🔥 China Trend Watch — Week 45-46 (2025)
Part of Eye on Digital China. This edition was sent to paid subscribers — subscribe to receive the next issue in your inbox.

Welcome to the Eye on Digital China newsletter. It has been an especially tumultuous week on Chinese social media: from the crisis triggered by Takaichi’s remarks to the Nexperia clash and the near-total blackout surrounding the Yunnan “wild child” case. Despite their differences, all of these stories share a common thread — mistrust, whether on the geopolitical stage or at home in institutions and state media.

Thank you for the kind reactions I received after the last newsletter, in which I took a bird’s-eye view of China’s evolving social media landscape and announced a soft goodbye to What’s on Weibo (if you haven’t read it yet, you can find it here).

I’m very grateful to everyone who has followed my journey with What’s on Weibo, and I’m excited to start this new chapter together.

Under the Eye on Digital China newsletter, you can expect updates in three categories: fast-moving trends, slower-burn signals, and longer thematic explorations — plus the occasional personal story, including from the road as I travel through China. (I’ll soon be covering roughly 3,000 miles across the country, so I’m sure I’ll run into plenty worth sharing.)

This is the China Trend Watch edition — a quick catch-up on real-time conversations. Let’s dive in.

Quick Scroll

• 🔺 A new 32-country survey by The Economist and GlobeScan found a sharp increase in the share of respondents who prefer China over the US as the world’s “leading power,” and younger people are driving much of this shift.
• 🛵 As Ele.me (China’s No.2 food-delivery platform) rebrands to “Taobao Flash Delivery” (淘宝闪购), competitor Meituan used it as the perfect marketing moment by bidding farewell to its long-time competitor with a virtual “memorial service,” complete with “farewell coupons.”
• 👀 Famous Chinese author and Nobel laureate Mo Yan (莫言) made his debut on the social media app Xiaohongshu this week, with a meme-ready video and posts. He’s been praised as a “meme king” for quickly adapting to the app’s community — gaining over 950,000 followers in just five days.
• 🏳️‍🌈 Two of China’s most popular gay apps, Blued and Finka (翻咔), have been removed from from Apple App Store in China as at the request of Chinese internet regulatory authorities. Last month, Blued – which has over 40 million registered users in China – temporarily suspended new user registrations after media reports accused the platform of facilitating encounters that led to HIV infections among minors.
• 🏆 A remarkable moment during the Golden Rooster Awards went viral after Ne Zha 2 won the award for Best Art Film — yet no one came to pick it up. Director Jiaozi (饺子) had already announced earlier in the year that he and his entire team would be too busy working on Ne Zha 3 to attend any events — and he, very clearly, is a man of his word.
• 🔻 Chinese-Canadian celebrity Kris Wu (吴亦凡), convicted in 2022 for rape and sentenced to 13 years in prison, keeps reappearing in online discussions — but only through rumors. This week, speculation about his possible death in prison spread across social media yet again (“What, did he die again?” some joked). Local authorities have denied the rumors.

What Really Stood Out This Week

1. Sino-Japanese Tensions Escalate After Takaichi’s Taiwan Remarks

[#高市早苗让日本国家承担代价#] [#教育部提醒谨慎赴日留学#] [#日本死气#] [中国大陆至日本航班量大幅下滑]

Political cartoon circulating on Chinese social media, made by Jun Zhengping (钧正平), official social media name/persona used by the People’s Liberation Army.

With the recent appointment of conservative politician Sanae Takaichi (高市早苗) as the new prime minister of Japan, seen as the ideological successor to Shinzo Abe, many expected renewed Sino-Japanese tensions due to her stances on various sensitive bilateral issues, from wartime history to Taiwan. But perhaps few expected relations to escalate so quickly and so intensely.

This week, Japan and Takaichi have been top trending topics after she made provocative remarks during a hearing in the Diet about potential military intervention in Taiwan-related matters, suggesting Japan’s Self-Defense Forces could exercise the right of collective self-defense if such a situation were recognized as “survival-threatening.” She is also pushing defense-related policy changes, including exploring revisions to Japan’s “three non-nuclear principles.”

The remarks have set off a chain of events — and online trends — marking what may be the worst flare-up in ties since 2012, when major anti-Japanese protests erupted in China following Japan’s purchase of the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Chinese officials are sharpening their tone, issuing angry and escalatory diplomatic statements via X, domestic social media, and Foreign Ministry press briefings.

The recent escalations have also led to official warnings about safety risks for Chinese nationals in Japan. On Sunday, China’s Ministry of Education advised Chinese citizens to exercise caution when planning study-abroad arrangements in Japan.

From the comment section…
Beyond nationalist discourse and general anti-Japanese sentiment on Chinese social media — and users vowing not to travel or study there — many discussions are also focusing on geopolitics and history rather than consumer boycotts. Well-known nationalist knowledge blogger Pingyuan Gongzi Zhao Sheng (@平原公子赵胜) posted a lengthy post on Weibo (crossposted to Xiaohongshu) suggesting that Japan is filled with ‘deadly energy’ (死气 sǐqì) – acting irrationally and aggressively because it is in complete decline — socially, economically, technologically, and militarily — but unable to accept it. He argues that a strong and stable country would never gamble its future like this, and that only a “zombie-like” nation in denial would provoke China unnecessarily. A related hashtag about Japan’s gloomy status-quo (#日本死气#) has also been used by other commentators across social media.

2. New Updates in Yunnan’s “Wild Child” Case Raise More Questions

[#云南通报赤裸小孩事件#] [#赤裸小孩生长发育正常#]

Last month, I wrote about a distressing case involving a 3-year-old boy from Nanjian County (南涧县) in Yunnan who was seen walking on all fours, behaving dog-like with possible spinal deformities, naked and apparently neglected by his parents. Several netizens recorded the scene, and videos quickly spread online in mid October, with thousands referring to the boy as the “wild child” (野孩子 or “naked child” 赤裸小孩) of Yunnan and demanding that authorities intervene and hold the parents accountable.

What followed was a wave of confusing — and sometimes contradictory — media reports. Some outlets initially claimed the boy’s parents were impoverished and struggling, while others reported they were well-educated and financially stable, framing their dubious parenting approach as a deliberate and philosophical “lifestyle choice.”

The parents, who live a camper-van lifestyle, turned out to both hold university degrees (the mother even holds a post-graduate degree). They claimed they practice “natural education” (自然教育法) and said their son disliked wearing clothes because of eczema. Some reports said they refused to cooperate with local authorities; others said they agreed to stop letting their child crawl around naked. Neither the 3-year-old nor his younger brother had ever been registered for a household hukou (registered permanent residence), raising further concern.

Online, speculation intensified. Many netizens feared the child was being deliberately mistreated for profit, suggesting a dark-web content industry behind the scenes.

This week, local authorities and state media posted a new update, releasing a video of the boy — referred to as Pingping (平平, an alias) — walking and playing normally. According to officials, the parents are now receiving support and guidance in raising their children, and both boys are being issued official household registrations by local authorities. The investigation, they said, found no evidence that the parents were involved in “illegal online profit-making.”

But many netizens are anything but convinced. They argue the child shown in the video isn’t the same boy — his face is blurred, and his voice appears overdubbed. Posts questioning the official narrative are being censored. And although authorities say the case is now closed, with the family under ongoing guidance, many people online feel the story is anything but over, and that the real truth still hasn’t surfaced.

From the comment section…
Some of the doubts about the veracity of the story and videos are being expressed in more subtle ways to avoid censorship. One Weibo commenter simply wrote that “mild spinal deformities in a 3-year-old may improve within 3–6 months through corrective treatment (…) while recovery from severe deformities may take 1–2 years or even longer” — subtly suggesting that it would be impossible for the boy to be walking and playing normally now if he had shown signs of spinal deformity just weeks earlier. On Douyin, users also questioned what happened to the supposedly severe eczema that had allegedly prevented the boy from wearing clothes. A Zhihu writer expressed frustration: “The official report is extremely fake, but there’s no way to talk about it.” Another commenter echoed the sentiment: “People today aren’t stupid. Even if you forbid them to speak, do you think they won’t know something is wrong?” For many, the case is troubling not only because of the child’s situation, but because the official handling of it has reinforced a growing sense that the public is being managed rather than informed.

3. Nexperia and Dutch ‘Pirate Gene’ Discussions

[#安世半导体事件令荷兰国际形象受损#] [#商务部回应荷兰官员涉安世半导体言论#]

It wasn’t just bilateral relations with Japan that took a hit this week — tensions between China and the Netherlands have also deepened due to the ongoing dispute surrounding Dutch intervention in the chipmaker Nexperia. This is an issue I wrote about last month. After the incident made international headlines, China responded by blocking the export of Nexperia chips from its factory in China, putting major European automakers at risk of running short on critical components for vehicle electronics.

In brief: Nexperia (安世半导体), a Dutch semiconductor company based in Nijmegen and wholly owned by the Chinese conglomerate Wingtech (闻泰科技) since 2019, became the center of a major diplomatic clash after the Dutch government reportedly ordered a one-year freeze on strategic and governance changes within the company on September 30. Citing national security concerns and a desire to secure domestic chip production, the Dutch move came amid reports that Nexperia CEO Zhang Xuezheng was relocating production facilities and sensitive technology from Europe to China.

While tensions had previously seemed to ease, the conflict escalated again this week. The Dutch public broadcasting organization reported on a widening rift as Nexperia China accused the Dutch branch of disrupting production by refusing to send chip components to the Dongguan factory. Meanwhile, Nexperia Netherlands claimed the Chinese side had been urging customers to reroute payments away from the Netherlands and into Chinese bank accounts. A Dutch delegation is expected to travel to Beijing next week to discuss the situation and attempt to break the deadlock.

On Chinese social media, many users view the Dutch actions as an unfair use of a Cold-War-era law to target a modern, legally operating multinational company. The move is widely seen as another example of Western countries shifting rules to maintain technological dominance when faced with strong competition from Chinese firms. As a result, what began as a company-specific dispute has grown into a broader geopolitical struggle over global chip control and economic sovereignty.

From the comment section… The Nexperia incident is a hot topic across multiple Chinese platforms — Bilibili among them. There, users frame the Dutch government’s action against Nexperia as outright robbery or “piracy,” coming from a country with “pirate genes” (“海盗基因”). Many blame Western countries for lecturing China about law and market rules while being the first to violate them once they feel threatened. Another recurring sentiment is that European countries like the Netherlands are simply acting as pawns of the United States. Regardless of the angle, most netizens agree that the latest developments reflect poorly on the Netherlands — a country usually associated with windmills and cheese, now seen in the light of chips and piracy. (On a lighter note, as a Dutchwoman myself, I’m happy to report that despite the current tensions, the overwhelming Dutch-related content on Xiaohongshu is still about Miffy and Van Gogh.)

---

Word of the Week

Modern Opium [当代鸦片] (dāngdài yāpiàn)

Over the past year, the term “modern opium” has become more common on Chinese social media— used as a popular term to promote food or other products. It’s perhaps not unlike the famous “finger-licking good” slogan in the West, but applied far more broadly, also to refer to “addictive” online accounts, collector toys, or restaurants. In fact, it has become so commonplace that you can now find “modern-opium food recommendation” suggestions on platforms when searching for good places to eat in major Chinese cities.

Recently, the term began trending as a controversial expression after Chinese media focused on an official online complaint arguing that it “turns national trauma into entertainment” (将民族伤痛娱乐化) and trivializes a painful chapter of Chinese history, drawing a direct connection to the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860).

The complaint has put the term at the center of public attention — but how controversial is it, really? While Chinese media are eager to highlight how inappropriate the phrase is, given China’s collective memory of the “century of humiliation,” many Xiaohongshu users nevertheless seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to describe their newfound addiction to a milky drink, a sweet dessert, or the perfect hotpot. (I can relate to the latter.)

On the Feed

During this year’s Single’s Day Shopping Festival (11.11), “Europe” was a popular item on shopping lists, not for its fashion or chocolate, but for anti-theft tools. Using “Europe is not safe” slogans and real footage of pickpockets in action, hundreds of Taobao sellers promoted handy anti-theft accessories for Chinese tourists traveling abroad, some even labeled for specific countries, from Spain to Germany.

This year’s shopping festival reportedly generated 1.695 trillion RMB ($238B) across platforms — still up 14.2% year-on-year, but with far slower growth than in previous years (2024: 26.6% growth). Jing Daily noted a noticeably more negative social media vibe surrounding the festival, with young consumers on Xiaohongshu growing more skeptical and questioning its purpose. Gen Z users are prioritizing timeless purchases over trend cycles and embracing more practical spending (like gadgets to avoid getting robbed in Europe).

Thanks for reading this Eye on Digital China China Trend Watch. For slower-moving trends and deeper structural analysis, keep an eye on the upcoming newsletters.

And if you happen to be reading this without a subscription and appreciate my work, consider joining to receive future issues straight in your inbox.

Many thanks to Miranda Barnes for helping curate some of the topics in this edition.

— Manya

Spotted an error or want to add something? Comment below or
email me.
First-time commenters require manual approval.

©2025 Eye on Digital China / What’s on Weibo. Do not reproduce without permission —
contact info@whatsonweibo.com.

This edition of the Eye on Digital China newsletter by Manya Koetse was sent to premium subscribers. Subscribe now to receive future issues in your inbox.

“Do you still remember going to the internet cafe, paying 2 yuan ($0.30) per hour during the day or 7 yuan ($1) for an all-nighter? Staying up playing games and surfing around?”

It’s the kind of content you’ll often see today on platforms like Douyin or Bilibili — nostalgic videos showing smoky internet cafes (wangba 网吧) from the early 2000s, where people chatted on QQ or played World of Warcraft on old Windows PCs while eating instant noodles. These clips trigger waves of nostalgia, even among internet users too young to remember that era themselves.

Internetcafe in 2005, image via 021zhaopin.com

The current nostalgia wave you see on Chinese social media is indicative of how China’s digital world has evolved over the past 25 years, shifting from one era to the next.

As I welcome a new name for this newsletter and say goodbye to ‘Weibo Watch’— and, in the longer run, to the ‘What’s on Weibo’ title, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic myself. It seems like a good moment to look back at the three major stages of Chinese social media, and at the reason I started What’s on Weibo in the first place.

1. The Blogging Boom (2002–2009): The Early Rise of Chinese Social Media

When I first came to China and became particularly interested in its online environment, it was the final phase of the early era of Chinese social media — a period that followed soon after the country had laid the foundations for its internet revolution. By 1999, the first generation of Chinese internet giants — Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and Sina — had already been founded.

China’s blogging era began with the 2002 launch of the platform BlogChina.com (博客中国), followed by a wave of new platforms and online communities, among them Baidu Tieba and Renren. By around 2005, there were roughly 111 million internet users and 16 million bloggers, and the social impact was undeniable. 2005 was even dubbed China’s “year of blogging.” ¹

Chinese writer Han Han (韩寒, born 1982), a high-school-dropout-turned–rally car racer, became one of the most-read figures on the Chinese internet with his sharp and witty blogs. He was just one among many who rose to fame during the blog era, becoming the voice of China’s post-1980s youth.

The rebel of China’s blog era, Han Han, became of voice of his generation.

When I moved to Beijing in 2008, I had a friend who was always out of money and practically lived in an internet cafe in the city’s Wudaokou district, not far from where I studied. We would visit him there as if it were his living room — the wangba was a local hangout for many of us.

Not only online forums and blogging sites were flourishing at the time, but there was also instant messaging through QQ (腾讯QQ), online news reading, and gaming. Platforms like the YouTube equivalents Tudou (土豆) and Youku (优酷) were launched, and soon Chinese companies began developing more successful products inspired by American digital platforms, such as Fanfou (饭否), Zuosa (做啥), Jiwai (叽歪), and Taotao (滔滔), creating an online space that was increasingly, and uniquely, Chinese.

That trajectory only accelerated after 2009, when popular Western internet services, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, became inaccessible from within mainland China.

⚡ The launch of Sina Weibo in 2009 came at a crossroads for China’s social media landscape: it was not only a time when many foreign platforms exited China, but also when internet cafes faced major crackdowns.

As a foreigner, I don’t think I ever visited internet bars in Beijing anymore by that point — internet use had largely shifted to home connections. Laptop ownership was rising, and we all had (pre-smartphone) mobile phones, which we used to text each other constantly, since texting was cheaper than calling.

Some of the mobile phones in China’s 2009 top 10 lists.

Weibo came at just the right time. It filled the vacuum left by the online crackdowns across China’s internet while still benefiting from the popularity of blogging. Weibo (微博), after all, literally means “micro-blog” — micro because the number of characters was limited, just like Twitter, making short-form posts the main way of communication.

Weibo quickly became hugely successful, for many more reasons than just timing. Its impact on society was so palpable that its trending discussions often seeped into everyday conversations I had with friends in China.

In English-language media, I kept reading about what was being censored on the Chinese internet, but that wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to know — I also wanted to know what was on Weibo, so I could keep up with my social circles.

That question planted the seed for What’s on Weibo: the simple curiosity of “What are people talking about?” What TV series are popular? What jokes and controversies are everyone discussing (but that I never fully grasped)? I wanted to get a sense of an online world that was, in many ways, intangible to outsiders — including myself. As I had moved back to Europe by then, it was also a way for me to stay connected to those everyday conversations unfolding online in China.

With scissors, glue, and some paper, I started sketching out what a future website might look like.

Papercrafting the idea for a website named ‘What’s on Weibo’ in 2012.

And in March 2013, after doing my best to piece it together, I launched What’s on Weibo and began writing — about all kinds of trends, like the milk powder crisis, about China’s many unmarried “leftover men” (shengnan 剩男), and about the word of the moment, “Green Tea Bitch” (lǜchá biǎo 绿茶婊) — a term used to stereotype ambitious women who act sweet and innocent while being seen as calculating or cunning.

2. From Weibo to the Taobao Moment: China’s Mobile Social Era: (2010–2019)

Around 2014–2015, people started saying Weibo was dead. In fact, it hadn’t died at all — some of its most vibrant years were still ahead. It had simply stumbled into the mobile era, along with China’s entire social media landscape.

As mobile internet became more widespread and everyone started using WeChat (launched in 2011), new mobile-first platforms began to emerge.² In 2012–2013, for example, apps like Toutiao and Xiaohongshu (小红书, RED) were launched as mobile community platforms. With the rapid rise of China’s new tech giants — Bytedance, Meituan, and Didi — a new mobile era was blossoming, leaving the PC-based social media world far behind.

Spending another summer in Beijing in 2014, I called it the “Taobao Moment” — Taobao being China’s most successful online marketplace, a platform for buying and selling practically everything from clothes and furniture to insurance and even Bitcoins. At the time, I thought Taobao captured everything Beijing was at that moment: a world of opportunities, quick decisions, and endless ways to earn and spend money.

On weekends, some of my friends would head to the markets near the Beijing Zoo to buy the latest dresses, purses, jeans, or shoes. They’d buy stock on Saturday, do a photo shoot on Sunday, and sell the goods online by Monday. You could often spot young people on the streets of Beijing staging their own fashion shoots for Taobao — friends posing as models, Canon cameras in hand.

During that period, What’s on Weibo gradually found its audience, as more people became curious about what was happening on Chinese social media.

Around 2016, Weibo entered another prime era as the “celebrity economy” took off and a wave of “super influencers” (超级红人) emerged on the platform. Papi Jiang stood out among them — her humorous videos on everyday social issues made her one of China’s most recognizable online personalities, helping to drive Weibo’s renewed popularity.

Witty Papi Jiang was a breath of fresh air on Weibo in 2016.

People were hooked on social media. Between 2015 and 2018, China entered the age of algorithm- & interest-driven multimedia platforms. The popularity of Kuaishou’s livestreaming and Bytedance’s Douyin signaled the start of an entirely new era.

3. The New Social Era of AI-fication and Diversification (2020–Current)

China’s social media shifts over the past 25 years go hand in hand with broader technological, social, and geopolitical changes. Although this holds true elsewhere too, it’s especially the case in China, where central leadership is deeply involved in how social media should be managed and which direction the country’s digital development should take.

Since the late 2010s, China’s focus on AI has permeated every layer of society. AI-driven recommendation systems have fundamentally changed how Chinese users consume information. Far more than Weibo, platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu have become popular for using machine-learning algorithms to tailor feeds based on user behavior.

China’s social media boom has put pressure on traditional media outlets, which are now increasingly weaving themselves into social media infrastructure to broaden their impact. This has blurred the line between social media and state media, creating a complex online media ecosystem.

At the same time, it’s not just AI and media convergence that are reshaping China’s online landscape — social relationships now dominate both information flows and influence flows. ³ Not everyone is reading the same headlines anymore; people spend more time within their own interest-based niches. It’s no longer about microblogging but about micro-communities.

China now has 1.12 billion internet users. Among new users, young people (aged 10–19) and the elderly (60+) account for 49% and nearly 21%, respectively. The country’s digital environment has never been more lively, and social media has never been more booming.

As a bit of a dinosaur in China’s social media world, Weibo still stands tall — and its trending topics still matter. But the community that was once at the heart of the Chinese internet has dispersed across other apps, where people now engage in more diverse ways than ever.

In China, I notice this shift: where I once saw the rise of Weibo, the Taobao boom, or the Douyin craze, I now see online and offline media increasingly converging. Social media shapes real-life experiences and vice versa, and AI has become integrated into nearly every part of the media ecosystem — changing how content is made, distributed, consumed, and controlled.

In this changing landscape, the mission of What’s on Weibo — to explain China’s digital culture, media, and social trends, and to build a bridge between Western and Chinese online spaces — has stayed the same. But the name no longer fits that mission.

Over the past few years, my work has naturally evolved from Weibo-focused coverage to exploring China’s digital culture through a broader lens. The analysis and trend updates will continue, but under a new name that better reflects a time when Weibo is no longer at the center of China’s social media world: Eye on Digital China.

For you as a subscriber (subscribe here), this means you can expect more newsletter-based coverage: shorter China Trend Watch editions to keep you up to date with the latest trends, along with other thematic features and ‘Chapter’ deep dives that explore the depth behind fleeting moments.

For now, the main website will remain What’s on Weibo, but it will gradually transition into Eye on Digital China. I’ll keep the full archive alive — more than twelve years of coverage that helps trace the digital patterns we’re still seeing today. After all, the story of China’s past online moments often tells us more about the future than the trends of the day.

Thank you for following along on this new journey.

By Manya Koetse

(follow on X, LinkedIn, or Instagram)

¹ Liu, Fengshu. 2011. Urban Youth in China: Modernity, the Internet and the Self. New York: Routledge, 50.

² Mao Lin (Michael). 2020. “中国互联网25年变迁：两次跃迁，四次浪潮，一次赌未来” [25 Years of China’s Internet: Two Leaps, Four Waves, and a Gamble on the Future]. 人人都是产品经理 (Everyone Is a Product Manager), January 3. https://www.woshipm.com/it/3282708.html.

³ Yang, Shaoli (杨绍丽). 2025. “研判2025！中国社交媒体行业发展历程、重点企业分析及未来前景展望：随着移动互联网兴起，社交媒体开始向移动端转移 [Outlook for 2025! The Development History, Key Enterprises, and Future Prospects of China’s Social Media Industry: With the Rise of Mobile Internet, Social Media Has Shifted to Mobile Platforms].” Zhiyan Consulting (智研咨询), February 7. https://www.chyxx.com/industry/1211618.html.

Spotted a mistake or want to add something? Please let us know in the comments below or email us. First-time commenters, please be patient — we will have to manually approve your comment before it appears.

Eye on Digital China, by Manya Koetse, is co-published on Substack and What’s on Weibo.
Both feature the same new content — so you can read and subscribe wherever you prefer. Substack offers community features, while What’s on Weibo provides full archive access. If you’re already subscribed and want to switch platforms, just get in touch for help. Both feature the same new content — so you can subscribe or read wherever you prefer. If you’re already subscribed on one platform and would like to move your subscription over, just let me know and I’ll help you get set up.

© 2025 Manya Koetse. All rights reserved.