Unexpected stardom
Foreign talents find a following in China through short video platform Douyin
When British singer Shaun Gibson finally left China to head home for the holidays it wasn’t for Christmas but Chinese New Year. During his first year and a half of playing music in China, Gibson had adapted a couple of popular Chinese songs by sampling the melodies and writing English lyrics for them.
Another reason for heading back to the UK was that he had been invited to perform at a series of Chinese New Year celebration events across the country. Three video clips from his performance at Trafalgar Square on February 10 quickly went viral on video sharing platform Douyin, known as TikTok internationally, causing the singer to gain an additional 342,000 fans on the platform within five days.
Before Gibson left China to perform overseas, singer Christine Welch flew to Beijing from the US in January for the first time since she left in 2016 to perform her Chinese song “A Million Possibilities” on CCTV program Everlasting Classics Season Two. Welch had released the song five years ago, but in August of 2018 it went viral on Douyin in China with plays and covers of the song reaching into the hundreds of millions.
Gibson and Welch are not the only ones to make a splash on Douyin by performing in Chinese. If you surf the platform you will easily find numerous videos of foreigners speaking in Chinese or performing Chinese songs, dances or comedy routines.
A platform for sharing
A master student majoring in computer science at Hefei University of Technology, Tesso17, as he is known on Douyin, comes from Equatorial Guinea. He has attracted 3.76 million fans on Douyin with his hilarious videos, especially ones in which he teaches viewers how to pronounce English words with the aid of Chinese characters written on a blackboard. Many Chinese netizens have given him thumbs up for his creative and exaggerated performances and were amazed by how he could use Chinese words to approximate the pronunciation of English words.
Tesso17 told the Global Times that when he was a child he dreamed of becoming an actor one day. He began posting videos of his daily life in August 2018 just because it was fun, but once he reached 20,000 followers, he began putting more effort into making his videos more entertaining.
A professional musician and singer, Gibson releases all his new songs on major social media and music platforms around the world. TikTok is the platform on which he has the highest number of fans and is his preferred platform due to the level of interactivity it brings.
“YouTube and [Chinese video platform] Bilibili, they are great for reaching a lot of people, but you can’t see the interaction apart from the comments on the bottom of the video,” Gibson said.
When Gibson uploads content on Douyin, netizens can edit this together with their own content to make videos.
Having never heard about Douyin, Welch was informed by her friends on Facebook in August 2018 that her song had gained tremendous popularity on the platform in China. Out of curiosity, she downloaded the app and was soon surprised by the number of videos of Chinese netizens performing covers of her song.
“It’s a really creative environment for splicing different media together,” Welch told the Global Times.
Deeper insight
Gibson graduated with degrees in popular music and music history from the University of Liverpool. Surrounded by Chinese friends at college, he learned
Chinese on his own and from his friends. He told the Global Times that what attracted him the most about Chinese culture was traditional architecture, clothing and especially musical instruments.
When working on his own music, he sometimes spends an entire day adapting a single Chinese song because he needs to first understand its meaning, make changes to the melody and write English lyrics that stay true to the original theme of the song. His hope is to create songs that “for Chinese audiences are the new versions of songs they’ve already known and for Westerners are melodies different from the styles that they have gotten used to.”
Although she spent two years working on a music career, Welch doesn’t think of herself as a professional musician. Right now, she is pursuing her PhD in Chinese literature at the University of Wisconsin. Nevertheless, she still loves to write song lyrics in Chinese.
Both Gibson and Welch are fascinated by the continuity of Chinese culture. For instance, Gibson was amazed how lines from ancient Chinese poems could be used as lyrics for contemporary songs.
“We don’t take Shakespeare and turn it into a pop song. It would just be weird,” he noted.
Welch says she finds it amazing that after studying Chinese for a few years she is now able to “read texts from 3,000 years ago through Chinese characters.” She loves ancient Chinese literature so much that she reads it and translates it into English every day.
“For me, Chinese culture is not history. When I go to the park, I see people playing erhu [a traditional stringed instrument], I see people dancing at the square. Chinese culture is very much
alive,” Gibson said.