Series / Produce 101 China

“Going against the wind, growing towards the sun.”

Produce 101 China is a competition reality television show which gathers 101 aspiring female singers and pits them against each other with the goal of producing an 11-person idol girl group. Most contestants come from a range of notable performance arts companies, but several independent trainees compete as well. It is a licensed spin-off of the South Korean show Produce 101.

The show aired from April 21, 2018 to June 23, 2018. The 11 finalists debuted as Rocket Girls 101 and will promote independently of their original agencies for two years.

The show was hosted by Huang Zitao of EXO fame, with the following instructors:

Composition: Tiger Hu

Vocals: Jason Zhang, Ella Chen

Dance: Show Lo, Wang Yibo

The second season onwards changed the title to Produce Camp, or alternatively known as CHUANG.

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Tropes appearing in Produce 101 China:

• Aborted Arc: Early on, the show appeared to be building up a rivalry between Sunnee and Re Yina after the former spoke out against the latter’s promotion to A class during auditions. One episode later, and the rivalry appeared to have been forgotten.
• The Ace: Chen Fangyu, also known as Kimberley Chen, was arguably the most successful individual artist in the entire roster prior to coming on the show. When she entered the stage for the first time, the other contestants started singing one of her original songs.
• Affectionate Nickname: A few of the girls have rather entertaining nicknames, such as Gao Qiuzi (Panghu - “fat tiger”), Lai Meiyun (Xiaoqi - “little seven”), and Li Zixuan (Douzi – “bean”).
• All or Nothing: Applies to several contestants, including those who were part of an idol group that was dropped by their company. For example, the former 1931 girl group members said that the schedule to compete on Produce 101 was the last one their company gave them.
• Always Someone Better: Many contestants are aware that their skills cannot compare to their more talented opponents. Instead of trying to outdo them, they try to stand out by emphasizing their own abilities.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Before the second round of eliminations, each dormful of girls was given 2000 RMB (approximately 300 US dollars) and taken to Ikea to buy decorations for their room. The group with the best decorated room won a small reward.
• The Artifact: The center position, which is coveted by contestants in the Korean version of Produce 101, tends to be equated with the leader position in China. As a result, the drama over who gets to be center in the Korean version is far less prevalent in the Chinese version.
• Ascended Fangirl: Zining is a big fan of the composer Kim Jimun, and is thus overjoyed when she gets to perform an original song by him on the show, Ferris Wheel Tears.
• Attention Whore: Zhu Tiantian is accused of this by her fellow contestants during the re-evaluation for Pick Me, due to forgetting the lyrics partway through and ad-libbing moves and lyrics which disrupt the performances of the girls next to her.
• Audience Participation: As a competitive reality show, Produce 101 is built off this premise.
• A Wild Rapper Appears!: Happens in pretty much every song featuring Yamy, who is a rapper.
• Back for the Finale: All 101 contestants return for the live final to perform Pick Me onstage, and also get to sit in a special section in the audience for the final individual performances and announcements.
• Bait-and-Switch: Tao is fond of pulling these when announcing scores for each of the girls’ performances. As expected, the girls aren’t always amused by this.
• Big Damn Heroes: During the first round of eliminations, the leader from each of the eight highest-ranked teams is given the opportunity to save one team member who did not make the cut.
• Big "NO!": Kimberley lets out one of these when she realizes that she has to battle against Ziting and Lucia, her two closest friends on the show.
• Bilingual Bonus: A meta example. A lot of information on the contestants can be found on Chinese websites, including their family backgrounds, education, and outtakes from the show, which have not been translated into English.
• Boyish Short Hair: Sunnee, Ni Qiuyun, and Luo Yitian stand out from the other contestants for having short blonde hair. Yang Bing also counts for this after she dyes her hair after episode 4.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: On occasion the girls talk directly to the people filming them, which leads to some entertaining lines.
  Yin Rui: (During eliminations) “Why are you filming me? Is it to send me off?”
• Breather Episode: Breather segments is a more accurate term. While Produce 101 is a reality competition, it contains a number of variety show elements like letting the girls go shopping to decorate their dorms, having a talent show, and playing encouraging videos from their families, among others.
• But Not Too Foreign: A number of trainees are of Chinese mixed descent. Lin Junyi is half-Korean, Mena is half-Spanish, Ju Lin is half-German, and Sunnee is half-Thai. Meanwhile, Kimberley and Lucia hail from Australia and Brazil, respectively, but are ethnically Chinese.
• Call-Back: During the group counseling session with Huang Bo, he describes Meiqi as the kind of girl that would be looked up to as a child. In response, the rest of the girls start singing a line from the song Someone Else's Child, which was performed on the show two weeks earlier.
• Challenge Seeker: Gao Yingxi is a trained dancer, and repeatedly voices her desire to perform more difficult dances during the challenges. However, her suggestion is usually shot down by her teammates, since that would make things harder for those of them who cannot dance as well as she can.
• Class Clown: Gao Qiuzi quickly garnered the online nickname “human emoji” for her over-the-top expressiveness and comedic lines. Additionally, both Yu Meihong and Yin Rui seem to revel in this behavior. When Meihong and Qiuzi are in the same group for their performance in Episode 4, Qiuzi even notes that the two of them together brings a lot of goofing off to their rehearsals.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Each class wears color-coded t-shirts with their graded letter printed on the back, just like in the original.
• Comfort Food: After their first live performance, Huang Bo makes handmade dumplings for the girl to help remind them of home. In order to speed up the process, the girls help him with it.
• Confession Cam: Used throughout the series to give focus to individual contestants and give insight into events on the show.
• Cover Version: A few of the stage performances feature covered songs, including an unexpectedly soulful rendition of Justin Bieber's Let Me Love You.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Some trainees, like Aojuan and Angela, are skilled singers but have no dancing experience, which is crucial for launching an idol career. Their goals in being on the show include learning how to dance.
• Cry Laughing: Happens when a girl is crying and then someone else cracks a joke which makes them break out in laughter at the same time.
• Dance-Off: A twist added in the auditions is that if A class has already been filled, anyone assigned to A afterwards can challenge them to a battle over their spot. The battle has a dance component where the contestants have to freestyle to a chosen song.
• Deadpan Snarker: Several trainees have their moments, but Qiuzi stands out in particular.
  Zhang Jie: “It seems we have a lot of pretty, young girls in F class. We’ve put all the young, pretty girls in F class.”
  Qiuzi: “Really? I’ll go to F class then. Don’t force my hand.”
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: As an Australian, Kimberley has a level of straightforwardness that makes her stand out from the other Chinese contestants, who are sometimes hesitant to voice their true opinions, especially in front of a camera. While this could be considered rude in Chinese culture, it is quite normal for people from Western countries.
• Determinator: Pretty much all of the girls, who are aware of the opportunity afforded to them by competing on the show. Special mention goes to the eight diligent centers, who the instructors singled out for putting in the most hours of practice for the Pick Me re-evaluations.
• Dramatic Pause: Used heavily during elimination announcements and when announcing votes during the live shows.
• Engrish: A good number of the Chinese songs are written like this. Also occurs when the trainees, for whatever reason, decide to perform songs that are written entirely in English.
• Family Honor: Many of the girls express wanting to make their families proud by winning the show.
• Fish out of Water:
  • For Ziting, competing in Produce 101 was the first time she went to China by herself. Since she can’t read Chinese, she has to transcribe the lyrics of all her songs into pinyin before singing them.
  • Angela from Hong Kong also couldn't speak Mandarin very well at all at first and had a lot of trouble communicating.
  • Kimberley has stated in later interviews that she has a lot of trouble reading Chinese, especially the simplified characters that are used on the mainland. She gravitates towards spending time with other girls who are also foreigners, such as Li Ziting or Lucia, or can speak English fluently, like Lin Jia'an. She hadn't spent much time in China beforehand, and some cultural differences got in the way of her communication and reception. See Values Dissonance below.
  • Re Yina felt like this, as a model with no singing or dancing experience thrust into the competition and having the spotlight put on her very early on. A few other girls without any real training or experience, such as Duan Aojuan and Yang Chaoyue, express similar sentiments towards the competition.
  • Subverted with Wang Ju, a former modeling agent with no entertainment background whatsoever and a very distinctive look that didn't fit the typical idol style. She ended up fitting right in with everyone else and becoming one of the most beloved contestants by her peers and the audience alike. She ended up loving the experience so much that she went on to continue performing after the show ended.
• Fun with Subtitles: The broadcast is accompanied with colorful onscreen text and small animations highlighting some of the contestants’ behavior.
• Genre Mashup: As mentioned earlier, Produce 101 is a competitive reality show aiming to create the first successful Chinese idol group, but also blends numerous lighthearted elements from variety shows.
• The Gift: Duan Aojuan is described by the judges as having a very clean and natural singing voice despite having never had vocal training. Hu Yanbin commends her on being able to sing with lifted mandibles to achieve a mellow sound. Aojuan has no idea what he’s talking about.
• Girl Next Door: Aojuan has this image, as she shows up to the audition in her school’s track uniform and wearing minimal makeup.
• Girls Love Stuffed Animals: Many of the girls brought cute plushies with them during their stay on the competition.
• Gratuitous English: In spades. While only a handful of the trainees are fluent English speakers, many of them like to pepper their dialogue with English phrases.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Not all of the diligent centers named in the first round make it through the subsequent eliminations.
• Heroic Sacrifice: During the first eliminations round, the leaders can only choose to save one person from each team who didn't make the cut, despite many teams having several such people. As a result, some of the girls who didn't make it decide to let their other teammates who want to stay more than them take the chance over themselves.
• Hidden Depths: During the room decorations segment, some of the trainees get to show off their construction abilities. Special mention goes to Chaoyue, who says that she used to help her parents fix the house whenever part of the wall fell down.
  Qiuzi: "You thought idols could only sing and dance? No, we can also hammer walls."
  • Many of the trainees actually graduated from college with degrees in subjects like finance and chemistry before pursuing an idol career.
• Ice Queen: Subverted for Zining. She gave off a cool impression at first towards the other trainees, but was actually just shy and admitted that she sometimes has trouble expressing herself.
• Idol Singer: The goal of the show is to produce a girl group which can kickstart the idol industry in China, a country which has yet to establish a concrete idol culture unlike their neighbors in Japan and Korea.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: During the group counseling session, Zixuan reveals that as a child, her mother forbade her from calling her mom, instead only allowing her to use the title Teacher Zhang. As a result, most of the warmth she received growing up came from her friends. Zixuan says that she never wants to leave the show, since she is afraid that she won’t be able to find the same level of companionship out in the world as she has from her fellow trainees.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Happens every time a trainee is called to speak while crying, usually during eliminations.
• Ironic Name: Yang Chaoyue’s name means “to exceed”, but she expresses doubt at being able to push her abilities further. It’s lampshaded by the interviewer, who says she should be more like her name.
• Jack of All Trades: Many of the girls can qualify as this, but Liu Renyu is the most fitting example. Despite her young age, she shows herself to be a well-rounded performer with talent in every single area, including singing, dancing, songwriting, and stage presence, but she's often overshadowed by others who are exceptional in one particular area, such as Kimberley for vocals, Meiqi for dance, and Yamy for rapping and composition, even though those girls may be lacking in other areas. In Episode 8, she even says, "I want you all to know that even though there's always someone better than me in everything I do, at the very least, I can show you that I can do anything."
• Lampshade Hanging: “Is this a sitcom?”
• The Leader: Every team has one for their performance.
• Leg Focus: Most of the trainees wear shorts or skirts for their performances which show off their long legs.
• Lighter and Softer: In comparison to its Korean counterpart, this version of Produce 101 is edited in a way that focuses less on team drama and places more emphasis on building friendships and improving together.
• The Load: Yang Chaoyue can neither sing well or dance well, and only participated in the show because she was offered 2000 RMB and free lunch if she auditioned. However, because many viewers find her personality charming, she managed to maintain high popularity throughout the series.
• Motor Mouth: Yin Rui. From her entrance in Episode 1, from her overly excitable nature we can see she's a Genki Girl. But during her evaluation, she performs a song that she sped up because she felt it went too slow otherwise. When she is explaining this to the mentors and in her later confessional, it's even lampshaded by the editing that she talks excessively, and excessively fast.
• Multilingual Song
• Nice Girl: Surprisingly for a competitive reality show, almost every one of the contestants is this.
• Older Than They Look: Most of the contestants are in their early twenties, but look much younger.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. There are two Meiqi's and two Lucia's, but in both cases one of them was eliminated after the first round.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: The girls speak standard Mandarin while on the show, but occasionally lapse into the dialects of their home regions.
• One Head Taller: During the performances where the girls sing a song with a popular male artist in the pop industry, many of them are at the perfect height to rest their heads on the man’s chest.
• Pop-Star Composer: JJ Lin features as a guest instructor for an episode, where he hosts a songwriting class. Due to his popularity, many of the girls place his class as their first choice despite having no prior composition experience.
• Power Trio: The “Triple A” team consisting of Kimberley, Mimi, and Lucia, so named because they all scored an A in their audition together.
• Product Placement: A rather blatant example found throughout the show. They even have advertisements where the girls hold mock conversations with each other while openly showing off or using said products.
• Rage Breaking Point: Tao snaps at the trainees during the relay race to pick songs and storms off when one of the girls falls and the other racers keep running instead of checking on her. He comes back soon after and explains that he had pent-up frustration from the girls not listening to him and holding up the show with their chatting.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: The mentors are responsible for training the girls, but are not overly harsh in their criticism and are willing to listen to and comfort the girls when they get upset.
• Shrinking Violet: Li Zixuan starts crying when she is called to sing in front of her class. She also cries during a confession cam where she talks about how many beautiful girls are in the competition and how she worries that her being the center for Pick Me drags down the average beauty of the show.
• Sole Survivor: Happens inevitably when only one member from each group or company is left remaining in the competition. Also occurs when only one person from each song’s team makes the cut.
  Fan Wei: “Everyone says I’m the leader of former 1931, but now I’m on my own.”
• Squee: Many of the girls have this reaction when learning which of the experienced idols they will be performing with. It's telling that a good number of them can recognize these idols just based on the sound of their voice.
• Stage Names: Some of the contestants go by their stage names rather than their given names, such as Yamy, Sunnee, and Chou Chou. Special mention goes to Lu Xiaocao, whose real name, unlike the previous examples, is undisclosed.
• Take That!: While he never refers to anything explicitly, Ma Dong has some rather obvious words when telling the girls what sets them apart from overseas groups.
  Ma Dong: "We see a lot of foreign girl groups. We see their synchronized dance moves. Even the angle they bow at is the same. And when they smile, the amount of teeth they show is the same. And we think this is a girl group."
• The Glasses Come Off: Many of the trainees wear glasses in their off-time, but remove them for their performances.
• Tomboy: Sunnee and Yamy are singers with traditionally cool images, as opposed to the feminine looks of the other contestants. Both express wanting to alter their moves in the dance for Pick Me to be less girly, but are told that for the sake of the group’s unified image, they should dance like the others.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: Yamy has a very cool, tomboyish style and less feminine mannerisms than the others, but during the talent show in Episode 7, she performed a dance routine to ''Kakushinteki☆Metamaruphose!'' while wearing a Sailor Fuku. Additionally, in Episode 8, she deliberately chose a more feminine silhouette for her costume and performed in a more girly manner, even attempting to play up a cutesy schoolgirl image as Cringe Comedy during the stage introduction.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: 39 contestants are cut after the first round, so viewers had little time to get to know any of them in any meaningful capacity. Also applies to the girls who didn't get much screentime.
• Wham Line: Show Lo delivers one when explaining that not everyone on the show will be able to debut, and therefore the trainees should have backup plans in case a performance arts career doesn’t work out for them.
  “An artist without a stage is helpless. An artist who doesn’t know how to get off the stage is a tragedy.”
• You Are Fat: Whether or not this ties into the greater Chinese culture is unclear, but the trainees make a lot of fat jokes towards each other, something which probably would not fly in a Western television series.