He Yuan

He Yuan is a newcomer in the entertainment industry and one of the six contestants assembled for “13 Days on the Island.” He arrives with Huo Yingying, Zhao Zhe, Ao Ziping, and Zhou Hao, while Shen Tang is the other woman in the group. Although the contestants are presented as inexperienced figures with little established standing, Shen Tang is already the most popular among them. He Yuan therefore enters the program from a distinctly precarious position: visible enough to be included, but not successful enough to possess a secure career or a substantial audience. His presence helps turn the survival program into a comic study of minor celebrities trying to manufacture professional futures from almost nothing.

Identity and Career Position

He Yuan’s own account of his online following exposes the weakness beneath the apparent glamour of celebrity. He says that he has 50,000 Weibo followers, but admits that 49,900 were bots purchased by his company. The remaining figure is not presented as a stable fan base so much as a hope waiting to be tested. His stated ambition is modest but revealing: if the program becomes popular, he wants to gain real fans. The distinction between purchased numbers and genuine attention gives his career an economic and emotional stakes that the show’s publicity machinery cannot conceal.

The same conversation places him alongside Huo Yingying, whose more than 100,000 followers are also largely artificial, with the remainder consisting of employees of her father’s company. He Yuan reacts with jealousy and jokes that his difficulty making ends meet exists because somebody else is enjoying the good life in his place. The joke is more than a character gag. It establishes him as financially strained, socially observant, and capable of turning professional humiliation into banter before it becomes unbearable. Unlike a securely established star, he must treat exposure itself as a possible livelihood.

The Island Survival Arc

At the dock, the six contestants divide into three working groups. He Yuan and Zhao Zhe are assigned to build the shed, while Huo Yingying and Ao Ziping search for resource packages and Shen Tang and Zhou Hao construct the stove. The division gives He Yuan an ostensibly practical responsibility, but the surrounding conditions immediately undermine any fantasy of a polished variety-show performance. The island is enormous and genuinely empty, with no convenient places for eating, drinking, or sanitation. The program’s promise of an untouched survival environment is therefore literal rather than promotional exaggeration.

He Yuan and Ao Ziping spend half a day searching for a resource package without finding even a trace of one. He Yuan becomes irritated and wonders whether the production team has hidden the supplies so well that the contestants are meant to starve. When they hear what seems to be a chicken, the two men abandon the failed search and try to catch it directly, assuming that a domestic hen should be easy prey. The assumption collapses into slapstick: after half an hour, both men are sprawled on the ground and covered in feathers, while He Yuan can only gasp at the fact that the chicken can fly. Their failure transforms an ordinary food source into an adversary and reveals how little control the contestants possess over the supposedly manageable tasks assigned to them.

The consequences are physical as well as comic. He Yuan and Ao Ziping apparently injure themselves while trying to catch the chicken, and when Shen Tang and Ao Ziping later appear, Ao Ziping is being carried on He Yuan’s back while He Yuan’s legs shake badly. He Yuan is therefore not simply the inept participant who causes trouble; he also becomes part of the group’s improvised support system, carrying an injured companion despite his own exhausted condition. The image captures the program’s recurring reversal of celebrity expectations: the contestants arrive to display themselves, but survival reduces them to hunger, feathers, strained muscles, and mutual dependence.

Group Relations and Comic Function

He Yuan’s interactions with the other contestants are marked by a mixture of irritation, envy, and a desire for affection. After Shen Tang comforts Huo Yingying by putting an arm around her, stroking her hair, and patting her back, He Yuan looks enviously toward Ao Ziping, evidently hoping for comparable reassurance. Ao Ziping responds by staring at him in fright and covering his chest; Zhao Zhe avoids He Yuan’s gaze altogether. The exchange makes He Yuan the group’s comic outsider, someone who recognizes the value of tenderness but cannot obtain it without exposing his need for it.

His relationship with Shen Tang is similarly shaped by contrast. Shen Tang possesses unusual practical confidence: she handles dangerous situations calmly, understands the artificial logic of publicity, and maintains a professional smile even while black fans flood her livestream with abuse. He Yuan, by comparison, is more transparent. His annoyance, hunger, jealousy, and hope for recognition remain close to the surface. Yet the contrast does not reduce him to a foil. His frankness helps make visible the human cost of the entertainment system that Shen Tang manages through practiced emotional labor. Her composed performance converts hostility into traffic and money, while He Yuan is still waiting for the attention generated by such traffic to become something real.

Survival, Food, and the Rural World

The contestants’ hunger eventually becomes one of the clearest measures of He Yuan’s transformation from performer to survivor. When Shen Tang finally prepares rice, the guests devour it without maintaining even the pretense of camera-ready manners; Ao Ziping sheds a tear at the meal. He Yuan is part of this collective collapse of performance. The scene places the supposedly glamorous cast within a material economy governed by food, labor, and exhaustion rather than follower counts.

The program later connects that meal to the agricultural cycle around them. Rice grown in the south will not be ready for harvest for several months, while the local farmers are harvesting spring corn and will plant autumn corn afterward. The guests voluntarily decide to help the elderly woman living next door. For He Yuan, this movement from staged survival to agricultural work broadens the meaning of the program. The island has exposed the contestants’ dependence on resources; the farming episode shows the labor and seasonal time required to produce those resources. His comic incompetence thus sits beside a more serious recognition that food cannot be reduced to a prop in a shopping cart or a reward for television drama.

Narrative Role and Significance

He Yuan functions as a picaresque, episodic figure whose story is assembled through reversals rather than a single grand triumph. He begins with artificial followers and an uncertain livelihood, receives the practical assignment of building a shelter, fails spectacularly at catching a chicken, carries an injured companion, competes for emotional attention, and continues hoping that a successful show will produce real fans. Each incident is relatively self-contained, but together they form a portrait of a celebrity economy in which careers are improvised through public embarrassment.

His comedy also exposes the distance between institutional publicity and lived reality. Companies can pair Shen Tang with every male celebrity she has worked with in order to exploit her notoriety, while a contestant like He Yuan must rely on a program’s uncertain popularity to escape obscurity. Shen Tang’s livestream demonstrates the same mechanism from another angle: hostile comments increase the audience, her professional smile protects the performance, and the company’s revenue share turns scandal into income. He Yuan’s dream of genuine followers reveals what that system leaves unresolved. Visibility is plentiful, but recognition is scarce.

The character’s significance lies precisely in his lack of a completed success story. He Yuan does not enter the island as a hero with hidden mastery; he is hungry, awkward, underfunded, and easily overwhelmed by a flying chicken. Nevertheless, he remains hopeful, socially engaged, and willing to participate in collective labor. His failures make the survival show funny, but they also prevent the entertainment industry from appearing weightless. Behind the numbers, pairings, comments, and carefully managed images are performers who need work, food, companionship, and an audience that is not fabricated.