In recent years, American and Chinese leaders have had icy relations over many international issues, which have been covered in countless news profiles. Born in China and based in Los Angeles, Zheyu Liang, an award-winning and talented film producer, director, and editor, hopes to create films that would make for a nuanced and refreshing departure from these macro level conflicts that sew so much division. Zheyu wants to help bridge cultural gaps and let one society get to know about and understand another better.
Recently Zheyu finished producing and directing a documentary called “Alibaba, Tmall Global trend stories”. Alibaba, the “Amazon of China”, is one of the world's largest retailers and e- commerce companies and it hosts the largest B2B, C2C, and B2C marketplaces in the world. Tmall Global, the largest B2C platform in China with over 500 million monthly active users and over 150,000 merchants. It allows brands and retailers without operations in China to build virtual storefronts and ship products into China from their home countries. The film features the executives of Alibaba Group and Tmall Global on a big tour of key markets all over the world bringing products and “trends” such as snowboarding and clean beauty to Chinese consumers, the world's largest consumer economy in purchasing power. Many great local merchants find language and logistics to be a big hurdle to conquer themselves when they try to enter the Chinese market. It's also challenging for Chinese consumers to get to know and pick good products from numerous oversea brands. The film shows how Alibaba, Tmall Global and local niches brands work together to help local brands and Chinese consumers better understand the culture, values, market and lifestyle of each other and bring boutique and niches brands to China, which is a one stop solution to reach over 1 billion customers in the Alibaba ecosystem.
As one of the producers, Zheyu also produced a documentary that features the culture, vision, and influence of Tik Tok and its parent company ByteDance, a large Chinese Internet technology company. As of June 2021, ByteDance has 1.9 billion monthly active users in 150 countries across all its content platforms. It hosts Tik Tok, one of the most popular worldwide social media platforms, which has been downloaded over 3 billion times globally. The film follows five creative and innovative ByteDance and Tik Tok engineering pioneers in the tech industry across five different countries. By portraying their professional work and personal stories, the film shows why they are passionate about technology, how they have made great contributions to inspire creativity and enrich life and how they help people across language, culture, and geography to enjoy content empowered by technology and connect with each other more.
Zheyu thinks cinema is not only an art, but also an important and powerful link that can connect different people from various backgrounds and cultures and help us understand each other more. Zheyu hopes to continue to make films that can bridge the cultural gap and show the global audience what lives in different places of the world look like.
