About Following the Yuan

Following the Yuan

Following the Yuan is an English-language newsletter covering Chinese consumer trends, brands and consumer business, written by Yaling Jiang and published at chineseconsumers.news on Substack. Its own description, recorded by Muck Rack, states its brief plainly: founded in 2022, it is "a business publication focused on how and why Chinese people spend their money," aimed at a business and financial audience, providing "original reporting and analysis on China's consumer market in an economic downturn, and 'color' beyond the earnings calls and market reports." Jiang, a former full-time journalist — she left a technology-reporting role at the South China Morning Post, and had written for outlets including Glossy, Vogue Business and WWD — began regular publishing at the end of 2022 after leaving her journalism job, and had published more than 100 posts by the end of 2024. Alongside the newsletter she runs ApertureChina, a research and strategy consultancy providing services for brands and financial institutions. Her Substack profile summarises the combined practice: "Making sense of China through its people, trends and phenomena using a journalistic approach. I do qualitative research & due diligence on China." The publication lists more than 5,800 subscribers.

Yaling Jiang: from newsrooms to newsletter

Following the Yuan is an example of the journalist-to-newsletter path, and its founder has described the reasoning on the record. Jiang had earlier published through a WeChat official account (around 2015) and on Caixin Blog (2015–2018), years before the newsletter existed — experience she herself draws parallels from, noting in podcast discussion how newsletter-based journalism resembles the WeChat official-account model she already knew. In full-time journalism she worked as a technology reporter at the South China Morning Post and wrote on consumer and fashion business for Glossy, Vogue Business and WWD. In conversation on The Negotiation podcast, she explained the frustration that pushed her independent: "When striving to work for bigger and bigger newspapers and platforms, I realized that the newsrooms don't always prioritize people's stories. They don't prioritize the consumer stories in the business world, instead, they go for the click." Following the Yuan was built to invert that priority — to treat ordinary Chinese consumers' spending, tastes and anxieties as the main story of the Chinese economy rather than as colour beneath corporate news. She began regular publishing at the end of 2022 after leaving her journalism job, and the newsletter has appeared under her editorship since, with her byline framing its approach: consumption as a window on Chinese society.

Origins before Substack

Although Following the Yuan is dated from 2022, Jiang's practice of publishing consumer and social observation under her own name is older. She had earlier published through a WeChat official account (around 2015) and on Caixin Blog between 2015 and 2018, during the years when WeChat accounts were the principal independent-publishing format inside China. She has drawn the parallel explicitly in discussion of newsletter-based journalism: the Substack model she adopted in 2022 — a named writer, a subscription relationship, an audience built post by post — resembles the WeChat official-account model she already knew from her twenties, transplanted to an English-language, international readership. That lineage helps explain the newsletter's form: the mix of digest and essay, the direct address to subscribers, and the comfort with platform experiments (syndication, video, podcast) all have precedents in the WeChat publishing culture in which she first wrote. It also distinguishes her from newsletter founders who came to independent publishing directly from Western newsrooms without an earlier platform career.

What the newsletter covers

The publication's content divides between a numbered consumer-news digest and longer analytical and reported pieces. The digest — which passed issue #79 by October 2025 — assembles the fortnight's significant consumer developments in compressed, wry form: Tiffany & Co. apologising over missing mooncakes, burger chain Tastien testing a solo pizza brand for China's expanding solo-dining market, cinemas selling nap slots as audiences shrank, Lululemon and Häagen-Dazs restructuring their China operations, and retail investors fighting over Unitree Robotics stock. The longer pieces take up themes the digest cannot: how China "found joy in being cheap," why anti-involution sentiment feels un-Chinese, dialect influencers, China's AI consumer goods, childcare subsidies, and the consumer meaning of phenomena from Labubu to RedNote's influx of "TikTok refugees," on which Jiang published analysis and an op-ed in Time. Her framing, as a 2026 podcast appearance summarised it, is that Chinese people see themselves as consumers first and political citizens second, that brands wield more social power than anticipated, and that China's rising soft power is entangled with consumer trends. The archive's breadth — from Sinopec opening pet salons to AI companionship products — is itself the argument: in contemporary China, the consumer sphere is where social change is most visible.

Method: reporting, guest voices and experiments

Jiang has used her annual retrospectives to document the newsletter's working methods with unusual candour. In "What I've learned running this newsletter (2024 edition)," she recorded that she had published over 100 posts by the end of 2024, described a guest-contributor model under which outside writers publish under their own bylines, and explained that the model followed an open-rate experiment — testing whether readers would open posts not written by her, and finding the format viable. Contributors such as Rongrong Zhuge, who co-bylines many later digest issues, and Yijun Liu have become recurring voices. The retrospective also described experiments beyond the newsletter format: syndication to Seeking Alpha, short video, and a podcast, each tested as channels for the same consumer-market reporting. A later reflection on five years on Substack, based on a reader survey, reported that paying subscribers subscribe chiefly to access paywalled content (87.5 per cent) and to support her personal endeavours (75 per cent) — data she published, characteristically, in the newsletter itself. This habit of reporting on the publication inside the publication makes Following the Yuan a documented case study in independent newsletter economics as well as a source on Chinese consumers.

ApertureChina and the consultancy

The newsletter is one half of Jiang's professional practice; the other is ApertureChina, her research and strategy consultancy through which she provides research and strategy services for brands and financial institutions. The two activities reinforce each other: consultancy fieldwork and due diligence generate the on-the-ground consumer insight that the newsletter publishes, while the newsletter demonstrates the analysis that consultancy clients buy. Joint programming makes the link explicit — a 2025 webinar on whether China's first childcare subsidies would work was billed as "Following the Yuan x ApertureChina," offering a thirty-minute coffee chat with paid subscribers. Jiang's Substack biography presents the combination without separation: qualitative research and due diligence on China, pursued with a journalistic approach. For the newsletter's business and finance readership — brand strategists, investors and market researchers — this dual structure is part of the value proposition: the writer is not observing the consumer market from outside but is paid by participants in it to understand it, and says so openly.

Audience and recognition

Following the Yuan's audience, by its own description and Muck Rack's listing, is a business and financial readership following China's consumer market — executives at consumer brands, investors, consultants and journalists. Its Substack page lists more than 5,800 subscribers. Recognition has come through the China-watching circuit's own channels: Jiang has been a guest on The Negotiation podcast (in a two-part conversation covering the newsletter's founding and the reception of the Barbie film in China), on Ginger River Review's Inside the China Room, and on the Sinobabble podcast, where she discussed consumption as identity and politics in China; she has spoken on panels including the London School of Economics China Development Forum, addressing how America's perceived decline activated China's soft power. Her Time op-ed on the TikTok-refugee moment on RedNote carried her analysis to a general international audience. Muck Rack classifies the publication as an English-language digital newsletter of Asian scope, published from China — an independent listing that corroborates the newsletter's own account of its founding in 2022 and its business focus.

Editorial stance: the consumer as citizen

The newsletter's stance is that consumption is not a trivial beat. Jiang argues — in her podcast formulation — that Chinese people understand themselves as consumers first and political citizens second, so that brand behaviour, pricing, nationalist boycotts and lifestyle trends carry social and political weight that conventional business coverage misses. Her writing attends to identity and class: explainers decoding mainland socioeconomic and regional stereotypes, examinations of lying-flat sentiment, and analyses of how state subsidies and "big narratives" distort consumer markets — her "three deadly sins of the Chinese consumer market" being big narratives, copycatting trends and state subsidies. The tone mixes a reporter's specificity (store counts, closure rates, allotment figures) with an essayist's attention to mood: why crowds returned after COVID but spending did not follow, or how RedNote's commercial nature creates room for progressive voices within limits. This combination — consumer data read as social evidence — is the publication's signature and the reason it is cited beyond the marketing trade press.

Place among China consumer publications

English-language coverage of Chinese consumers is dominated by consultancies' reports and by business wires' earnings coverage; Following the Yuan occupies the independent middle ground between them, offering a named journalist's continuing, bylined account of the consumer market since late 2022, with more than 100 posts by the end of 2024 and a digest that had reached its seventy-ninth edition by October 2025. Its documented practices — guest bylines tested by open rates, Seeking Alpha syndication experiments, a paired consultancy, published reader-survey results — make it one of the more transparently run of the independent China newsletters launched in the 2020s. In this directory it is recorded as Yaling Jiang's English-language consumer-business newsletter, founded in 2022 and published at chineseconsumers.news, catalogued under China — in its case accurately, since its subject, reporting and consultancy practice all centre on mainland China's consumers, even as its readership of brand and finance professionals is international.