The most popular scenic spot NPC that went viral over the holiday season has caught the eyes of the entire internet.

One after another, "scenic area NPCs" have gone viral, and Zhang Shuangjian is a particularly special one among them —

He interprets strength, interprets silence, interprets powerlessness, and inadvertently strikes a chord with the mood of contemporary people: he can cast a spell on an ordinary balloon, making it completely motionless no matter how hard he pushes it; he can also create four-sided transparent air walls anywhere, trapping himself; he can even play two roles alone, using a piece of clothing and a shelf to present a lonely interaction.

Relevant videos have repeatedly become breakout hits, and netizens have interpreted various meanings from the performance, which Zhang Shuangjian fully accepts.

Life has its ups and downs, and online traffic is even more volatile, he said, "People post videos that make me go viral, and all I can do is thank this opportunity, and seize as much of it as I can. I am a very ordinary person at heart, I just love mime and master a little bit of performance techniques."

"From now until the beginning of November, my schedule is fully booked."

During the first National Day holiday after he rose to fame, mime artist Zhang Shuangjian's schedule was fully booked long in advance, and many scenic spots that moved too slowly could only get a rejection. New Weekly interviewed him in early September and early October. When asked where else he had performed between the two interviews, Zhang Shuangjian could only recall the details by checking his itinerary. This wave of his sudden popularity stemmed from a seemingly ordinary performance invitation from a scenic spot.

In July and August this year, Zhang Shuangjian was invited as a content creator to give street physical performances at multiple tourist attractions in Jiangxi and Shanxi provinces. After these performances were filmed and released by scenic area staff and tourists, they spread rapidly across major short-video platforms, and many of the clips received more than 100,000 likes.

In Zhang Shuangjian's performances, he can make an ordinary balloon or a box act as if enchanted, refusing to move no matter how hard he pushes or pulls it; he can also create four-sided transparent air walls to trap himself anywhere at any time; he can even play two roles alone, using a piece of clothing and a shelf to interpret another person that can interact with him.

Zhang Shuangjian gives a street performance at a scenic spot. (Photo from Douyin @Pei Xiao)

In the comment sections of the videos, besides praising Zhang Shuangjian's superb skills, viewers also put forward various interpretations of his performances. For example, for the box that cannot be moved no matter how hard people try, some viewers sighed, "What is inside the box that makes you unable to lift it, leave it or get away from it"; as for the four invisible glass walls, many netizens associated it with the idea that "the adult world is full of shackles that trap ourselves".

Some people think these room for imagination and social emotions are foreshadowing laid by Zhang Shuangjian as a performer, but Zhang Shuangjian responded that it was not his original intention. "Interpretation is the audience's business, I can understand all of them, but these are not the settings I designed," he said. During the interview, I gradually realized that Zhang Shuangjian's breakout success is actually jointly created by new forms of cultural tourism, the algorithm logic of short-video platforms, and the public's demand for emotional expression.

This is not the first time Zhang Shuangjian has seen such interpretations. In 2019, he began to post short videos on Douyin, and similar comments appeared at that time. The subtle emotions of the public have always existed. Only this time, the filming done by all scenic area staff together with the netizens' demand for secondary creation gave emotional expression the boost of traffic operation logic.

Zhang Shuangjian believes that all labels are attached by others. Life has its ups and downs, and after a show becomes a hit, there will inevitably be a quiet period, and he cannot predict how long this cultural tourism trend will last. He only hopes to seize the moment, stick to two priorities at the same time: he will persist in creating and performing the plays he prefers, and continue to take commercial performance gigs, "Making money is not a shameful thing," he said.

Mime artist Zhang Shuangjian. (Photo provided by the interviewee)

01

A Special Summer Vacation

When I met Zhang Shuangjian in early September, he was wearing a loose white top, black cropped trousers, and black-rimmed glasses, looking relaxed and casual, not much different from his image in those viral videos. At that time, he had just finished his performance at the Prince Dai Mansion in Datong, Shanxi, and returned to Suzhou, ending his special "summer vacation".

If you love watching comedy shows, you might have seen Zhang Shuangjian on TV earlier. He was the runner-up of the second season of Top Funny Comedian, and also a guest of the sixth season of Happy Comedian. In the comedy creation environment where verbal performance is the mainstream expression, his almost silent performance looks very special. As a result, he is called "the mime boy", and even "the master of Chinese mime".

In 2015, Zhang Shuangjian participated in the second season of Top Funny Comedian. (Photo from the official WeChat account of "Dragon TV Top Funny Comedian")

Zhang Shuangjian started his career with commercial magic performances. Wedding ceremonies, company opening events, property launching ceremonies, and cultural tourism scenic spots are all the venues he has traveled to for performances. When the market demand was high, he could give hundreds of performances a year; but in recent years, sometimes he only gave two or three performances a year.

In June this year, the staff of the Gexian Village Scenic Spot in Shangrao, Jiangxi contacted Zhang Shuangjian, hoping that he could come to the scenic spot to perform for a month. Zhang Shuangjian had never tried to perform continuously in the same place for so many days, and he also wondered if he could stand the hard work, but finally he made up his mind to go.

Starting from mid-July, at 4 p.m. every day, Zhang Shuangjian needed to perform 6 shows at different locations in the scenic spot, each lasting about 15 minutes. He performed all the classic segments including carrying boxes, pushing balloons, teasing squirrels, and creating air walls. At first, the performances were held on a small stage. But later the scenic spot found that videos of performances given off the stage got far more traffic. So Zhang Shuangjian began to give street performances.

In a video posted in September 2019, Zhang Shuangjian performed the segment of "teasing a squirrel". The squirrel was actually just a plush toy. (Photo from Douyin @Zhang Shuangjian)

In the sweltering summer, Zhang Shuangjian described himself as a "drowned rat" after the performance, completely soaked all over, with his hair sticking together in clumps. On the first day, he performed in overalls, but later he simply chose the lightest white T-shirt and black lantern pants for the shows. During the interval between each performance, he would go to a coffee shop in the scenic spot to enjoy the air conditioning. But because there were too many people escaping the summer heat, he could almost only stand there. As soon as his body cooled down, the next performance was about to start.

"It is definitely hard work, but it does not make me feel bad." Zhang Shuangjian knows his own personality clearly: if he does not force himself to go out of his home to the streets of the scenic spot and establish on-site connections with the audience, he might just lie flat. Although he does not like the high repetition of performances in scenic spots, he especially cherishes the opportunity of street performances, because the audience and interactions in each show are uncertain.

Most directly, the audience will spontaneously form a circle around him, sometimes only 2 meters away from Zhang Shuangjian, and sometimes 10 meters away. Sensing the inappropriate distance and keeping the audience at a proper distance is a skill of controlling the scene, which Zhang Shuangjian has already mastered very skillfully.

Zhang Shuangjian performing and the surrounding tourists. (Photo from Douyin @Fengqiao Yepaming)

He likes to communicate with the audience, staring at them and feeling their presence, "In performance, you must truly listen, truly watch and truly feel, instead of lowering your head and focusing only on your own actions." What he cares about is not whether the audience's eyes show recognition for him, but whether there is a feeling that "we are all here together". To judge whether a performance is good or not, he values the experience it brings to the audience the most, which can be verified on the spot immediately. What he looks forward to most is seeing the audience happy.

He once met a very interesting child during a performance. The child asked Zhang Shuangjian where exactly the "air wall" was. Zhang Shuangjian teased him and said, "I will bring it over for you, but you have to touch it gently." Then he pretended to compress the wall into a very small size and let the child keep it. The child really believed him. This made Zhang Shuangjian feel a little sorry for lying to him, but he could not break the illusion, so he said to the child, "This thing is called faith. If you believe it exists, it exists." He told me that this kind of faith is also required to perform mime well.

Performance clips such as "the balloon with resistance" and "no-object glass wiping" went viral across the whole internet, and some people praised him as "China's Mr. Bean" and "the next Charlie Chaplin". In a video with more than 360,000 likes, Zhang Shuangjian leans against an ordinary balloon at the very beginning, and the balloon seems to be fixed in the air. Then there seems to be a magical force pulling the balloon in one direction, getting stronger and stronger, no matter how hard Zhang Shuangjian pulls it back or presses it down, nothing works.

This video got 365,000 likes on Douyin. (Photo from Douyin @Wan Xing)

The Gexian Village Scenic Spot started construction in 2016, with a total investment of 1.6 billion yuan for the first phase, and began trial operation on May 1, 2020. The scenic spot invested a lot of money in the early stage of construction, and to get the investment back, it needs a steady stream of tourists. Short-video platforms just provide the scenic spot with a low-cost shortcut to quickly gain popularity, attract tourists and speed up the recovery of project funds.

The Nünyüzhou Scenic Spot, which belongs to the same cultural tourism group as Gexian Village, saw the good spread data of Zhang Shuangjian's performance content, and borrowed him in the fourth week; the Prince Dai Mansion in Datong, Shanxi noticed Zhang Shuangjian's traffic appeal, and also extended an invitation to him. In this way, Zhang Shuangjian's online popularity was transmitted back to offline scenarios.

02

"Making Money Is Not Shameful"

In the first three days of this year's National Day holiday, Zhang Shuangjian performed at a newly opened tourist attraction in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province. Although it was the golden week for tourism, probably because the scenic spot had not gained much popularity yet, Zhang Shuangjian observed that there were not many tourists there. In addition, the scenic spot lacked experience in how to use content creators and how to operate content, so the spread effect was not as hot as expected.

The reason why he pays so much attention to these details is that Zhang Shuangjian clearly knows that for scenic spots, traffic means ticket revenue. The audience of an on-site performance may only be a few hundred people, but the audience of online spread can be millions or even tens of millions of people.

He believes that he could create a hot topic in July and August thanks to the short-video spread matrix of the scenic spot. According to his introduction, Gexian Village has an internal reward mechanism: for example, if a video gets more than 1 million views, the employee who shot it can get a bonus of about 1500 yuan, and the bonus increases progressively based on the view count. So the employees keep shooting, and can publish hundreds of videos with similar content every day. This is the foundation for the content to achieve breakout success.

Clips of Zhang Shuangjian's performance on Douyin. (Screenshot from the internet)

In the past two or three years, new "gameplays" of cultural tourism have pushed various scenic area NPCs into the public view, such as the "snow cake monkey" in Changchun Zoological and Botanical Park, the "little yellow fish" in Gexian Village, and "Aunt Wang" in Wanshan Scenic Area. These NPCs have their own characteristics: some focus on the appearance track, some emphasize emotional value, some pursue down-to-earth breakout fame, but all of them narrow the distance with tourists. This provides materials for online spread for scenic spots, and further drives the growth of passenger flow.

Xinhua News Agency once reported that internal research of some scenic spots shows that tourists who have participated in NPC interactions can extend their average daily stay in the scenic spot by two to three hours. Relying on NPC interactions and the "silver note" gameplay, Wanshan Wuxia City saw its annual revenue surge 15 times in 3 years, reaching 1.27 billion yuan in 2025. And "Aunt Wang", the top stream NPC of Wanshan, has gained 7.848 million followers on Douyin, and has also started her "national tour" in the past two years.