Understanding China

I’d like to share with you a recent Internet viral event in China. This one becomes ridiculously hot not because of its content, but lack of. Someone created a short post in one of the popular online gaming community – “JiaJunPeng – your mom asks you to go home to have dinner” JiaJunPeng is the name of a person. The post has no content except for this subject line. Who could imagine that in a matter of days… this post has over 30,000 replies and is still growing. Peopleget very creative about this post – from speculating about who isJiaJunPeng to role-play his relatives, to create variation of the initialpost in local dialect, etc. This is before any major media gets in. I have started to see T-shirts get created for this event andarticles written to analyze the underlining social forces of this phenomenon. I am fascinated by this. I always think that good content isnecessary to get the viral marketing effect. This proves another way – give people enough room to imagine to co-create to improve…then harness the results.

TV series is a very popular format of program in China. It is different from sitcom or soap opera or other drama series I have seen here. A TV series typically has 20 – 40 episodes and a complete plot. There is seldom a sequel, maybe one for very popular ones. The storyline of a TV series is usually based on a novel, which is little known by the public until the TV series is shown. Stars in a popular TV series can become a celebrity overnight.

For some reason, Chinese TV series favor historical content,e.g. stories in Qing Dynasty, during civil wars and 50′s/60′s. This creates… an opportunity for Korean TV series, which are extremely popular in China, among older generation and women at all ages. Korean TV series’ storyline has a certain pattern – a love story which somehow involves a lot of hardship for whatever reason. Many Chinese think Korean programs still show a lot of respectfor family values, which have been diluted in China in the last 20 years…