4 May is Youth Day in China. To mark the occasion, OPPO and Tencent Video jointly created a short film ‘The Answer to Shang An’, which focuses on Xiong Wei, a young, post-90s calligraphy worker, Chen Joy, a post-00s national style culture propagator, and Paraboy, a post-00s professional player at Game for Peace. These three atypical “Shang An” youths, use their experiences to answer the question of what is “Shang An”.
What with being a high-frequency buzzword on the Internet in recent years, “Shang An” in the broader sense encompasses further education, job hunting, dating, marriage and parenthood, while in the narrower sense it refers to getting a job in the national system by taking an exam, or going on to a postgraduate school, which is why “Shang An” can be translated as “Land an offer or a job”.
According to the subtitles at the beginning of the film, about “Shang An”, there are 188K videos on WeChat, 16.32 million notes on Xiaohongshu (RED), 520 million topic views on Weibo (China’s Twitter-like platform), and 34.17 million articles on Baidu. Most young people pursuing “Shang An” are in the transition between youth and adulthood, an important stage in a person’s life when profound transformations take place.
In the short film, three youths talk about their choices and loves, and encourage everyone to find their favourite career but within different career scenarios, demonstrate OPPO Find X7’s many features and selling points. OPPO uses this short film to tell young people that “Shang An” doesn’t have a standard answer, and wishes that they have the courage and freedom of “Shang An”.
On Weibo, the hashtag #Answer about Shang An# (关于上岸的答案) operated by OPPO has 63.32 million views and 108K discussions. Netizens acknowledged the concept conveyed by the short film, with one commenting, “Shang An is finding a meaningful thing that you can do consistently.”
