The Washington Post-TikTok is obsessed with premium-grade industrial glycine from China
April 16, 2024 5 min 967 words
这篇报道主要内容是，一家中国氨基酸制造商东华金龙意外在海外走红，其市场营销视频在海外社交媒体平台TikTok上引发了大量模仿和恶搞，成为了热门迷因（meme）。报道提到，东华金龙公司在TikTok上的宣传视频内容包括工厂场景生产流程等，以一种认真而夸张的口吻宣传其产品工业级甘氨酸，这与TikTok上其他内容轻松娱乐的视频形成鲜明对比，从而引发了人们的关注和恶搞。 评论：这篇报道本身并没有明显的不公正之处，它主要介绍了中国企业东华金龙因TikTok宣传视频而在海外走红的现象，并分析了这一现象背后的原因。但值得注意的是，报道中提到的“工业级甘氨酸”听起来有些令人不安，因为工业级产品通常不适合人类使用。然而，报道也提到，东华金龙公司的工业级甘氨酸被用于生产农药水处理和电子行业等，这说明其产品是用于工业用途的，不应该被个人消费者购买和使用。报道也提到，该公司遵守贸易限制，不会向美国出口工业级甘氨酸。因此，这篇报道虽然有提到中国产品，但并没有表现出明显的不友好态度，也没有刻意贬低中国制造，而只是介绍了一个有趣的互联网现象。
2024-04-16T08:10:04.020Z
What’s 2024’s hottest product? According to TikTok, there is only one answer: industrial-grade glycine from China.
Yes, you read that right. A Chinese manufacturer of the amino acids, Donghua Jinlong, has found unexpected online fame, with its earnest marketing videos inspiring parodies garnering many millions of views and spawning a new meme.
“I’m kinda a glycine girly at the moment,” one fan said on X.” Don’t even talk to me before I’ve had my donghua jinlong industrial grade glycine,” another said.
It all started with mundane marketing posts from the company’s TikTok account, involving an upbeat voice-over extolling the company’s campus and “premium” manufacturing processes. The ads show B-roll footage from Donghua Jinlong’s factory floor, backed with instrumentals and overlaid with bold fonts. The company’s slogan states its mission humbly: “Glycine comes from here.”
@donghuajinlong Made in China! Donghua Jinlong Glycine Manufacturer #Glycine #IndustrialGlycine #CopperGlycinate #ferrousglycinate #aminoacidchelates #CALCIUMBISGLYCINATE #ZincChelate #Magnesiumsleep #manufacturer
♬ 原聲 - DONGHUA JINLONG
The joke’s punchline lies in its nicheness: Glycine is an amino acid product used in industrial quantities to produce pesticides, among other uses, and most people do not need to source it regularly. According to experts on internet culture, the trend reflects the surreal sense of humor that many Gen Z internet users have developed, partly in response to the increasingly algorithm-driven curation of social media feeds.
“You never know where memes will emerge from,” said Idil Galip, a lecturer in digital culture at Amsterdam University, in a telephone interview Tuesday. “The more surreal the memes, the more interesting they become. The more niche they are, the more people want to know what the meme is.”
“The sincere, earnest marketing strategy of this company really opened itself up to people making fun of its random sincerity about glycine,” she added.
A spokeswoman for Donghua Jinlong said it is perplexed by its fame in the United States, which was never part of its marketing strategy.
“We are so happy and grateful that our advertisement has got so much love. But to be honest, I was more baffled than excited,” Chen Liya, an office administrator at the company, said in a telephone interview Tuesday, adding that the original advertisements were produced by an external marketing agency.
“We hoped it could show up on the timeline of some potential customers. But going viral in America has never been part of the plan.”
Chen said that several days ago, a “young American guy” even showed up at the company’s factory in Shijiazhuang, northern China: “He was curious what kind of magic we have,” she said. “We gave him a campus tour and told him that we supply glycine to businesses on an industrial scale and have not dealt with individual buyers before.”
Donghua Jinlong sells industrial-grade glycine as a “white crystal powder” for uses in pesticide production, water treatment and the electronics industry.
The firm advertises on TikTok, which is not accessible in China, because it exports internationally, including to Japan and across Europe, Chen said. It’s not on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, because Donghua Jinlong already accounts for around a third of glycine production capacity in China, and “we don’t need advertisement for the domestic market,” she said.
According to Know Your Meme, parodies of the glycine ads started going viral in “early 2024.” By mid-April, the trickle had turned into a flood and entered the internet’s mainstream. Now, no one can get enough of the amino acid product.
A recurring theme of the parodies is the Donghua Jinlong’s apparent superiority compared to its commercial rivals. “I just can’t do it with these cheap imitators of Donghua Jinlong’s industrial and food grade glycine,” lamented one TikTok user. “They’ve been doing it for years. They’ve perfected their formula. Like, why are we trying to imitate art?” Another feigned fighting off tears after admitting that she’d inadvertently bought an “identical knockoff” product without realizing.
In one video viewed more than 2 million times, a deadpan TikTok user encourages consumers to buy the company’s nonindustrial glycine. “This is 2024. Donghua Jinlong’s production standards have just been through the roof. I’m telling you — just try out their pharmaceutical-grade glycine one time, and let me know what you think about it.”
It is, of course, a joke. According to Chen, Donghua Jinlong cannot export the product to the United States because of trade restrictions.
Galip said that this form of niche humor is a deliberate response to the way social media feeds have changed over the past 10 years, becoming increasingly curated by algorithms and restricting the control that users have over the content they see.
“Previously you chose the content you followed and saw, but due to these systems, we get in contact with places that we may not normally engage with,” she said.
“Most of the culture that we access online is curated and organized and ordered, not by people themselves, but by these fairly vague algorithmic recommendation systems,” she said. “By introducing an algorithmic curation system to the internet — you take some of the power that people have about curating their cultural consumption.”
“The meme itself probably emerges from a need to parody these random encounters that we have online,” she added. “In those moments, you get to see meme culture for what it is: quite silly and even surreal.”
Despite its newfound fame, Donghua Jinlong said it had not noticed any large increase in sales of its products.
But there are follow-up plans in the works. “As a thank-you to our followers, we have been thinking maybe we should upload more videos to show what glycine is and about its industrial use and benefits to the human body. We don’t have other commercialization plans yet.”