Weekly #18: TikTok's sister app Douyin becomes a new online travel agency 🛫, when soy sauce meets ice cream and new song meets gym class🏆 | Following the yuan

Are crazy collaborations an opportunity for both sides, or is one 'stealing the rice bowl' from the other, as the Chinese slang goes?

No one wants to read climate news, but it's being thrust into our faces as El Niño intensifies.

It wasn't long ago that I reported with my ex-colleagues at Sixth Tone about the Henan floods, where we reviewed videos and images of people trapped in the subway, and residents losing their loved ones to a disaster that no one could foresee.

Two years later, as we endure the hottest summer recorded on Earth, the floods in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei province, caused by heavy rains from Typhoon Doksuri last week, have taught me again how fragile the world is.

Book publishers in Beijing are counting their losses amid the torrential rainfall and floods. Image: cptoday.cn

“The level of floods in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei could exceed that of the Henan floods [in 2021],” said HAO Nan, the head of Zhuoming Info Aid, a social organization created to aid the exchange of info amid natural disasters. [If you or your friends are proficient in Chinese and want to help remotely, you can scan the poster and become a volunteer.]

1. Douyin and New Oriental becomes the new OTAs 🛫

The Events: After several phenomenal tourism marketing successes from Zibo BBQ to Shijiazhuang rock festival, this month sees a slew of new media companies entering tourism.

Social media platforms including TikTok’s sister app Douyin and ex-education company New Oriental’s livestreaming platform East Buy Holding both recently jumped on the bandwagon.