Well Loved Or Well Exploited?

Calls to protect China's underage influencers from parents using them to make money.

- Aw Cheng Wei

When Yaoyao was tripped by an older boy in February and the incident was uploaded in a social media post, netizens became angry and concerned that the child was being abused for laughs.

The four-year-old girl in China has some 200 million followers on social media.

The netizens' anger was further fanned when Yaoyao's mother, who manages the social media account on Douyin, commented that the scene of tripping Yaoyao was "re-created, after failing to catch it on video for the first time".

They accused her of staging what appear to be candid everyday moments of her daughter who, with her round cheeks and cheeky smile, has won their hearts.

In a separate post about Chinese New Year celebrations in January, netizens speculated that Yaoyao's red hands were the result of being out filming in the cold for hours.

Temperatures in south-western Guizhou, where Yaoyao's family is from, range between 5 deg C and 10 deg C in January, the province's coldest month.

Suspicions about Yaoyao's welfare snowballed with the latest incident, as the topic became one of the most popular discussions on microblogging platform Weibo.

The spotlight on Yaoyao was among factors that prompted lawmakers at China's latest annual parliamentary sessions - which ended earlier in March - to call for stronger protection for minors who may be forced by their parents to appear on social media.

Delegates at the country's National People's Congress (NPC), China's highest law-making body, also expressed concern over how parents have been putting their children on mukbang streams, feeding them alcohol and making them act out scripted scenes to draw laughs and likes.

Mukbang streams feature content creators who record or live-stream themselves eating big meals.

Local media cited the examples of a three-year-old who was fed until she weighed about 35kg due to mukbang live streams and a six-year-old being forced to walk a tightrope blindfolded.