Products of the internet factory

Young kids dream of fame, and entertainment company executives dream of making a fortune. Thus a boy band is born

Resistance is futile; How can you possibly not fall instantly in love with these five impish boys and, smitten, reach for the "like" button?

That is no doubt the calculation of their manufacturer, Yue Hua Entertainment, which seems to have timed and choreographed everything to do with the singing and dancing group YHBOYS to perfection.

And so it was that five boys, aged from 10 to 13, were unfurled on China in a three- and-a-half minute video called Brand New World a few weeks ago just when the country was awash with saccharine sentimentality - Valentines Day.

In the video, the five, all of whose voluminous mops of hair are adorned with pieces of cute headgear, including the seemingly inevitable back-to-front baseball cap, are garbed in loosefitting hoodies. They prance about in a synchronized dance routine that is interspersed with shots of group members gesticulating with their hands, giving the thumbs up, giving each other the high fives, jumping for joy and generally having a hoot of a time, and all this to the sound of unrelentingly upbeat, feel-good music.

Little surprise then that little more than 24 hours after YHBOYS first saw the light of day their video was reported to have been viewed more than 10 million times. They now have more than 27,000 followers on Sina Weibo, akin to Twitter.

Getting an early start in show business is not exactly new. After all, the late American child star Shirley Temple made her debut at the age of 3, but the sudden appearance and instant success of YHBOYS has raised some eyebrows in China.

First, there is the name, some suggesting that it has an uncanny resemblance to TFBoys, a Chinese teenage boy band put together by the Beijing company Time Fengjun Entertainment, and which gained rapid popularity, essentially through the internet, after putting out a debut promotional video, Ten Years, in August 2013.

However, for every person who raises questions about Yue Hua Entertainment's commercial intent with the youngsters, there seem to be 100 others who cannot get enough of them and eagerly await more videos - and the merchandise that is do doubt on its way.

In bringing the group together, seven boys from provinces including Jiangxi and Hebei, Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Taiwan, were chosen from more than 3,000 candidates who applied in an internet talent search, says Du Hua, founder and chief executive of Yue Hua Entertainment, which has been creating Chinese pop idol groups since 2009. Five of those boys appeared in the video released last month, and the two others will appear in two videos to be put out on the internet this month. Eventually more boys will be put into the group.

The recruitment process and getting the boys ready to be shown to the public took more than two years, and having invested so much time and effort in bringing YHBOYS together, Du has big plans for them. In fact those plans appear to go well beyond China, a Twitter account, @YHBoysGlobal, having been set up for them, even if for the moment it has just a few hundred followers.

Plans are also afoot for a YHGIRLS group whose members will be aged between 16 and 18.

The singing and dancing group YHBOYS consists of five boys, aged from 10 to 13. They now have more than 27,000 followers on Sina Weibo. Photos Provided To China Daily

"There is huge potential for developing Chinese pop groups. And more than 200 pop groups are set up every year. China has this huge population but just a dozen or so new groups appearing every year, and most of them fizzle out.

"These seven boys are not just good looking but also talented, some playing instruments such as the guitar and piano and some dancing hip-hop and speaking English. We want them to be role models for Chinese youngsters."

The members of YHBOYS and their parents contacted for this article declined to be interviewed but it is apparent that at least one of the boys, aged 11, is already well into his show business apprenticeship.

Zhang Minghao, born in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, made his TV debut when he was 9, performing on Go! Baby!, a variety show produced and aired on Anhui Satellite TV in which youngsters take part in quizzes and show off various talents. Zhang has since appeared in other variety shows aired by Hunan Satellite TV and Beijing TV. Last April he starred in a movie, After School, directed by Liu Yijun, whose theme is school bullying.

The other members of the group are Guo Dianjia, Li Linma, Liu Guanyi, Sun Jiakai, Zhang Enshuo and Zhang Junyi.

Another priority for the company is ensuring that YHBOYS fans get every possible opportunity to see their training, rehearsals and minutiae of their daily lives, which in turn becomes fodder for live streaming on social media.

"It's all about communication," Du says. "The boys grow up and their fans are able to see the ways they are changing and how they are progressing. This kind of bond between the pop group and fans is important."

Girl band

Even as Yue Hua Entertainment prepares to put a girl band together, Nook (Beijing) Culture Media Co Ltd, which publishes the fashion magazine Xin Wei, whose target readership is college students and young female office workers, continues to seek the next Chinese female pop stars through a competition called China Girl.

The annual competition, China Girl, which started in 2010 as a beauty contest, sends top ten winners to go to Japan to receive training in being a model first and then possibly becoming a pop idol.

Xin Wei is the Chinese-owned Mandarin version of the Japanese magazine Vivi, one of Asia's top selling fashion magazines. Editions localized for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand are also published.

Zhu Guangrui, publisher of Xin Wei, says that when China Girl was first held the winners' main job was modeling for the magazine and attending fashion events in China and Japan. Over the years the competition has expanded so that successful entrants take part in TV shows, movies and video games.

Jia Qi, 28, from Inner Mongolia, was selected as one of the top winners from China Girl in 2010. She learned traditional Chinese folk dance from when she was 7 and later graduated from Minzu University of China in Beijing.

She is now a TV presenter and takes others who have been successful in the China Girl competition and trains them for careers in the entertainment industry.

"Unlike in South Korea, where pop groups' managing companies keep a very tight rein on them, in China we have a lot of freedom," Jia says.

"The lines between various industries, such as TV, movies, online broadcasting and modeling, are blurred. Competition is fierce, and these days young people are much more hungry for fame than they were when China Girl began. From a very early age they want to become a star."

More than clones

Zhu says she is keen to create stars with something special rather than just South Korean Japanese pop star clones. This month her company plans to open a school occupying four floors of an office building in Tianjin that will recruit young people who hope to become pop idols.

One of the hardest tasks in creating a pop group is coming up with something that is highly distinctive and in which the members themselves have highly individual styles, thus setting the group apart from other pop acts.

"Content is crucial. We will design courses tailor made to each student. Some will be good singers and other good dancers. If you want to attract fans you have to make maximum use of your own specialty."

Any young person keen on an acting or musical career used to have to go through a talent agency or had to find somehow impressed enough with them to want to record their music or to get them to stage professional performances, she says, but now, by virtue of the internet and social media, they can attain overnight fame simply by posting a video online.

Besides looking for newcomers to the scene, Zhu is also interested in young performers who already have a fan base online.

"With a fan base and us giving them training they are highly likely to strike success in the market. For attractive young men and women the idea of being in a pop group can seem highly glamorous, but it involves extremely hard work, and you really need to enjoy what you are doing. Yes, you may look fabulous on stage, but behind the scenes you have to go through a heck of a lot physically and mentally."

Producers find that it pays to emulate

In the late 1980s and early 1990s one of the most popular boy groups in China was Xiao Hu Dui, or Little Tigers, a trio from Taiwan. The group, founded in 1988, comprised of Alec Su, Nicky Wu and Julian Chen. It disbanded in 1995 after having released 12 studio albums and starring in movies, winning acclaim with their squeaky clean dance moves and catchy pop songs.

However, over the ensuing 18 years, success was elusive for made-in-China boy bands, most fading into pop-world oblivion after a hit or two. Instead it was groups such as Backstreet Boys, Big Bang and SMAP from Japan, South Korea and Western countries that dominated the Chinese market.

But in 2013 along came TFBoys. What seemed to give the group, consisting of Wang Junkai and Wang Yuan, both from Chongqing, and Yiyang Qianxi from Huaihua, Hunan province, instant appeal was their fresh, handsome school-boy image.

The group went on to become one of the most successful Chinese pop groups in the country, evidenced by that contemporary Chinese barometer of success Sina Weibo, the Twitter like service, on which the group has 20 million followers.

In January they were the opening performers in the most watched TV program in China, celebrating Chinese New Year, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, said to have had more than 1 billion viewers. The three members have also launched solo careers, including Wang Junkai starring in the film epic The Great Wall alongside Matt Damon and Andy Lau. Wang Yuan was a delegate for China at the sixth United Nations Economic and Social Council youth forum and gave a speech in English calling for equal access to quality education worldwide.

It is with that kind of success in mind that Chinese entertainment companies have been toiling away looking for the right act that can emulate TFBoys and thus deliver huge commercial success. One such is Yue Hua Entertainment, whose choice of name for its latest musical creation, YHBOYS, may be a mark of respect for TFBoys or reflect a hope to ride on the group's coattails.

Indeed, in creating boy bands and girl bands in China, emulation seems to be the name of the game, Chinese companies closely following the lead of top record label and talent agencies in Japan.

So following the success of the Japanese girl group AKB48 - the letters are an abbreviation for Akihabara, a district in Tokyo that is the girls' stamping ground, and 48 is how many members the group originally had - a Chinese girl group sprang up in 2013 in Shanghai bearing the name SNH48. The Chinese group is modeled closely on the Tokyo group, and its 48 members are aged about 20.

China Music Business News, an online news platform for China's music industry, says that about 20 pop boy groups will be introduced to audiences in China this year.

In December Huang Rui, the former manager of TFBoys, launched a project called Original Plan, in which Chinese pop idols aged from 10 to 18 years old are recruited through both open auditions and a network of scouts.

Before being exposed to the world, millions of potential fans will be drip fed images of the performers in the form of cartoons, one way of keeping them hooked and connected to the project, Huang says.

"We need to come up with original ideas. You can't just simply go and try to produce duplicates of others' success stories."

chennan@chinadaily.com.cn