FakeColdwar dot tv
The business behind abandoning China, the rise of Hololive EN, and absorbing SE Asia
When Hololive JP streamers Kiryu Coco and Akai Haato received a three-week suspension for sharing Google Analytics data tables that displayed Taiwan as a country, they weren’t the only ones hit by the backblast. All of six Hololive CN performers immediately started losing subscribers at an alarming rate. On November 13 they announced that all six would be retiring by the end of the month and HololiveCN would be effectively shut down.
The sparse coverage that exists of this month-long ordeal tends to frame it almost exclusively from the culture war and “soft power” angle. You could be convinced into believing that Cover was facing off against direct intervention from the Chinese government, black-suited CCP goons showing up at the Hololive CN offices and delivering a sealed envelope addressed from the Politburo. In reality there doesn’t seem to be any indication of direct intervention from the government. I mean this was a business streaming anime-styled idols playing videogames to a few hundred thousand people on bilibili, not a Twitter or Google. Instead all the pressure applied to Coco and Haato and Hololive CN looks like it came from an online community or group of communities where Chinese nationalist trolls are known to share info on media impinging on the good name of the People’s Republic, more often than not by violating -- knowingly or not -- the One-China policy, and organizing coordinated harassment and complaints against those parties until they either do some performative apology or shut down. Basically the mainland Chinese equivalent to the Proud Boys, 8kun, or any other loose collective of online incels with a nationalist troll bent. As I said in a previous newsletter, it’s really hard to imagine someone from Hololive EN making a similar goof referring to Israel as Palestine and not seeing extremely similar Western forces coalesce to drive them off the internet.
The other thing the culture war focus has overlooked is the business dimension of Hololive CN’s retirement. Even before the entire controversy of this autumn broke out all of the CN streamers were struggling to break out of the low hundred-thousands of subscribers. For a business unit aimed towards the ostensible biggest consumer market in the world this was a pretty disappointing showing, especially when compared to the launch of Hololive EN in September of this year.
Little of this had anything to do with the “quality” of talent in Hololive CN. YouTube, the site that every other Hololiver uses as their main platform, is banned in China, relegating CN to local Chinese-language equivalent Bilibili. Despite servicing that ostensible largest consumer market, monthly active users (MAU) on Bilibili lag far behind the mindnumbing 2 billion MAUs YouTube’s press materials boast. Even with all other mitigating factors ignored this put a hard ceiling on the potential growth of any vtuber locked out of YouTube. (not even taking into account the question of how many of those 130 million users logging into Bilibili would be interested in a channel where anime girls play videogames while screaming and drawing pictures of each other)
Bilibili quarter-on-quarter MAUs:
Add onto that the political volatility and influence of aforementioned nationalist troll groups and the already-low growth ceiling of Bilibili gets even lower. Cover would be far from the first media company to hit headwinds in chasing the mirage of the Mandarin-language market. While we’ll probably never know how much the decision to cut Hololive CN was purely a panic response to the anti drama versus using the opportunity to unload a relatively unsuccessful satellite, I find it hard to believe there wasn’t a dimension to it that was cold hard capitalism.
Another factor that makes me think this way is the runaway success of Hololive EN. In less than a quarter all of the new English stable has been able to outstrip the peak subscribers of the most popular CN streamers, with Gawr Gura even becoming the first Hololive member to reach the one million subscribers milestone. It’s worth wondering how much more Cover might have been willing to fight (or concede to the demands of antis) for its toehold in the Chinese market had it had Hololive EN levels of subscriber and viewership growth.
Bilibili subs and views - Hololive CN (11/19):
Youtube subs and views - Hololive EN (11/19):
But why has Hololive EN seen such crazy growth numbers in such a short amount of time? A big part of it is latent demand -- English-speaking Hololive fans have had to make do with fan translations of Japanese Hololivers (vtuber clips having become their own cottage industry on YouTube) or exploring the variety of independent Western vtubers. Another factor is the “lucky” timing of having launched when schools, universities, and offices in many English-speaking countries were still in some state of shutdown and remote learning/work. In addition those things, however, is the fact that the potential overall reach of Hololive EN is far more extensible than anything CN or even JP could manage.
There are six countries including the United States where English is natively spoken by a majority of the population. That’s already a huge market, but add onto that all the countries where English is recognized as an official language or where English emphasized in schools as a second language and the potential reach of English content is truly vast. This is especially the case in Southeast Asia where English is often the second language of choice due to its regional status as a language of wider communication, many people are effectively multilingual because of the linguistic heterogeneity of numerous Southeast Asian countries, and the enduring popularity of anime and manga-themed products in the region. A good practical example of this phenomenon is Hololive competitor Nijisanji’s Indonesia sub brand, whose vtubers code switch between Bahasa Indonesia and English freely in their streams, frequently using English for the majority of stream time. In this way a bunch of different markets can be absorbed by an English-language imprint like Hololive EN. Unsurprisingly, Nijisanji has been the same thing, announcing in August that it would be accepting applications for a new Nijisanji EN. (a rebrand of its former Nijisanj India brand) It’s becoming obvious that the two big vtubers agencies are starting to realize where the tradewinds blow.
Is anyone out there old enough to remember Obama’s “pivot to Asia” spiel? While it didn’t exactly get far past the rhetoric phase during his two terms as president, TPP aside, the Trump era kicked it into high gear in the wake of a relative containment of the Middle East with Iraq and Afghanistan fading from mainstream Western attention (and Yemen never reaching it in the first place), reconsolidation of major Arab Spring-discontent Egypt under military dictator Adbel Fattah al-Sisi, and stabilization of the Syrian Civil War following the Turkish attack on the Kurdish YPG and subsequent reabsorption of Kurdish provinces by the Syrian government. A main part of Trump’s right-populist facade was China baiting. And while the ostensible labor/jobs protection bent of his populism put him at odds with supporting the TPP treaty -- a sweeping neoliberal trading alliance designed to orient Pacific-adjacent countries away from both Chinese supply and demand -- the Biden administration will likely have no compunctions about renewing US commitment to said treaty. As I’ve said before the trajectory towards a US/CN cold war is bipartisan and inescapable at this point. Tiny niche cultural spats like that of Hololive CN are expressions of that irrevocable tide flowing into every aspect of culture.
The distinction between this cold war and the last one is that this time around there’s no real case to be made that it’s a conflict between capitalism and communism. The PRC still self identifies as a “communist” state, but in reality 21st century China is far more of an authoritarian state capitalist system than anything resembling communism or even socialism. Oh on the cultural level make no mistake that this conflict will be played up as a new fight between “democracy” and “chi coms” or capitalism vs. the commies, but don’t get it twisted: the US/CN cold war is effectively a war of two different capitalisms.
In a way this is a throwback to international conflicts pre-WW2. The Second World War, for obvious reasons, created a need for all wars to have an ideological angle to them. Democracy vs. authoritarianism, capitalism vs. socialism, secular humanism vs. islamism, etc. The US/CN cold war however would be like those European wars of the 18th and 19th century where the cassus belli was around which noble family’s inbred princeling would be given rights to a certain duchy or which country got exclusive trade rights to a certain extractive subordinate nation.
America’s desire to pivot away from China and towards the rest of Asia, just like Cover’s decision to move past Hololive CN and emphasize EN instead, has its roots in capital as opposed to simple crude ideology. Ever since the normalization of US and Chinese relations in the 70s under Richard Nixon, the main economic exchange between the two countries has been that of exporting manufacturing away from expensive organized American labor to China and the consumption of cheaply produced Chinese goods by the far more affluent American consumer base. That may be starting to shift as Chinese labor costs continue to rise, the potential for political volatility re: the CCP seems to be rising, and South and Southeast Asian countries continue to court Western companies to move their manufacturing southward.
Chinese manufacturing, especially in the high tech sector, seems to be holding strong for the time being, but as with all things capital, past performance isn’t a deterministic predictor of future results. While Southeast Asian countries may lag far behind China in terms of both scale of manufacturing as well as high tech fabrication, the mere fact treaties like TPP exist indicate the willpower to develop both those things in places outside of the People’s Republic. Most of South and Southeast Asia is far more invested into the neoliberal capitalism-with-American-characteristics model of global capital as opposed to the Chinese model, which may make them a nascent resource worth investing in to Western capital, even if the required capacities aren’t quite there yet.
And that really is at the heart of the “cui bono” of the US/CN cold war. It’s a bidirectional thing. Southeast Asia is far more willing to play ball with low labor costs/no tariffs/low labor protections expectations Western capital has of a manufacturing trade partner because it knows sinking more American money into the region equals a greater counterweight against neighbor China from expanding its sphere of influence there. Conversely, America knows that Southeast Asian governments are far more willing to acquiesce to that cheap manufacturing subaltern role (versus a resurgent China whose publicly stated strategy is to segue towards a domestic consumption economic model) in the Western capitalist order in exchange for a greater degree of NATO-like security guarantees from the US against China. Greater trade cooperation begets greater defense cooperation, which means new markets and higher budgets for Western defense contractors and arms dealers plying their trade in the region. Few if any of these weapons systems stand any real chance of being used in a “hot” war, but the practical application of these things is far less important than their role in the virtuous cycle of keeping Western allies’ contractors profitable and your own domestic nationalist hawk constituencies fed and watered with all the shiny new hardware to parade through the capital. When the rationale for keeping US budgets for defense contracts sky high comes up, the government can point back to the ongoing cold war and accuse penny pinching critics of being “soft on China.” Similar rationales will be trotted out to justify similar initiatives on the Chinese side.
This is why I say this will all take on an air of inevitability. There’s just too much potential money involved. As the mock war of capitalisms slowly intensifies, expect to see more media sense the zeitgeist and take the opportunity to disinvest from their increasingly volatile Chinese operations.