Over the past year, political, economic, and social developments and measures have once again changed the Chinese digital environment. When it comes to China’s online landscape, nothing ever stays the same. The new China Internet Report 2021 by SCMP gives an overview of the latest trends and developments. Do not reproduce our content without permission – you can contact us at China’s tech sector has been facing an ongoing crackdown by Beijing regulations, a lot has been changing in the country’s digital environment over the past year. First-time commenters, please be patient – we will have to manually approve your comment before it appears. “society society”) emoji, which also comes from online culture and is a way among friends to (self-mockingly) talk about being ‘gangsters,’ ‘brothers.’ or ‘scoundrels.’Īs the new emoji are still in their testing phase, not all WeChat users can use the new emoji yet, so you might have to wait a bit before being able to try them out.īy Manya Koetse, with thanks to a mistake or want to add something? Please let us know in comments below or email us. There’s also a “ shehui shehui” (社会社会, lit. Other new emoji are the “wow” emoji, and others to express “ok,” “add oil,” “emm,” “oh!” The meme was originally spread on social media platforms such as Reddit, but then also became hugely popular in China, where it became a symbol of sarcasm (also read this Abacus article on this topic). The smiling dog has been around since 2013 and is known as the doge meme, based on a photo of a Shiba inu.

“Eating watermelon” (吃瓜 chī guā) is an online expression that comes from “watermelon-eating masses” (吃瓜群众 chī guā qúnzhòng), which describes a common mentality of Internet users who have no idea what is actually going on but are still commenting or following online stories for their enjoyment – perhaps comparable to the “popcorn memes” that are ubiquitous on Western social media platforms.

The reason why especially the watermelon-eating and dog emoji are being discussed on social media, is because these emoji are based on popular internet memes. On Weibo, the new emoji have become a topic of discussion under the hashtags “WeChat’s New Emoji” (#微信上线新表情#), “WeChat’s Watermelon Eating Emoji” (#微信上线吃瓜表情#), and “WeChat’s Dog Emoji” (#微信上线狗头表情#).ĭifferent from the Unicode emoji (see Emojipedia), WeChat and Weibo have their own sets of emoji, although there is overlap. The new emoji include, among others, a watermelon-eating emoji and a smiling Shiba Inu. On January 14, Tencent’s Wechat introduced new emoji to its existing emoji set.

Wechat emoji download