DgcityThe global dialogue on Chinese popular culture and creative industries has opened in the canal town of Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, as part of the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit. CPOPwave 2026 brought together leading companies in gaming, animation, film and television with scholars and overseas creators to discuss how Chinese original content is finding audiences beyond the domestic market.
The agenda covered the practical machinery behind that reach: content creation, production models, international operations, the rapid integration of AI tools and the harder question of copyright compliance across jurisdictions. Participants drew on the past year’s successes to examine what makes a Chinese game or series travel, rather than simply be exported.
A new report on Chinese pop-culture brands and creative content in international markets was released at the event, laying out case studies of works that have built durable audiences overseas. The framing matters: the industry has moved on from early hopes that translation alone would carry content abroad, and now studies community-building, local publishing schedules and how players reinterpret source material in fan art, music and video.
That side of the story was visible in the CPOPwave Immersive Character Exhibition, installed in Puyuan Ancient Town. Rather than confine franchises to a convention hall, organisers placed characters and interactive scenes among the canals, old shops and courtyards of the water town, letting visitors walk through the gap between a historic Chinese settlement and contemporary game worlds. A launch night staged music and performances in the same setting.
Overseas creators featured in the programme offered an external view of why Chinese games now pull people in, pointing to character writing, regular content updates and the density of the worlds players inhabit. Several had travelled to China specifically for the event, a small marker of how seriously international fan-creators treat the country’s franchises.
The location was not incidental. Wuzhen has hosted China’s flagship internet gathering for years, and putting pop culture inside a heritage town enacts the argument the industry increasingly makes: that its appeal rests on mixing deep Chinese cultural material with globally legible digital forms. Whether that blend can keep expanding under the pressures of AI, regulation and copyright will define the next phase.
