy, material abundance, popularized education and mass culture. At the same time, the digital experience and access to the internet have made them relatable to the Western millennials. Their experiences in the three eventful decades of China’s history have made them an incredibly complex and multifaceted group, and Bilibili has provided them with a realm to express themselves freely on the internet through visual media.

As China’s youth become more central to society, a new digital lifestyle has formed on Bilibili. An ecosystem surrounding content, entertainment, e-commerce, and culture has emerged from the soaring originality of this generation. In their full glory, videos on Bilibili are now shaping China’s mainstream popular culture as an embodiment of Chinese youth’s claim for the future.

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To view the full list of Bilibili and “Rolling Stone China’s” 100 Most Notable Content Creators of 2020, go to bilibili.com/BPU2020