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For a long while, Steam had a lot of Chinese users, but they only had 1 game in their inventory: Dota 2

Hao Wu on three factors creating opportunities for indie games in China.

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Dan Grover’s roundup of Chinese mobile UI trends in 2015 is spot on. The things that feel particularly important are the amount of design around data vs. WiFi, the prevalence of bullet comments for video, and those amazing 12306 CAPTCHAs. I’ve never learned more while trying to prove I’m a human.

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Tea Leaf Nation did a quick writeup of a trending hashtag from Chinese New Year last week, #回家前回家后#. The hashtag encouraged people to post selfies before and after they went to their ancestral homes in the countryside to celebrate CNY and, in the process, “watch as Linda, Vivian, and Julia become Cuihua, Xiaohong, Yadan again.”

These selfie collages contain a wealth of information about the cultural codes of urban sophistication vs. rural simplicity while also revealing the self-awareness and deftness with which young people—especially the enormous number of first-generation urban migrants—navigate these facets of their identities.

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The number of Chinese students at U.S. high schools has ballooned in recent years. In 2005, fewer than 1,000 Chinese students were enrolled at U.S. secondary schools; by 2013, that number had surpassed 23,000.

Chinese Students Are Flooding U.S. Christian High Schools, ChinaFile

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Advanced Red Envelope Techniques

Red envelopes used to be a simple joy. On a festive occasion like Chinese New Year, people exchanged perfumed red-and-gold paper envelopes stuffed with cash to signify good will. For Chinese kids, it was like Trick or Treat but infinitely better—kneel in front of your elders in a New Year’s greeting, and you’d walk away with cold, hard cash to spend on whatever toy you wanted.

This is basically all you had to do.

With the digital age, red envelopes have taken a new form. Mobile payment giant Alipay rolled out digital red envelopes back in 2012, but they didn't really take off as a concept until 2014, when messaging app WeChat rolled out a playful digital red envelope feature that allowed people to send a fixed amount of cash to a group of friends who would randomly receive different portions of the pie. The feature, designed to get WeChat users to link their bank accounts to the app and become comfortable with sending money socially on the app, was MASSIVELY successful. WeChat's p2p digital red envelopes are still most popular around the New Year (both solar and lunar!), but they're now also used throughout the year as a way to show gratitude, celebrate, pay vendors, or just as a casually competitive game amongst friends. Alipay and Weibo rolled out a similar feature in 2015, greased by Alibaba founder Jack Ma personally handing out over 990,000 RMB in red envelopes on New Year's Eve.

In 2015, digital red envelopes became a major marketing promotion as well. WeChat partnered with CCTV’s official Chinese New Year Eve gala and tons of online vendors to encourage users to shake their phones (摇一摇) for a chance at over 100 million RMB worth of red envelopes in gift certificates and digital cash. As seen in the GIF above, lots of users got, uh, innovative with their red envelope techniques.

Traffic cops had to get in on it, too.

This year, Alipay became the official red envelope partner for CCTV’s Chinese New Year, and people were even more prepared for their shot at over 700 million RMB of red envelopes. Many Chinese internauts (sic) spent so much time maximizing their chances for red envelope success that people dubbed themselves 敬业福, or "full-time fortune workers." One of the minigames involved in Alipay's promotion encouraged people to tap a button as quickly as possible. Dissatisfied with physical limitations, some people took to engineering, modifying household tools and even children’s toys to improve their odds of winning money.

My favorite of the ones I’ve seen so far might be this sewing machine-turned-red envelope harvester that I saw floating around on WeChat. Two phones at the same time!

For Lunar New Year 2016, WeChat reported that its users exchanged over 8 billion red envelopes on a single day—at peak traffic, this looked like 490,000 red envelopes being exchanged every second. Alipay hasn’t released its numbers yet.

Seen an impressive red envelope harvesting technique not covered here?

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The Great Facebook Expression Bag War of 2016

If you’ve been paying attention to Kpop news recently, you may have heard about the incident last week wherein Chou Tzuyu, a Taiwanese member of the Kpop group Twice, stirred up some geopolitical drama by waving a Taiwanese flag during an online broadcast. Sensitivity around Taiwanese independence is always a heightened issue around the general election, so she found herself facing cancelled appearances and pulled endorsements until she (possibly with pressure from her label, JYP) apologized publicly in another online video published on Weibo (think Chinese Twitter).

This is already pretty complicated, but the story is just beginning. Like Twitter, Weibo can be a bit mobby, and so many of the responses to Chou’s apology expressed disbelief about the sincerity of the act and demanded more repercussions for JYP. One of the people who joined in on the fun was Lin Gengxin, a Chinese actor, who reposted the video with the comment: “The apology was so sudden that she didn't even have time to memorize her script," a reference to the fact that Chou is reading from a letter. 

This is far from the rudest comment on Weibo, but Lin’s high-profile made him a target for Taiwanese people angry about the apology in general. They started taking to his Facebook page—remember, Facebook is blocked in mainland China, but not Taiwan—to shame him for making fun of a 16 year old girl. When Weibo users caught wind of this, they became outraged as well and issued rallying calls to “vault over the Great Firewall en masse and defend the honor of our fellow countryman”. The result, probably best witnessed in the 58k+ comments on one of Lin’s in-costume Facebook selfies, is an epic flame war riddled with insulting image macros and internet yelling that has been termed “The Great Facebook Expression Bag* War” by the Chinese internet. 

(* 表情包, literally “Expression Bag”, refers to one’s collection of image macros gathered from around the internet for use on Weibo and WeChat—like a reaction GIF folder, except GIFs aren’t as big on the Chinese internet.)

According to Chinese bloggers and posters, the whole incident has been an impressive show of strength for Chinese “expression bags”—blog posts and status updates alike marveled that the Taiwanese were so behind on this core internet skill. But this assertion showcases the subtle cultural divides between the two linguistically-compatible countries—the mainland Chinese posters are expecting their Taiwanese counterparts to understand and participate in image macro microtrends developed on platforms like Weibo and WeChat, which Taiwanese users just don’t use.

A macro from Team Taiwan starring new president Tsai Ying-wen: “Quick, look! It’s a dumbass!”

Team China image macro with a “Expression Bag Made for Chinese People” watermark, emphasizing China’s stance that Taiwan is a province.

An exchange between the two sides: top, a Taiwanese poster mocks the low-production-value of Chinese image macros by photoshopping “Made in Taiwan” onto his own selfie; below, a Chinese user photoshops his face into another image macro with the caption “Let dad teach you: expression bags aren’t made like that.”

My favorite story from the war, though, shows that the increased dialogue may be a good thing despite the trollful nature of the exchange. A bunch of Chinese users looking for the Facebook page for Taiwanese media outlet “Sanli News” accidentally stumbled onto a different FB page for "Sanli Entertainment News”. Some of these lost souls fell in love with the Taiwanese social media editor for that page, who helpfully tried to direct and console them.

“First time vaulting over the Firewall and I get lost” “There’s a first time for everyone.”

tl;dr Actor makes fun of Kpop star who waved a flag, Chinese users circumvent a government-imposed firewall by the thousands to perform patriotism via image macros on Facebook.

Editor’s note: While we sympathize with how fun it can be to take part in a massive, meaningless internet fight like this, Multi Entry’s opinion about international politics in general is that 1) all borders are oppressive, 2) colonialism’s legacy on the world is a traumatic one, and 3) war is a garbage way to spend money. 

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Of the people making Chinese trap with a sense of humor—and yes, there are multiple—狠毒男孩 (Very Poisonous Boy) is the one who pulls it off the best. This song is his ode to being rich and 兰州拉面 (Lanzhou Pulled Noodles), a quick & extremely cheap meal served in ubiquitous eateries often run by Chinese Muslims. The fact that the MV for this song is just a few text and image overlays on top of a G-Dragon video really sells it.