Zibo
College students quarantined during COVID posted thank-you barbecue videos. Result: 900 million views, 4.8 million tourists in one month, 800% booking surge. The ceramics-and-chemicals city learned that costly signaling—genuine kindness, algorithmically amplified—converts to economic value.
In early 2023, the hashtag 'Zibo barbecue' accumulated 900 million views on Weibo—and 4.8 million tourists descended on a 4.7-million-person industrial city in a single month. Bookings surged 800%. A ceramics-and-chemicals town that most Chinese associated with pollution became the hottest travel destination in the country, because college students who had been quarantined there during COVID posted thank-you videos on Douyin.
The virality had a backstory. During Omicron lockdowns, Shandong universities bussed students to Zibo for forced quarantine. The local government treated them well—providing barbecue, hospitality, and humanity in a period defined by institutional harshness. When controls lifted, students returned and documented their trips. The algorithm did the rest. This is a textbook case of costly signaling: Zibo's kindness during quarantine was expensive (feeding thousands of students), hard to fake (the students experienced it directly), and therefore credible. The signal propagated through social media and converted into economic value—retail sales rose 8.3%, accommodation surged 16%, and catering jumped 25.2% year-on-year in Q1 2023.
But Zibo's real economy runs on ceramics, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, metallurgy, and textiles—traditional industries accounting for 70% of Shandong's industrial base. The city produced China's largest quantities of household ceramics and colored glaze by the 1980s. Compared to Jingdezhen, China's porcelain capital, Zibo's ceramics heritage remains commercially undertapped.
The barbecue boom exposed the fundamental tension in China's rust-belt cities: viral attention generates tourism revenue but not industrial transformation. Zibo's post-viral finances showed little improvement in underlying debt metrics. Other heavy-industry cities watched eagerly to see if barbecue tourism offered an economic model or merely a sugar rush—the metabolic equivalent of burning glucose instead of building muscle.
Zibo's GDP exceeds 420 billion yuan. The city demonstrates that in the attention economy, a single act of institutional kindness—amplified by algorithm—can redirect millions of consumers. Whether it can redirect an industrial economy is the unanswered question.