“ <i>Xueba</i> Couples”

Abstract In recent years, China's party-state has propagated a multitude of love stories online featuring college-student couples with both exceptional academic performance and political credentials as so-called xueba couples. Based on qualitative text analysis and complementary fieldwork, this article argues that such an official storytelling of “meritocratic romance” constitutes a soft paternalistic propaganda campaign aimed at university-educated Chinese youths, now often caught between “lying-flatism” and an “intimacy crisis” amid rapid economic and sociodemographic changes. It shows that the party-state's “thought and political works” directed at young people have been extended over life politics, while signifying the continuing relevance of Confucian cultural and Maoist revolutionary legacies in model-making tactics for propaganda and social management, albeit under President Xi Jinping's new slogan of “positive energy” and through new digital intermediaries nurtured by media convergence reforms. While an active online viewership market exists for meritocratic romance, an analysis of audience responses indicates that the persuasive power of official xueba couple narratives has been compromised by elitism and state paternalism intrinsic to the model-making formula.