I’ve spent thirteen years doing exactly this. Let me give you the honest version.

The short answer: Selling Chinese cultural IP internationally is not a language problem, not a cultural difference problem. It is a productisation problem.

Most projects that fail abroad fail for the same reason: they’re trying to export culture when what international markets actually buy is experience.

Those are not the same thing.

The Real Problem With Cultural Export

Traditional cultural export thinking goes like this: We have valuable culture. We want people abroad to understand and appreciate it. We’ll bring it to them.

This is a communication strategy, not a commercial strategy. And it’s structured backwards.

Foreign consumers don’t have an obligation to understand your culture. They have one question: what does this add to my life?

When Lightopia Festival succeeded across fifteen UK cities with 2.65 million visitors, it wasn’t because we convinced British families that Chinese lanterns were historically significant. We succeeded because we built an experience that gave families a specific, compelling reason to go out on a cold December evening — and delivered on that reason completely.

The culture was the core. The experience was the product.

The shift in thinking sounds small. The difference in outcomes is enormous.

Four Practical Principles

1. Find a specific cultural core, not a broad category

The weakest brief I hear is: “We’re bringing Chinese culture to the world.”

What specifically? Chinese culture is not a product. Zigong lantern-making — the craft of building fifteen-metre luminous silk-and-steel sculptures by hand — is a product waiting to happen.

The more specific and distinctive your cultural core, the more it can function as a genuine differentiator in international markets. “Traditional culture” competes with everything. A specific craft, story, visual language, or practice with no Western equivalent occupies a clear space.

Test yourself: Can you describe your cultural core in one specific sentence?

2. Design for emotion first, education second

Most cultural projects lead with information. History, context, significance, craft traditions. This is a mistake.

Audiences need to be emotionally engaged before they’ll be intellectually curious. Once you’ve made someone feel something, they’ll want to know more. If you start with the lecture, you’ve lost them.

For Lightopia, the emotional sequence was: arrive, be overwhelmed by scale, feel wonder, feel warmth, feel connected to the people you came with — and only then, while still inside that feeling, encounter the stories and cultural background embedded in the installations.

Emotion opens the door. Information walks through it.

3. Localisation is not optional

Many Chinese cultural projects treat localisation as a nice-to-have — they’ll “localise a bit” once they’re established. This gets the logic exactly backwards.

Localisation is not adaptation after the fact. It’s the mechanism by which your work becomes meaningful to people who didn’t grow up inside it.

When we prepared for Manchester, the team spent three days walking the city before any logistics work. They noticed that bees were everywhere — on pavements, lamp posts, buildings. Manchester’s civic identity is built around the bee: industrious, collective, resilient.

We designed a bee lantern. At the end of the light and water finale, instead of Santa Claus, Manchester got a glowing bee delivering the Christmas gifts.

On opening night, a visitor cried. She said she couldn’t believe a Chinese company had understood what her city meant.

That response — that specific, earned emotional reaction — doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when you’ve done the work to understand what your audience already cares about, and you’ve found the place where your culture and their culture overlap.

4. Build the commercial model at the design stage, not after

Sustainable international cultural projects need a commercial architecture, not just a commercial afterthought.

That architecture needs to answer:

– Who pays, and at what price?

– What are the multiple revenue streams?

– How do the unit economics change as you scale?

– What does replication in a second market cost, and how does that change by the fifth?

Lightopia’s model — ticket revenue, venue revenue sharing, brand sponsorship, multi-city touring — was designed to become more efficient with scale. That’s why fifteen cities was achievable. If the model had been “ticket revenue from one city,” we’d have stayed at one city.

Commercial model design is not the opposite of cultural integrity. It’s what allows cultural integrity to persist.

The CAAP Self-Assessment

If you have a cultural project and you’re wondering whether it’s ready for international markets, these six questions will tell you more than any market research:

1. Culture: What is your cultural core, in one specific sentence?

2. Emotion: What emotions do you want your audience to leave with?

3. Format: What format best serves both the cultural content and the target market’s commercial patterns?

4. Story: Is there a story the local audience already cares about that your project can become part of?

5. Interaction: How does the audience participate, rather than just observe?

6. Price: Does your commercial model have at least two independent revenue streams?

If you can’t answer three of those, you’ve found where the work needs to happen.

The Bigger Picture

China’s cultural content is — and I say this from a position of having lived and worked in the UK for twenty years — genuinely extraordinary. The depth, the craft traditions, the visual languages, the stories. It doesn’t lose to anything.

What’s missing is not quality. What’s missing is the systematised capability to turn cultural content into products that international markets can access, pay for, and come back for.

That capability is learnable. It’s buildable. And it’s what the next chapter of Chinese cultural influence in the world will depend on.

Ian Xia is the founder of Xiangvision (英伦大像), Lightopia Festival, and the CAAP™ Culture As A Product system. 15 cities · 2.65 million visitors · 37 international awards · 14 BBC features.