Can this ugly elf make China cool again?

The shift may be in large part because global views of the United States have taken such a nose-dive since President Donald Trump’s second term began. Morning Consult said that American favourability had fallen far faster than enthusiasm for China had risen in that period.

Given the “alarmingly isolationist turn of the US,” said Ying Zhu, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University who studies American and Chinese soft power, China looked “stable and steady in comparison”.

But China has also been trying to build its soft power in its own right, alongside its economic and military might. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has said that the country should work to “reshape” the international conversation in China’s favour. Broader appeal in pop culture, or as a travel destination, would bolster its claim to being an alternative to the United States for global leadership.

Within China, that effort has been successful. Many Chinese now turn to homegrown brands and stars instead of the Western ones they once idolised. Labubu dolls have sold out so quickly that some Chinese have taken to smuggling in dolls bought overseas to resell them. Last week, a human-size Labubu sculpture sold at an auction in Beijing for $US150,000.

There are signs some overseas fans of Labubu are engaging more with other Chinese products. On Reddit, users swap tips for ordering dolls or outfits on AliExpress and other Chinese e-commerce platforms. They express concern about American tariffs on Chinese imports.

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After Sue Aw, 30, visited Shanghai last year from Australia in part to find Labubu dolls (they were sold out), she now wants to visit China again later this year. She wanted to see other cities, and to buy more of Chinese clothing brands she had discovered.

Her friends in Australia have also “definitely seen China in a more positive light after the level of craze” around Labubu, she said.

But for other Labubu lovers, the doll’s Chinese origins seem unimportant, or even pass unnoticed. (In fact, while Pop Mart is a Chinese company, the character itself was designed by a Hong Kong-born artist raised in the Netherlands.) In Western markets, Pop Mart has collaborated with Disney and Marvel.

Some Chinese social media users have joked that the doll is so popular in the United States — where wraparound lines have developed at malls — because people there don’t know it is Chinese. For many Americans, the appeal of Labubu seems to be just as much, or perhaps more, about its ingenious marketing: its scarcity, its frequent use of “blind box” packaging, in which buyers don’t know which of several elves they will receive.

Even so, the growing presence of Chinese companies worldwide is itself a form of soft power, said Huang Rihan, a professor at Huaqiao University in Fujian province who has studied China’s messaging overseas. He pointed to how companies such as Pop Mart, Tencent or Alibaba have hired employees of different nationalities, in offices all around the world.

Huang said that China’s biggest soft-power successes had come from young Chinese entrepreneurs having the freedom to engage globally and experiment. Pop Mart’s chief executive, Wang Ning, is just 33, and has said that he wants the brand to work with artists from around the world.

“In the realm of culture, I think the government should loosen its grip,” Huang said.

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Indeed, a bigger challenge for China’s soft power efforts may be how eager Chinese authorities are to claim them. Repeated official calls to boost soft power suggest a belief that trendiness can be manufactured if the government just tries hard enough.

Sometimes that eagerness can be merely cringeworthy (a recent People’s Daily article called “What Makes China ‘Cool’” declared: “‘Cool’ is a term rooted in youth culture, typically associated with what is fashionable”) or propagandistic (China’s cool, another article said, came from “building a community with a shared future for mankind” — a slogan of Xi).

Government involvement, whether real or perceived, can also be more directly off-putting. When a Chinese company promoted Wukong, the blockbuster video game, last year to overseas streamers, it instructed them to avoid topics such as “feminist propaganda” or the coronavirus pandemic — terms that the government censors heavily.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.