Sixth Tone

With hundreds of concerts scheduled across China during the National Day holiday, some fans found the cheapest way to upgrade a seat was to rent a better camera phone. For about 100 to 200 yuan ($15 to $30) a day, concertgoers can rent flagship smartphones with powerful telephoto cameras that pull distant performers into clearer view, a useful option when high demand leaves fans seated far from the stage and professional cameras and long lenses are often barred from venues.

Few people in China have heard of Transsion Holdings, but hundreds of millions of people across the Global South use its phones. The firm, headquartered in China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen, has risen from obscurity to become a dominant player in Africa, where it makes nearly half of all phones bought on the continent every year, beating competition from Samsung, Apple, and domestic Chinese giants like Xiaomi and Huawei Technologies.

As the esports competition at the 2026 Asian Games in Nagoya, Japan, came to a close Friday, China finished atop the medal table with three golds and one silver after entering four of the 11 events. Its final gold came in Identity V, where victory over host Japan made 20-year-old Mu Xinyue the first woman to win an Asian Games esports title.

This summer, “All Wishes Come True!” took in more than 1.8 billion yuan ($268 million) at the Chinese box office, becoming the latest in a string of hit animated films inspired by traditional Chinese myths and legends. The movie reimagines the Eight Immortals, a group of legendary figures in Chinese mythology and Taoism, as ordinary mortals who pose as immortals and venture into the celestial realm of Penglai.

A northern Chinese village has announced it will spend 30 million yuan ($4.5 million) to recruit 100 character performers — known in China as NPCs, or non-playable characters — to interact with tourists. Successful hires will receive a range of salaries, with the highest reportedly reaching 10 million yuan a year.

SHANGHAI – At the Sept. 19 Shanghai premiere of her feature debut, “Shanghai Daughter,” Shen Zhongmin carried a rubber seed from the forests of the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, nearly 3,000 kilometers away in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, where her late father had worked. “The seed fell from the canopy and struck me as I retraced his life there,” Shen, 41, tells Sixth Tone.

In the classic Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” little demons are nobodies. They serve powerful demon kings, perform menial tasks, and are easily dispatched by heroes like Sun Wukong, better known as the Monkey King. Most do not even have names. But increasingly, these once-forgotten characters are moving to the center of the story. Across Chinese films, TV shows, games, and books, little demons are being transformed from anonymous supporting characters into protagonists in their own right.

A mobile game beloved by millions of Chinese users about a traveling frog is set to shut down after the game operator and the IP holder failed to reach a licensing agreement. Announced Tuesday by its official account on microblogging platform Weibo, the game, Travel Frog: China Journey, will discontinue on Dec. 8. “This time, the little frog is going on a long journey, with no set date of return,” the announcement read.

Chinese romantic drama “The Early Spring,” an adaptation of a 2021 web novel, has become the highest-ranked Chinese series on streaming giant Netflix’s weekly non-English TV chart. However, the show has divided domestic viewers over whether it romanticizes an unhealthy power imbalance between its protagonists: a male boss and his female subordinate. The TV series, which premiered Aug.