You're listening to Rough Translation from NPR, I'm Gregory Warner.

There's a kind of rise and fall celebrity story that we're all now familiar with, where

someone super famous who can do no wrong suddenly does something or tweets something and they

go down fast in a social media pile on.

Today we have a story from NPR's Beijing correspondent Emily Fang where you have the same arc, the

same rise and fall.

But the celebrity in question, a boy band star turned actor, he did not do or say anything.

The first that I heard of Xiao Zhan was the beginning of the end of his career.

This is when the coronavirus pandemic really started to get bad in China.

More people were getting sick, people were starting to die in large numbers.

But online, the top five trending topics with hundreds of thousands, if not millions,

of retweets each would have been things like boycott Xiao Zhan, avoid Xiao Zhan, take down

Xiao Zhan.

If you followed any kind of major brand online and you were shopping on any of China's e-commerce

apps, you may have seen scrolling comments from random users who would say things like,

take down Xiao Zhan, do not buy this product.

We must defend our public rights.

Public rights.

What even are public rights?

We're going to get to that.

It is what our whole episode is about.

But first, should we start with who Xiao Zhan even is?

...