You walk into a coffee shop on Shanghai’s Anfu Road. On the menu, a flat white costs ¥38 and is named 醒狮 (lion dance, the wake-up lion). The cup has a navy-blue wrapper with a stylized mountain-and-moon drawing that looks like an old ink painting. Behind the bar, a sneaker poster says “Made in Putian, made for the world.” On the next table, a young woman in a long silk jacket and white sneakers is opening a small cardboard box. Inside is a figurine of a chubby rabbit with a smirk.
None of this was in a museum. None of it was a heritage performance. All of it was stamped with one word: 国潮 (guócháo).
Quick answer: 国潮, which translates as “national tide,” is the wave of new Chinese brands, designs, and content that build on traditional Chinese culture but speak in modern design language. The clothing label, the bubble tea, the sneaker, the blind-box figurine, and the museum gift shop all count, as long as the team behind it is young, the design is unmistakably Chinese, and the brand is aimed at consumers who grew up online.
Where the word actually comes from
Guochao is the short form of 国民潮流, which translates roughly as “national-popular trend.” It took off around 2018, when a Li Ning sportswear runway show at New York Fashion Week featured Chinese-character-heavy track jackets, tai chi-flavored colorways, and “悟道” (Wudao, “the way of understanding”) printed on sneakers. The Chinese internet noticed. Sales spiked. Within two years, Anta, Peak, Erke, and a generation of smaller designers had reorganized their design language around Chinese cultural cues, and 2020 fashion magazines ran guochao features the way earlier years had run K-pop features.
The trick was that 2018 had two audiences ready at once. The state wanted more soft-power content in everyday life. Young Chinese consumers, especially in tier-1 cities, wanted products that did not feel like copies of Japanese, Korean, or Western brands. Guochao gave both groups something simple to point at: a Made-in-China label that no longer had to apologize.
What makes it “new”
Genuine guochao is not a museum gift shop. It borrows from heritage but runs at modern speed. Three features make a brand fit the term, even if nobody has checked off a list:
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The founder or design team is under 35. This is not a marketing line. It is the single biggest predictor of whether a brand uses guochao aesthetics creatively or as decoration.
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The cultural reference is specific, not vague. “Chinese style” without content is just a font choice. Guochao pulls from Shaolin, Mogao, Suzhou gardens, Forbidden City tiles, Song-dynasty tea ware, mid-century Shanghai advertising, or vintage Hong Kong cinema. The reference is usually named, not implied.
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The product is sold where young consumers already are: WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Tmall flagship stores. Guochao grew up alongside these platforms, and many of its products are designed to be photographed, unboxed, or livestreamed first.
If a brand ticks those three boxes, it almost certainly counts as guochao, whether or not it uses the word on its packaging.
Five flavors on the street right now
You can spot guochao across most big product categories. Here is what to look for.
Fashion. Li Ning and Anta at the high end. Smaller brands like Bosideng’s reissued down jackets, Umbrellaism’s hanfu-meets-streetwear cuts, and a wave of Gen-Z designers in Beijing’s Wudaokou selling pieces you cannot find on Taobao wholesale. Hanfu in the public park is part of the same current, just further along the heritage dial.
Tea, coffee, and snacks. New-style tea chains like Chagee, Heytea, and Mixue redesigned traditional tea into a fast-casual product. A Chagee store often looks like a mountain-Phoenix painting with a point-of-sale system. Heytea popularized cheese-foam tea. Mixue took the format to small cities at ¥4 a cup. Even the coffee revolution is partly guochao: Manner’s minimal-logo cups, %Arabica’s Chinese-building shots, and M Stand’s “Guochao-set” drinks all sit on this shelf.
Toys and collectibles. Pop Mart blind boxes are the textbook example. Its Molly, Dimoo, and Skullpanda lines feature Chinese cultural drops: a Forbidden City collab, a Peking Opera series, and a Suzhou-garden-themed set. The figure is contemporary design. The costume is heritage. The buyer is in their 20s.
Beauty and skincare. Florasis (花西?, a Hangzhou cosmetics brand, packages its foundations in porcelain-style compasses and names its shades after Song-dynasty poetry. Mao Geping, the makeup artist behind many CCTV Spring Festival Gala looks, runs a luxury line where palette lids are engraved with brushwork.
Media and entertainment. The donghua wave (Ne Zha, Fog Hill of Five Elements), palace-drama remakes that no longer make fun of the empress, the new kung-fu games, and the surge in Chinese-language fantasy reading on platforms like Qidian are all guochao in content form.
How to see it without flying to five cities
A few easy entry points if you visit China:
- Beijing. Sanlitun and Wudaokou for streetwear, the Forbidden City museum shop for premium guochao (the “Forbidden City Colors” lipsticks sold out for years), and the National Museum basement for affordable heritage books.
- Shanghai. Anfu Road for coffee and the umbrellas of Xintiandi, the Shanghai Museum gift shop for refined editions, and Yuyuan bazaar for the louder end of the spectrum.
- Chengdu. Kuanzhai Alley has guochao-ed Sichuan snacks, with packaging that turns mapo tofu into a manga.
- Hangzhou. West Lake area for tea brands with classical packaging, plus many flagship stores.
- Guangzhou. Liwan and the older neighborhoods for Cantonese opera tie-ins and gift boxes.
Outside China, look for guochao in two places first: K-beauty- or J-beauty-style cosmetics counters that have added a Chinese brand, and the gift section of a major museum (the V&A, Met, and British Museum have all done Chinese-style collabs).
Three mistakes foreign press often makes
If you are reading about guochao in translation, watch for these.
- Treating guochao as a state propaganda campaign. Some pieces are, some are not. The Li Ning 2018 moment was decidedly commercial, and the founders of most guochao brands will happily tell you they care about margins first.
- Reducing guochao to hanfu and dumplings. Hanfu is one corner. Guochao covers clothing, food, beauty, toys, music, gaming, museum shops, and even livestock brands (a Beijing duck brand recently put the duck in a hanbok).
- Calling guochao a fad. By 2026 it is a decade old, has produced multiple billion-dollar brands, and is now the default design vocabulary for any serious Chinese consumer brand. Even foreign brands in China are quietly adding red-and-gold accent pieces before their Lunar New Year campaigns, because that is what guochao trained the market to expect.
The simplest way to understand guochao: imagine a Chinese version of K-pop design that runs everything from sneakers to yogurt cups. The aesthetic is not borrowed. The customer is online. The designer is in their late 20s, and the reference is specific. That is the wave, and it has not crested yet.
