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China Digital

Sheep a Sheep: The Game that Mysteriously Took China by Storm in 2022

One poll on ‘Sheep a Sheep’ found that over 90% of participants either “could not understand” the game’s popularity or played it because they were just “following the trend.”

Zilan Qian

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Sheep a Sheep was the game hit of the year in China. But looking back, people struggle to understand how the simple game actually became such a success in the first place.

It was the game that everybody suddenly was talking about in 2022: Sheep a Sheep (Yang le ge Yang 羊了个羊), a mobile game that was mainly played through Chinese social apps such as WeChat, Tik Tok, QQ, and Kuaishou.

Sheep…

Zilan Qian is a China-born undergraduate student at Barnard College majoring in Anthropology. She is interested in exploring different cultural phenomena, loves people-watching, and likes loitering in supermarkets and museums.

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China AI

AI Actress Ad Pulled, Baihaitun Disrupts Shanghai and Cicada Meme Bugs Huawei

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Welcome to China Trend Watch (Week 32–33 | 2026), where I bring you the latest trends, memes, and debates driving conversation across Chinese social media. I’m Manya Koetse, a sinologist specializing in Chinese digital culture.

 


 

🗞️ QUICK SCROLLS

 

📈 Is China’s AI price war over?After a period of offering as much as possible to users at relatively low prices, Chinese AI (LLM) companies are now raising their prices. Last week,…

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China Digital

How Chinese AI Videos Turned Foreigners into Villains

How viral AI videos turn racialized outsiders into threats and violent Chinese heroes into defenders of social order, China’s first nationally broadcast AI drama, and why a newspaper is being sold for 50 times its original price.

Manya Koetse

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Welcome to China Trend Watch (Week 30–33 | 2026), where I bring you the latest trends, memes, and debates driving conversation across Chinese social media. Subscribe here to receive future editions.

 

Over the past few weeks, a noteworthy amount of AI-related news has been trending on Chinese social media, which is reflected in this week’s edition.

Now that AI has entered every corner of media consumption and online life, related discussions seem…

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