Besides the traditional kung fu, Peking Opera and books by ancient sages, several freshly minted Chinese pop-culture icons and trend-setting phenomena are also gaining traction worldwide.
They are changing the way China is perceived globally, 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: TikTok, a social media video app; Chinese sci-fi works; and wuxia, or novels and films about chivalrous swordsmen; among others, have been trending globally.
TikTok sweeps social media
Noor Afshan, 22, thought she would never have the chance to achieve fame or fortune after failing to qualify as a contestant in local reality shows several years ago.
Just for fun, the young Indian woman began posting videos of herself performing traditional Indian dances on TikTok - known as Douyin in China - a China-developed app launched in 2017 that allows users to create and share talent videos that are no longer than 15 seconds.
She posts every day and is now followed by 3.3 million people. She even makes around 50,000 Indian rupees ($723) a month by advertising for brands on the platform. The average per capita income in India is $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 and religion.
"It gives people a sense of identity and unity," she said.
TikTok was developed by Byte-Dance, a Chinese internet tech company, for markets outside of China. After WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook, it was the fourth most downloaded nongame app in 2018 worldwide. The number of downloads for TikTok hit 1 billion globally in February, according to app analytics site Sensor Tower.
People under age 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 because everyone can access the short videos he uploads.
Liu Cixin, author of Hugo Award-winning science fiction The Three-Body Trilogy, signs a book during a fan session in Istanbul, Turkey. HE CANLING/XINHUA
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 the best-selling literary fiction in the country.
Within a week, Hayakawa Publishing Corporation, the publisher of the book, ordered a 10th reprint, bringing the total number of printed copies to 86,000.
"I bought the Japanese version as soon as it was published," said Japanese reader Daichi Nakashima excitedly. "I started to read after work at six o'clock and I finished reading the whole book at 12 o'clock at night. It's really wonderful."
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, US 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 News Agency.
Liu is also the author of the short story The Wandering Earth, which was made into a global hit movie grossing over $700 million worldwide.
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. Chinese sci-fi "has the latest scientific knowledge and unique Chinese culture and history, which help produce a unique kind of science fiction that no other country has," Tachihara said.
Cover of
A Hero Born, the first book of Louis Cha's martial arts trilogy
The Legends of the Condor Heroes. [Photo provided to China Daily]
Novels charm readers
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 starts 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 by his pseudonym RWX.
"I think it (Chinese fantasy novels) offers a different point of view," said Zak Dychtwald, an author from California who has been engaged in China-US 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," Dychtwald said.
Those Chinese versions of fantasy novels are really fascinating for the young generation, 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 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 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 reality created by the authors.
