At the centre is a brand film featuring an elderly rock band that unexpectedly goes viral. There’s high contrast at play. While much of social media leans toward polished, premium-type aesthetics, Canva opts for something more disarming. The choice of older protagonists introduces a sense of novelty but also reinforces the campaign’s core message: creative expression is not limited by age, skill, or background. 

The campaign sits under the banner From Inspiration to Viral Hit, extending beyond the film into a broader set of activations. Canva is partnering with Rednote Design Week to launch what they’re calling a Viral Cover Design Challenge, alongside a series of offline workshops branded as Cover Creation Camps. These will take place across major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Hangzhou. 

Online competitions are designed to generate attention and participation at scale, while offline sessions translate that interest into practical engagement. The result is a closed-loop system that moves users from passive viewers to active creators. 

By tying the campaign to Rednote Design Week, Canva gains access to an established creator ecosystem and the promise of platform-backed traffic. For participants, the incentive is tangible: visibility, not just expression.  

Canva has long positioned itself as a tool for everyone. A drag and drop design tool. This campaign evolves that message, shifting from usability to visibility. By tapping Rednote’s creator economy, it reframes design as not just easy, but as a means to be seen, shared, and culturally relevant in a crowded content landscape. They’re basically saying, your story deserves to be told, and here’s a tool simple enough you can get that story out there. 

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The brand breaks down ‘Xujiahui’ (徐家汇), centring on the first two characters ‘Xu family’ (徐家), before expanding outward. Crowdsourced handwritten surnames – Wang, Li, Zhang, alongside compound names like Murong – are layered into a dense visual field that ultimately resolves into the final character 汇 (to gather). It’s a clean piece of work: from one family to many, from many into one place. It’s also a message that taps into MUJI’s long-running homely narrative. 

On Chinese social platforms, the reaction has been split. Rednote discussions show two camps forming quickly. Supporters focus on the logic. They read the work as participatory and locally attuned, a campaign that pulls MUJI closer to Chinese consumers.  

Critics, however, aren’t arguing with the idea. They’re looking at the design. The oversized black 汇 character – thick, dominant, bold – is the flashpoint. Users describe it as visually jarring, out of step with the handwritten textures around it, and at odds with the negative space that typically defines MUJI’s aesthetic. 

It’s a question of execution discipline. MUJI has built its brand on restraint and minimalism. The thing about minimalism is that when the restraint behind it slips – even slightly – it becomes frighteningly visible.  

The poster Muji put up in Xujiahui hasn’t failed. But you could say it has exposed something in Muji’s branding: MUJI’s idea of home is tied very tightly to how it chooses to show it. When it drifts even slightly off course, the customers that have tied themselves just as tightly to that brand image feel it all too acutely.  

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Students who flashed their timetables to prove they had 8am classes got coffee in return. A Real Reviews wall surfaced crowd-sourced takes the pits and peaks of life at work. Campus cats were fed from an interactive paw tool. An intern slacking guide ran coping mechanisms as light-hearted copy.  

This isn’t a new tactic – Rednote, Bilibili and other big players have been hot on offline activation. But what Xiao Mifeng is actually doing is trying to carve out a niche that the competition can’t touch.  

Carving out campus  

Xiao Mifeng sits in an awkward gap. It’s somewhere between Rednote’s chic lifestyle agenda and a Douban discussion thread. What they get users with is structure. Verified users offer real-world advice for parts of life that are difficult enough for anyone to navigate, let alone young people. Where most social media has a look at my life vibe, Xiao Mifeng’s selling point is: Life? Here’s how to survive it.  

Looking at the difference in function like that, the Campus Reality Exhibition is a bit more like a product made physical than a marketing push.  

Why did Xiao Mifeng go offline? 

Growth is slowing across China’s platforms. New users are hard to come by. So the game must change. The spread of platforms using offline events to increase engagement points to the fact they’re going for depth over scale. They want to offer something that will cement their platforms in the daily lives of their userbase.  

Offline gives platforms a bit of texture – a literal third dimension. It turns users into participants and generates engagement that’s fed back online through content posted. We’ve seen it from Xiaohongshu and Bilibili already. Xiao Mifeng’s take is narrower. It’s not about aspiration. It’s just everyday student life, packaged as experience. 

Why Xiao Mifeng Keeping it real  

That’s So Real comes across as a bit of an odd way to name an event. Of course it’s real, it’s happening, isn’t it? Realness happens to be a core part of the niche Xiao Mifeng wants to carve out for itself.  

Again, think of this within the context of the competition: social media awash with images of lives we know all too well are fake. Xiao Mifeng’s angle is as the social media platform for the bits of life that you don’t want to photograph. Your long, boring meetings. The bad bosses. The endless, murderous overtime. They’re basically the anti-social media lifestyle app.   

The Dao view 

The exhibition pulled in more than 2,700 student participants. It offered something ‘real’ to each of them that stopped by. It was the kind of ‘real’ that translates very well to platform engagement.   

The ways they chose to engage were an owning of the low-value moments in life. Feeding a stray campus cat or writing a review of your workplace on a wall does not carry the same type of social clout as eating at one of Shanghai’s best restaurants or grabbing a drink from the city’s trendiest matcha shop. But the event pulled in the engagement anyway. Xiao Mifeng has pulled off an event that got the clicks, delivered something real, and aligned like two straight rails with its brand offering.  

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The report tracks Q4 2025 cases. Here are the numbers: A total of 65 employees were dismissed for breaching internal rules. Of those, ten were named in serious cases, including seven transferred to judicial authorities on suspicion of criminal offences. Several were also added to a shared industry blacklist. 

While the headline number is down from the previous quarter – 120 dismissals and 14 criminal referrals – the focus of enforcement is widening. Information security and social media leaks are emerging as key pressure points. 

Nine employees were dismissed for lending out corporate tools such as Feishu (飞书) accounts and devices. Throughout 2025, ByteDance filed twelve civil lawsuits against staff accused of leaking confidential information. That included instances where staff had done so through paid external consultations. There were also a string of cases involving false disclosures on platforms like Maimai and Rednote (小红书), running the risk of damaging brand reputation.  

The Dao view: ByteDance and the industry corruption crackdown 

What’s really changing is the structure of enforcement. ByteDance’s use of industry blacklists aligns with a wider push led by companies like JD.com (京东) and Tencent (腾讯). Cross-company mechanisms like the Sunshine Integrity Alliance (阳光诚信联盟) have been set up to share misconduct records, effectively restricting job mobility for offenders across the major platforms. 

At the same time, internal systems are being sharpened. Tencent operates a codified ‘red line’ framework backed by a dedicated anti-fraud unit and regular case disclosures. JD.com has extended enforcement beyond employees into suppliers and partners, targeting corruption across the full commercial chain. 

The result is a more interconnected landscape. For employees, dismissal is no longer the endpoint. In serious cases, the consequences range from industry exclusion to full-on criminal liability. 

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It’s that un-talked-about side of recovery. You get the organ you need, but when you’re back on your feet, you don’t feel capable of getting your teeth into life. As we’ve learnt from Alipay’s film, it’s a lesser seen psychological element to coming through alive. Patients in the film are overly cautious, limiting movement and social activity.  

Broader narratives 

Let’s wheel it back a bit. Ant Forest was originally designed to inspire low-carbon thinking in Alipay users. Essentially, you converted steps taken and user activities – like using greener forms of transport – into points that planted trees. Here, the platform is given a fresh spin as a recovery tool.  

But the connection between organ transplant recovery and Ant Forest is more conceptual than anything. The film presents the app’s user activities as incremental recovery. Tree growth as the rebuilding of life after surgery.  

Why does Alipay focus on organ transplant survivors, not donors?  

Can you think of a close demographic that gets plenty of attention in media? Organ donors? It’s an easier story to sell. There’s moral appeal and the promise of saving a life.

Alipay’s organ recipient focus is smart though. It ties in much better with how they want people to use Ant Forest. While organ donation narratives are full of one-off, dramatic interventions, transplant recovery is a slow, tentative process.  

It’s not a campaign that urges donations or grand gestures. It’s one that invites empathy through daily routine – the same daily routine that Alipay and Ant Forest run on.  

Dao’s wider view 

This is not Alipay’s first time engaging with the theme of organ transplants. Back in 2016, the platform partnered with the China Organ Transplant Development Foundation to integrate an organ donation registration portal into its app, simplifying what had been a fragmented offline process. 

That approach reflects a wider pattern across China’s digital ecosystem. Platforms like WeChat and Meituan have steadily folded public services into their core user journeys, from health tools to civic utilities. The result is a shift in how public interest initiatives are delivered: not as standalone campaigns users need to seek out, but as embedded features encountered through routine behaviour. 

What highlighing transplant survivors does for Alipay 

So, what does this latest push actually do? Not much in a clinical sense. It doesn’t improve access to transplants or change medical outcomes. This is about strengthening Alipay’s role in everyday life. By layering new meaning onto Ant Forest, the platform deepens engagement with a feature users already return to daily.  

It also reinforces Alipay’s positioning as a broader social utility, not just a payments tool. Tying into organ donation and recovery aligns with public interest priorities, while building emotional resonance around otherwise functional behaviour. In effect, Alipay isn’t changing what users do. It’s shaping how those actions are understood, binding the platform further into everyday life. 

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The platform has launched its First Grassroots Mini Competition (第一届民间小赛). Users are invited to conjure up their own contests across art, food, lifestyle, pets and fashion. The scope is intentionally wide. Hyper-specific observations, regional quirks, or completely unhinged ideas are all welcome.

The format builds on momentum sparked by creator 樊小书, who framed these contests as a way to ‘defend, celebrate and live ordinary life well.’ Don’t be fooled by the earnest sentiment. It works because the barrier to entry is basically non-existent. No expertise required.

Online, the Rednote competitions play out through posts. Users submit entries, rally votes and let likes decide winners. Offline, the strongest ideas get a second life. After online rounds, selected competitions can receive support from the platform to host real-world finals.

That jump from feed to physical is important. A slipper contest is funny enough online. A slipper contest with a live final is content. It drives a feedback loop that fuels what Rednote runs on: engagement.

The mechanics also fit a key part of Rednote’s strategy lately. That is the push to promote a more community-driven platform. In their recent interest report, they highlighted all sorts of niche activities their users are engaged in. It was light-hearted, highlighting knitting communities and spaces for things like badge collecting.

The Rednote competitions feel just as unserious. Rednote clearly knows the most engaging thing on their platform is probably people messing around with everyday life.

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The digital yuan (or e-CNY) is China’s way of upgrading money for the platform age. It gives the People’s Bank of China more control, cuts Big Tech down to size and turns cash into something smarter – programmable, trackable and policy-ready, with half an eye on reshaping finance at home and abroad. 

There’s a big structural shift in amongst this news too. The digital yuan is no longer just a payments tool running alongside the system. It can now sit on bank balance sheets and count as interest-bearing deposits. You can read that as the digital RMB starting to behave like actual money. 

Having it run like actual cash changes incentives. Before, the e-CNY functioned more or less like a parallel payment tool. It was useful, but not something banks were motivated to promote. By tying it into the nitty gritty of banking economics, regulators have equated adoption with profit. And so now banks can earn from using it. 

If the banks can profit, they will push. The numbers already suggest momentum. In China, the digital yuan had processed 3.5 billion transactions worth 16.7 trillion RMB (around $2.4 trillion). Some 230 million individual wallets have been opened, alongside nearly 19 million corporate accounts. 

It’s safe to say we’re moving into a new era for the e-CNY. You could think of the first post-pilot stage. What began life in research papers in 2014 and went to pilot in 2020 has now hit an undeniable rollout stage. 

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At first glance, it looks like another marketplace entering an already crowded field. But JD isn’t playing the usual cross-border game here. Instead of shipping cheap goods from China, the company has spent months building out a network of local infrastructure, including warehousing and its own delivery network under the JoyExpress banner. Their pitch is clear: faster delivery, tighter control and fewer question marks over the authenticity of what you’re buying. 

In the UK, that promise is already being localised. JD says it will offer next-day delivery to around 17 million households, supported by distribution sites in Milton Keynes and Luton – a signal that this is as much a logistics rollout as it is a retail launch. 

And that makes sense because a logistics-first approach is core to how JD operates at home. In China, the company built its reputation on owning inventory and managing fulfilment end-to-end. It’s a model that trades margins for reliability and speed. Now, it’s exporting that playbook to Europe. 

The timing is telling. Growth in China’s e-commerce market has slowed, competition has intensified, and platforms are looking outward for their next phase. Europe, with its dense urban populations and mature online shopping habits, offers a logical testing ground, if a fiercely competitive one… 

The JD.com Joybuy launch: A wider view

JD’s multi-country launch suggests this is more than a trial run. By entering six markets simultaneously, the company is effectively treating Europe as a single logistics network, aiming to build scale quickly and spread costs across borders. Its upcoming €2.2 billion acquisition of German retail group Ceconomy adds another layer, providing local expertise and supplier relationships to support that expansion. 

Unlike platforms such as Temu or AliExpress, which lean on ultra-low pricing and cross-border shipping, JD is betting on local stock and speed. If Temu represents China exporting price, the JD.com Joybuy launch suggests something else: a maturing Chinese retail market with the logistical power to stand up to some serious, established global plays. Amazon should take note.  

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From March 15, Apple’s standard commission on paid apps and in-app purchases in mainland China has dropped from 30% to 25%. Developers in Apple’s small-business and mini-app partner programmes will see their rate drop from 15% to 12%. 

For developers, that five per cent trim matters. The 30% fee has long been a sore point across the tech industry. Game studios, subscription services and content platforms have all argued the cut is too steep, especially for companies already paying marketing and platform costs elsewhere. 

In China, the Apple tax issue has increasingly attracted regulatory attention. Authorities have been looking more closely at how global platforms charge local businesses, part of a broader push to tighten oversight of the digital economy. Apple’s pre-emptive move suggests the company would rather adjust the dial voluntarily than wait for regulators to force their hand. 

The savings could be substantial. Analysts estimate Chinese developers could collectively keep more than RMB 6 billion (about $870 million) each year thanks to the lower fees. That money could go into everything from product development to marketing – or simply padding margins in China’s brutally competitive app market. 

The Apple tax in China: A wider look

The change may also ripple into China’s fast-growing mini-app ecosystem. These lightweight apps, often embedded into larger platforms like WeChat, are a key way for businesses to sell services, content and subscriptions on smartphones. Lower commissions make those business models a little easier to run on Apple devices. 

So on Apple’s part, it’s a clear message. The company is looking to keep developers happy, and keep regulators calm. China is one of the world’s largest app markets, one that Apple will want firmly inside their App Store economy. 

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Now AgiBot is taking that momentum overseas with a Munich unveiling of a new range of humanoid robots: the Expedition A3. The machine is designed for high-interaction work such as manning reception desks, navigating the nuances of retail and entertainment venues – basically customer-facing positions.  

That’s exciting news. We’re one step closer to having a robot serve us our popcorn next time we’re at the cinema. But the A3’s arrival signals more than just that. It’s AgiBot dipping its toes in the European market, and it reflects a broader shift happening across the robotics industry.  

For years AgiBot humanoid robots have been mostly experimental prototypes. Tools more for entertainment than actual help. Companies are now pushing toward real-world deployment – and fast.  

Industrial use is a testing ground. AgiBot’s Genie G2 humanoid robot has begun trial operations in factories, including deployments with automotive parts supplier Joyson Electronics. The robots are now performing hundreds of tasks across production lines.  

For now, they’re still learning the ropes. Early tests suggest productivity still only sits at about half that of a human worker, though the company expects this to rise to 70–80% of human efficiency by the end of this year.  

Behind the push sits one of China’s biggest advantages: supply chain density. Many of the core components needed to build humanoid robots can be sourced within a two-hour drive of Shanghai, anchoring development in the Yangtze River Delta’s manufacturing ecosystem. That location also puts them within easy shipping distance of the rest of the world – a market AgiBot now has its eyes firmly fixed on. 

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