People across social media began using this to show off things to do in Beijing and elsewhere.
This meme reveals that Baidu’s report has something for tourism industries as well. What would have happened if a foreign tourism agency had hopped on to this meme and showed it was paying attention?
We used this meme in a recent article for a logistics company whatsapp australia number asking “Who’s in Uzbekistan’s foreign trade industry?” It received 24 shares and 500+ likes, which is quite high for this kind of niche content, and valuable. In niche content for high-value sales, that’s like having a conference hall full of attendees.
Disenchantment
One of the other top terms found in Baidu’s word cloud for memes is the term 祛魅 or “disenchantment”.
This is a social science term originating with the German anthropologist Max Weber to describe how people moved from traditional society, where they saw an enchanted world before them, to the modern world, where everything was rationalized and beliefs were devalued.
Baidu didn’t go into depth about this meme’s history, and even a quick search on the website doesn’t draw up anything useful. The term has been used online in China for many years.
However, a number of articles can be found on Baidu from the past few months describing the term and how it illustrates peoples’ experiences with modern life. One of these comes from the People’s Daily, one of China’s top newspapers.
After all, China has been facing economic and geopolitical uncertainties since COVID 19. Most young people up until now have been used to growing up in a country always on the rise. Recent events may have allowed these individuals to experience a harder side of life for the first time.
Hard Crowd Control
This term comes from China’s gaming culture, specifically multiplayer online battle arena games where two teams compete against one another in a preset battlefield.
In these types of games, players are capable of putting effects on others to “control” them, meaning that the other player will be unable to use their character.
In English ‘gamerese’ we learned this is called “stunlocked”. The Chinese word, however, has jumped out of gamer culture into the broader Chinese Internet lexicon.
In recent months, the term “control” has become a popular meme word in China to describe when a particular video or article gains someone’s attention, usually emphasizing how much time a player spent viewing it.
玉米几
China is home to many different “topolects”, which means people in different regions can read the same language but speak it differently. It’s a little like a dialect, but given that people can read the same, it is not the exact same.
This meme comes from this environment.
A woman in China’s southern Yunnan province made a video that became popular online due to her pronunciation of the Chinese word for “1”. Instead of it sounding like the Mandarin “yi”, it sounded like “yu”.
This meme highlights something unique about China compared to a lot of Western countries: puns related to the way people speak in different regions of the country are very popular.