China's second-largest shopping festival, held around June 18, originally the anniversary sale of the e-commerce company JD.com.

The schedule of working 9am to 9pm, six days a week, once celebrated by some tech founders and now a byword for overwork in China's internet industry.

Ant Group's payment and lifestyle app, originally built as the escrow layer for Taobao, which together with WeChat Pay forms China's mobile payment duopoly.

The reaction images, stickers, and meme pictures that Chinese chat users deploy as a rich parallel language in daily messaging.

Dockless rental bicycles unlocked by QR code, a Chinese-invented mobility category that boomed, crashed, and consolidated into a quiet urban utility.

A video platform that grew out of anime, comics, and gaming fandom into China's defining Gen Z video community, famous for its bullet comments.

Sealed toy boxes sold without revealing which figure is inside, a mystery-collecting format popularized by Pop Mart that hooks buyers on completing sets.

The twelve-animal cycle (rat through pig) that assigns each lunar year an animal sign, shaping festival imagery, birth-year customs, and casual personality talk.

The roughly 40-day travel rush around Chinese New Year, often described as the largest annual human migration on Earth.

Real-time viewer comments that scroll directly across the video screen, turning solo viewing into a shared, chat-like experience.

Collectible art toys aimed at adults rather than children, driven by original IP characters and artist collaborations, with Pop Mart as the industry's flagship.

ByteDance's Chinese version of the short-video app known internationally as TikTok, run as a separate product with its own content and e-commerce ecosystem.

China's vast, cheap, and fast parcel delivery system, the world's largest by volume, which makes next-day delivery of almost anything a daily expectation.

China's ultra-cheap, ultra-fast restaurant delivery system, dominated by Meituan (yellow) and Ele.me (blue), with riders visible on every street.

The Chinese internet's word for memes: viral jokes, catchphrases, and references that cycle through social media at high speed and act as cultural shorthand.

The consumer movement favoring Chinese brands that blend modern design with Chinese heritage and aesthetics, marking a shift away from the assumption that foreign equals better.

The booming youth market for anime, comic, and game merchandise such as badges, standees, and trading cards; guzi is Chinese transliteration of the English word goods.

A youth-driven revival of historical Han Chinese clothing, worn today as fashion, festival wear, and a statement of cultural confidence.

China's high-speed rail network, the largest in the world by a wide margin, running trains at up to 350 km/h between nearly every major city.

Honkai: Star Rail is a massively popular space fantasy role-playing gacha game developed by Chinese company HoYoverse.

China's beloved communal meal where diners cook raw ingredients in a simmering pot of broth at the table, with regional styles from Chongqing's chili inferno to Beijing's mild copper pot.

China's second-largest e-commerce company, built on self-operated inventory and its own logistics network, with a reputation for authentic goods and same-day delivery.

Taking China's civil service examinations, an increasingly popular path to a stable government job, with applicants at record highs and competition ratios that can reach thousands to one.

China's second major short-video app, known for its strong communities in smaller cities and rural areas and its livestream-driven economy.

The snaggle-toothed elf character from artist Kasing Lung, sold by Pop Mart, whose plush charms became a global craze and a symbol of Chinese IP going worldwide.

Selling products through live video hosts who demonstrate items and push limited-time deals, a retail format China scaled into a hundreds-of-billions-of-yuan industry.

The app-first coffee chain that overtook Starbucks in China by store count with cheap coconut lattes, infamous for a 2020 accounting scandal and then a remarkable comeback.

The famously funky rice noodle soup from Liuzhou, Guangxi, flavored with river snails and sour bamboo shoots, which became a national obsession and a packaged-food export hit.

A customizable spicy-numbing street hot pot: pick skewers of ingredients, have them boiled in a chili broth, and pay by weight or skewer.

Tea with milk and toppings like tapioca pearls, the everyday treat drink of young China and the foundation of a powerful chain-store industry now expanding globally.

Lightweight apps that run instantly inside super apps like WeChat and Alipay without downloading, used for everything from ordering coffee to government services.

China's ultra-budget tea and ice cream chain, famous for one-dollar drinks, a catchy jingle, and one of the largest store counts of any food chain in the world.

Involution: the sensation of ever-intensifying competition that produces no real progress, the defining buzzword of overworked young China since 2020.

The category of freshly-made tea-based drinks, from cheese-foam fruit teas to lemon teas, that Chinese chains built into one of the country's hottest consumer industries.

The price-first e-commerce platform that rose on group buying and farm-direct goods to challenge Alibaba and JD, and the parent of the international app Temu.

China's dominant way of paying in person: scanning a merchant's QR code (or showing your own) through WeChat Pay or Alipay, which largely replaced cash and cards.

App-based car rides, a market dominated in China by Didi Chuxing, which merged with Uber's China business in 2016.

Rentable portable batteries docked in kiosks across Chinese cities, rented by scanning a QR code and returnable at any station of the same network.

The algorithmically-fed vertical video format, usually under a minute, that has become the dominant way Chinese internet users consume media.

The November 11 shopping festival that Alibaba turned from an unofficial student holiday into the largest retail event in the world.

Group dancing in public plazas and parks, mostly by retired women, a daily fitness-and-social ritual visible in every Chinese city and occasionally controversial for its loudspeakers.

An internal Chinese martial art practiced worldwide as slow, meditative movement for health and balance, rooted in Daoist ideas of softness overcoming hardness.

Lying flat: the viral philosophy of opting out of the rat race by doing the minimum, rejecting overwork, mortgage, and status competition.

Alibaba's vast consumer marketplace, founded in 2003, where millions of merchants sell essentially everything and much of Chinese online shopping culture was invented.

The traditional Chinese calendar's 24 seasonal markers, from Start of Spring to Major Cold, which still anchor food customs, farming, and cultural events, and are UNESCO-listed heritage.

Internet-famous people, places, or products in China: the influencer class and the influencer-economy infrastructure that turns online fame into sales.

Tencent's super app that combines messaging, social feeds, payments, and millions of built-in mini programs, and is effectively the default operating system of daily life in China.

The publishing platform inside WeChat where media outlets, brands, and individual writers push articles to subscribers, functioning as China's blogosphere and newsletter system in one.

Sina's microblogging platform, China's closest equivalent to X (Twitter), whose trending hot search list functions as the country's public agenda meter.

A lifestyle community app built on user-generated reviews and recommendations, where young Chinese consumers research what to buy, eat, and visit.

China's largest question-and-answer knowledge community, similar to Quora, whose hot list captures what educated Chinese internet users are debating.