In China’s campaign to win over hearts and minds worldwide, its latest weapon is a fanged, bunny-eared, arguably quite ugly plushie.
The grinning fuzzy toy, called Labubu, is made by a Chinese company and has become a global craze. It has in recent months been toted by celebrities including Rihanna and David Beckham; set off brawls among competing shoppers in England; and prompted overnight stakeouts in Los Angeles. It has even shaped the travel itineraries of some devotees, who have planned trips to China around hopes of buying one there. Resale prices for the roughly $30 figurine have run into the hundreds of dollars.
“I flew all the way to China just to visit the BIGGEST POP MART STORE IN THE WORLD,” read the caption on a TikTok video by one vlogger from the Philippines, Lianna Patricia Guillermo, referring to the company that makes Labubu. (Ms. Guillermo clarified in an interview that she had visited the store during a long layover in Shanghai.)
The enthusiasm over Labubu may pass like any other viral trend. But it could also be another sign that China, which has struggled to build cultural cachet overseas amid longstanding concerns about its authoritarian politics, is starting to claim some victories.
Chinese state media outlets have sought to frame it that way. “The furry, nine-toothed elf created by Chinese toymaker Pop Mart has become a benchmark for China’s pop culture making inroads overseas,” said an article in People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece.
Other Chinese products to find global followings include video games such as Black Myth: Wukong and affordable, well-made electric cars by BYD and other brands. DeepSeek, the Chinese AI model, has been adopted by tech companies overseas, including in the United States and Europe. Foreign travel bloggers have posted videos of themselves gushing about Shanghai’s skyline and Chengdu’s pandas.
More niche offerings, like soapy Chinese period dramas, are finding audiences too. Patti Smith, the punk rock legend, has apparently left admiring comments on the Instagram account of a relatively unknown actor in one that recently debuted on Netflix.
Polls also show changes in public opinion. An analysis published in May by Morning Consult showed that for the first time China’s global standing surpassed that of the United States, including among American allies. Even in the United States, where views of China remain overwhelmingly negative, the share of Americans with an unfavorable opinion of China fell for the first time in five years in March, according to Pew. Younger Americans in particular are less hostile to China.
The shift may be in large part because global views of the United States have taken such a nosedive since President Trump’s second term began. Morning Consult said that American favorability had fallen far faster than enthusiasm for China had risen in that period.
Given the “alarmingly isolationist turn of the U.S.,” 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 favor. 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 idolized. Labubu dolls have sold out so quickly that some Chinese have taken to smuggling in dolls bought overseas to resell them. On Tuesday, a human-size Labubu sculpture sold at an auction in Beijing for $150,000.
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.
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 like Pop Mart, Tencent or Alibaba have hired employees of different nationalities, in offices all around the world.
Professor 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,” Professor Huang said.
Indeed, a bigger challenge for China’s soft power efforts may be how eager the 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 cringe-worthy (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 Mr. 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.
Siyi Zhao contributed research.
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
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