China × Global · Weekly Essays
Your insider lens on China — Business · AI · Tech · Marketing.
13 years running global marketing at Transsion / TECNO and NetEase. Jury member, Effie Awards Greater China. Guest lecturer, Peking University School of Economics.
13
Years operating
8
Award jury seats
456
Pages, China playbook
25
Essays published
China Social Intelligence
One email every Monday, about seven minutes, on your brand alone. Not a dashboard you have to log into, and not a keyword count you still have to interpret yourself.
Written by a person whose name is on it, for one brand at a time.
How it worksA monthly ranking of Western brands by Chinese social buzz. L'Oréal leads on total volume, but 97% of it is paid. Strip that out and YSL is the one China actually loves.
Read before you subscribe
A free monthly ranking of how China talks about Western brands, and a 456-page field guide to the industries behind it.
About Annie
Annie spent 13 years inside one of the most underestimated marketing operations of the past decade — global digital lead at Transsion / TECNO, running paid acquisition and brand across 60 countries on a nine-figure annual budget.
She sits on the juries of eight Chinese marketing awards, including Effie Awards Greater China, and was named Marketing Innovator of the Year at the Golden Mouse Awards. She lectures at the Peking University School of Economics and the Renmin University of China School of Business.
In 2021 she went independent, published From Local to Global with China Machine Press, and now writes the dispatches she wishes she'd had access to a decade ago.
Annie Chan Talk is where she translates China for the world — and helps the world reach China.
Latest
China Social · 16 min
Not three channels. Three different businesses. What Xiaohongshu, Douyin and WeChat each actually reward, how to split a budget across them, what the data layer costs before you buy a single impression, and the five things I would stop paying for today.
On the record
Effie Awards Greater China, Golden Mouse, Hooray, TMA, TopDigital, Golden Touchpoint, the Shanghai International Advertising Awards, and the China International Advertising Festival. Judging teaches you more about what actually worked than winning ever did.
Weekly · Free
Every Monday, one dispatch on what's actually working in China — and one cross-border arbitrage Western brands keep missing.
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What the report actually shows
Real output from the August index, not a mock-up
Free · Monthly
L'Oréal is the most talked-about Western beauty brand in China this month, and 97% of that talk was paid for. Strip the paid posts out and YSL is the one China actually loves. 12 brands, roughly 2,300 posts, method published in full.
Read the August indexChina Social · 16 min
The dominant format on Douyin is not the influencer livestream Western teams picture. It is a staffed, scheduled, paid-traffic retail shift that runs most of the day, most days of the year. Brands fail on Douyin because they file it under the wrong department.
China Social · 15 min
Amateur mirror-selfie posts beat polished creator content on Xiaohongshu, and authenticity is not the reason. The reason is that Xiaohongshu is a search index with a feed attached, which changes what a note is worth and how a seeding budget should be built.
