Young Chinese make innovations through intangible cultural heritage

With a love and fascination for traditional culture, many young Chinese have begun to use their creativity to innovate using elements from China's intangible cultural heritage.

Papercutting, the traditional Chinese art of paper design, has been adopted in many creative arts, including food and clothing.

On the Chinese lifestyle-focused social media platform Xiaohongshu, a video of cookies featuring a paper-cut styled dragon pattern received over 2.6 million views and 130,000 likes.

Liu Shan, a stay-at-home mother who loves Chinese papercutting, is the baker behind the cookies. Liu came up with the idea of making paper-cut styled Chinese zodiac-shaped cookies last year. The video of her rabbit cookies soon went viral, and she promised to try more complicated dragon patterns this year.

Liu started designing her dragon pattern last November and spent five days making the cookies before the Spring Festival. She said she would complete a series of cookies featuring all the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac over the next 10 years.

Young craftswoman Chen Lingling created a cloak featuring Chinese paper-cut patterns. As an intangible cultural heritage enthusiast, Chen has made a variety of different clothing and headwear, with the aim of making cultural heritage part of young people's daily lives.

She chose auspicious patterns such as the phoenix and golden fish to deliver her Spring Festival greetings. Her video featuring the cloak has received around 750,000 views and earned her fans from both China and abroad, encouraging her to continue her interest in intangible cultural heritage.

Cotton-padded pajamas, which many people may think are generally worn at home, are actually popular outerwear in central China's Hunan Province, where many locals choose the comfortable and inexpensive garments to resist the cold and damp winter weather.

This year, four young designers from Beijing combined elements from cotton-padded pajamas and Nuo Opera, a form of folk opera popular in Hunan, to create a fashionable coat. They have also updated clothes popular in other regions of China to appeal to the tastes of young people. Their related posts received over 800,000 views online.

According to a report published by Xiaohongshu, users of the platform uploaded nearly 1 million posts with the hashtag "reinvention" between February 9, the Chinese New Year's Eve, and February 16.

Analysts say these reinventions demonstrate young people's creativity and zest for life, and the innovations that use elements of intangible cultural heritage reflect their growing cultural confidence.