Mengyang
Mengyang is poor. Her parents passed away the year before. So at the age of 16, she drops out of school to raise her four younger siblings in a small village in China.
To save money, the whole family eats only potatoes. You know it’s true because they are doing it right now, live in front of you on stream.
That is why she is asking you to buy these mountain walnuts grown by the people in her region. It’s all natural, she says, and the purchase would help the local villagers.
There is one problem, however—a math problem, to be precise.
Mengyang is a popular streamer in China, with over 3 million followers. So how is she still poor?
Indeed, when a fan tries to visit her in her mountain hut, he finds that she doesn’t live there. This isn’t even her farm; it’s just a random field somewhere that she goes to film.
Her parents are alive and well and living comfortably in a new house.
And she is living your typical influencer lifestyle, with branded watches, luxury cars, and exclusive parties.
In particular, these walnuts are not grown by the local villagers. They are bought wholesale, then repackaged to ship to customers. And that is where law enforcement got involved.
In March 2024, Mengyang was convicted of false advertising and sentenced to 11 months in jail.
But that was not an isolated incident.
It was a small part of a much larger trend in China, a growing “sympathy economy,” if you will, where people turn hardship into content on social media to profit off viewers’ sympathy.
The specific forms the hardships take can vary widely depending on the creator.
You could be homeless and documenting your life on the street, or facing bankruptcy and sharing your story. You might be diagnosed with a rare disease or taking care of a sick relative and need help with medical expenses.
Whatever the hardship may be, the general format is that you make content about that hardship in a way that induces sympathy. You then share that content online to create a sympathetic connection with your audience. You then monetize either by asking for direct donations or by selling sponsored products and framing the purchase as a form of “support.”
This is called maican in Chinese, a term that translates to “selling misery.” And it has grown into a large enough niche in content creation that the Chinese government has taken notice. In an official communication by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the fraudulent monetization of misery was explicitly listed as a problem to be prioritized.
As a report by Think China puts it: “China’s poor no longer beg, they livestream.”
Why Selling Misery Works
Now, to be fair, selling misery online isn’t automatically a bad thing.
People fall through the cracks of society all the time, and often through no fault of their own.
It follows that if you need help, you should ask for it, because people can’t help you if they don’t know that you need it.
So how does one ask for help?
Before social media, people used to do this the old-fashioned way: go onto the streets and beg.
This was inefficient, however.
Most people are on the street presumably because they are trying to go somewhere. To beg on the street is to compete with that priority.
This is on top of the fact that you are not in control of whom you meet, so you are at the mercy of luck to a large degree.
All you can really do as a street beggar is go from one stranger to the next, over and over, until you happen upon someone who finds your predicament more pressing than wherever they are trying to go.
This process is wasteful for everyone involved. You are wasting your own time by going up to a large number of strangers who would not have helped you in the first place. You are also wasting those strangers’ time by interrupting their days to no productive end.
Not to mention this whole process is not very dignified.
But when you beg online through social media, a lot of that changes.
First, you are no longer competing with people’s immediate priorities. Unlike on the street, where people are trying to go somewhere, on social media platforms people are already there to consume content. If your plea for help takes the form of a piece of content, then you are meeting people inside the activity they are already doing.
Second, you are less at the mercy of blind luck. This is because the social media algorithm is pushing your content toward the kinds of viewers who are more likely to engage with it. So you are no longer wasting people’s time by blindly forcing your presence upon them. Instead, you are employing a piece of technology that surgically delivers your presence to those more likely to be receptive.
And lastly, begging online—or begging from home, I suppose—is a bit more dignified compared to begging on the street. It’s also logistically simpler. We are talking about the most vulnerable members of society here, who likely already have their hands full with whatever problems they are dealing with. Automating some of the logistics of asking for help through technology is probably a good idea, all things considered.
Why It Breaks
So what’s the problem?
Well, social media is too powerful a tool, where a single upload has the potential to reach the rest of the world.
When you beg using this tool, today you might be on the brink of bankruptcy asking for help; but tomorrow you might just go viral and be well on your way to becoming a millionaire.
This asymmetric potential for profit attracts economic competition.
It might be strange to think about economic competition in the context of begging, but that’s what this space has become: a competitive niche in content creation, one that’s no different from any other content creation niche.
This means that success in the sympathy economy is not determined by how much suffering exists, but by how well that suffering is portrayed.
It no longer matters whether you actually need the help. What matters is your marketing skills and content strategy.
In other words, how well you can run your content creation business.
When Victims Become Influencers
Now some people in this space probably do genuinely need help at first. But seeing what this space has become, they end up having no choice but to adapt.
In other words, they start out genuinely asking for help, then turn into proper influencers as time goes on.
So you can start following someone on social media because you think they are a human trafficking survivor, only to then see them begin doing TikTok dances and trying to sell you moisturizers. As a viewer, that can be a little jarring to see.
That’s basically what happened in this report, which shows some viewers being a bit upset about this. They say that these influencers are using their misfortune to create an audience and using it to sell products.
But the morality here isn’t entirely black and white. On a basic level, we can’t expect people to work for free.
So if it truly takes a full-time job’s worth of effort to advocate for public awareness on something like human trafficking, then one can make the case that the way to do it sustainably is to also do some TikTok dances once in a while and sell some moisturizers.
But the balance here is not easy to maintain. For example, creators need to not lie to their audience and need to draw clear boundaries between activism and product promotion, along with any other conflicts of interest. So it’s difficult, but not impossible, to do this work in an ethical manner.
Fabricated Misery
What is morally black and white, though, is when people fabricate fake personas online to attract and monetize sympathy.
Some of these efforts are done badly enough that they look pretty obvious.
Like this one here, which is clearly an actress playing the role of a homeless woman, who then meets this actor who plays the role of a bully. There’s a plot here, I think, where the two later become friends and go get food together. The whole thing could be a somewhat entertaining skit if it isn’t pretending to be real.
Now we can laugh at these bad attempts, but there is a gradation of skill here. Some content creators are better at this than others. And a sufficiently skillful content creator can produce something that evades detection for most viewers.
Scaled Exploitation
Some content creators might even attempt to scale their endeavor.
Because why pretend to beg online yourself, as one person? If you are good at this, why not start a company and organize groups of people and train them to beg online together, at scale?
That’s exactly what happened in some documented cases of companies using scripts, staged scenes, and actors to fabricate hardship narratives.
There are even multichannel networks, or influencer agencies, that specialize in managing creators who are in the selling-misery niche. Mengyang, the girl we discussed at the beginning of the video, was associated with such an agency.
There are even reports of some of these agencies traveling to rural areas to proactively look for people who are facing hardships. They would then sign cooperation deals with them under the pretense of helping them escape poverty. They would then build exaggerated tragic stories around them to drive online traffic and sales.
In the best of cases, I would like to think that this can be a mutually beneficial arrangement where organizations help the vulnerable reach the help they need. But in reality, it often looks indistinguishable from organized exploitation of the most vulnerable people in society.
This Is Not New
Now the sympathy economy might seem uniquely dystopian in a way that feels unprecedented.
But to put things in perspective, the business of selling misery isn’t necessarily new. It isn’t even unique to China.
If you’ve seen Slumdog Millionaire, there’s a scene where a criminal gang takes vulnerable kids from the streets, maims them to make them more sympathy-inducing, and then sends them out to beg for money. That’s how the gang profits.
That’s of course fictional and dramatized for film, and it’s in India. But it’s based in reality.
China has its own version of this type of crime. There’s a piece of criminal code specifically for this, Article 262-1 (“组织残疾人、儿童乞讨罪”), meaning using violence or coercion to organize disabled people or minors under 14 to beg.
Fifteen cases involving 32 people were prosecuted for this between 2010 and 2013.
And outside organized crime, on a grassroots level, there have been petty crimes around this too.
Like this guy who got arrested in 2016. He tucked one arm inside his shirt to make himself look like an amputee while going around an intersection begging for money. He was making about 50 bucks a day doing it.
So people were aware that misery can be packaged and sold for money, and business models around this idea had already been attempted.
What is different now with this newer iteration of the sympathy economy is the delivery mechanism.
In the old sympathy economy, people begged in person, while the new sympathy economy is online. That difference has profound implications.
You see, street begging is constrained by the laws of physics.
You are one person standing in one place, begging from one stranger at a time. No matter how good you are at your job, there is only so much sidewalk you can physically occupy. As a result, it’s difficult for any one player to monopolize the entire sympathy economy.
But online, these limits disappear.
Unlike atoms, bits can be copied limitlessly and transferred across vast geography at near-zero cost.
Practically, this means you only need to perform begging once in front of a camera. The resulting mp4 file then has the potential to reach millions of people.
As a result, the competition is no longer local, but global.
It also means the business of selling misery now follows a Pareto distribution, the same way most content-based online businesses do.
In other words, a small share of the content gets most of the views, most of the engagement, and most of the money on any given platform. On YouTube, for instance, the top 10% of channels get 80% of the views.
So being slightly better than your competitor does not just get you slightly better results, but orders of magnitude better.
This dynamic incentivizes a rat race, where each player is forced to make content that maximizes engagement rather than authenticity.
The sympathy economy that we see today, with its distinctly toxic aftertaste, is the result.
Why It Matters
Now this is obviously bad for several reasons.
First, the current sympathy economy delivers help to those who are good at content creation, not those who need help. In other words, it’s delivering help to the wrong people. So it’s not working.
This doesn’t only hurt those who need help, however. It hurts viewers as well. Viewers are repeatedly exposed to sympathy-arousing content only to find out that the content is fake. Over time, people can grow cynical and distrustful to an unhealthy degree, resulting in a society that is less caring than it otherwise would be. Since they assume that everything they see is fake, they begin to watch suffering as if it were entertainment. Meanwhile, real suffering has even less of a chance to be addressed in a now numb and jaded world.
So what’s the solution?
Well, some level of social safety nets is welcome here. In principle, most people agree that in a civilized society, there should be a basic standard below which a person does not fall. Instead of forcing the most vulnerable members of our society to become influencers, it seems obvious that as a society we should just help them.
However, agreeing on what the appropriate level of social safety net is, and how it should be implemented, is the much more difficult coordination problem that not every society has managed to solve. Most of the time that’s the politicians’ job, though, so I wish them the best of luck. As we all know, politicians are very productive members of society; so are YouTubers. I am the latter, so I will stop now.
Thanks everyone, see you next time.
Selected Sources
Main anchors
中央网信办启动“清朗·网络直播领域虚假和低俗乱象整治”专项行动. 2024. (https://www.cac.gov.cn/2024-07/31/c_1724107668689755.htm)
'Selling misery': China’s victim-turned-livestreamers turn trauma into traffic and face growing scepticism. 2025. (https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/china-livestreaming-selling-misery-sympathy-economy-yang-niuhua-child-abduction-5456236)
摆拍“卖惨”视频引流牟利 警方以涉嫌虚假广告罪追责. 2025. (https://news.cctv.com/2025/02/26/ARTINVXnCq1Ed4xU9s6RrhM0250226.shtml)
打造卖惨人设、带货假冒产品 网红“凉山孟阳”被判刑. 2024. (https://www.chinanews.com.cn/sh/2024/03-19/10182567.shtml)
中华人民共和国刑法（2020年修正）. 2020. (https://www.sdcourt.gov.cn/jningweisfy/385991/385992/8362093/index.html)
I Tube, You Tube, Everybody Tubes: Analyzing the World’s Largest User Generated Content Video System. 2007. (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22/camhor/mia_imc07_sumitted.pdf)
Supporting anchors
Singaporean in China: China’s poor no longer beg, they livestream. n.d.. (https://www.thinkchina.sg/society/singaporean-china-chinas-poor-no-longer-beg-they-livestream)
男子藏胳膊扮残疾人乞讨日赚三四百被民警识破. 2016. (https://www.chinanews.com/sh/2016/05-11/7867088.shtml)