Call Me ‘GBA Brothers’: Reality TV, Popular Culture, and Soft Propaganda

In 2015, the Chinese government launched the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative to integrate nine mainland cities with the two Special Administrative Regions. The term ‘GBA’, however, only entered everyday discourse after the reality television show Call Me by Fire featured five Hong Kong contestants who dubbed themselves the ‘GBA brothers’. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of social-media posts, comments, and platform circulation following the programme’s broadcast, this article traces how ‘GBA’ was popularised, reinterpreted, and reworked in everyday audience discourse. I argue that the ‘GBA brothers’ exemplify a platformised mode of soft propaganda, in which state-influenced broadcasters deploy entertainment to advance political agendas while relying on media enterprises, government-affiliated ‘mouthpiece’ accounts, and ordinary users to amplify an entertaining yet ideologically charged discourse. While this strategy boosted the visibility of the term, it also backfired due to the endogenous dynamics of popular culture: television audiences interpreted the GBA brothers as representing and valorising a resilient Hong Kong identity rather than a newly minted ‘GBA identity’. By foregrounding audience reception, this article demonstrates the structural limits of entertaining soft propaganda and shows how popular culture simultaneously enables and unsettles state-led projects of regional identity formation.