Weak-Obligation Reciprocity and the Making of Belonging: Offline Wuliao Exchange in Chinese Fan Communities

Abstract

Offline exchange remains a crucial but under-examined part of platformized fan culture. In contemporary Chinese fandom, fans often bring wuliao, including cards, stickers, postcards, handmade ornaments, and other fan-made or fan-circulated materials, to concerts, theatre performances, fan meetings, and other events. These objects are given, exchanged, photographed, remembered, and sometimes used to start further online and offline relationships. Drawing on participant observation, 13 qualitative interviews, and supplementary online observation in the performance-viewing community around Shanghai People’s Square, this article examines how wuliao exchange turns ordinary materials into gifts and how these gifts help produce a sense of fan belonging. The analysis develops the concept of weak-obligation reciprocity to describe a form of exchange in which return is expected but not compulsory, remembered but not strictly calculated, and morally evaluated without becoming a formal debt. The article argues that wuliao exchange creates situated ethics, transforms spectators into recognizable community members, and converts affective labor into visibility and subcultural capital. At the same time, it also generates tensions around value mismatch, competition, and unequal access to recognition. By placing Chinese fan wuliao exchange in dialogue with gift theory, material culture, and fan studies, the article shows how weak-tie communities can produce temporary but meaningful forms of belonging through small objects and embodied co-presence.