What is a U.S. reality TV star all over Chinese social media? The simple answer is “Why shouldn’t she be?” But if you’re American, and you feel lost without a deep understanding of Kris Jenner’s sudden popularity among China’s netizens, you need a lot of context.
We don’t often think of memes in the same terms as the rest of the digital economy, but there are parallels to be made between the evolution of how our time and money is spent online and how each new era’s memetic social comedy has grown and shifted in size, scope, and provenance. Stepping back to survey online humor’s development from demotivational posters to “facts” about recently deceased actor Chuck Norris to image macros, trollfaces, wojaks, slop, and beyond—the breakneck pace of it all is nothing short of watching a fish crawl out of the primordial sea and Animorph into a Neanderthal in front of your eyes.
As the internet stratified itself into ever-more-niche silos of interest and allegiance, online memes became increasingly inscrutable to those outside of each in-group, save for the few terminally online individuals shackled to their screens and cursed to understand them all. Helpful resources like KnowYourMeme.com would eventually show up, academically taxonomizing and chronicling each new meme that emerged.
But just as offline Western hegemony is crumbling in real time, so too may be our meme supremacy. A brave new world of Chinese memes is emerging that has even our foremost meme scholars scrambling to keep up and legacy news outlets scratching their heads. Earlier this year, Harry Potter character Draco Malfoy became the unofficial mascot of Lunar New Year celebrations after netizens discovered that the Mandarin transliteration of Malfoy sounded auspiciously like both “horse” and “fortune.” Soon enough, Malfoy actor Tom Felton’s face was plastered throughout Chinese malls, homes, and social media.
Today, with the petrodollar’s death rattle soundtracking the next chapter of the American Century of Humiliation, a new prosperity-focused Chinese meme has emerged to end-zone dance on our misfortune. While younger generations of online Westerners may long to “become Chinese,” certain swaths of China’s Gen-Z are seeking the life of one particular American: Kris Jenner.
The Kardashian clan matriarch has become an overnight icon on the social media platform RedNote (aka Xiaohongshu). There, users have taken to changing their profile pictures to photos of the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star. The frenzy has also taken the form of public appeals and prayers to Jenner with the hopes of manifesting her fortune, fame, or even just a job offer. As TikTok user marcelowang0527 notes, the career-focused Jenner fans have even gone so far as to customize their pfp image of her in an outfit exemplifying their particular job—doctor, engineer, teacher, etc.
A Business Insider report on the trend found a RedNote user praising Jenner as “The Empress Dowager” and another encouraging everyone to “keep that 9-figure bank balance!”
Given the recent revelation that it was mostly bots behind the recent shaming of Chappell Roan, and the general degradation of our trust in reality thanks to AI, it would be more than reasonable to assume this Jenner fever is a manufactured marketing gimmick. A new season of KUWTK is filming right now, after all. But access to the show has been limited in China since 2011, and some of the country’s most egregiously wealth-flaunting influencers even found themselves deplatformed in 2024. A convoluted promo play just doesn’t add up. It seems this viral moment—now over 53 million views of the #krisjenner hashtag—may be a genuine case of another culture organically finding its way to wholesome, good-natured shitposting.
KnowYourMeme may still be reluctant to log this Kris Jenner meme and others originating from what is arguably now the most powerful country in the world, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us shouldn’t be paying attention. Whether keeping tabs for cynically self-interested reasons or because you’re able to connect with the universality of the humor and humanity they convey, Chinese memes have undeniably broken containment. Let’s just hope we’re fortunate enough to catch some more before things go dark over here.
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