Maclean’s Magazine：The Rise and Fall of a Chinese-Canadian Pop Star

Du felt gutted and betrayed. And so, motivated by revenge or justice or both, she unleashed a torrent of accusations against Wu. In July of 2021, she publicly posted on Weibo with an account of what she says really happened the first night she met him: he had allegedly raped her after she drank too much at the party and went unconscious. “You loved a lot of girls at the same time, but I was just one of them.” She said Wu, who was 30, had a penchant for young girls. “I’ve learned that your requirements are women born in the 2000s and underage girls who are preparing for their gaokao.” (Gaokao are university entrance exams.) A friend who knew Wu at the time confirmed his interest in teenage girls, telling me that he’d once had a high school–aged girlfriend when he was in his late 20s.

Du described how Wu used middlemen to procure girls for his pleasure. He would lay girls’ photos laid out on a table and “select them like merchandise,” she wrote on Weibo. He allegedly held parties in Shanghai and Los Angeles where he’d pick out girls who caught his eye, then ask his assistants or middlemen to invite them to his hotel on the pretense of a fan meet-up or job opportunities in the entertainment industry. Wu’s former friend corroborated these allegations, telling me that Wu worked with a guy who was “essentially a pimp.” His job was to find suitable girls and bring them to parties for Wu.

Du’s post launched a mini #MeToo movement against Wu. Her original post clocked millions of Weibo views, and in the days that followed, she says, eight women told her about their encounters with Wu. Du said that two of the girls who talked to her were under 18. A couple of days after her post, Du conducted interviews with major Chinese media platforms like Tencent, repeating her claims and her desire for justice for all the girls and women affected. “You are beautiful on the outside, but in fact, rotten on the inside,” Du wrote to Wu on Weibo.

In July of 2021, Wu’s mother, Stacey, filed a police report claiming that Du Meizhu was blackmailing her and her son for three million yuan (about $550,000), and that she’d already wired 500,000 yuan (around $100,000) to a bank account belonging to Du. The Beijing police later released a first statement: the person extorting Stacey wasn’t Du Meizhu, but a 23-year-old fraudster who had impersonated Du online to swindle money from Wu’s mom.

The false report kicked off an official investigation. The police in Beijing corroborated Du’s story that she and Wu met in December of 2020, had sex and kept in touch via WeChat until April of 2021. They said they were investigating Wu for his alleged misdeeds—but they also accused Du of hyping up her story to gain “internet fame.” They weren’t the only ones to accuse her of exploiting her connection with Wu for personal gain: two of her former friends later alleged Du was extorting Wu for money from the beginning. (I attempted to reach both Kris Wu and Du Meizhu several times for this story but did not receive a response from either of them.)

The police accusation against Du only galvanized her supporters, generating a swift and forceful backlash. One post, which received over 100,000 likes and shares, said: “If Du is sensationalizing her story to become famous, I support it, so the whole world will know about Wu’s alleged crimes.” The hashtag #GirlsHelpGirls went viral on Chinese social media, with over 11 million mentions by mid-July.

In China, many women are reluctant to report sexual harassment because the justice system places a disproportionate burden of proof on the accusers: between 2018 and 2020, only six women filed sexual harassment cases against their harassers in Chinese courts, according to research from Yale Law School. Yaqiu Wang, the senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, says that Chinese women turn to the internet to get the government to listen in a system that often discounts female victims of sexual assault. In China, where the legal system is opaque and the free press is non-existent, social media has become a place where victims can publicize their cases.

On July 19, 2021, Wu posted on Weibo. He refuted all the allegations levied against him: “I never selected concubines or date-raped anyone,” he wrote. “There were no underage girls. If any evidence of this were to be found, please be assured that I would enter prison on my own accord.”

The accusations against Wu took place against the backdrop of a sweeping Chinese government campaign designed to clean up what it deems to be toxic behaviour in the private sector, specifically targeting the entertainment industry, tech and education sectors. By 2021, when Wu’s transgressions came to light, the state was becoming increasingly insecure about its global image amid the COVID pandemic and worsening Sino-U.S. relations. Beginning that year, it embarked on a new campaign to control the country’s pop culture landscape. A ban was issued on rankings of celebrities by popularity in an attempt to control online fandoms. TV shows were banned from featuring so-called “sissy” entertainers. Celebrities and influencers were prohibited from promoting values the state deemed immoral and hedonistic—things like infidelity, drug culture and even ostentatious displays of wealth on social media. Meanwhile, stars who the party disapproved of often vanished from public sight altogether.