Incredible Things Are Happening In China — Twitter post about Beijing's Palace Museum stray cat next to photo of people in frog costumes with Chinese flag

Incredible Things Are Happening In China

2020catchphrasesemi-active

Published October 18, 2026

"Incredible Things Are Happening In China" is a catchphrase that spread on Twitter starting in late 2020, usually attached to banal or cute clips from Chinese state media. After a December 2021 post by @DerekPutin paired the line with an animal video and gathered over 20,000 likes, the format turned into a running Twitter joke, and by 2023 posters were extending it to other countries with "Incredible Things Are Happening in X."

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Overview

Posters typically attach "Incredible Things Are Happening In China" to a short clip or screenshot sourced from CGTN, People's Daily, Xinhua or a similar Chinese state-run account, where the actual content is almost always mundane rather than politically weighty. The humor sits in the gap between the awed caption and whatever trivial footage follows, like an orange cat lounging around a Chinese news anchor's desk6 or a small animal doing something unremarkable4.

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The catchphrase is also used sincerely at times, usually when actual Chinese policy news breaks, which flattens the ironic register and makes it function as an all-purpose caption rather than a strict joke format5. By 2023, the line had become generic enough that posters were applying "Incredible Things Are Happening in X" to events in other countries entirely9.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter / X
Creator
Unknown
Date
2020

The earliest known uses of "Incredible Things Are Happening In China" were two Twitter posts from December 2020, one by @housetrotter on December 3rd1 and another by @muenzenberg_w on December 5th2. An iFunny upload used the catchphrase as a title on August 3rd, 202110, and on September 3rd, 2021, a tweet by @goingtoflorida1 became the first known use of the line to go past 1,000 likes3.

The specific pairing with Chinese state media animal content showed up on December 7th, 2021, when @DerekPutin posted a video captioned with the phrase that went on to collect over 20,000 likes4. Know Your Meme documents this post as the earliest known example of the cute-animal variant that would define most later versions5.

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How It Spread

The catchphrase went properly viral in September 2022, when @goofxist used it on a clip of an orange cat from Chinese state media and the tweet reached over 96,000 likes within a year6. A month later, on October 15th, 2022, @castawaymariner posted another version that gathered more than 25,000 likes7, and @KyleTrainEmoji followed on January 9th, 2023, with a post that collected over 9,000 likes8.

By late 2023, the format had migrated to Reddit, where /u/Rude-Weather-3386 posted an "Incredible things are happening in China" thread on r/TheDeprogram on October 15th, 2023, which earned over 1,000 upvotes in three months9. Around the same period, the phrasal template "Incredible Things Are Happening in X" began showing up to describe events in other countries, extending the joke well beyond its original China framing5.

Timeline

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Frequently Asked Questions