NOW in addition to kung fu, other Chinese trend-setting phenomena are gaining traction worldwide, including Beijing Opera, books by the ancient Chinese sages and several freshly minted icons of Chinese pop culture.

They are changing the way China is seen by the world, as well as the way today’s young people see and present themselves to the world.

According to a recent survey with a sampling of over 6,000 people, China-born video/social media app TikTok and Chinese sci-fi and wuxia (or fiction) novels, among other cultural goods, are seeing a rise in global popularity.

TikTok sweeps social media

Twenty-two-year-old Noor Afshan thought she would never have another chance to achieve fame or fortune after failing to qualify for the local reality shows in her area several years ago.

Just for fun, the young Indian woman began posting videos of herself performing traditional Indian dances on TikTok, a China-developed app launched in 2017 that allows users to create and share talent videos of no longer than 15 seconds.

She uploads posts everyday and is now the idol of 3.3 million people. She even makes around 50,000 Indian rupees (US$700) a month by advertising for brands on the platform. The national average income per capita in India is US$2,100 per year.

TikTok, Afshan said, has offered ordinary people a place to show their creativity and connect with others regardless of their caste or religion. “It gives people a sense of identity and unity,” she said.

TikTok was developed by ByteDance, a Chinese Internet tech company, for markets outside of China. After Whats-App, Messenger and Facebook, it was the fourth most-downloaded non-game app for 2018 worldwide. The number of downloads for TikTok hit 1 billion globally in February 2019, according to app analytics site Sensor Tower.

People aged under 30 account for the majority of TikTok’s users. Extremely simple and user-friendly services have contributed to the app’s explosive growth.

“It is a new way to express ourselves, to make people know more about us,” said Panupong Ketlekwat, a 21-year-old college student in Thailand who earned over 20,000 followers on TikTok by lip-syncing popular video clips.

He said the app helps him demonstrate his personality and lifestyle as everyone can access the short videos he uploads.

Sona Rai from Thailand shared the same view. “My favorite aspect of TikTok culture is how it enables the creation of video memes, and how it’s a fairly low barrier to join in and create your own,” she said in a comment on Quartz, a business news website targeting high-earning readers and readers via mobile devices. “I realize it (TikTok) is powered by AI but it feels delightfully human,” said Rai.

Chinese sci-fi wows fans, critics

Thanks to blockbuster books like Hugo-Award-winning novelist Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Trilogy,” Chinese science fiction has grown in popularity both at home and abroad and across all ages in recent years.

When the book was launched in Japan this month, “The Three-Body Problem,” the first part of Liu’s trilogy, reached the top of the Amazon chart of best-selling literary fiction in the country.

Within a week, Hayakawa Publishing Corporation, the publisher of the book, has ordered a 10th reprint, bringing the number of printed copies to a total of 86,000.

Japanese reader Daichi Nakashima, 27, said he was impressed by the “distinctive Chinese cultural characteristics” and “scientific details” of the book.

“In terms of theme, it is quite different from European, American and Japanese science fiction ... It’s not about intuition or destiny. It’s about humans’ hard work and rational thinking that opens up the future,” he said.

“Most of the readers are in their 30s, (but) there are also younger readers ... Sci-fi readers aged 50 to 60 also buy it,” Nozomi Omori, the Japanese translator of the book, told Xinhua.

Liu is also the author of the global hit movie, “The Wandering Earth,” which grossed over US$700 million worldwide. In comparison, “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” grossed just over US$786 million.

Several other Chinese sci-fi writers have also become well-known. Chen Qiufan’s debut sci-fi novel “The Waste Tide” is set to be published in Japan later this year. “In the future, Chinese sci-fi will become a genre that will be remembered by science fiction fans,” said Omori, who is also a critic and anthologist. “This is the golden age (of Chinese sci-fi),” said Japanese writer and scholar Toya Tachihara.

Charming wuxia novels

At first glance, Chinese wuxia novels may be hard to understand for foreign readers due to the genre’s complicated cultural background and connotations. But more and more fans have been devoting themselves to the translation of these books, as well as the promotion of Chinese culture.

Wuxiaworld.com is a magnet for Chinese wuxia novel fans. Founded by Lai Jingping, a Chinese-American, the online community has attracted dozens of novel translators and thousands of readers.

“Wuxiaworld started like a fan website, and is proof of the concept that Chinese culture, if done properly, has the chance to be spread to Western markets,” said Lai, better known as RWX, his pseudonym.

“I think it (Chinese fantasy novel) offers a different point of view,” said Zak Dychtwald, an author from the U.S. state of California who has been engaged in China-U.S. cultural and people-to-people exchanges for years. He offered several examples of how Chinese fantasy novels offer a different perspective.

“There are different ideas of what it means to be a hero. There are different ideas of what it means to be family-oriented ... different ideas of what it means to be masculine or feminine,” said Dychtwald.

Chinese takes on those various themes as portrayed in Chinese fantasy novels are really fascinating for the younger generations, who for the most part have only come into contact with Western versions of such ideas, Dychtwald said. What’s more, the Chinese versions can diversify readers’ understanding of the world, he added.

In a Twitter poll conducted on why Chinese novels have become popular, nearly 30 percent of the 3,000 participants said that the cultural elements attract them the most.

Many people further commented that Chinese fantasy novels, to some extent, help spread traditional Chinese philosophies like Taoism, which emphasizes harmony and balance in life. Nearly half of the participants said they identified with such values as justice as they are presented within the works, while around 22 percent said they enjoyed indulging themselves in the alternative realities created by the authors.   (Xinhua)