in a public setting, it doesn t alleviate or address the concerns about her wellbeing. staying with china, a top chinese live streamer has been fined $210 million for tax evasion. huang wei, known as viya, is famous for her ability to sell anything by livestreaming on the taobao live platform from noodles to a commercial rocket launch. viya has more than 80 million followers on taobao and another 18 million on weibo. she was fined for hiding personal income and other offences in 2019 and 2020. our china analyst kerry allen explains what we can read into this. well, if you think in general in china, it s a communist country, and live streaming is this new lucrative way of being able to influence how people spend their money. so someone like viya, who s got this huge following and literally can attract young audiences and encourage them how to spend their money, it puts companies in certain positive lights. and then there might be, obviously, the kind of influence that comes off the ba
streaming queen. she could sell literally anything online, and she was growing very rapidly. she also did a lot last year with reviving wuhan s economy, back at the beginning of the covid 19 pandemic. this was literally when she sold this rocket launch. so she was able to bring loads of money for wuhan, she s appeared on state tv constantly. yet there were signals that life streaming, the whole industry was coming under scrutiny from china becausejust in general, there were these earlier finds targeting other life streamers, and earlier this month there was one of her companies that she owned suddenly closed, so people were asking, could she be under suspicion of tax evasion herself? ijust asking, could she be under suspicion of tax evasion herself? of tax evasion herself? i ust need to understand of tax evasion herself? i ust need to understand how of tax evasion herself? i ust need to understand how this of tax evasion herself? ijust need to understand how this works - i of
staying with china a top chinese live streamer has been fined $210 million for tax evasion. huang wei, known as viya, is famous for her ability to sell anything by livestreaming on the taobao live platform from noodles to a commercial rocket launch. viya has more than 80 million followers on taobao, and another 18 million on weibo. she was fined for hiding personal income and other offences in 2019 and 2020. let s bring in the bbc s china media analyst kerry allen. tell us more about what viya is doing to generate those figures. irate doing to generate those figures. 7 cannot underestimate how much of a star viya is in china. china has a huge life streaming industry of more than 400 million people. she was very much known as china s life