As “Pokemon Go” sweeps across the world, leaving in its wake hordes of screen-glued players roaming the streets in search of the franchise’s cartoon creatures superimposed onto real-life scenes on their phones, those eager to get poaching in China have been left wanting.

The app, made by Californian-based software developer Niantic, relies on Google’s mapping servers, which means that Chinese users need to use special software to breach the country’s Great Firewall. Even then, however, players are reporting maps void of a single creature, after the game blocked vast swathes of Asia following an overload of traffic last week.

Players in areas of Liaoning province and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which lie in the northeastern and northwestern extremities of China, respectively, have reported success in the game, leading some players to surmise that developers’ attempts to block access to the game according to geographical position were not sufficiently thorough. A map circulating on microblog Weibo platform shows a rectangular zone stretching across much of Asia and parts of northern Africa, purportedly indicating where players would be met with terrains void of Pokemon. The post, uploaded by a user who described himself as an application tester at a games studio, had been shared almost 13,000 times as of Monday.

Guo Fanjun, a 23-year-old player in Liaoning’s provincial capital Shenyang, told Sixth Tone he had been playing “Pokemon Go” since it became available on July 6. Using virtual private network, or VPN, software to hurdle the firewall, Guo said the user experience was good enough, apart from issues of precision with the game’s global positioning system.

“It’s so exciting encountering a new monster I haven’t seen before,” Guo said. “I’ll get nervous that they’ll run away or that I’ll run out of Poke balls,” referring to the in-game items needed to capture the game’s elusive creatures. According to the IT professional, most of Shenyang’s Pokemon reside between parks, shopping areas, and university campuses.

Han Yiyi, a 24-year-old electrical engineer from Xinjiang, told Sixth Tone she was able to play the game freely, and that most of her quarry had been living either in her house or in local parks.

For those unlucky enough to live outside the Pokemon havens of Liaoning and Xinjiang, decrypted versions of the game that bypass its geographical limitations may provide the answer. Nineteen-year-old Li Xinyi from the city of Chongqing in southwestern China told Sixth Tone that a decrypted version of the game given to her by a friend had “saved” her. 

The Pokemon fan, who is studying in the U.S., said that since downloading the decrypted version Sunday evening, she had successfully captured around 30 specimens. “I’m currently at the airport in Beijing,” she told Sixth Tone by text message, “where I’ve caught between 15 and 20. All of them here are bats.”

“[The decrypted version] is not too stable, but it works just fine,” Li said.

Frustration among those eager to enter the augmented reality of “Pokemon Go” has been exacerbated by an inferior Chinese knock-off game called “City Fairies: GO.” In Chinese, the word for fairy, or spirit — jingling— is also used in mainland China in the official translation of Pokemon.

“City Fairies: GO,” released by Shenzhen Tanyu Interactive Science Culture Co. Ltd., entered the market in March, at a time when Niantic, the developer of “Pokemon Go,” announced that it was seeking volunteers to test the game environment of a new augmented reality game based on the Pokemon franchise.

“City Fairies: GO” provides users with virtual creatures that can be conquered and captured according to the player’s position. Unlike “Pokemon Go,” however, scenery is not rendered according to real locations.

The knockoff game is currently the number one free download in Apple’s app store in China, a statistic that may be explained by those mistaking it for “Pokemon Go.” “I thought I was playing ‘Pokemon Go,’” lamented one user on their Weibo microblog. “After a few minutes I realized I’d downloaded ‘City Fairies: GO,’ the legendary China-made Pokemon. Awkward.”

Hopes for unrestricted access to “Pokemon Go” and its augmented reality were ignited Monday when users reported that the geographical block had been lifted, only to find that it had been reinstated a short time after.

Additional reporting by Yin Yijun. With contributions from Li You.

(Header image: Giant Pokemon balloons float down Sixth Avenue during the Macy’s 84th Annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York, Nov. 25, 2010. Ben Hider/Getty Images/VCG)

Li Zijian, a 19-year-old university student living in Shanghai, stares intently at his iPhone during a break from packing up his dorm room for the long summer holiday. He’s heading back to his hometown in central China soon — a six-hour high-speed train journey away — to spend two months with his family.

“Li Zijian” is not his real name. Like most young gay Chinese, Li’s relatives, and many of his friends, don’t know about his sexuality, and for now he’d like to keep it that way. But while he watches one of his favorite live broadcasters on the Chinese app Blued — the most popular gay social networking app on the planet, with 22 million members — he’s just one of many.

Li is watching a 19-year-old from Chongqing — a city of hills and skyscrapers in China’s southwest — who goes by the name “Gobeing” on Blued. He has around 15,000 fans, and currently more than 1,000 of them are watching him. The monkeys on his blue T-shirt are half-covered by a white blanket, despite the summer heat. Awkward moments of silence intersperse his responses to viewers’ comments and questions, which include what he ate today, requests to sing, interrogations about what kind of men he likes, and some that are a little more ribald.

In a society where gay men are almost invisible — just 15 percent of Chinese LGBT individuals have come out to their families — and gay characters and themes in popular culture are subject to censorship, live streaming on gay social media apps began at the start of 2016 and became instantly popular, providing much-needed visibility, but also padding the pockets of gay businesspeople.

“The viewer comments are sometimes really gross,” Li says without taking his eyes off the screen — it’s hard to keep up with what people are saying because their comments scroll by so fast. “Reading these messages is just as important as hearing the broadcaster’s responses” Li says.

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They include “Are you a top or a bottom?” and “Wow, fresh meat!” and perhaps the most common of all: “Take off your clothes!” But that’s not going to happen, and Gobeing deftly avoids such requests. These live streams might seem free and fluid, but they are strictly regulated: As with all live streaming apps in China, as soon as a broadcaster shows any inclination toward explicit sexual content he or she will likely be cut off.

But this level of regulation and censorship isn’t just limited to live-streaming apps. Just this year the China Television Drama Production Industry Association released censorship guidelines for television producers which stated that homosexuality was “abnormal sexual behavior” and unfit for inclusion in TV drama, and a popular gay internet series called “Addicted” was suddenly deleted from the web without explanation. 

The clampdown on gay content has coincided, though, with the explosive rise of live streaming, leading ordinary gay people in China to gain thousands of fans simply by downloading an app and broadcasting their lives, through their smartphones, to viewers across China. 

Kyle He, 21, of Hunan province in central China has just graduated with a civil engineering degree and is about to start work. When he first acknowledged he was gay, He says he plundered the internet in search of others who were in similar situations.

Now with Blued’s live-streaming platform, He says it is much easier to find people with the same life experiences. “It helps people who have just realized their identity as gay,” he says. “They can see other gays who enjoy their life and live happily, which will give them lots of courage and confidence.”

But that hasn’t helped He to come out to his family, which is why he declines to give his full Chinese name.

“My family is a more traditional Chinese family, and they think that boys need to pass on the family name, continue the so-called family bloodline,” He says. “So I’m facing the question of marriage.”

He is not alone. The United Nations Development Programme’s recently released report, “Being LGBT in China,” paints a bleak picture. A majority of the LGBT respondents to the survey said they were forced — or had faced pressure — to marry against their will. Some gay men and lesbian women enter into heterosexual marriages and have children in order to appease their families, although more and more are vowing not to do so.

Jie Lian, a 19-year-old from Beijing, tells Sixth Tone that he, too, likes watching Blued’s live broadcasts because he doesn’t have any interactions with gay people in the non-virtual world.

“The audience will have discussions while the broadcaster talks, so I can get a feel for what they are thinking,” Jie says. “But this kind of exchange of ideas only happens for me on social media and not in real life.”

Like many users, Jie spends real money on virtual gifts that he sends to broadcasters, who can then exchange the presents for real money at the end of the month, after Blued has taken a cut. Sending virtual gifts — cars, flowers, beer, and food — increases the chance of a broadcaster replying to viewer questions or acknowledging presents by mentioning the gift-giver’s name.

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Wang Shuaishuai, a 26-year-old Ph.D. candidate at Amsterdam University who has been studying Blued for his thesis, says that live broadcasts have quickly become Blued’s primary income. He calls this phenomenon “the capitalization of homosexuality in China.”

Wang says that gay business is overshadowing queer politics in China, and he believes that Blued’s live-streaming success is not a result of tightening censorship in other spheres. “Rather, these live streams are a new space that has been carved by gay Chinese businessmen who have made it possible for new manifestations of gay culture to surface.”

Wang says that for the cosmopolitan middle class, live streaming is merely a site of consumption and a way to satisfy their commercial tastes, although he agrees that Blued’s live streaming might be valuable for young gay Chinese in smaller towns and cities, who are dependent on social apps to compensate for their otherwise weak bonds with gay people.

Fan Popo, the queer activist and independent filmmaker from Beijing, echoes Wang’s statement. “I always say that the internet means more democracy in China,” he tells Sixth Tone. “Before, if you were from a really poor area, or from a really small city, you couldn’t find your community. But with live streaming on Blued, you feel like someone’s in front of you, like they’re with you.” 

Fan, 31, believes that the “very few” mainstream depictions of gay and lesbian people in China that make it onto our screens are often heavily riddled with stereotypes. “Usually writers and producers think gay men must be very sissy, and lesbians are all butch,” he says.

According to Fan, live streaming on Blued has offered a more diverse picture of gay people in the media, a picture that’s less likely to be constrained by stereotypes. “I think there are many different types of people live-streaming on Blued, from older to younger,” he says. “There is lots of diversity.”

Author and scholar Olivia Khoo of Australia’s Monash University, whose research focuses on screen media and sexuality in the Asia-Pacific region, tells Sixth Tone that while it’s difficult to avoid stereotypes in popular culture, there are so many young LGBT people growing up in the West who turn to such representations as role models. 

The popularity of live streaming in China, particularly on Blued, could very well offer young gay men in China an alternative to the representations they encounter in the mainstream media, Khoo says, adding that “The ‘liveness’ and authenticity of these broadcasts provide a realness to representations of LGBT people and their everyday experiences.”

Back in Li’s Shanghai dorm, one of his roommates has just walked in. Li suddenly closes Gobeing’s Blued broadcast and stealthily switches to another app. His roommates don’t know he is gay.

Li drops his phone next to some T-shirts and other clothes strewn about his bed. He begins to fold them. 

“I really should get back to packing my stuff anyway,” Li says, quietly. “I’ll have plenty of time to watch this stuff during summer vacation.”

Additional reporting by Yin Yijun and Zhou Yinan.

(Header image: Svetikd/E+/VCG)

The Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe is creating a furor among Chinese opera lovers. This year alone we will put on almost 300 performances, both in China and abroad. Ten years ago, we would have been lucky to hit 30.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Tang Xianzu — a renowned Chinese playwright. He is famous for his contributions to kunqu, an ancient and revered style of Chinese opera, and one which our troupe specializes in. The opera originated in eastern China in the 16th century, but began declining in popularity two centuries later with the rise of the more internationally famous Peking opera. Many elements of Peking opera were heavily influenced by kunqu. 

I am 43 years old this year. I began studying kunqu in a traditional opera school in Shanghai at 13 and joined the local troupe at 22. My life was simple then, and basically only involved sleeping, eating, training, and performing.

Shanghai was dazzling and fashionable, but much more expensive than my home city of Wenzhou, in eastern China’s Zhejiang province. My monthly salary was less than half what the average citizen made. At 300 yuan (around $36 at the time), us young performers simply couldn’t keep up with the costs of the city.

I ended up spending my days at the opera house and my evenings waiting tables. The routine was brutal, but even worse was the fact that when we finally got around to performing, our audiences were almost nonexistent.

The most memorable instances of this occurred at one of our performances in 1995. Our troupe had nearly 100 people on standby — actors, band members, dancers, costume stylists, and backstage staff — but when the curtains were flung open, we found ourselves face-to-face with no more than five people. One of them later told us that he had only come in since our theater was air-conditioned and it was boiling outside.

We knew there was no way to survive like this. We would have to proactively reach out to our potential audience, actively promote ourselves, and spread the word of kunqu.

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Kunqu is a literary and elegant classical art form, meaning we needed to find audience who would appreciate high culture. Our first inclination was to focus on college students. Shanghai has a myriad of easily accessible universities, and we thought that we’d be an instant hit if we could gain access and put on some kunqu classics for the students. Sadly, this was not to be the case.

The universities were very cooperative. A lot of the teachers even induced their classes to watch us through incentives like offering course credit. The students didn’t buy it. Some tried to run away; the teachers had to lock the doors of the theater to keep them inside.

It left us in an awkward position. We sympathized with the students. If they didn’t enjoy it, why bother?

We decided to change our approach. The goal remained the same — to engage with the younger generation — but instead of leading with the classics, we decided to make our performances more easily digestible. We began including Q&A sessions and encouraged audience participation in our shows to try and get the students more excited about the ancient art.

The response from students was overwhelmingly positive and we began branching out. For Valentine’s Day we put on a special performance showcasing flirting scenes from kunqu classics. We also displayed posters of us at Xintiandi and The Bund — some of Shanghai’s trendiest areas — to show that kunqu was fashionable as well as traditional.

We exhausted ourselves trying to attract audiences in creative new ways, and it worked. To popularize the art form, we had to bring it into the present. Kunqu opera kept its soul — we just repackaged it.

One thing that I’ve realized over time is that kunqu does not belong only to the actors, but to all Chinese. At a recent performance in Guangzhou, in southern China’s Guangdong province, people flew in from cities all across China to see us perform.

Even today we strive for innovation. At a performance last month we hired a virtual reality team to record four of our shows, which will be produced into the first virtual reality kunqu in China. We want to see if immersive multimedia can bring new artistic possibilities to an ancient opera form.

Tang Xianzu once wrote: “How do you know the beauty of spring without stepping into the gardens?” We believe kunqu to be underappreciated, beautiful art. In a rapidly developing world, it is important to take a step back and preserve ancient cultural heritages.

(Header image: An audience watches ‘The Peony Pavilion,’ one of Tang Xianzu’s ‘kunqu’ operas, at Nanjing Museum, Jiangsu province, May 18, 2016. Wang Luxian/VCG)

In China, shamate is a subculture characterized by glam rock outfits and elaborate hairstyles. Most of the participants of this culture are young, rebellious migrant workers who have come to Chinese metropolises from rural areas.

Shamate is a transliteration of “smart,” which pokes fun at the rebellion of shamate enthusiasts against society — they neither care about academic achievement, nor about looking formal. The term in Chinese was coined by Mai Rox in Hong Kong in 1999, who began posting photos of herself online with eccentric hairstyles and dress. Her style was influenced by the visual and glam rock bands of the 1980s, cosplay culture from Japan, and Korean popular culture.

Around 2000, shamate culture began spreading through mainland China’s entertainment industry after enjoying immense popularity in Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. China’s first juvenile rock band “The Flowers,” founded in 1998, dressed in a shamate style.

However, over the next decade this style would devolve from an urban fashion trend to an underclass subculture as it began to be picked up by young migrant workers, who were searching for their own unique identities and trying to carve out their own niches in their new cities. In April 2011, Wowkie Zhang, the original lead singer of “The Flowers,” posted a picture of a boy decked out in shamate garb on microblogging platform Weibo, mocking him for shedding his rustic roots and turning toward subculture.

The derision of the once-fashionable culture would continue. In November 2013, a Chinese net user posted photos of a young man sporting an afro, with the caption “a shamate caught on the street,” and commenting that the hairstyle looked like “the molecular structure of a virus.”

In April 2014, the encyclopedic video-website feidieshuo.com posted a video, “The Sorrow of Shamate Youth,” which explained how to spot a shamate enthusiast: they were born in a rural area in the 1990s, at most finished high school or vocational school, generally work in heavy industry in towns or suburbs of big cities, try to recreate urban fashion through cheap imitations, listen to mainstream music, spend a lot of time in internet bars, and use “Martian language” — a complicated online Chinese script — on the internet.

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The media chimed in as well. A widely circulated article posted in April 2013 by South Reviews, a subsidiary of the Guangzhou Daily News Group, concluded that the shamate youth “due to limited education, income, poor living conditions, and a dim future, lack the ability or awareness to improve themselves in culture and knowledge. They are representative of the incomplete urbanization and modernization of individuals and groups.” Consequently, shamate’s prestige as an urban fashion trend dropped and it became an underclass style.

In “The Sorrow of Shamate Youth,” a voiceover asserts: “They are from the countryside, and make a living in the cities; they don’t have wealth or knowledge, the only thing they own is a Qzone elite title.” Qzone is a social networking platform popular with teenagers, and is in large part responsible for the popularization among the underclasses of shamate.

The platform is much more popular among rural migrant workers than among populations who grew up in urban areas. According to data collected by a hacker in July 2015, that Qzone users are primarily located in the provinces of Guangdong, Hunan, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Henan — all provinces famous for heavy industry. In the big international cities, like Shanghai or Beijing, WeChat — another social messaging app — is much more popular.

Qzone has a ranking system that divides its users into a hierarchy. To move up the pecking order, a user is required to be online for long periods of time, buy and spend Q Coins — equal to 1 yuan ($0.15), and update their Qzone profile daily. The higher the user rank, the more features are unlocked. 

It was on this platform where users fiercely compete to be unique that shamate, largely considered in the early 2000s to be a fashionable urban trend, took off. Special group pages for shamate enthusiasts began appearing, some including more than 10,000 members.

Many of these groups had strict membership requirements. Qzone users were asked to proactively participate in group-related activities, spend large amounts of time online each day, and update their profiles with new shamate videos and photos. The founders of the groups often ran them like feudal lords, exerting absolute authority.

The online shamate communities expanded rapidly, and the once-urban fashionable subculture became overrun with members of the lower classes. A strong sense of community was formed online, and strengthened through offline meet ups with other shamate enthusiasts.

Consequently, shamate in China — which drew its influence from various foreign cultures — was transformed from a desired urban fashion-trend to a mocked subculture.

(Header image: Two men with ‘shamate’ haircuts at the Guangzhou Railway Station, Guangdong province, Feb. 13, 2015. Hu Yu/VCG)

One of my most memorable experiences with the Chinese animation industry occurred my first day on-the-job. It was the summer of 2014 and I was at an animation production facility in Suzhou, in eastern China’s Jiangsu province.

I had been brought to China to work as one of the directors on an upcoming film “Ping Pong Rabbit,” which was being produced by a Shanghai-based animation company, Mili Pictures. Some of the main characters of the film had already been designed by a team under my direction back in Los Angeles, but there was still a lot of work that needed to be done.

I like to get to know the artists I will be working with before beginning a project, so I asked to meet with the group who would be designing and working on the backgrounds, the sets, the props, and the remaining characters before starting production.

One of the first things that struck me was how young the staff at Mili were. Many of them were barely into their 20s and very few were over 30. This was completely unlike my experience at large animation studios in the United States, which are typically filled with staff members who have been in the industry for 20, 30, and sometimes even 40 years.

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I asked to see their portfolios to try and get a sense of how capable they were as artists and designers. I wanted to see the stuff they were proud of — what they carry around to show to prying eyes like mine. I’ve always thought that it’s really important to become familiar with the personalities and skills of the artists that you’re working with to get a sense of their abilities.

They showed me their work and blew me away; these were amazing artists! I’ve seen my fair share of great paintings and sculptures — I actually went to one of the top art schools in the world, the Rhode Island School of Design, but the young artists I met that day in Suzhou were as good as anyone I had met in Rhode Island.

I felt inspired. It became immediately clear to me that China’s animation industry, stuffed with young and eager talent, was poised to do great things.

Since then, I have had my expectations exceeded time and time again in China. The young people I have encountered have amazing energy, talent, and are hungry to learn. They’re open-minded and just want to absorb as much as they can. I love their attitudes.

The popularity of the animation industry in China is exploding. In the summer of 2014, Mili’s “Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn” was released. In it, a group of warriors travel through a fantasy realm to kill an evil dragon.

At the time, many Chinese film critics considered it to be the best locally produced computer-generated imagery (CGI) movie to date. With a tiny budget of around $22 million, Mili did an excellent job. To compare, “How to Train Your Dragon 2,” also released in 2014, but by DreamWorks Animation, had a budget of around $145 million.

Although the box office earnings for “Dragon Nest” were disappointing, considering it was Mili’s and the entire production cast’s first feature — including Song Yuefeng, the director I am currently working with on Ping Pong Rabbit — it was a remarkable achievement.

One year later the animated movie “Monkey King: Hero is Back,” based on the Chinese literary classic “Journey to the West,” was released by a production company in Beijing. Grossing $100 million within three weeks of its release, the movie broke records as the highest-grossing China-produced animated film, and critics began calling “Monkey King” the best Chinese CGI film of all time. The local industry is thriving and only seems to be gaining momentum.

The only place where I think improvement could happen is in animation, specifically in the way in which the characters move. An animator has to be an actor — they have to intimately understand facial expressions and posture to best express the emotion of the character.

Many of the young Chinese animators I’ve worked with were originally interested in computer gaming. They loved video games and were technically savvy, so they thought they would try their hands in animation. But storytelling is a skill in itself — it requires much more than just technical knowledge of how to animate.

Empathy and involvement with the characters onscreen is what makes an audience emotional. It’s what makes us really love a movie. This is something I stress to the young animators at Mili every day — you can’t simply take a character from point A to point B, but instead you have to understand the emotion of the scene and find the best way to express it.

When I think about Chinese animation, I always think back to that first day, when I saw those amazing portfolios. It’s only a matter of time before Chinese animated movies become as popular around the world as movies from Pixar and Dreamworks.

(Header image: A promotional poster for ‘Ping Pong Rabbit.’ Courtesy of Mike Johnson)

One of the world’s most popular competitive pastimes will be missing from the Olympic Games, which will begin Friday: e-sports. But if you ask industry insiders in China, computer gaming should one day level up into an Olympic sport.

The International e-Sports Federation (IeSF), a competitive gaming advocacy group, submitted an application to the International Olympic Committee to have e-sports recognized earlier this year.

Despite ever-growing audiences and record-breaking prize pools in international competitions, few e-sports companies have managed to find a profitable business model. It’s not all about the money, though.

E-sports would create yet another space for China to flex its athletic acumen on the world’s Olympic stage. The country’s talent pool is vast: According to the Ministry of Culture, of the country’s 670 million web users, 370 million are gamers.

At the Global e-Sports Executive Summit held in Shanghai on Tuesday, IeSF’s secretary-general Alex Lim was reportedly cautious about the bid’s chances. Other industry insiders feel the same.

Yu “Misaya” Jingxi, a former captain of one of the country’s first e-sports clubs, “WE,” believes getting Olympic recognition is a distant possibility. “We need more support from the government and the e-sports community first,” the 23-year-old told Sixth Tone, adding that Chinese players are gradually becoming more professional.

China’s sports authority formally recognized e-sports in 2003, but Ding Dong, director of the State General Administration of Sports’ e-sports department, doesn’t expect the games to make it out of the country’s smoky internet cafes and into the Olympics any time soon. “There’s no possibility that e-sports will be in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics,” he told Sixth Tone. “It’s all just hype.”

But should the request be approved, it would do more than just lend credibility to “video games-as-sports” arguments. Chinese companies could benefit from admittance, and there would be medals to be won, too: In 2014, a Chinese team took home 33 million yuan in prize money for winning the “Defense of the Ancients 2” world championship. Another Chinese team placed second.

Alibaba, China’s e-commerce giant, recently inked a partnership agreement with IeSF. Alibaba Sports Group CEO Zhang Dazhong said in a written statement following the deal that “The IeSF has been committed to promoting e-sports moving into the mainstream, including by pushing them into the Olympic Games, which is in keeping with our ideals.”

Alibaba is quickly establishing itself as the industry’s deep-pocketed patron. With the support of the IeSF, the company is planning to spend 988 billion yuan ($149 million) on a network of gaming arenas and tournaments to nurture the ambitions of China’s growing gaming fan base.

Rival tech giant Tencent, owner of the company behind the wildly popular game “League of Legends,” looks to be moving in a similar direction. With investments in a handful of other competitive games, the company is already running its own tournaments and betting big on the industry’s success.

For now, China’s gamers and industry stakeholders can sit back and enjoy 2016’s games in Rio de Janeiro. IeSF’s bid is in the International Olympic Committee’s hands, and they’ve said they won’t begin reviewing the application until December.

Additional reporting by Wang Lianzhang. With contributions from Li Xueqing.

(Header image: E-sports teams compete with each other during a League of Legends League Championship Series tournament at the Riot Games studio, Los Angeles, California, U.S., April 4, 2015. Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Polaris/VCG)

A video making fun of socially awkward situations has racked up thousands of likes and shares on Chinese social media since it was posted last week. But some net users were quick to point out the whole skit was suspiciously similar to an episode of U.S. show Saturday Night Live.

“Listen to your heart and don’t compromise!” is the text that jumps out at the start of the 4-minute clip. Six scenarios taken from Chinese daily life follow. A young man is asked to stand up for an elderly lady on the bus, another man is urged to drink a glass of alcohol with a friend, and another is asked for money by a beggar.

The twist is that, instead of reacting polity as one would be expected to, the protagonists bluntly speak their minds: No, I won’t stand up, I won’t drink, and I won’t give you any money. After every scene, the characters break out in song and dance. “This is the feeling of freedom,” the lyrics go.

The clip is part of an episode of web TV show “Yes Boss,” which started airing in 2013 and is coproduced by UniMedia and Youku Tudou, one of China’s biggest video websites. The show this year aired a second season, and every episode has on average been viewed some 10 million times.

The scene aims to showcase Chinese social conflicts and traditional values, Ke Da, the show’s main writer, told Sixth Tone. Respecting the old is regarded as a virtue in China, and when someone offers to drink, you drink. But in the clip the opposite happens.

Net users were quick to share and like the video on microblog platform Weibo, lamenting they wish they dared speak their mind in similar situations. “I was just talking about how annoying this kind of emotional blackmailing is,” wrote one user. “Now that I’ve watched this video I feel great.”

But other users pointed out they thought the clip was almost a near copy from a 2015 sketch by Saturday Night Live (SNL), a popular comedy program from the U.S. All that was changed were the language and the situations — in the SNL clip one character refuses to share her phone number with an old acquaintance, and another calls out a friend for not paying enough when splitting the bill.

In both shows, the blunt words are followed by slow-motion shots of the protagonists jumping from excitement and joining each other in dance, reveling in their freedom from social conventions. Both skits carry the same message. In the SNL version, the song’s lyrics go “Say what you wanna say, let the words fall out.” In the end of both videos all the characters come together, cheering and laughing.

“Yes, I have watched the show,” Ke said when asked about the similarities between “Yes Boss” and SNL. “It is the model we consulted.” He added that they had wanted to put the story in a Chinese context. “You can’t say it is a rip-off just because of some similarities in their story structure,” he explained.

Opinions on Weibo were less sanguine. One user, who pointed out where people could watch the SNL episode, wrote“I don’t even have to explain. Everyone just watch and you’ll see.”

(Header image: A screenshot from the funny video shows a man counting money in front of a beggar.)

It isn’t uncommon for a hit movie to popularize a song, but in China, a song sometimes results in a movie production. 

This January, news came that the hit “Miss Dong” by Chinese singer Song Dongye will be adapted into a feature film in 2017. The five-minute song is a tribute to Miss Dong, who looks sad but guarded, and “is not a woman without a story.”

The song’s overwhelming popularity among fans has incentivized investors to adapt this song.

The song gained more than 700,000 hits when it was first uploaded to Douban Music, an online music platform, in 2012. But it wasn’t until 2013, when another singer, Zuo Li, performed the song on “Super Boy” — a televised singing contest — that “Miss Dong” became a household name.

The line “I fell in love with a wild horse, but have no grasslands at my home” struck a particular chord with fans who have suffered through heartbreak and unrequited love. It also led one celebrity, Taiwan’s Tao Jingying, to remark that “it reminds me of my first love.”

And now the song will be adapted into a feature film. The main reason for this is that Chinese investors are looking for anything — including music — to make into a movie.

But what can we expect from this song-to-film adaptation? According to a press release by China’s media supervision body, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television, the movie will depict a romance between a celebrity and a magazine editor. Although there is a huge gap in their income and social status, the couple manages to overcome their differences and end up together.

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It sounds like another cliche Cinderella story, but plotlines don’t really matter to investors — they know the power of fan enthusiasm. Their confidence is further bolstered by the precedent of success that has already been established in the industry — song-to-film adaptations are cheap and easy to make, and gross huge box-office sales. 

Looking to music for inspiration in the movie-making industry is quickly becoming a trend. In 2014, the song “My Old Classmate,” a popular folk song from 1995 about a young man’s crush on his classmate, made its way to the big screen. Gao Xiaosong, the song’s composer, was brought on as executive producer of the movie. With a recognizable name and a largely nostalgic fan base, the movie went on to gross 456 million yuan (about $68.7 million) — not too shabby, considering the movie only cost 20 million yuan to make.

Last year, “Forever Young,” a movie about a university romance and based on a 2004 song, made 379 million yuan. The terrible reviews from critic did nothing to halt sales.

In all of these adaptations, the lyrics of the original song serve as story prompts, and are loosely tied in to the plot of the movie. What really draws audiences in is the familiarity of the title.

However, while the trend has only recently been gaining popularity in China, it is by no means the world’s first foray into song-to-film adaptations. The 1981 Hollywood movie “Coward of the County” is based on the song of the same name first recorded by Kenny Rogers. “Pretty Baby,” released in 1978, is a film inspired by a Tony Jackson single. 

But songs may only be the tip of the iceberg. As Gao Xiaosong told the Beijing News in 2015, “When the film industry grows this rapidly, anything that has the ability to inflame millions of hearts has the possibility of making it on the big screen.” This highlights the problems of China’s movie landscape: It is an industry ruled by cash cow-seeking investors who have no regard for artistic integrity.

Perhaps there are simply not enough creative screenplays to choose from, or perhaps investing in easy-to-make movies is a quick way to turn a profit, but at stake are filmmakers’ reputations and fan enthusiasm. Once they’re gone, it will hard to win them back.

(Header image: Michael Kai/Corbis/VCG)

Late last month the stunning flop “League of Gods” was released unto the world, adding to what has thus far been a miserable summer at the Chinese box office.

In July, Chinese films brought in less than 4.34 billion yuan (about $653 million) in box office sales, down by 1.2 billion yuan from the same period last year. For the Chinese movie market, which has been growing at a breakneck speed in recent years, it is the second time in 2016 that ticket sales have slumped — the first time being in April.

Strictly speaking, summer sales still have another several weeks to recover, but if the 5 billion yuan brought in by the industry last August is anything to go by, such a recovery seems impossible — August sales are typically lower than July.

“League of Gods” was universally panned by critics upon its July 29 release. On Douban, China’s largest user review website, the film has been given 3.4 out of 10 stars, making it one of Douban’s worst reviewed movies. Although “League of Gods” is outfitted with celebrities from some of the most critically acclaimed movies of the last few years, it is nonetheless doomed to the bargain bin.

The awful quality of domestically produced movies has become an issue that can no longer be ignored. From the failed comedy-western “For a Few Bullets,” released in July, to romantic-comedy flop No-One’s Life Is Easy (So I Married an Anti-Fan), it feels like all summer 2016 has produced are movies catering to a love for celebrity culture with little regard to content.

It would seem that rapid growth of the film industry in recent years has made domestic producers complacent with their own success, giving them blind faith in their own abilities and unbridled optimism about the state of the market. And yet a large part of this bubble is due to a practice known as “ticket supplementing,” where production companies use various practices to distort box office sales.

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In March state news agency Xinhua reported that the distributor Dayinmu Film Distribution had fabricated thousands of screenings of “Ip Man 3” and had bought up a large number of tickets to inflate box office sales. This practice has become rampant in the Chinese film industry and offers one explanation for how tickets sales managed to increase by nearly 50 percent in 2015 from 2014. As the president of Beijing Enlight Media Co. Ltd., Wang Changtian, acknowledged in a press conference in July, the lower-than-expected returns from “Big Fish and Begonia” were largely due to ticket supplementing.

Falsifying box office sales is a tactic used by some film distributors to make a movie seem more popular than it is, thus inclining audiences to come and see it. This creates a bubble and makes it hard to tell how well the industry is doing.

During the Beijing International Film Festival in April, Li Dong, the associate director of the Film Special Funds — an office of China’s media censorship body, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television — made a similar statement: “The high box office returns enjoyed by Chinese movies last year is almost without exception down to exaggerated box office revenues.” His statement was later strongly rebuked by his boss, Jiang Tao, who said: “This is an extremely inaccurate thing to say, and an irresponsible claim to make.”

Thus, the question is: Have industry managers misread genuine market numbers, or deliberately disseminated false information?

After Dayinmu was strongly criticized for the “Ip Man 3” incident, the practice of ticket supplementing seemingly disappeared overnight. This was a major catalyst in the slowing down of the movie market over the summer — as the ticket sales bubble bursts and ticket supplementing is becoming a thing of the past, the paltry popularity of low-quality domestic films has been laid bare for all to see.

But perhaps a slowdown in the Chinese film market isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It will allow people to look squarely at industry shortcomings, and brush aside fanciful, short-term dreams in favor of setting more realistic targets, hopefully moving the industry into a new phase of growth. The path ahead is always there; we just need to find the right way in.

(Header image: People watch a film at a cinema in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, Nov. 24, 2013. Chen Jianyu/VCG)

“Alpha Flow” has quickly gained popularity in the weiqi community since the five-game match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol in March. Weiqi, also known as “Go” in English, is a two-person board game originating in East Asia.

Lee Sedol is one of the world’s best Go players. In March, he lost to the computer program AlphaGo in a widely publicized series of games. This was the first loss of a human of Lee’s ranking to a computer program.

“Flow” is a common term in Go, similar to a line in chess. It refers to a strategy of setting up the pieces on the board to try and offer a player the advantage. Some of the more famous layouts include the China Flow, created by Chinese professional Chen Zude, the Korea Flow, created in the 1990s by Cho Hun-hyun and Lee Chang-ho, and the Cosmic Flow, created by Japanese grandmaster Masaki Takemiya.

Alpha Flow is term used to describe several new layouts that occurred during the matches between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, referring especially to the variation that surfaced in the fifth game.

Many professional Go players have since embraced Alpha Flow, acknowledging the profound impact that machines have brought to the game. Many people in the public assumed that professional Go players would laud the day when computers could finally beat humans, but on the contrary, it was very exciting. The machine brought the game new variations and new possibilities.

Let’s first debunk a common misconception. Many people outside of the Go community think that Go players are exceptionally intelligent. They consider AlphaGo’s victory over Lee Sedol proof of artificial intelligence’s dominance over the human brain. 

But the truth is, although there are several geniuses among us, most Go players are normal people. We’re just very diligent. Japanese Go master Fujisawa Hideyuki once said: “There are hundreds of secrets in Go, and I only know seven.” 

AlphaGo is an extremely powerful machine. The memory of the AlphaGo and Lee Sedol match is still vivid in my mind. In the second game, AlphaGo shocked everyone by making moves unfathomable to the professional Go community. It seemed like the computer had made amateur mistakes. 

But the program somehow managed to turn those compromising moves into a powerful flow over the course of the game. By the end of the fifth match, AlphaGo had managed to revolutionize the game. It exposed numerous flaws in existing flows and changed the way players approach Go.

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Interestingly, AlphaGo never once played a perfect game. It calculated the highest probability of winning, and played lines that guaranteed it a victory, without any risks or life in its moves. AlphaGo is very good at winning games, but a simple victory has never been the real essence of Go.

Go was first created over 5,500 years ago in ancient China. The board consists of 19 lines, with 361 crossing points, and it is closely related to cosmology. The center of the board is known as taiji in Chinese, which translates to “supreme ultimate” and is a philosophical principal that refers to the creation of the universe. The black and white playing pieces represent yin and yang, a Chinese philosophy about duality that promotes natural balance in the world.

The grandmaster Wu Qingyuan once said that although Go is a competitive game, winning should never be viewed as the end goal. The ultimate purpose of the game should be to achieve neutrality, like the natural harmony that occurs when yin and yang are balanced. 

The perfect game is therefore when this neutrality is reflected on the Go board — a match in which the full potential of every single piece is activated. In this way, AlphaGo hasn’t yet achieved perfection.

Nonetheless, AlphaGo has without a doubt helped Go professionals further develop the game. The most immediate proof would be Lee Sedol’s nine consecutive victories immediately after his match with AlphaGo. 

Go players are discovering untapped potential. With only two variations, Alpha Flow is already a hit. If the computer continues developing more game patterns, our understanding of the game will be exponentially increased.

I’ve been studying Go since I was 6 years old. I’ve poured my heart and soul into it, but I know that I might never be in the same league as some of the world’s top players.

At 9 I began to study under Ruan Yunsheng, the best player in central China’s Hubei province. I was in the national youth team by 13. I had a solid beginning, but I have settled in the 40s in world rankings. Even though I was born in 1990, I am no longer considered a young player — the new generation born after 1995 dominates the game. One of them, Ke Jie, is currently the world’s highest ranked player.  

At training, I can feel the strength and potential of the young players born after 2000. I know I am in decline, and sometimes feel pressured. This is why watching AlphaGo transform the game is particularly comforting to me. It’s helping give me faith that nothing is set in stone — as long as a player has the drive and a little creativity, age shouldn’t be an issue.

Go has never just been about competition for me. It has taught me to remain collected, to think through things, to keep my head above water, and remain confident in the face of defeat. It’s more than just a game of winning or losing, and understanding that is an important part of becoming a professional. I don’t believe AlphaGo can comprehend that.

(Header image: Bambustone/VCG)

Despite not making it to the 100-meter freestyle swimming final, Ning Zetao remained one of China’s most beloved athletes for the 2016 Olympics. The wall on Ning’s Weibo account — China’s most popular microblogging platform — filled up with more than 100,000 loving user comments after his competition.

In addition to Ning, there are several other male athletes — mainly competing in fencing and gymnastics — who have won the adoration of Chinese fans without having won any medals. All of them have handsome faces and sculpted bodies, and are described as xiao xian rou, or “little fresh meats,” by Chinese media and net users.

The phrase “little fresh meat” has been around now for several years and refers to someone who is athletic, young, and handsome. In 2014, the online media company Sina published an article rating the top 10 “little fresh meats” in China’s entertainment circle.

The popularity of the label has helped to change how the media portrays men. Only a decade ago, male leads in Chinese film and television were cast as tough, authoritative, and patriarchal characters. If a male character appeared meticulously groomed, he was normally portrayed as being a sissy, a eunuch, or gay — intended to be objects of contempt.

Not anymore. Little fresh meats have inspired the media to create new representations of male beauty, often characterized by well-built, topless torsos, and delicate, almost feminine, features. They signify female desire.

Last year Gong Yan — a 34-year-old columnist who runs a public account on mobile messaging app WeChat — published an article that was picked up by many online media sources. The article focused on Chinese actor Yang Yang, specifically taking time to praise his beauty. “If there was a television series in which Yang Yang only sat and ate melon seeds, I would happily watch 80 episodes of it.”

In a sense, the popularity of these men is the opposite of the “male gaze” — an academic term that refers to the cinema viewing women as objects and subjecting them to a controlling gaze. Under this new trend, young men become the objects of desire.

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In many cases, these little fresh meats are viewed as sexual objects whose fans don’t attempt to hide their erotic lust. Whenever a photo or trailer of one of these young men appears online, user comments invariably tend toward the bawdy. 

However, not every little fresh meat is the subject of erotic spectacle. One famous counterexample is the TFBoys, one of China’s most popular teenage-boy bands. At the time of their debut in 2013, the three members of the group were schoolboys between 13 and 14 years old, but the majority of their fans were females over 20. Their fans labeled themselves “aunts,” and their love for the TFboys was more protective than desirous.

Thus we can say that there are in general two types of little fresh meats. One is an alluring, passive sexual object, while the other is an innocent, naive boy. Both are beautiful, and more importantly, both of are markedly different from common male stereotypes in the Chinese popular culture in times past.

Unsurprisingly, while pleasing a large number of women, the popularity of the trend also upset many people. In a forum during the Shanghai Television Festival held in June, screenwriter Wang Hailin labeled the phrase “obscene.” Last year, film director Feng Xiaogang told the press that the phrase conjured up pornographic sentiments.

And yet it seems that these criticisms are having no effect on the public. An increasing number of films and television shows are casting little fresh meats as male leads, and new celebrities are appearing every day. According to the entertainment industry market research firm EntGroup, the commercial value of certain little fresh meats is enormous, and often comparable to some of China’s biggest stars, like Jackie Chan. 

In a way, Chinese women are using their power as consumers to forge the ideal male figure — one who is beautiful, understanding, and inoffensive. But does the label “little fresh meat” really, as critics attest, carry indelicate implications and objectify men? The answer of course is yes, but for me these flaws are outweighed by their merits.

We must not forget that modern-day China remains a society on the long road to gender equality. The United Nations Development Program ranked China as 40th among all countries for gender inequality in 2014. In a sense, by forging their own conceptions of beauty and showing how much influence these preferences can have in the free market, women can be seen to be challenging the stubborn patriarchal order.

Or perhaps it is not a deliberate attack on a male-dominated society, but simply an outpouring of feeling — a lust for beauty. Nonetheless, I believe that it is breathing fresh air into gender stereotypes, making them less rigid and more complex.

(Header image: The singer and actor Lu Han is pictured at the 5th Beijing International Film Festival in Beijing, April 18, 2015. Zhang Tianran/VCG)

When people hear the blind Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli sing “Time to Say Goodbye,” they are stirred not only by his chilling operatic voice, but are also touched by the fact that his disability doesn’t affect his capacity to move millions of people.

In 2002, my camera crew and I were shooting a project deep in the Taihang mountain range, in northern China’s Shanxi province, when we encountered a group of blind musicians known by the locals as meiyanren, or “the people with no eyes.” I held my breath the first time they sang for us. It was nothing short of stunning.

Many disabled performers call Shanxi’s mountain ranges home. These blind entertainers make their livings from singing, playing music, storytelling, and fortunetelling, often appearing at weddings, funerals, and other festivals.

The group I met during my travels specialized in playing music and singing. These meiyanren of the Taihang Mountains pass on their repertoire of ancient songs orally. They play an important role in maintaining the Zuoquan County folk song tradition — one of China’s official intangible cultural heritages.

The blind singers of Shanxi have a history dating back thousands of years, and have passed along countless music traditions from generation to generation. But in addition to what they bring to China’s culture, the meiyanren also hold a special place in the hearts of the Chinese for their contributions during the Second Sino-Japanese War. 

In 1940, one of China’s frontline command headquarters was stationed in Zuoquan County. To penetrate the Japanese blockade, the army organized the blind entertainers of the Taihang Mountains into four army squads. Led by one commander who would feign blindness, the squad would enter enemy territory disguised as entertainers to deliver intelligence and firearms to resistance efforts.

I spoke with a meiyanren who told me the story of his former commander, Chen Yuwen. Their squad had been tasked with distributing anti-Japanese leaflets to Chinese in enemy territory and bringing back an intelligence report from an agent on the inside. Unfortunately, they were discovered by sentries when crossing the line and captured.

Desperate, Chen asked the Japanese soldiers if they could sing for them, hoping that it might stay their imminent execution. Amused, the guards agreed. Chen managed to somehow choke his way through “The Three Kingdoms,” an epic song about Chinese imperial history, and the Japanese commander was so thoroughly impressed that he decided to let them go.

Since then, many of the meiyanren involved in the war have passed away and their traditions handed down to their apprentices. I have met 11 in total, all of whom were extremely talented vocalists or instrumentalists.

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This is a group of people who live at the bottom of society. In the past 70 years of wandering they estimate that they have visited around 1,700 villages around the Taihang Mountains, offering their entertainment services for money. Chen told me there used to be a mutual agreement that if one of the singers accidentally fell from a precipice, the others would shout a few times, and if they heard no response they would continue on their way, eating and singing together as they always had. They are believers in destiny, but this blind acceptance of fate is not something I see as negative; instead, I believe it to be a refreshing inner clarity.

Coming to know these people and the impact they’ve had on society has been an amazing journey for me. Thus, it was very distressing to learn that modernization is causing the traditions of the meiyanren to wither away, and I made it an obligation of mine to record the life story of this legendary group of people before that happened. I started shooting my independent film in 2006.

However, I quickly discovered how expensive it is to shoot a film. Severely underfunded, I had no choice but to mortgage my house, take on extra jobs, and secure a loan. My parents also supported me with their 200,000 yuan (about $30,000) in savings. In total, I have spent several million yuan and shot more than 500 hours of footage. The film is now in its final editing stages.

During the long shooting process one of the percussionists of the group, Meaty, passed away. In his final days he told me how sorry he was that he wouldn’t make it to the film’s release. Then, in July 2014 my father also passed away. On the day of his cremation, one of the meiyanren called to tell me that they had sung for an entire day and night in honor of my father.

During the 10 years it took to shoot the film, a number of media reports helped spread awareness of the blind entertainers. The government stepped in and one by one they were offered state-sponsored housing. They began receiving subsistence allowances, and each was offered a pension fund.

Four years ago they hired a driver to take them around the mountain villages for their performances. But the traditional folk songs have been waning in popularity in modern times. Most of Taihang’s villagers are migrants, working far from home, and those left behind have found new ways of keeping themselves entertained.

When performances can be secured, payouts are less than what they used to be. Several years ago the people in the mountain villages gave generously. The economy of the area has traditionally been kept afloat by coal mining, but the depression of the coal industry in recent years has affected flow of capital into the region.

At a promotional event in June 2016 for my recently published book, “The Eyeless,” a reader asked me if I thought that my part in exposing meiyanren culture to the world and spending time with them as an outsider had spoiled their traditions in any way.

I think my involvement has certainly had an influence on them, perhaps detrimental. But I believe that as a group, the meiyanren have fulfilled their mission of sustaining an important Chinese heritage. It’s time for them to rest. They now lead comfortable lives, which I think they’ve earned.

I spent 10 years filming these blind itinerant entertainers not so that others may pity them, but out of a necessity to keep a record of the songs which are an intrinsic cultural heritage. I wanted to show people the light and warmth they have brought to the mountains where they live, and to capture the unadulterated happiness and freedom of the people with no eyes.

(Header image: ‘Meiyanren’ perform at a charity concert in Changzhi, Shanxi province, Jan. 17, 2016. Yao Lin/IC)

The Rio Olympic Games may have ended two weeks ago, but Chinese audiences still can’t get enough of their beloved Olympians.

Now that the sports stars are in high demand, live-streaming platforms and television series are beating a path to their doors, with propositions of fame and sometimes fortune.

Leading the pack is British television personality Bear Grylls, most famous for his TV show “Running Wild With Bear Grylls,” where he invites celebrities from different fields, like U.S. President Barack Obama, actress Kate Winslet and former NBA player Shaquille O’Neal, to make guest appearances on the show.

Grylls is hugely popular in China, with nearly 2 million followers on China’s microblog platform Weibo and his own survival reality television show called “Absolute Wild.” Netizens have dubbed him “the man standing atop the food chain” for his voracious appetite for worms. 

On Saturday, Grylls invited Fu Yuanhui, bronze medalist in the women’s 100-meter backstroke swimming event, to appear on his show.

Fu charmed millions of fans around the world with her adorable personality and goofy facial expressions during her post-race interviews in Rio. One live stream of her during the Rio Olympics had 10 million viewers in one hour.

“You have conquered the pool, now nature awaits!” Grylls wrote. “It sounds like you truly are a fighter!”

In response, Fu posted: “Wow! Cool!”

In an earlier interview with One-On-One, a talk show on state-owned China Central Television, Fu said she never wanted to be a star and doesn’t like the feeling of it at all.

According to the production team of “Absolute Wild,” Fu has nevertheless agreed to take part in the show, joining others celebrities like Yao Ming, a former NBA player, and Robin Li, the founder of internet giant Baidu. Shooting for the show starts in September and will air on the Discovery Channel and Shanghai-based Dragon TV in the fourth quarter of this year.

Other Olympians have also found their ways into the TV studio. Sun Yang, the winner of the men’s 200-meter freestyle race, will appear on a reality show called “It Takes a Real Man,” where he will subject himself to rigorous military training.

Zhang Jike, a champion table tennis player, will appear as a guest on a new episode of “Up Idol,” on which he will teach a group of female entertainment stars how to play Ping-Pong.

This year’s Olympic Games were somewhat of a turning point for Chinese sports. The gold medal tally was perhaps disappointing, but the athletes themselves won over millions of fans by showing their bright personalities. 

Unlike previous generations of athletes, who were under the rigid control of the state-sponsored sports system, today’s millennials have more access to the outside world — and through social media, the outside world has more access to them.

Deputy dean of Peking University’s Institute of Cultural Studies Chen Shaofeng told Sixth Tone that because the sports system is more open than before, athletes have become stars in China. “They don’t just have a better sense of humor and fashion nowadays, they also know how to attract an audience,” he said.

In any case, net users can’t seem to get enough. Many social media users have voiced their excitement about the coming show. “Bear! Watch out for Fu’s prehistoric power,” said a user of microblog platform Weibo, referring to one of the swimmer’s famous quotes. “I can’t wait to see a new series of her memes,” said another.

(Header image: A promotional photo from ‘Absolute Wild’ shows Bear Grylls holding a snake. From the reality TV show’s Weibo account)

Wearing a white baseball cap and a gold chain around his neck, 27-year-old Huang Xianzhe stands out against the gray drabness of his hometown of Xiaogan in central China’s Hubei province.

The slow pace of economic growth means much of Xiaogan’s skyline is still defined by low-rise concrete apartment blocks built in the 1980s. There’s a small, half-finished high-rise area in Xiaogan’s south, but that doesn’t stop the city from feeling parochial. It’s not a place where you’d expect to find a rapper like Huang.

In the past two decades, hip-hop has spread from major cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, and is now beginning to reach cities like Xiaogan, which, with its built-up area’s population of just under 1 million people, is considered small by Chinese standards. But although the sound has spread, it hasn’t developed fully yet, and it’s still a struggle for someone to support themselves as a rapper, even in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Huang, who raps in Chinese, admits he doesn’t fit in in Xiaogan. At night, other residents his age are nowhere to be seen. “In the evenings you won’t see any young people on the streets here because they are all in internet cafes,” he says. Aside from talking about love and loss, Huang also brags and plays the role of a gangster on some tracks. This might explain why he hasn’t played any of his tracks to his conservative parents, whom he describes as “traditionally Chinese.”

A sense of alienation permeates the lyrics of Huang’s song “I Hate to Be Home Along [sic]” from last year:

One person driving, one person sleeping, one person tipsy
Nobody quite understands how this life makes me weary
Familiar streets with unfamiliar people, repeatedly intertwine
Why has it been burnt to ashes, this truth that’s evaded me?

Huang was first exposed to hip-hop almost a decade ago when he was studying popular music at Kunming Professional College of Arts, in the southwestern province of Yunnan. Hip-hop wasn’t in the curriculum, but it was a rising genre among Huang’s peers, and soon he was hooked. He started writing lyrics immediately, and turned to his home for inspiration. “I felt like I was missing something, as I hadn’t spoken the local dialect in a long time,” he says. “So I started writing songs in it.”

One of those was “Xiaogan Spirit,” a track he wrote in just a few days that celebrates Huang’s hometown.

I am a Xiaogan lad
I live on Beijing Road’s left-hand side
Why do I want to write a song about Xiaogan?
Because living here I feel happy

When he made the track in 2007, Huang’s skills in recording and songwriting were crude, but he uploaded the track to an online forum for Xiaogan residents anyway. Within a couple of days, it had more than 10,000 listens, and as net users uploaded it to other platforms, the track quickly spread. Five days later Huang was fielding interviews from local TV stations and newspapers.

Ever since that track, many of Xiaogan’s young people know of Huang and his music. “Releasing that track gave me a lot of confidence,” he tells Sixth Tone over local snacks in a Xiaogan food hall. But he has yet to make any money from his craft. When he performs at parties in Xiaogan, he says he receives gratitude, but no money. “In Xiaogan you could probably survive off of pop music, but that’s not what I want to do,” he says.

The small nightlife scene in Xiaogan is defined by profit-hungry clubs where customers sit at tables listening to upbeat music played by a DJ. There are jobs at the clubs for performers who can sing pop hits, but no opportunities for people like Huang to perform their own music.

Archie Hamilton, cofounder of Shanghai-based music company Split Works, which organizes music events for Chinese and international artists, believes that alternative acts here are worse off than their European counterparts. “In China the underground music scene is still so incredibly far removed from the space where people can make money,” he says. “There are very few institutions or individuals who are actually working at a grassroots level. People think that if it’s not already famous, it’s not interesting.”

At various points in his life, Huang has opened an electronics store, a clothes shop, and a bar in Xiaogan to try and make a living. He funded the businesses with a mixture of family support, savings, and loans. The bar failed outright, but Huang made enough money on the other two businesses before closing them down to sustain him until now.

It will be a long time before independent artists like Huang see any money from Spotify-like services. Music-streaming sites in China are only just beginning to cooperate with major record labels to make sure both the labels and artists are paid for their work. Spotify offers a nominal fee to independent artists per play, but few provisions are being made for smaller artists by China’s streaming services.

In Xiaogan, there are signs of change within the music scene. In 2014, Xiaogan native and local musician Xiao Shuai opened a live music bar called MF House in the city. Business has been slowly improving in the two years since. “When we started, I wouldn’t charge at the door because people here weren’t used to it,” Xiao says. “But people are getting used to it now.”

Xiao says Huang hasn’t yet headlined the venue himself because he is cautious about performing in front of a hometown crowd. “He wants to put on an especially good show here,” Xiao says. “So he needs more time to prepare than he would usually.” Every month MF House hosts two to four performances, and Xiao says on average 50 to 60 people attend. “I think the future of music in Xiaogan is bright,” he says.
 
Hamilton is also hopeful that more small cities like Xiaogan will be able to support local music scenes of their own in the future. He’s seen successful one-off events take place in cities smaller than Xiaogan and thinks it’s only a matter of time before things improve. “There’s no reason why, over the next decade or two, all of these small cities can’t support their own music scenes,” Hamilton says.

Huang has already moved on, and now lives in Hubei’s provincial capital Wuhan, an hour’s drive from Xiaogan. There, over 100 hip-hop musicians are working to develop the music scene, using a recording studio run by one of the city’s earliest rappers as a base. The city of 10 million only has two live music venues, so Huang makes most of his money from irregular corporate gigs, though he also dips into his savings occasionally.

Over the last decade, Huang has had frequent doubts about the likelihood of achieving success in music. Now that he is closer to 30, those doubts are harder to ignore. “Maybe just doing music isn’t very realistic,” he says. Huang is considering looking for work in a bigger city like Shanghai, in the hope that he can continue to do music in his spare time. It will still be a few more years before people like him can make a living from hip-hop in their hometowns.

“I don’t know how to change the situation,” Huang says. “I can only do my own thing.”

Additional reporting by Feng Jiayun.

(Header image: A rapper performs at Vox, a live music venue in Wuhan, Hubei province, Aug. 5, 2016. Feng Jiayun/Sixth Tone)

In global terms, China’s music market is tiny. Figures for 2014 put the value of the most populous country’s recording industry at just over $105 million, smaller than a host of other countries, including Belgium and Switzerland. Only its biggest cities have vibrant underground music scenes, attracting musicians from all corners of the country.

Ever since the explosion of China’s underground music culture around the turn of the century, the cultural, historical, and physical differences that exist between its metropolises have meant that musical communities around the country have grown, and continue to grow, in varied ways. In addition, China’s post-’80s artists are the first of their time to self-educate through the internet and self-organize through online message boards, social networking, and mobile apps, adding to the diverse ways in which musical communities around the country are developing.

“Big cities like this have more people who actually listen to underground music,” says guitarist Liu Xinyu of his native Beijing. He talks above the din of the city’s School Bar — a key venue for live music in the city — after a recent solo performance there. “A lot of bands find themselves lonely in their hometowns, but when they come to Beijing, there are so many more people to hang out and make music with.”

Liu is one-quarter of Chui Wan, a psychedelic experimental rock band that formed in 2010. While its other members hail from far-flung corners of China – Ningxia autonomous region in the northwest, Heilongjiang province in the northeast, and Guizhou province in the southwest – the band’s roots were set in the country’s capital. In particular, Chui Wan is a byproduct of the once seminal, now defunct rock club D-22 in Beijing’s northwestern student-heavy Wudaokou area.

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It was at D-22 where Liu and Chui Wan’s vocalist Yan Yulong met, and where their musical tastes came to be shaped by the weekly Zoomin’ Night performance series that began there in August 2009. At D-22, Liu and Yan became versed in ’60s American psychedelia, North African traditional music, and work by avant-garde minimalist composers.

The band now performs frequently throughout the country and even further afield, in North America and Europe, but their music remains infused with traces of China’s capital. On “Beijing Is Sinking,” the closing track from Chui Wan’s 2015 self-titled album, Yan sings of languor, inertia, and regression: “Beijing is sinking/Every corner is aflame/Tread slowly/Listen carefully.”

Even though earlier this year an international study found that Beijing actually is physically sinking, Yan says he meant it metaphorically. “The underground Beijing music scene had its golden age, when everyone was more optimistic about it,” Yan says, referencing the heyday of D-22 and other venues in Beijing between 2008 and 2014. Chui Wan, at least, is now established enough to be able to perform regularly in places other than Beijing.
 
Rising rents, declining revenues, and less tolerance from government bodies have put an end to many music venues and festivals in Beijing over the last two years. It’s a tough climate for musicians in Beijing at the moment, compared with the situation in previous years. Yan is evasive when asked if his song has political connotations. “To me, it’s about restoring energy,” he says of Beijing’s current fallow period.

While Chui Wan riffs on nostalgia for a recent past, Shanghai’s Duck Fight Goose, by contrast, is squarely focused on the future. In August, the band released their second album “CLVB ZVKVNFT,” for which they shed the mid-tempo, math-rock sound of their 2011 debut, “SPORTS,” and traded their guitars for a battery of electronic and digital instruments.

“CLVB ZVKVNFT” is a work of “Sinofuturism” produced in China’s richest megalopolis. The album is packaged like a video game, complete with a map, an instruction manual, and a cyberpunk narrative populated by artificially intelligent cyborgs and nanotech invaders.

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“It's been a cumulative process,” says Han Han, Duck Fight Goose’s vocalist and principal songwriter, referring to the production of “CLVB ZVKVNFT”. One of the key catalysts of the band’s evolution between albums has been the city of Shanghai itself. Shanghai’s rock scene is dwarfed by that of the capital, despite the latter’s venue closures and other obstacles in recent years. It does have, however, China’s largest and most progressive electronic music scene, ranging from niche, beat-less soundscape performances all the way to mainstream dance music megaclubs. Since 2011 Han has immersed himself in the world of electronic music production, frequently meeting with other artists to exchange ideas at underground Shanghai club The Shelter.

Wu Shanmin, the bassist of Duck Fight Goose, says it is technology that stokes the band’s creative fire. “We think that an artist should be able to create brand-new things,” she says. “Technology is basically creating new things that then enable people to create new things themselves. That’s what I want my art to be.”

Over a thousand kilometers to the north, another local music scene is being shaped by its city’s history and geography. The city of Dalian sits on a peninsula that juts out into the Bohai Sea in the northeastern province of Liaoning, only 300 kilometers from the border with North Korea. With only 6 million people, Dalian is much smaller than Beijing or Shanghai, but the city’s unique location and colonial history are shaping an underground music scene nonetheless.

“Northern Electric Shadow,” the latest album from indie rock band DOC, is a direct reflection of the city. “For a person living in Dalian, water and the ocean are everywhere,” says DOC’s lead guitarist Jiang Hao. “The fact that the ocean is sometimes peaceful and other times incredibly violent, the fact that it’s basically infinite — all of this has a strong effect on the music and the people.”

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Jiang, originally from Dandong near the North Korean border, moved to Dalian for university and stuck around to work for a shipping company after graduating. The other four members of DOC also have day jobs. They practice twice a week, even though they rarely perform. “We’re definitely not a full-time band, but rock music has always been a major part of our lives,” Jiang says.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Dalian was at various times occupied by the Japanese, and signs of that occupation are ubiquitous in the city. Though Japan’s imperialist forces were especially brutal, Jiang thinks his home city holds romantic stories from the time. “In Dalian we’ve all heard stories about how Japanese people came and went, leaving their offspring behind,” he says. “Because of the history of aggression between China and Japan, there must be a Romeo and Juliet story, a sad love story.” That story came to be the song “Koshimizu,” an imagined historical romance between a mixed Chinese-Japanese couple.

Compared to Beijing and Shanghai, Dalian’s music scene is tiny: Jiang’s main hangouts are Echo Books, a shop inside a former sea freight depot, and Hertz, the city’s one underground music bar. Jiang and some of his friends organized a music festival at a beachside art gallery called Dansheng in 2014, but they couldn’t generate enough revenue to keep the space open, and it now stands abandoned.

As such, playing rock music is set to remain a hobby for DOC. But for Chui Wan and Duck Fight Goose, there’s little separation between work and play. They’re frequently on the road, spreading their sounds domestically and internationally. Neither is a full-time band, but their members have found jobs in creative industries that allow them to spend time on their music.

The music of Chui Wan and Duck Fight Goose is a part of the sound of the megacity. The differences between the two bands underscore the tension felt in today’s China: One circles quietly around the past, the other hurtles loudly into the future.

With contributions from Emma Sun and Zhao Yue.

Disclosure: Josh Feola is a former drummer for Chui Wan; he left the band in 2012. He has also worked with Duck Fight Goose and DOC in the past as a booking manager for Beijing venues D-22 and XP. He has worked as a translator and international freelance correspondent for Maybe Mars, Chui Wan’s record label, and D Force, the label that released the latest Duck Fight Goose and DOC records.

(Header image: Wu Shanmin performs in Beijing, Aug. 20, 2016. Ma Yiting and Ji Jianpeng for Sixth Tone)

Although the 2016 Summer Olympics have ended, images of the Chinese backstroke-swimmer Fu Yuanhui, whose exaggerated reactions during post-event interviews, continue to explode across social media. When it was announced that Fu would be roughing it in the wilderness on survivalist Bear Grylls’ new show, many online users optimistically predicted that “a new wave of ‘biaoqing bao’ would be forthcoming.”

Although the term biaoqing bao has several usages, it typically refers to GIFs that loop short video recordings, short animated clips, or to a still photo. These are often accompanied by text captions and widely disseminated across social media. In most viral biaoqing bao, the visual content is highly exaggerated, such as with the ones depicting Fu’s Olympic interviews.

Biaoqing bao have become an important part of social communication for Chinese net users in recent years, so much so that it is nigh impossible to find a purely textual conversation in chat groups anymore. They are used mostly by the younger generations, while the older generations prefer using static emojis. 

Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is often credited as having invented smiley emoticons. After posting the now-famous sideways happy and unhappy faces in an online bulletin board in 1982, net users quickly began adopting these emojis to convey emotion.

But it wouldn’t be until the late 1990s that the typographical signs would evolve into modern-day emojis. Created by Shigetaka Kurita for the world’s first mobile internet system launched by Japanese mobile phone operator NTT Docomo Inc. in 1999, the platform included 176 emojis inspired by Japanese manga, Chinese characters, and street signs, and quickly ushered in a new era of online communication.

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Emojis have evolved since then, but in recent years have begun being overtaken in China by biaoqing bao, since apparently static images can no longer satisfy the demands of the online world. But what accounts for all the hysteria?

Simply put, they are convenient tools to convey emotion, since images are often much easier to be understood than pure text. Although biaoqing bao often include captions, they are typically short and serve as accompaniment to the main image or video. Still, it is the combination of text and image that has brought emojis into a new era, and offered them a level of expression not previously afforded to emoticons of the late 20th century.

China’s baoqing bao shares a cultural logic with kuso, which was originally an interjection in Japanese, but came to be adopted across East Asia. Kuso is a blanket term that now often refers to anything on the internet parodying and criticizing popular culture. This satire appeals to the younger generations, especially in China, since it is simple to understand and can often be used in non-committal political dialogue, like in early 2016 when net users posted thousands of anti-independence memes to Taiwan-registered websites.

The non-committal nature of this protest is important. The digital generation likes to express their ideas, but not always so much as to be involved in a serious social movement. To many young people in modern China — most of whom have not experienced the nastier perils life has to offer — having fun is priority number one.

Interestingly, the political aspect of biaoqing bao goes back much farther than the current generation. Posters with simple visuals and text captions were heavily employed by the Chinese government as propaganda tools throughout the 20th century. Even today, traces of this can be found in the publicity posters issued by the government across the streets of China.

Internet memes and GIFs in China play an important function in society. They alert net users to trending topics in popular culture as well as offer an outlet for guarded political discourse. They are evolved forms of the crude emojis of the late 20th century, and in them we can see traces of propaganda posters of the 20th century. In the future, they will likely further evolve, and continue to expand and shape the way people communicate.

(Header image: A man shows a handful of rocks that have been painted to resemble emoticons, Jan. 17, 2016. Wang Haibin/IC)

An actor serving an apprenticeship with Guo Degang, one of China’s richest celebrities and the country’s leading “crosstalk” star, has denounced his master on social media.

On Tuesday, 30-year-old actor Cao Yunjin published an article on microblogging platform Weibo describing how his 43-year-old teacher, who has been teaching him the traditional art of Chinese cross talk for the past 14 years, had exploited their relationship.

Cross talk is a centuries-old art form historically performed in China’s capital city of Beijing, during which two performers exchange verbal witticisms about contemporary life in China, creating rich puns around popular subjects like politics and show business gossip.

Cao’s comments evoked discussion about the traditional art form and how appropriate the training system is. In his microblog, Cao accused Guo of unfair demands in doing housework, sharing the rent, and forgoing opportunities to appear on television to raise his professional profile.

The disgruntled apprentice wrote that Guo forced him to quit the finale of a cross talk TV competition held by China Central Television, the state broadcaster, along with other allegations of unfair treatment.

“I am your employee, so why did I not receive my salary after I acted in your movie?” Cao asked, referring to his role in the 2010 comedy “The Love of Three Smile: Scholar and the Beauty.” “You used to be poor,” he added, “and so you should know what it is like not to be able to support one’s life.”

The benefits of becoming a cross talk superstar are not negligible. Guo is a superstar in China, with 66 million followers on Weibo, and has been named by Forbes as one of the country’s 100 richest celebrities every year since 2007.

Cross talk is one of the performance arts in China that continues to use the traditional apprenticeship system, which encourages a father-and-son-like relationship. The son is expected to be obedient and grateful to his father, who in return teaches him a skill that he can use to make a living.

In previous interviews, Guo has said that he follows a tried-and-tested training process during which his students work as helpers, and then as apprentices.

“After you are recruited as a student, you live with your teacher and do housework for him,” said Guo to People Magazine, a Beijing publication. “I don’t teach you cross talk every day. You also have to do this work.”

In China, the most famous cross talk venue is the Deyun Club in Beijing. According to reports, Guo is the ultimate authority of what happens in the club.

Yue Yunpeng, another student of Guo’s, published a Weibo post expressing his gratitude to his teacher, attributing his fame, performance opportunities, and commercial success to the famous actor. “All I have today was given by my teacher,” he wrote in his post.

However, another apprentice, who left the Deyun Club six years ago to develop his own career, described Guo as a dictator, and claimed that each actor’s salary was decided by the cross talk star.

Cultural critic Han Haoyue told Sixth Tone: “Cao’s article is a big bomb to the industry of Chinese traditional art forms. It exposes the conflict between family discipline and modern business management.”

Han points out that in traditional performance arts, teachers can largely decide the fates of their students, especially when they are renowned industry figures.

“Teachers will make sure their favorite students have more chances to perform in big events, including roles in television dramas and movies,” Han said. “They will introduce these students to celebrities and directors. But those who do not obey will be forced out, and in even worse situations, teachers will use their resources to kick them out of the entertainment industry entirely.”

In his Weibo post, Cao accused Guo of banning him from a television performance because they had a disagreement on the nature of his contract. He also claimed in his article that Guo required all his students to publicly condemn his rivals, and threatened to prevent them from performing if they did not comply.

Onlookers have noted that there’s a certain sad irony to the accusations surfacing about Guo.

The beloved performer became famous for his rebellious, unorthodox, grassroots style, which disrupted the rigid style of Chinese cross talk.

Early on in his career, Guo dared to criticize the state’s televised and hugely popular Chinese New Year gala for lacking meaningful content.

(Header image: Guo Degang performs at a theater in Beijing, Aug. 20, 2011. VCG)

A video making fun of socially awkward situations has racked up thousands of likes and shares on Chinese social media since it was posted last week. But some net users were quick to point out the whole skit was suspiciously similar to an episode of U.S. show Saturday Night Live.

“Listen to your heart and don’t compromise!” is the text that jumps out at the start of the 4-minute clip. Six scenarios taken from Chinese daily life follow. A young man is asked to stand up for an elderly lady on the bus, another man is urged to drink a glass of alcohol with a friend, and another is asked for money by a beggar.

The twist is that, instead of reacting politely as one would be expected to, the protagonists bluntly speak their minds: No, I won’t stand up, I won’t drink, and I won’t give you any money. After every scene, the characters break out in song and dance. “This is the feeling of freedom,” the lyrics go.

The clip is part of an episode of web TV show “Yes Boss,” which started airing in 2013 and is coproduced by UniMedia and Youku Tudou, one of China’s biggest video websites. The show this year aired a second season, and every episode has on average been viewed some 10 million times.

The scene aims to showcase Chinese social conflicts and traditional values, Ke Da, the show’s main writer, told Sixth Tone. Respecting the old is regarded as a virtue in China, and when someone offers to drink, you drink. But in the clip the opposite happens.

Net users were quick to share and like the video on microblog platform Weibo, lamenting that they wished they dared to speak their minds in similar situations. “I was just talking about how annoying this kind of emotional blackmailing is,” wrote one user. “Now that I’ve watched this video I feel great.”

But other users pointed out they thought the clip was almost a near copy from a 2015 sketch by Saturday Night Live (SNL), a popular comedy program from the U.S. All that was changed were the language and the situations — in the SNL clip one character refuses to share her phone number with an old acquaintance, and another calls out a friend for not paying enough when splitting the bill.

In both shows, the blunt words are followed by slow-motion shots of the protagonists jumping from excitement and joining each other in dance, reveling in their freedom from social conventions. Both skits carry the same message. In the SNL version, the song’s lyrics go “Say what you wanna say, let the words fall out.” In the end of both videos all the characters come together, cheering and laughing.

“Yes, I have watched the show,” Ke said when asked about the similarities between “Yes Boss” and SNL. “It is the model we consulted.” He added that they had wanted to put the story in a Chinese context. “You can’t say it is a rip-off just because of some similarities in their story structure,” he explained.

Opinions on Weibo were less sanguine. One user, who pointed out where people could watch the SNL episode, wrote“I don’t even have to explain. Everyone just watch and you’ll see.”

(Header image: A screenshot from the funny video shows a man counting money in front of a beggar.)

Late last month the stunning flop “League of Gods” was released unto the world, adding to what has thus far been a miserable summer at the Chinese box office.

In July, Chinese films brought in less than 4.34 billion yuan (about $653 million) in box office sales, down by 1.2 billion yuan from the same period last year. For the Chinese movie market, which has been growing at a breakneck speed in recent years, it is the second time in 2016 that ticket sales have slumped — the first time being in April.

Strictly speaking, summer sales still have another several weeks to recover, but if the 5 billion yuan brought in by the industry last August is anything to go by, such a recovery seems impossible — August sales are typically lower than July.

“League of Gods” was universally panned by critics upon its July 29 release. On Douban, China’s largest user review website, the film has been given 3.4 out of 10 stars, making it one of Douban’s worst reviewed movies. Although “League of Gods” is outfitted with celebrities from some of the most critically acclaimed movies of the last few years, it is nonetheless doomed to the bargain bin.

The awful quality of domestically produced movies has become an issue that can no longer be ignored. From the failed comedy-western “For a Few Bullets,” released in July, to romantic-comedy flop No-One’s Life Is Easy (So I Married an Anti-Fan), it feels like all summer 2016 has produced are movies catering to a love for celebrity culture with little regard to content.

It would seem that rapid growth of the film industry in recent years has made domestic producers complacent with their own success, giving them blind faith in their own abilities and unbridled optimism about the state of the market. And yet a large part of this bubble is due to a practice known as “ticket supplementing,” where production companies use various practices to distort box office sales.

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In March state news agency Xinhua reported that the distributor Dayinmu Film Distribution had fabricated thousands of screenings of “Ip Man 3” and had bought up a large number of tickets to inflate box office sales. This practice has become rampant in the Chinese film industry and offers one explanation for how tickets sales managed to increase by nearly 50 percent in 2015 from 2014. As the president of Beijing Enlight Media Co. Ltd., Wang Changtian, acknowledged in a press conference in July, the lower-than-expected returns from “Big Fish and Begonia” were largely due to ticket supplementing.

Falsifying box office sales is a tactic used by some film distributors to make a movie seem more popular than it is, thus inclining audiences to come and see it. This creates a bubble and makes it hard to tell how well the industry is doing.

During the Beijing International Film Festival in April, Li Dong, the associate director of the Film Special Funds — an office of China’s media censorship body, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film, and Television — made a similar statement: “The high box office returns enjoyed by Chinese movies last year is almost without exception down to exaggerated box office revenues.” His statement was later strongly rebuked by his boss, Jiang Tao, who said: “This is an extremely inaccurate thing to say, and an irresponsible claim to make.”

Thus, the question is: Have industry managers misread genuine market numbers, or deliberately disseminated false information?

After Dayinmu was strongly criticized for the “Ip Man 3” incident, the practice of ticket supplementing seemingly disappeared overnight. This was a major catalyst in the slowing down of the movie market over the summer — as the ticket sales bubble bursts and ticket supplementing is becoming a thing of the past, the paltry popularity of low-quality domestic films has been laid bare for all to see.

But perhaps a slowdown in the Chinese film market isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It will allow people to look squarely at industry shortcomings, and brush aside fanciful, short-term dreams in favor of setting more realistic targets, hopefully moving the industry into a new phase of growth. The path ahead is always there; we just need to find the right way in.

(Header image: People watch a film at a cinema in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, Nov. 24, 2013. Chen Jianyu/VCG)

“Alpha Flow” has quickly gained popularity in the weiqi community since the five-game match between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol in March. Weiqi, also known as “Go” in English, is a two-person board game originating in East Asia.

Lee Sedol is one of the world’s best Go players. In March, he lost to the computer program AlphaGo in a widely publicized series of games. This was the first loss of a human of Lee’s ranking to a computer program.

“Flow” is a common term in Go, similar to a line in chess. It refers to a strategy of setting up the pieces on the board to try and offer a player the advantage. Some of the more famous layouts include the China Flow, created by Chinese professional Chen Zude, the Korea Flow, created in the 1990s by Cho Hun-hyun and Lee Chang-ho, and the Cosmic Flow, created by Japanese grandmaster Masaki Takemiya.

Alpha Flow is term used to describe several new layouts that occurred during the matches between AlphaGo and Lee Sedol, referring especially to the variation that surfaced in the fifth game.

Many professional Go players have since embraced Alpha Flow, acknowledging the profound impact that machines have brought to the game. Many people in the public assumed that professional Go players would laud the day when computers could finally beat humans, but on the contrary, it was very exciting. The machine brought the game new variations and new possibilities.

Let’s first debunk a common misconception. Many people outside of the Go community think that Go players are exceptionally intelligent. They consider AlphaGo’s victory over Lee Sedol proof of artificial intelligence’s dominance over the human brain. 

But the truth is, although there are several geniuses among us, most Go players are normal people. We’re just very diligent. Japanese Go master Fujisawa Hideyuki once said: “There are hundreds of secrets in Go, and I only know seven.” 

AlphaGo is an extremely powerful machine. The memory of the AlphaGo and Lee Sedol match is still vivid in my mind. In the second game, AlphaGo shocked everyone by making moves unfathomable to the professional Go community. It seemed like the computer had made amateur mistakes. 

But the program somehow managed to turn those compromising moves into a powerful flow over the course of the game. By the end of the fifth match, AlphaGo had managed to revolutionize the game. It exposed numerous flaws in existing flows and changed the way players approach Go.

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Interestingly, AlphaGo never once played a perfect game. It calculated the highest probability of winning, and played lines that guaranteed it a victory, without any risks or life in its moves. AlphaGo is very good at winning games, but a simple victory has never been the real essence of Go.

Go was first created over 5,500 years ago in ancient China. The board consists of 19 lines, with 361 crossing points, and it is closely related to cosmology. The center of the board is known as taiji in Chinese, which translates to “supreme ultimate” and is a philosophical principal that refers to the creation of the universe. The black and white playing pieces represent yin and yang, a Chinese philosophy about duality that promotes natural balance in the world.

The grandmaster Wu Qingyuan once said that although Go is a competitive game, winning should never be viewed as the end goal. The ultimate purpose of the game should be to achieve neutrality, like the natural harmony that occurs when yin and yang are balanced. 

The perfect game is therefore when this neutrality is reflected on the Go board — a match in which the full potential of every single piece is activated. In this way, AlphaGo hasn’t yet achieved perfection.

Nonetheless, AlphaGo has without a doubt helped Go professionals further develop the game. The most immediate proof would be Lee Sedol’s nine consecutive victories immediately after his match with AlphaGo. 

Go players are discovering untapped potential. With only two variations, Alpha Flow is already a hit. If the computer continues developing more game patterns, our understanding of the game will be exponentially increased.

I’ve been studying Go since I was 6 years old. I’ve poured my heart and soul into it, but I know that I might never be in the same league as some of the world’s top players.

At 9 I began to study under Ruan Yunsheng, the best player in central China’s Hubei province. I was in the national youth team by 13. I had a solid beginning, but I have settled in the 40s in world rankings. Even though I was born in 1990, I am no longer considered a young player — the new generation born after 1995 dominates the game. One of them, Ke Jie, is currently the world’s highest ranked player.  

At training, I can feel the strength and potential of the young players born after 2000. I know I am in decline, and sometimes feel pressured. This is why watching AlphaGo transform the game is particularly comforting to me. It’s helping give me faith that nothing is set in stone — as long as a player has the drive and a little creativity, age shouldn’t be an issue.

Go has never just been about competition for me. It has taught me to remain collected, to think through things, to keep my head above water, and remain confident in the face of defeat. It’s more than just a game of winning or losing, and understanding that is an important part of becoming a professional. I don’t believe AlphaGo can comprehend that.

(Header image: Bambustone/VCG)