To say that China had a successful 2025 would be an understatement.
According to President Donald Trump’s campaign agenda and early months of his second administration, the United States was going to be tough on China. Trump went heavy on tariffs, limited chip exports, and tried to assert dominance over the country.
A year later, you’d have trouble finding evidence of it.
Instead, China has prospered by exercising hard economic power over the US — by wielding its newfound soft power. If you didn’t catch the blockbuster Chinese movie Nhe Zha 2 or play Black Myth: Wukong, you likely caught wind of a Labubu.
But why did these cultural exports finally leave China now? And how might it impact China’s growing hard power over the US?
To find out, Today, Explained senior producer and reporter Miles Bryan spoke with Don Weinland, a China business and finance editor for The Economist based in Shanghai.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
How would you define [China’s] soft power?
The first thing to say is that China massively underpunches on its cultural exports. This is the world’s second biggest economy, an incredible manufacturing power unparalleled elsewhere. And yet on cultural exports, it is really not doing very well on that front.
This is something that’s actually changing. For many years, I don’t think you would’ve known most of the movies or video games or toys that are being made in China, especially not by name. But China did much better on cultural exports in 2025 than it has in previous years.
I feel like we should start with Labubu. I don’t have any Labubus, to be honest, but I do see them everywhere, and I was surprised to learn in researching for this story that they originated in China. Are you a Labubu guy?
I’m not really a Labubu guy per se, but I am very interested in Pop Mart, the company that makes Labubus. It really started getting a lot of attention in 2024, and then in ’25, it just blew up. If you haven’t seen one, they’re often described as being “ugly cute.” And they come in these things called blind boxes. You don’t know what Labubu you’re going to get. They’re collectors’ items. It’s kind of like baseball cards in a way. You don’t know what baseball cards you’re getting, and you might get a rare card.
So what else? You mentioned movies.
Nhe Zha 2 really blew up at the beginning of 2025. It’s an animated film. It tells a traditional Chinese myth story. It’s the highest grossing animated film ever. That’s quite amazing in itself. And most of that happened domestically, but I know people in the US that have seen it as well.
Chinese films don’t get a lot of screen time in the US traditionally, but this one seems like it did break through in some places. You would hear senior leaders citing Nhe Zha 2, which is very odd to hear them referencing this animated film. And really, they were pointing to what they see as a cultural success. So that tells you something about how important this movie was.
You also mentioned video games. I was looking into one game that looks like it broke through: Black Myth: Wukong. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Incredibly popular within China, but also overseas. I think it’s one of the most popular video games of this style ever. It’s also based on a traditional Chinese myth. It was so popular that the areas in China that it takes place in started getting a bunch of tourists visiting them. This type of cultural product can generate economic growth, not just in the selling of the product itself, but also in areas like tourism.
What do these products have in common that contributed to their breaking out of China as cultural exports in the past year? What do you think is happening here that’s different?
I’ve kind of narrowed it down to two really important things. One is that a lot of the creators behind these things are in their late 30s or early 40s, and they are people that went to university in China just as the education system was changing. A lot more students were going to school at the time. It’s a time when the internet was relatively free. It was quite easy to get online and look at foreign websites. I think they absorbed a lot of foreign culture.
Another thing is that these types of products are being funded quite a bit better than in the past. The Communist Party has its priorities. It wants to be strong in manufacturing; it wants to be strong in areas like electric vehicles and batteries, solar power. It hasn’t really focused that much on its cultural products and its soft power, and we can kind of see that changing in areas like animated film or video games. It’s a lot easier for these types of companies to get funding now, and that just means that it’s going to reach a lot more people in China, but also overseas.
There’s another factor that has really held back cultural exports in China, and that’s just rules and regulations here that make it very, very difficult to make raunchy, sexy entertainment, the type of stuff that we’re used to in the US. Sometimes even broaching the topic of divorce is difficult in sitcoms. You can’t even really have haunted houses in Chinese entertainment, because the Communist Party doesn’t like superstition.
What’s your bet on the next big Chinese cultural export? Think we’re getting a Labubu 2.0 in 2026?
I don’t think Labubu is going away anytime soon. Pop Mart is going to keep cranking out these strange, ugly, cute dolls. But I would say one area that American consumers might see in 2026 is they might see more Chinese products, well-made products, popping up in America. We’ve been talking about entertainment, but products have a big impact on soft power as well. If you start buying well-made Chinese products, it could change your mind about China.
It does seem like China’s making progress on entertainment and cultural products that are more geared towards children. I think that’s kind of a safe space for Chinese cultural exports. You don’t need things like violence and sex and the raunchier bits of entertainment in this space. That might make it easier for more of these types of youth-focused things to reach people outside of China.
