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TechTech Trends

Chinese version of TikTok promotes traditional dance and music as Beijing pushes to clean up internet content

  • ByteDance’s Douyin is investing ‘tens of millions of yuan’ to promote live-streamers producing content involving traditional music from different cultures
  • The incentive scheme offers creators cash rewards for such content that can include dances from Chinese ethnic minorities

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Women in traditional Chinese Hanfu attire dance for visitors to celebrate the Cherry Blossoms Festival in Nianhuawan, a town near Wuxi city, Jiangsu province, on March 22, 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE
Yaling Jiang
China’s most popular short-video app Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok that is also owned by ByteDance, announced a new initiative on Tuesday to support domestic live-streamers who promote traditional culture, a move announced a day after the country’s cyberspace administration announced a campaign to clean up online content during the Lunar New Year holiday.
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The live-streaming unit of Douyin plans to invest “tens of millions of yuan in cash to help outstanding live-streamers to develop their careers”, the platform said in a statement on Wednesday.

Users who live-stream content in any of seven music-related categories are eligible to apply for preferential treatment and cash incentives. The categories include folk songs, bel canto, national instruments, Western instruments, ethnic dance, classical dance, and contemporary dance, with more expected to be added in the future, according to Douyin.

Douyin defines ethnic dance as “dance from all ethnicities [in China] that mainly include Han, Tibetan, Mongolian, Korean, Uygur and Hui”. Meanwhile, classical dance is defined as “classic Eastern-style dance that couples strength and softness, such as Han-Tang Dynasty dance and Dunhuang dance”.

To take advantage of the new scheme, live-streamers have to pass certain assessments on their professional capabilities and how much of their content is dedicated to related content, among other things. Each hour of their seven most recent live streams longer than 60 minutes must contain at least 10 to 30 minutes from the specified categories, according to the announcement.

The platform, which has more than 600 million daily active users in China, has proven to be an addictive service thanks to its finely tuned algorithms that push an endless flow of content related to users’ interests. But it has more recently come under constant pressure to clean up content deemed unhealthy by regulators.

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Cultural content is one way of appeasing censors, and it has helped boost engagement on the platform in the past. In 2019, Douyin announced that 93 per cent of national-level Intangible Cultural Heritage projects had videos on the platform, collectively accumulating 3.3 billion likes. Last year, the company said that 99.4 per cent of related projects – such as traditional opera and the craftsmanship of making luosifen, known as smelly Chinese noodle soup – were represented on the platform.
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