In 2022, foreigners who have no interest in Chinese at all, learned a new word “Bing Chilling.” With the combination John Cena’s pronunciation and the actual ice cream, it is easy to understand that the word written as “Bing Chilling” is actually “ice cream”.
Now, the first reaction of TikTokers all over the world to see ice cream is probably not “ice cream”, but: “Good morning China, now I have Bing Chilling!”
Original Chinese:
Zaoshang hao zhongguo
Xianzai wo you BING CHILLING
wo hen xihuan BING CHILLING
danshi sudu yu jiqing 9
Bi BING CHILLING sudu yu ji qing
Su du yu ji qing jiu
wo zui xihuan
suo yi… xian zai shi yin yue shu jian
Zhu n bei
Yi, er, san
English Translation:
Good Morning, China
Now I have ice cream
I like ice cream very much,
but “Fast and Furious 9” is better than ice cream
Background
Tracing the source of Bing Chilling is an extremely simple job. No matter which platform you enter this word on, the first thing that appears is John Cena. The famous WWE professional wrestler he has won the WWE Championship many times with his superb acting skills and classic lines “You can’t see me.” He is well-known by audiences all over the world and after retiring, he successfully entered Hollywood acting.
Now, John Cena is being known to more people because of his multiple identities on and off the screen. He is the Messenger of Peace, John Xina and a master of Chinese scripts.
Spread
Due to its widespread spread in the English-speaking area and Southeast Asian countries, Bing Chilling is now likely to become “the first Chinese language for foreign young people”. You can find phonetic versions of various languages on the Internet, and even on Chinese learning websites, many people are practicing the pronunciation of Bing Chilling.
The Bing Chilling pandemic on TikTok has given people the illusion that the whole world is learning Chinese. But if you ask them what the word means now, most people are likely to be as clueless . The meaning is dissolved and forgotten, but it is still widely imitated and used, which is the ultimate destination of every Internet meme.
The term “Bing Chilling” came from May 2021, when he used machine-translated Mandarin on Weibo to promote his participation in the movie “Fast and Furious 9”.
Original Text English:
“Good morning China, now I have ice cream, I like ice cream, but “Fast and Furious 9” is better than ice cream, “Fast and Furious 9” is my favorite. So, it’s music time, get ready: 1,2,3 ♫ ♩ Fast and Furious 9 in two weeks ♬♪…”
The Chinese accent in the video is too awkward and the preface does not match the postscript, after the original video was uploaded to YouTube with English subtitles, it caused the first wave of popularity. This round of small popularity also caused Bing Chilling to fall into the whirlpool of controversy. The reason why it is called a small epidemic is that the real explosive spread did not happen until November this year.
Then, the video went viral, gaining 32 million views. As you can expect, other Internet celebrities began to pick up ice cream and compete to imitate, and then another meme became popular on TikTok.
So far, the Bing Chilling entry has received more than 1 billion views on TikTok.
It’s that simple, Bing Chilling became popular, so popular that foreign elementary school students are learning it, and it doesn’t seem special because it is a Chinese “exotic language”. People began to disassemble the full text, translate it in multiple languages, read it and recite it by heart.
Then it was returned back to Chinese internet and became some kind of “new Chinese style”.
The Bing Chilling Controversy
During the first round of popularity of Bing Chilling, John Cena made a serious mistake when promoting “Fast and Furious 9” in Mandarin ↓
Under the reports of domestic and foreign media, things fermented very quickly. John Cena himself quickly updated a new video on Weibo, apologizing to the Chinese audience in Chinese.
But for many Chinese audiences, this matter is bound to not turn the page so quickly. Before the release of “Fast 9”, many people began to boycott the movie on social media. For some good-natured people abroad, this is an opportunity to make use of the topic. Bing Chilling and John Cena have been made into memes full of political satire and spread on 4chan and other forums.
In a nutshell, some American netizens regard John Cena as John Xina, and believe that he is earning so-called “social credit points” in China. Bing Chilling as a meme, in the earliest round of communication, ironic negative views dominated the mainstream. However, this round of dissemination is only carried out at the small circle level after all.
In the second half of 2022, Bing Chilling had been going away until it was resurrected by TikTok. The negative meaning of Bing Chilling has been diluted precisely because a year later, it came to the trend of TikTok short video bloggers with bigger popularity.
Popularity
