Xu Yiyang Livestreams Through Tears to Deny Surrogacy Rumors About Her Child
After weeks of speculation that her child was born to a surrogate, the singer and influencer Xu Yiyang took to a livestream to answer her critics point by point — and left the internet arguing about what celebrity families owe the public.
Xu Yiyang, the singer and influencer married to pop star Huang Zitao, sat down for a livestream on Thursday night to answer the question the Chinese internet would not drop: whether the child she and her husband announced they have is really hers.
The rumors had been multiplying since the couple confirmed the child's existence. Commenters speculated the boy was carried by a surrogate, that there were other children, that the child held foreign nationality — along with recycled gossip about Huang's fidelity. The surrogacy angle is the one with teeth in China, where the practice is banned outright and celebrity couples are routinely suspected of quietly going abroad for it. An undercover report this autumn alleging East China's largest underground surrogacy clinic showed just how live that nerve is.
Xu went down the list, point by point, in answers summarized by Sina Entertainment as she spoke. "We have one child, and I gave birth to him myself," she said. "I hope everyone will stop making malicious things up." Both she and Huang are Chinese, and the child is Chinese. He is a little over two years old and taller than his peers. He was born by caesarean section, with the scar in a place even a swimsuit would hide. The summary of her answers drew more than 220,000 likes within hours.
What turned the response into a national moment came at the end. A friend's consoling message broke her composure mid-stream; she teared up and moved to sign off. Huang, freshly back from outside, walked into the frame and asked — in a clip now everywhere — "Who's bullying my wife?" (谁欺负我老婆了). In the room but mostly silenced, he was not allowed to interject; Xu later explained she had stopped him from speaking. He said only that watching her be worn down by comments day after day pained him, and that many of the questions concern a small family's private details that he does not want to re-explain forever. Viewers split, as one recap put it, between those moved by the protectiveness and those who noted that emotion is not an answer to a factual question.
There was one further disclosure with a shelf life all its own. The couple, it turns out, filmed a "childbirth transition video" — the swiping-into-the-next-scene format that dominates Chinese short video — at the time of the birth. Huang had been ready to post it; Xu stopped him because her postpartum state was bad and she did not want to be discussed. Netizens now beg her to release it as proof. She says she never will — but predicts Huang "won't be able to help himself," and that the day it goes up is the day people finally believe her.
The episode says something about the bargain Chinese celebrities strike with their audiences: marry in secret, give birth in secret, and the reckoning arrives as an interrogation. Xu's answers were the most detailed she has given, and they closed the gap on some rumors while leaving the deeper one intact — the transition video that would settle it, presumably, remains unaired.