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February 2017

Since the self-help best-seller Chicken Soup for the Soul landed in China in the late 1990s, “chicken-soup” motivational culture has become a social, cultural and commercial phenomenon. In the age of social media, the cheesy, gooey, feel-good culture has flooded people’s smartphones, formed a huge positive-thinking industry, and caused heated arguments.

Professor Henry Yiheng Zhao, a leading cultural critic and scholar in semiotics and comparative literature, argues that the prominent ‘chicken-soup’ phenomenon, triggered by the self-help best-seller Chicken Soup for the Soul, is a sign of the rising populism of culture in China today

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