Event: China

Jane Lyu flew to Malaysia on Tuesday to visit a city that she had never heard of until recently. The 32-year-old engineer from Guangxi, southern China, first spotted it on Weibo.Now, standing outside the pink-domed Putra Mosque in Putrajaya, she explains through a translation app how the country’s administrative capital, a planned city barely three decades old, ended up as the first stop on her Malaysian itinerary.Lyu, who arrived as part of a company trip that began in Singapore, is one of millions of Chinese tourists poised to visit Malaysia this year – and Malaysia is counting on all of them.Hot air balloons float near Putra Mosque (left) in Putrajaya, Malaysia. Photo: EPA-EFEHer group decided to look beyond the buzz of Kuala Lumpur in favour of Putrajaya’s staid grandeur, long, empty roads flanked by government offices and the Putra Mosque’s lakefront arches opening onto a wide ceremonial square that is perfect for photographs.“Before this, we never heard of the Putra Mosque but we saw it on [microblogging site] Weibo and Douyin [the mainland Chinese version of TikTok]. We had to go. it looked so beautiful,” Lyu said“On social media, we saw durian stalls as well. We can’t wait to eat the fresh durian.”Travellers like Lyu are exactly the type Malaysia is targeting with its Visit Malaysia 2026 campaign. The country aims to welcome 7 million Chinese tourists this year, banking on visa-free travel, expanded air links to third-tier Chinese cities and a digital campaign built around mainland mega-apps such as RedNote, Douyin and Weibo.A RedNote user takes a picture near the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Photo: RedNote

A nostalgic tale about family, hope and hardship, Dear You has swept the box office in China this summer - and opened an unexpected conversation about identity thousands of miles away in Singapore. The sleeper hit was filmed almost entirely in Teochew, a language from China's Chaoshan region which is still spoken among older generations of Chinese in South East Asia.But when the movie hit Singaporean cinemas this month, many were dismayed to learn that most of the screenings would be dubbed into Mandarin - the lingua franca of China and one of Singapore's four official languages, along with English."Being Teochew, watching it in Teochew makes it even more special," says Wu Silin, a church worker. She and her mother watched Dear You last week, after snagging tickets to one of just eight special Teochew screenings. The tickets reportedly sold out in less than two hours.When the film is being screened in its original language in China, why not in Singapore, where Teochew is still spoken by many older Chinese people? That's what many locals are asking.The film has inadvertently sparked a debate over the government's long-standing push for Chinese Singaporeans to speak Mandarin instead of other languages, or what they call dialects, from China.What began as an attempt to unify the Chinese community in Singapore has proven so effective that, some argue, it has driven dialects like Teochew, Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka into an irreversible decline. Authorities have responded to the impassioned calls for the movie to be screened in Teochew. "We hear the calls for dialect films to be more freely screened in cinemas," Singapore's information ministry said in a statement on Monday, promising to "take a more flexible approach". As people commiserate online, some have shared plans to travel to neighbouring Malaysia to catch Dear You in…