China’s JStor Equivalent Fined $12.6M for Monopolistic Behavior

On December 26, China’s top market regulator, the State Administration for Market Regulation, imposed a fine of 87.6 million RMB (about 12.6 million USD) on China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI or Zhiwang in Chinese) for monopolistic behaviors.


Founded in 1999, CNKI is the country’s largest online academic database, think Google Scholar or JStor. It has been the major — sometimes the only — source for academic research and thesis writing in China.


According to its website, the platform boasts more than 1,600 institutional customers overseas across 60 countries and regions on top of 32,000 domestic customers. As of 2021, it had over 200 million users, more than 16 million daily visits, as well as 2.3 billion full-text downloads.


However, in May this year, market regulation authorities began investigating CNKI for suspected monopolistic behaviors.


The investigation found that the database has abused its dominant market status by implementing unreasonably high fees and signing exclusive contracts with academic institutions and individual scholars since 2014.


Therefore, the state administration asked CNKI to stop all illegal activities and pay a fine of 5% of its 2021 domestic sales of 1.8 billion RMB, which is about 87.6 million RMB.


On the same day, CNKI responded that it earnestly accepted the decision. The platform also listed 15 steps of its overhaul plan.


This is not the first time the database has gotten into hot water. In December 2021, an 89-year-old professor sued CNKI for copyright infringement and won a 700,000 RMB settlement. The retired scholar claimed that the platform had picked up multiple published articles from him for free. Even worse, he had to pay the platform to download his own papers.


As recently as June this year, the government launched a cybersecurity investigation into CNKI as the platform holds a large amount of personal information and data related to national security industries.


Cover image by Depositphotos

USA Beats China on TasteAtlas’ List of World’s Best Cuisines

TasteAtlas’ 2022 rankings for the world’s best cuisines, traditional dishes, and local restaurants were released on December 22, and they have proven more than a little controversial.


Commentators have criticized the lists by TasteAtlas, a travel guide highlighting “traditional dishes, local ingredients, and authentic restaurants,” for a myriad of reasons, perhaps most notably for the strong performance of American food on its global cuisine rankings.


American cuisine ranks as the eighth-best cuisine in the world, surpassing French, Chinese, and 85 other cuisines, an outcome that has generated a whopping 44.8 million views on Twitter.

According to its website, TasteAtlas assembled the ratings based on “audience votes for ingredients, dishes, and beverages.”


Who, exactly, made up this audience is not specified, but it clearly didn’t involve the social media masses, with a seemingly endless roster of Twitter and Instagram users railing against the results. Many have called the global cuisine rankings a joke and asked for a recount.


“England [is] higher than Thailand… What the hell is going on?!” wrote one Instagram user, while another chimed in, “Who is running this account? USA before France, Portugal, Peru, [and] China!!! Morocco [at] the end!! Ridiculous list.”

TasteAtlas’ list of the 100 best-rated traditional dishes globally is not being warmly received either. Some question how the U.S. ranked eighth for the world’s top cuisines, but not a single dish from the country made it onto the best dishes list.


In case you are wondering, eight out of 100 entries for traditional food came from China: tangbao, guotie, xiaolongbao, cha siu bao, shuijiao (or jiaozi), dan dan noodles, Peking duck, and shumai. Two Chinese dishes, tangbao and guotie, placed in the top five.


We’re glad to see both tangbao and xiaolongbao on the list. However, based on the pictures TasteAtlas picked, we’re not confident that the publication actually understands the differences between the two. (Read our illustrated guides to learn more about Chinese dumplings and noodles.)


Last but not least, TasteAtlas recommended a slew of local restaurants for 20 countries and regions, nominated by “renowned food guides, food critics, and Google ratings.”


For China, the agency highlighted five establishments: Hai Jin Zi (Shanghai), Hao Sheng (Shanghai), Jesse (Shanghai), Wang Fu (Hong Kong), and Xin Rong Ji (Beijing).


However, in a country with eight major cuisines and even more regional varieties, it feels like TasteAtlas did the Chinese mainland dirty by selecting only five eateries — three specifically focusing on Shanghainese cuisine. Meanwhile, both Germany and the U.S. have more than 40 highlighted restaurants.


Check out our FEAST section for more nuanced reporting on China’s F&B scene.


Cover image designed by Helen Haoyi Yu

Prequel to Sci-fi Film ‘The Wandering Earth’ Hits Cinemas Next Month

The Wandering Earth 2 dropped a new trailer and a series of new posters on December 14, revealing that the film will officially hit cinemas on the Chinese mainland on January 22, 2023, the first day of the upcoming Spring Festival (aka Chinese New Year).

The upcoming film will serve as a prequel to the 2019 blockbuster The Wandering Earth. Both are adaptions of acclaimed Chinese sci-fi author Liu Cixin’s short story of the same title, which was released in 2000. Director Frant Gwo announced the prequel three years ago, and the film’s first trailer debuted in August of this year.


The two films are set in the future, when the Sun is about to turn into a red giant, swelling to a size so great that it will consume the Earth. To avoid a fiery end, humankind decides to propel our home planet to another galaxy, precisely 4.2 light years away, using thousands of giant rocket thrusters.


While the first film mainly focuses on Earth’s journey through the galaxy, the prequel will depict conditions on Earth before it started wandering. Moreover, it will also reveal how people across the planet were initially skeptical about the crisis and the ‘Wandering Earth Project’ before struggling to save themselves.


Poster of The Wandering Earth 2. Image via IMDb.

Poster for The Wandering Earth 2


Like the first film, author Liu serves as the executive producer of The Wandering Earth 2. Lead actor Wu Jing will reprise his role as protagonist astronaut Liu Peiqiang. Other famous faces in the new film include veteran actor Li Xuejian and Hong Kong star Andy Lau, the latter making a special appearance as a scientist.


The Wandering Earth earned about 700 million USD worldwide in 2019, and it was the first-ever Chinese sci-fi film to be released on Netflix. As such, Chinese netizens have long been excited about The Wandering Earth 2, and many expect it to dominate the Chinese New Year box office.


A hashtag for the new trailer on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo has garnered 110 million views at the time of writing.


“The special effects are clearly making progress. They look so much better than those in the 2019 film. I can’t wait to see it!” commented a Weibo user.


Another netizen wrote, “The cast is awesome. Andy Lau will definitely be a highlight! Undoubtedly it will be my top movie choice during the Chinese New Year holiday.”


All images via IMDb

‘The Old Town Girls,’ a Sentimental Mother-Daughter Murder Film

Alternative Visual Archive is a RADII column that spotlights Chinese films that interrogate ‘otherness’ and/or strive for alternatives to mainstream narratives. This month, we introduce ‘The Old Town Girls’ ahead of its U.S. video-on-demand debut.


At a time when the rumble of machinery has become an anachronism in hyper-digitized China, some film directors have intentionally zeroed in on the country’s obsolete industrial landscapes. If Wang Bing’s ambitious nine-hour-long documentary Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) is one of the pioneering articulations on the matter, Yu Shen’s directorial debut, The Old Town Girls (2020), is the latest endeavor to tell a story against this background. Expect a potpourri of family melodrama and crime.


The desolate industrial landscape in the film is an allegory for the story as a whole. The film, based on a true story, revolves around a left-behind teenage girl and her abandonment issues. The introverted high schooler, Shui Qing (played by Li Gengxi), lives with her father and nonchalant stepmother in an industrial town in China’s southwestern province of Sichuan.


Chinese film The Old Town Girls

Shui Qing, played by Li Gengxi


Alienated from her family, she is emotionally dependent on her precocious best friend, who behaves like a mother figure. Shui’s melancholic yet tranquil life is soon disrupted by a surprising visit by her mother, Qu Ting (acted by Wan Qian), who had abandoned her infant daughter to pursue a professional dancing career in the more economically promising city of Shenzhen.


[Editor’s Note: Spoilers ahead; you’ve been warned!]


Qu’s sudden appearance is no accident: she is knee-deep in debt and is pursued by a thuggish loan shark. She exploits Shui’s loneliness and floats the idea of holding one of her daughter’s affluent classmates for ransom.


Chinese film The Old Town Girls

Shui Qing with her classmates by the basketball court


Despite not being an exceptionally orchestrated crime drama, The Old Town Girls skillfully depicts the mother-daughter relationship — a subject matter that often appears in East Asian cinema. However, Qu is not the stereotypically manipulative Asian mom, as rendered in films such as Everything Everywhere all at Once (2022). She is attractive, mysterious, and capricious.


However, she lacks morals, is irresponsible (heartlessly leaving her infant), coquettish (she flirts with her daughter’s male classmate), and absolutely ruthless.


mother-daughter relationship in The Old Town Girls

Shui Qing, with severe abandonment issues, longs to reconnect with her long-lost mother


Nevertheless, Shui still gravitates toward her mother, regardless of her 16-year-long absence, which seemingly defies explanation. The maternal love she has sought for so long is too overpowering and leaves no room for hesitation. Out of unconditional love for her mother, Shui unflinchingly defends her mother when confronted by the usurer and even complies with her mother’s wicked plans.


However, the duo is not adept at committing crimes and accidentally kills the hostage. The most visceral scene in the film follows: Both mother and daughter attempt to take the fall and convince the other to extricate herself from their troubles. This emotional scene becomes even more sentimental when Qu admits to having abandoned her daughter and family.


In case you were wondering, the real-life events were way more distressing than in the screenplay. The mother and daughter’s confessions at the police station respectively took six and eight-and-a-half hours. Furthermore, for fear of losing her mother again, the teenage girl spared no effort at concealing matters and protecting her parent. Just as the truth was about to be unearthed, the mother tried to blame her daughter for the felony.


true crime film

The screenplay is based on a chilling crime that happened in real life


As Yu’s directorial debut, The Old Town Girls is definitely not run-of-the-mill. It weaves themes of morality, family, betrayal, and alienation into a crime thriller that is both melodramatic and grim. That being said, pigeonholing the film into the thriller genre is a mistake. You’d likely be highly disappointed if you were expecting a cliffhanger of a crime movie, as the plot is straightforward at best and simplistic at worst.


Yet, it excels at its cinematography — the handheld camerawork makes the storytelling vivid and intimate. The deliberate choice of rendering the urban space in an ill-lit, monotonous manner is perfectly in sync with the film’s gloomy mood.


Chinese film The Old Town Girls

Shui Qing’s ruthless mother, played by Wan Qian


By setting the story in a hilly, decaying industrial city (versus the livelier city of Nanjing, where the original incident happened), the director successfully positions the doleful family drama vis-à-vis a disconsolate location. This artistic choice means to suggest that, like the city hemmed in on all sides by mountains, the relationship between Shui and Qu is doomed to be entangled in all sorts of trouble.


This dysfunctional and abnormal mother-daughter relationship is undoubtedly eulogized in The Old Town Girls, a topic that can easily rile China’s hard-nut-to-crack media watchdog. By including a disclaimer before the closing credits, which appeals for more care towards adolescents while condemning the duo’s misconduct, the film avoids clashing with socialist values and received the green light from the relevant film licensing bureau.


The Old Town Girls was theatrically released in China in 2020 and will receive its video-on-demand release in the U.S. on December 23.


All images via Cheng Cheng Films

Chris Lee and Hans Zimmer Compose Song for BBC Doc ‘Frozen Planet II’

Chinese pop star Li Yuchun, also known as Chris Lee, has teamed up with the Oscar-winning German composer Hans Zimmer to drop a promotional song for the widely acclaimed BBC documentary series Frozen Planet II.


Composed by Zimmer and titled ‘Send Them Home,’ the song spotlights our planet’s melting glaciers and the threat their disappearance poses to the threatened species of the cryosphere. The song also calls for broader public attention to climate change.

Frozen Planet II is a nature documentary series co-produced by BBC and The Open University. It is a follow-up to 2011’s ground-breaking Frozen Planet.


The sequel began broadcasting in September and came to China on December 17, exclusively airing on the Chinese streaming platform Migu Video. Lee and Zimmer’s song dropped on December 16, one day before the official China release.


Chris Lee and Zimmer’s song for Frozen Planet II

Poster of the Frozen Planet II. Image via IMDb


Zimmer has composed music for more than 150 films since the 1980s, including Rain Man (1988), The Lion King (1994), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), 12 Years A Slave (2013), Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017), and Dune (2021). He has won two Oscars and four Grammys.

Chris Lee is a singer, songwriter, and actress who became a sensation in China when she won the singing contest Super Girl (think American Idol) in 2005. The 38-year-old now boasts more than 16 million followers on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo and 2.2 million followers on Instagram.


“I like this song very much because its melody is really grand and beautiful,” said Lee of the promotional song in an interview. “It is a great honor to sing this song for Frozen Planet II.”


Cover image via Weibo

Bypassing ‘The Great Firewall,’ Chinese Vendors Go Global on Instagram

If there’s one thing Keru Zheng learned from selling on Instagram, it is that aesthetics matters.


Inside her apartment in Hangzhou, about 170 kilometers southwest of Shanghai, the 25-year-old spends eight hours per week staging newly arrived jewelry, taking close-ups against a backdrop, filming them from different angles, and editing footage before posting the pieces on her Instagram page — Cherrybomb Jewelry.

It is one of the many Instagram pages created by China-based sellers for ‘INS创业,’ translating to ‘IG Entrepreneurship’ in English.


In February 2022, after quitting her nine-to-five job at a tech company, Zheng decided to dabble in this new arena after learning about it on Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform focusing on lifestyle trends and entertainment.


Following online tutorials to set up a VPN (Instagram is blocked in China), open a Shopify store, create an Instagram page, and build content, she eventually debuted her jewelry brand on the platform.


“After learning from the tutorials, I immediately started to get the ball rolling. [This form of cross-border ecommerce] has a low barrier to entry because, in the early stage, the only cost was time,” Zheng tells RADII.


Instagram entrepreneurs, Instagram in China, China ecommerce

Image courtesy of Zheng


Despite the pandemic, cross-border trade remains robust in China. From 2020 to 2021, the trade volume of China’s cross-border ecommerce increased from 12.5 to 14.2 trillion RMB (about 1.7 to 1.9 trillion USD).


Amid the era of the social media milieu, young Chinese entrepreneurs began infiltrating the overseas market via Instagram. They use the platform as a marketing tool to generate traffic to their independent shopping websites, selling products with substantial profit margins.


The hashtag #INS创业 has reached 3 million views on Xiaohongshu, and this style of entrepreneurship has become a new business model for Chinese youths to take a slice of the cross-border ecommerce pie.


The choice of jewelry — lightweight and easy to ship, with a variety of styles — was a natural calling for Zheng. To better serve global shoppers, she dug into similar Instagram shops run by Western sellers, absorbing everything from visuals to captions, including their language style, layout, and hashtags, then tailored her content to Western aesthetics.


Since February this year, the Instagram entrepreneur has shipped more than 250 products to her clients, many of whom are based in North America.

Like other Chinese entrepreneurs on Instagram, the motivation for establishing a business on the platform is that it operates outside the competitive Chinese market.


Take earrings, for example: The endless array of similar products sold on Chinese ecommerce platforms like Taobao makes it difficult for one product to stand out. Furthermore, styles that Chinese netizens are used to are still new to overseas shoppers.


As the pandemic reduced consumer visits to brick-and-mortar stores, global shopping habits have shifted. According to a report by ESW, the pandemic significantly boosted cross-border ecommerce, with 46% of global shoppers surveyed having bought directly from an international brand online. Among those ages 25-34, the number is 52%.


These forces combine to make the overseas market more attractive, and Instagram allows vendors to fill the gap in demand. As of September 2022, the largest percentage of Instagram users in the U.S. — 27.5% — fall in the age range of 25-34. And with features designed to suit marketing purposes, Instagram is not only a nexus for young global shoppers but also an alternative for unjuanable Chinese youths to turn their entrepreneurial attention outward.


“There are definitely more opportunities in the overseas market, especially for niche, DIY products,” says Linda Wang, whose Instagram page has 18,000 followers.


After graduating from Robert Gordon University in Scotland in 2018, Wang returned to China and worked at a contact lens company for overseas operations.


Having learned about overseas marketing from the job, she created an Instagram page in 2019 and started experimenting with products like LED makeup mirrors. But it wasn’t until 2020 that she found her path: DIY custom decoden phone cases. A month after Wang posted the item on her page, Fairiespop, she finally received her first order.

Entrepreneurs have discovered that Instagram users have already formed shopping habits tailored to the platform. According to a 2015 study, 44% of active Instagrammers use the app to research and discover brands. Social features like stories, reels, and voting polls help boost user engagement, making it an ideal platform for marketing.


“Unlike TikTok, Instagram brings more clickbait compared to the individual shopping website. Different from Facebook, costs for ads are much lower on this platform,” Wang says.

Now, at the age of 26, Wang works full-time as an entrepreneur, and her shop receives more than 100 monthly orders. She shares her experience on Xiaohongshu, where she has 80,000 followers.


Wang says that as a photo-sharing site, Instagram is designed for visual representation. Esthetically pleasing pictures build up likes and interactions, which prompt the platform’s algorithm to send the post to other users’ ‘Explore’ tabs. More exposure increases visitors to the profile, therefore maximizing traffic to the independent shopping website listed in a seller’s Instagram bio.


“You’ve got to stay active and post high-quality pictures on a daily basis,” Wang says. “And you have to be patient to build good content step by step.”


Different from cross-border ecommerce giants like JD Worldwide and Shein, these small businesses on Instagram offer a more intimate shopping experience, allowing sellers and buyers to communicate directly.


Crystal Cruz of El Paso, Texas, shopped for the first time on Instagram after seeing a content creator posing with a phone case from Fairiespop.


Forgetting she had switched to a new phone, she ordered a case suited to her old device. After informing Wang of the situation via direct message, Cruz was touched when Wang responded and agreed to restart the work on the right-sized case.


“I literally gave her five stars because she was with me the whole time,” Cruz tells RADII.


instagram entrepreneurs

Image courtesy of Wang


Of course, this form of cross-border ecommece also presents some challenges. According to an analysis of the cross-border ecommerce marketing strategies of small and micro-sized enterprises in China, one issue is a lack of long-term planning.


“These small and micro-enterprises only see immediate benefits and have no long-term plans. Once small and micro-enterprises build their shops on the platform, the website is static,” the analysis explains.


Having established a successful enterprise for decoden phone cases on Instagram, Wang, who wants to expand the business to other products, shares the same concern. If followers and potential customers on Instagram are used to her page focusing on phone cases, adding new products may backfire.


“Followers might feel weird for a phone case shop to sell something else, and they may unfollow you for that,” says Wang.


For now, she says, the best way to stick to her expansion plan is to build another independent website, create another Instagram account, or try out other platforms, like Etsy, for selling new products.


“My long-term goal is to make a hundred million,” she jokes. “But seriously, I want to be influential, passing down my experience to others so everyone can make some money.”


Cover image compiled by Lu Zhao