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How China’s Pop Culture Playbook is Quietly Influencing U.S. Trends
By Kelli Luu | 14 Jul, 2025
What feels like a trend in the United States has been proven to be a formula in China and if you’ve ever said “TikTok made me buy it”, you’ve already fallen into the algorithm.
You may not have realized it yet, but a lot of what's trending here in the United States was already trending in China. The way we scroll online, the way we shop — it all had to start somewhere.
China is shaping our pop culture quietly beginning with technology. The infamous TikTok app was developed by Chinese company ByteDance and they don’t just entertain audiences, they decide what goes viral and what doesn’t make the cut. So how is it deciding?
With an extremely advanced algorithm, TikTok’s For You Page, which is where you can discover new content, is fully controlled by machine learning. Every tiny move you make on the app is analyzed as data including how long you watch a video or how fast you swipe away.
The ByteDance algorithm then will rank videos based on these actions and push out the videos that are being watched longer and interacted with. This way content doesn’t need millions of followers in order to go viral, just the right engagement patterns.
Douyin is China’s exclusive version of TikTok and has perfected the algorithm model. Douyin came out in September 2016 and sister app TikTok was released internationally the following year, but during this time, a similar short video app called Musical.ly was already popular in the United States. ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2018 and merged it with TikTok, boosting its downloads in the US immediately.
So when you see random beauty products or stuffed animal keychains all over your For You Page, it’s something that already has been viral in China on Douyin.
Along with advanced technology, China also has a thorough understanding of consumer psychology and we have recently seen this with the success of blind box collectibles. Chinese brand Pop Mart has become a billion dollar company selling sealed mystery boxes that give consumers the hope of scoring a rare figure or a more common one. Blind box toys gained popularity worldwide back in the early 2000s, so they are a perfect mix of surprise, nostalgia, and FOMO.
Another way we see China tapping into emotional buying is through livestream shopping which has become a global retail ecosystem. On platforms like Douyin and Taobao Live, hosts are going live daily showing off products and speaking to viewers in real time. They create urgency with their limited time flash sales, once again sparking FOMO driving people to impulse buy.
Livestream shopping has now taken root on TikTok Shop and even Amazon Live contributing to the $200 billion dollar market size in the United States.
From the way we scroll to the way we purchase, China’s influence is everywhere but it’s not loud and in your face. It is embedded in the trends we see on the apps we use. It is now algorithm culture, not just pop culture. So the next time you see the same product popping up again on your For You Page, just remember what feels new to you is old news in China and that’s exactly how their influence works.
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