Recontextualising Traditional Chinese Medicine on TikTok: Implications for International Chinese Language Education
Abstract
study examines how Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is presented on TikTok and what these representations may mean for international
Chinese language education. In January 2026, a purposive sample of 130 TCM-related videos was collected and coded for creator identity,
content type, visual intensity, language, interpretive framework, and audience response. The corpus shows that visually striking practices tended to have higher visibility. Among videos with more than 10 million views, 66.7% were coded as having strong visual intensity; view-count
category was significantly associated with visual intensity, χ²(4)=23.46, p<.001, Cramer's V=.30. Non-professional influencers and ordinary
users together made up 76.9% of the sample. More than half of the videos (57.7%) provided no substantive explanation or relied on vague or
mystifying language, and only 2.3% mainly employed TCM-specific conceptual vocabulary. These findings suggest that wider circulation may
come at the cost of some cultural context. In Chinese language education, such videos may be more useful as authentic digital texts for questioning, contextualisation and comparison than as stand-alone explanations of Chinese culture.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/wef.v4i6.10202
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