Ride the Wind 2026: When “Authenticity” Becomes a Selling Point

On April 3, the seventh season of China’s celebrity variety franchise Sisters Who Make Waves returned as Ride the Wind 2026 (乘风 2026). This show made a bold promise that all of their performances will be broadcast live. That means all the vocal and all the procedures during the show will not be edited.

In terms of viewing data, this method was a huge success. According to Streaming Media Net, the initial broadcast generated a Douyin trending index of 7.4 billion and a Douban popularity score of 140 million.

However, as performances became pre-recorded, actors performed with their microphones turned off, the production team changed their rules… people start asking: when “authenticity” is itself a marketing strategy, can it still be authentic?

What the Live Format Delivers

Over the past decade, Chinese talent shows have followed a well-established formula. Shows are heavily scripted and Auto-Tuned. What’s worse is that the results are even predetermined. A 2024 Tencent Entertainment White Paper noted the audience fatigue setting in with those formula.

However, Ride the Wind 2026 are quite different from that. Among 33 contestants were thrown together on stage in real time. Fewer than ten of them are trained singers. Lots of performers forgot her lyrics and sang off-key. There are countless “disasters” on this stage.

Yet these feeling of “rawness” are exactly what makes this show appealing.

In pre-recorded shows, viewers can never see contestants forget their lines, because those moments are all deleted by producers. By contrast, in the live broadcast, the cameras capture every moment lively. Whether contestants forgot their words, struggled to get back on track, or completely fall apart, the audience watches everything at the same moment it happens. That is why people keep watching. Nobody knows what will happen next.

Media scholar Yin Hong argues in Interpreting Reality TV that what makes reality TV interesting is not that it has zero production, but the push and pull between what producers plan and what happens on stage. When things don’t go according to plan, the real fun begins. Consumer researchers Rose and Wood, in a landmark Journal of Consumer Research study, make a similar observation. According to them, people do not accept whatever they see as being true blindly. Instead, they juxtapose the screen content against their personal experience and decide whether or not it is authentic. This phenomenon they referred to as “self-referential hyperauthenticity.” For “Ride the Wind 2026,” the chaos isn’t an issue. In fact, it is precisely what draws viewers in.

Both audience and critics are comparing the show to Super Girl 2005, an iconic singing competition of China. Nevertheless, there are differences between these two shows. As the Global Times noted, While the harshness of Super Girl can be attributed to its low budget, the production crew of Ride the Wind 2026 has decided to use harshness as its selling point. When what was once a measure of lack of resort becomes a carefully designed marketing strategy, the content undergoes a fundamental transformation.

The Cracks: Manufactured “Realness”

The problems came very soon. On April 7, a live rehearsal turned out to be pre-recorded. Then things got even worse on April 10. During the first public performance（ “一公舞台” ）, many viewers found that some of the performers were lip-syncing their song. As Xinmin Weekly reported, on the Yongchun stage, performers’ mouths shut but vocals continued.

Tencent News noted the vocal track was suspiciously flawless, lacking the breath variations of live singing. The Weibo hashtag “Ride the Wind lip-syncing” immediately hit number one.

An industry analysis in Jiemian News points out that in the past, when a performance had a lot of dancing, pre-recorded vocals were used to avoid singing off-key, providing viewers with a better experience. However, since the show had assured the audience that everything in the performance is live, using such an approach now seems like betrayal to the audience. Cultural critic Emily Bootle, in Our Authenticity Obsession, offers the sharpest framing: faking authenticity is worse than simply being artificial, because it exploits the audience’s desire for genuine connection—the one thing that cannot be manufactured.

The Paradox Worth Watching

Whether the show was truly “real” or not, that is probably not the point. What matters more is what happened after things went wrong. Jiemian News pointed out that the show basically broke the wall between the audience and the production team. When the first half got criticized for lip-syncing, the production team did not deny it. They just turned up the volume for the second half. And the funny thing is, people liked the messy second half more than the polished first half.

The Chinese entertainment industry has been obsessed with making everything pristine and perfect for many years now. Ride the Wind 2026 could potentially usher in a new era of Chinese entertainment that embraces imperfection. While this program did not create authentic live television, it surely provided a fresh approach for similar programs in the future.