A Virtual Idol Left Behind by the Times for 14 Years, Yet Someone Is Still Keeping Her Alive
After graduating from university, Lao Peng first spent two years working in a community, then plunged into Guizhou's railway system, where he has worked for six years now.
During the Qingming holiday in 2024, at Comiday — the largest doujin convention in Southwest China — Lao Peng gazed across the vast Western China Expo City plaza, where colorful COSERs swarmed as far as the eye could see, but he said he barely recognized anyone. Only in the doujinshi sales area inside the halls could he still pick out a few characters from Touhou Project.
Although he never quit being an otaku, Lao Peng hasn't followed any new anime seasons in years, nor played gacha games for a long time. From the perspective of today's post-'05 Generation Z two-dimensional youth, the 30-year-old Lao Peng might already seem like a “normie” who doesn't understand “anime culture.”
Yet behind the scenes, Lao Peng has been maintaining an official Weibo account for a virtual anime character — for fourteen years now, far longer than his time as a railway worker.
This virtual idol bears a rather resonant name: Green Dam Girl
Born in 2009, Green Dam Girl was a milestone in Chinese ACG, representing the carnival of grassroots-era free creators. She thus became China's first anime moe girl and China's first virtual diva.
Today, however, Green Dam Girl has all but vanished into the internet's vast sea of information. By rough estimates, the community still creating for her numbers fewer than a hundred people.
Lao Peng took over the Weibo account in 2012, when he was still a high school sophomore. He read a rather popular moe-fication fan novel, “Toppling the Three Gorges Dam Girl,” through which he learned about Green Dam Girl, joined the Green Dam Tongmeng Group, got to know the first-generation Weibo operator “Warmhearted Person,” and asked him a few questions.
“Warmhearted Person” told Lao Peng: you like Green Dam Girl so much — how about you run the Weibo account?
After handing over the account and password, “Warmhearted Person” departed. Just a random passerby, Lao Peng thus took up the post and became Green Dam Girl's second-generation Weibo operator — a role he holds to this day.
Lao Peng says: my tenure as operator was a failure. I was just a passerby at the time, like drawing an R-rank card and playing it right away.
But in truth, the creative boom around Green Dam Girl was already fading. As the popularity waned, the bases that defined her identity — the alliance group, the website, the Tieba forum, the blog — shut down one after another. Today, only the Weibo account barely carries on.
Green Dam Girl, in the end, was left behind by the times.
Green Dam Girl's roots can be traced back to 2008 — the year Beijing successfully hosted the Olympic Games, showcasing China's rebirth since opening up.
That same year, China's internet users reached 253 million, leaping to first place in the world, and infrastructure efforts for youth online safety were moving forward rapidly.
On January 14, 2008, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology publicly solicited proposals for a “green internet filtering software,” intended to be installed on computer systems in primary and secondary schools, to protect youth from the scourge of harmful online content.
Two software packages won the solicitation: the “Jinhui Expert System for Blocking Pornographic Images and Harmful Information” and the “Huaji护航 Internet Management Software.” The two were ultimately merged into one, named “Green Dam – Youth Escort,” and a pilot testing ceremony was held in Zhengzhou on October 8, 2008. The government paid 41.7 million RMB for one year of usage rights and released the software free online for netizens to download.
On April 1, 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, together with the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, and the State Council Information Office, issued the “Notice on the Installation and Use of Green Internet Filtering Software in Primary and Secondary School Campus Networks,” formally deciding to provide Green Dam · Youth Escort free of charge to internet-connected computer terminals in all primary and secondary schools, and to make it freely available to government agencies and individual users.
At that point, all was calm. Green Dam — government-funded, corporate-developed, free to download, and aimed at protecting youth — was an unimpeachable public-welfare project.
That is, until May 19, when the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued another notice: the “Notice on Pre-Installing Green Internet Filtering Software on Computers.”
To put it simply: from July onward, every computer manufactured and sold in mainland China would come pre-installed with this information filtering software called “Green Dam – Youth Escort.” Which meant that this software meant to protect minors was now going to protect adults too.
The nature of the matter had changed, and this notice triggered heated discussion among virtually the entire online population.
The first issue was necessity: the original purpose of Green Dam was to protect minors from harmful online content, yet now every computer was to have it pre-installed — such overreach had no justification for implementation.
The second was coercion: the software targeted youth while being free for all of society to download; now it went from free to mandatory, with no room for choice.
Based on these two points, conspiracy theories began circulating among the public, and “Green Dam Youth Escort” was saddled with the label of internet surveillance — accused of “using the forced rollout of monitoring software to strengthen online control.”
Han Han even wrote a dedicated article, “The Green Dam System Reminds You: The Following Content Contains Harmful Information,” to discuss the topic; some passages were rather inflammatory, so they won't be reproduced here.
Finally, there were the software's own problems — “Green Dam – Youth Escort” was like both an idiot and a rogue program.
Green Dam's functions weren't complicated: it could identify and block pornographic images, text, and other harmful content, and limit internet time and online chatting.
But after it became freely available online, problems kept piling up. First, the software was low-performing — there were jokes about it mistakenly blocking human faces, athletes, and map images as harmful content; and when it blocked harmful content on a webpage, it would shut down the entire browser.
In addition, Green Dam monitored network traffic and slowed connection speeds. The admin password could also be easily cracked: the password file was stored locally on the computer, and by replacing it with an MD5-encrypted string, one could reset the admin password to the default 112233, then access system settings to disable filtering or even uninstall the program.
Green Dam also injected a DLL directly into Internet Explorer, causing 360 to flag it as malicious software; it was extremely difficult to uninstall, and even after removal, about half its files remained on the system.
Even worse, the software saved its list of blocked websites locally, where users could easily browse the contents. On Baidu Tieba, one could even find posts where people shared site lists extracted from the Green Dam software.
As technicians dug deeper, they also discovered that Green Dam had allegedly plagiarized code from the American company Cybersitter; the two development companies in Beijing and Zhengzhou were sued by Cybersitter, which sought 2.2 billion dollars in damages.
For a time, complaints filled the air. Perhaps because of netizens' outrage, or perhaps because of the glaring flaws Green Dam exhibited, on June 30 the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced a postponement of the pre-installation mandate. On August 13, the pre-installation was formally cancelled.
By July 2010, the Green Dam project team's Beijing branch had disbanded for lack of funds, and the Zhengzhou side was likewise unable to carry on.
At this point, Green Dam's life cycle could be said to be over — a mere year and two months by generous counting. And from the thunderous official launch and full-scale pre-installation to the obscurity after cancellation, only about a month had passed.
Green Dam's life was undoubtedly brief, but its impact was profound.
Around 2009, the wind of Japan's “moe-fication” trend blew across the ocean to China.
At the time, the OS-tan craze was in full swing. “OS-tan” takes its name from Japan's 2ch forum, referring to the anthropomorphization of computer operating systems — mainly Windows — by Japanese manga fans. After entering China, its scope expanded to the moe-fication of computer software in general: Tencent QQ-tan, IE-tan, Firefox-tan, 360-tan, and so on.
With the notice made public, the Green Dam software was at the center of the storm. The combination of the two gave rise to the early forms of a moe-fied Green Dam.
The original moe-fied design can be traced to June 11, 2009, by the artist Xiaomi from the Light Novel Translation group, whose lineart was based on Kawashiro Nitori from Touhou Project. This date was later set as Green Dam Girl's birthday.
Since Green Dam Girl's creation was purely a spontaneous netizen activity, with no tight organization or deep coordination, many different versions of her design emerged in a short time. This earliest one became known as the “Kappa version.” Besides it, there were more than ten other versions: the Ryuuzaki version, the ZS version, the Cuimeng version, the Puppet Code Green version, the Baozi version, the “He Xie Your Whole Family” song-art version, the Huang Yitian version, and more.
Despite the many versions, Green Dam Girl generally shared these features: twin tails, a rabbit plushie, a discipline committee armband, a key, and a hat bearing the “harmonized crab” motif.
Her personality traits, in turn, were derived from the real Green Dam software's various quirks: the software's poor recognition ability gave Green Dam Girl her airheaded nature.
The software was nominally meant to block pornographic content, yet the list of blocked websites was stored directly on the local machine — so Green Dam Girl was widely regarded as tsundere.
The software carried a hefty 41.7 million price tag, so Green Dam Girl was set as a young lady with a combat power of 40 million or a net worth of 40 million.
And since it was expensive yet underpowered — all show and no substance, of limited capability — she was a loli who fell with a single push.
These mischievous and amusing moe-fied designs were embraced by the netizen masses. The Green Dam Girl Baidu Tieba and various fan forums were established, gathering many talented creators.
On June 19, 2009, Tatuwan, one of China's earliest MAD/otaku-culture remix masters, extracted the female child voice from the Founder Changting voice source, pitched it up 25%, and produced Green Dam Girl's electronic voicebank as her first voice source. That same day, he published “Green Dam Green Dam ☆ He Xie Your Whole Family” on ACFUN, which racked up 70,000 plays on its first day — a phenomenal work for the era. Later, ACFUN user Bishi, fed up with A-site's frequently crashing servers, founded the website mikufans on June 29 and began rehosting A-site submissions, hoping A-site users could still watch videos when the site was down. The very first rehosted video was “He Xie Your Whole Family.”
Later, that website called mikufans was renamed BILIBILI, and “He Xie Your Whole Family,” made with the Green Dam voicebank, earned the title of Bilibili's very first video, AV1(Editor's note: Bilibili's earliest video IDs followed the naming convention of AV + sequential numbers).
From 2009 to 2011 was the explosion period of Green Dam Girl fan creation: fan novels, manga, games, cosplay, radio dramas, stage plays — everything you could think of.
Among these creators were many names we know well:
The renowned voice actress Shan Xin voiced Green Dam Girl's Ume Sakura desktop assistant program(Editor's note: a customizable desktop mascot program), whose design was drawn by Arknights artist Ryuuzaki Ichi; another well-known voice actress, Xinyue Bingbing, also sang numerous Green Dam Girl fan songs; the encyclopedia of the ACG world, Moegirlpedia, was originally founded as “Green Dam Girl WIKI,” dedicated to collecting fan content about her…
In every sense, Green Dam Girl once led China's ACG scene.
June 11, 2009 was Green Dam Girl's birthday, and every year on that day her creators would create and post together — a day known as the “Sogreen Matsuri.” The festival never had an organizer; it was entirely driven by the voluntary response of many creators and creative teams — perhaps a unique romance of the grassroots era.
June 19, 2009 was the birth date of her voicebank, and although it was adapted from another synthesized voice, in a certain sense Green Dam Girl truly was China's first virtual diva.
The decline of Green Dam Girl as a subculture was unavoidable.
Some believe it was the natural decay of an internet subculture's life cycle; some believe the collapse in traffic resulted from repeated bans due to her anti-establishment nature; still others believe it was simply bad luck — the loss of creators created the awkward generation gap we see now.
Lao Peng and I have discussed this topic, and in the end we agreed: Green Dam Girl was left behind by the times — left behind by the 2010s, an era named capital and commercialization.
If the 2010s were the era of capital, then what came before could well be called the grassroots era. Green Dam Girl was the most thriving fruit of Chinese ACG in that grassroots era — the largest creative community, the richest creative output, and even an utterly free creative environment. It was a carnival of the grassroots age.
Just as firearms shattered the knightly class, the entry of capital ended the chaotic, free grassroots era.
During this period, China's ACG industry shifted to a commercialized operating model built on mobile internet, bringing bigger budget investments, more professional content production, and far crueler capital competition.
The webcomic platform U17 received investment from Shanda Literature in 2009 and began its transformation toward commercial operation. Six years later, in 2015, U17 had incubated Chinese comic IPs like “100,000 Bad Jokes,” “Brain,” “Rakshasa Street,” and “Wings of Rebirth.”
The danmaku video site ACFUN — in 2009, founder Wei Jun sold it for 4 million to Pan Enlin and Chen Shaojie, fulfilling his dream of buying a house and a car in Changsha. Later, under Chen Shaojie's direction, ACFUN imitated the live streaming of the danmaku site NicoNico, establishing the “ACFUN Live” service and funneling A-site's traffic into streaming, before eventually spinning it off from A-site to found China's largest streaming platform, “Douyu.”
As for Bilibili, the danmaku video site we're all more familiar with, no need to elaborate.
Even Moegirlpedia, born from the Green Dam Girl phenomenon, went through its own commercialization and became China's most comprehensive ACG encyclopedia.
Born on the fields of the grassroots, Green Dam Girl was never destined for the urban race of capital and commercialization.
Although Green Dam Girl once possessed an enormous user base and hundreds of teams creating for her — making her fame and influence, for a time, unmatched —
in the end, the disorderly nature of her creation meant these fan groups operated independently for long stretches, never forming a tight, properly-scaled organization, with no sufficient communication; only a nominal, hollowed-out “Green Dam Alliance Group” existed for mutual contact between them.
In art, Green Dam Girl had dozens of versions, each with inconsistent character settings, constantly splitting and diverging — resulting in a broad but shallow scope of creation. Small-scale fan creation, facing shortages of manpower, funding, and time, showed the expected fragility.
And as heavyweights like the remix master Tatuwan and famed voice actresses Shan Xin and Xinyue Bingbing gradually faded away, Green Dam Girl quickly lost her ability to produce breakout viral hits, and the remaining creators could hardly sustain the creative prosperity of old.
Facing the steel torrent built by capital and commercialization — with its high-spec, professional content — low-cost, small-scale Green Dam Girl fan creation was powerless to resist and could only be buried.
Having lost her breakout hits and facing mounting external creative pressure, Green Dam Girl's sphere of influence shrank ever smaller, her community closed in on itself, and finally she entered the twilight of her life cycle.
As the Weibo operator, Lao Peng recognized the decline in Green Dam Girl's popularity early on and made considerable efforts in response.
Beyond day-to-day Weibo operations, Lao Peng spent his own money every year commissioning Green Dam Girl sticker packs and fan art to sustain what little popularity remained, but the results were minimal.
At the time, some also attempted to commercialize Green Dam Girl, such as making a game. The other party launched a crowdfunding campaign — back in the era of prepaid phone card remittances — and Lao Peng, then a university student, contributed over two hundred yuan. In the end, the project sank without a trace, leaving no record online, and he can't even remember the game's name anymore.
Around 2015, besides Green Dam Girl, Chinese ACG moe girls like Xinkeneng, backed by CCTV, and Moebaichan, derived from the Green Dam WIKI, were all doing quite well.
At the time, China-Xinke Animation had an ambitious plan, executed by the then-operator Ximeng.
The plan was to make a comprehensive Chinese ACG crossover game, covering the popular Chinese voice actors, cover singers (utattemita artists), virtual divas, mascot girls, and so on of the day as game characters. The game was called “Dimension Academy – Reverse Spacetime.”
Green Dam Girl was naturally included among these characters. As the official representative, Lao Peng was invited to the China-Xinke Animation Channel offices in Beijing for negotiations, shared a meal with producer Mika from the program team, discussed the collaboration, and granted the license.
At the time, representatives of Green Dam Girl, Xinkeneng, and Moebaichan were all present, and Lao Peng, right in the thick of it, had a simple idea: huddle together for warmth, prop each other up, and jointly sustain the small community's popularity so it wouldn't cool off so quickly.
Besides the game, Ximeng also brought in the studio Colorful Pencil to draw original artwork, planning a high-spec original anime. A one-minute teaser PV was produced ahead of time, and a crowdfunding campaign was launched on the Modian platform.
On the PV alone, the anime's quality was honestly quite good — the production values and setting were eye-catching for the time.
But in the end, this project led by CCTV and produced by Colorful Pencil raised only 1,300 yuan in crowdfunding, far short of the expected 10,000 RMB, and the anime project never progressed any further.
As for the game “Reverse Spacetime Academy,” on which Lao Peng had pinned high hopes, it died in the womb as well. Since he wasn't directly involved and wasn't an industry insider, he knows nothing of the specifics — all he learned was that Ximeng left Xinke Animation.
In 2016, a newcomer joined the Weibo operation team: Xiaoxiaolyu. She proposed changing how the account was run — making the operations personal, posting daily updates, and serving as the behind-the-scenes mascot herself. Lao Peng had no strong objection; it seemed like a good change. But this proposal was met with fierce opposition from the Green Dam Alliance Group — the representative body of Green Dam Girl's fans and creators — who saw it as a drift toward personalization, a departure from Green Dam Girl as a pure virtual entity. The proposal was ultimately rejected, and Xiaoxiaolyu left within two months.
Later, the members of the Alliance Group also faded away one by one. Content creation dwindled, the Tieba forum and website shut down one after another, until almost only Lao Peng was left, still holding on.
Meanwhile, Xinke Animation took the path of virtual streamers. In that era when Japanese VTubers dominated, the VTuber Xinkeneng achieved considerable numbers, becoming a bona fide top Chinese VTuber.
Although Xinkeneng later ceased activity and the Xinke Animation Channel was completely shut down in 2022, her influence at the time was more than substantial.
Lao Peng, always a step behind, then had the idea of making Green Dam Girl a virtual streamer too.
By 2023, Lao Peng had spent 3,600 RMB of his own money commissioning an artist to create a Live2D model for a virtual streamer. The final result was indeed worth the price, but unfortunately no suitable streamer could ever be found, and the virtual streamer plan had to be shelved for the time being.
It wasn't until 2024 that a newcomer joined the Weibo operation, brought in a suitable streamer, and externally secured a fairly large virtual streamer agency — one ranking top three in Douyin's virtual category by revenue.
Lao Peng licensed out the rights, and the agency took care of everything: model artwork, streamer training, and content operations. During the six-month trial streaming period, even the streamer's workspace costs were borne by the agency.
But during those six months, the agency reassessed the project's value and ultimately chose to abandon the partnership, cutting losses in time.
Faced with this outcome, there was nothing to do but accept it in silence.
Lao Peng turns thirty this year, and he has quietly run Green Dam Girl's Weibo account for fourteen years.
Over those fourteen years, her fan creators have come and gone in wave after wave; those still holding the line alongside Lao Peng are the forty-odd members of the “Sogreen Matsuri Preparation Committee.”
Time has worn down the original passion. Today's Weibo feed is almost entirely reposts, with hardly any written output, and the active fans have dwindled to nearly zero — going several posts in a row without a single like or repost is simply normal now.
But every day, Lao Peng keeps doing the same thing. Until when? He's never considered that question.
Perhaps, in the far future, Lao Peng will be the last person to forget Green Dam Girl.
