Tea is mundane. You pour hot water on dried leaves and there is your drink. Yet it encompasses layers of meaning. If you live in Singapore, or anywhere else in Southeast Asia, you will have noticed the rapid proliferation of Chinese food and beverage outlets in your local mall. The numbers confirm the impression: according to the Financial Times, regional bubble-tea revenues alone tripled in five years to RMB 150 billion (20.2 bn USD) in 2023. When Singaporeans queued for four hours at the opening of Chagee, a Chinese milk tea chain from Yunnan province with over 6,200 outlets in China, the frenzy looked like any other consumer hype. My dissertation argues it was something more. Chagee is not simply selling tea. It is constructing a brand myth that brews Chinese civilisational heritage and modern sophistication into a single cup, and in doing so, it manifests Chinese soft power ambitions within a city where race, identity and belonging remain deeply contested.
The concept of soft power, first articulated by Joseph S. Nye, describes a state’s capacity to influence through attraction rather than coercion. China has pursued this explicitly since 2007, and President Xi Jinping repeatedly called for efforts to “tell China’s stories well”. Traditionally, this ambition has been associated with state-led mega initiatives such as the Confucius Institutes and the Belt and Road Initiative. However, looking around a mall anywhere in Southeast Asia we notice that the ambition extends further: New Chinese brands successfully incorporate Chinese cultural elements into global cosmopolitan urban culture, establishing themselves as an aspirational part of everyday cultural consumption.
Chagee is a particularly interesting case, because its proudly Eastern narrative is amplified via Western marketing techniques, successfully utilised by Coca Cola and Starbucks in building the American dream – a few decades ago.
Singapore is a post-colonial society still using racial classification, yet emphasising multiculturalism. It is also one of the world’s wealthiest countries, and the only Chinese-majority one in Southeast Asia, where the demographic dominance is often viewed as embedded privilege. Within this unsettled and wealthy landscape, brands and consumption become key sites of identity creation.
My project analysed Chagee’s Singapore marketing communication, including the first 377 Instagram posts since the brand’s launch, and it revealed a textbook case of cultural branding, a Western concept, where a brand creates myths by exploiting a specific cultural tension.
Consider the product. Chagee capitalises on the symbolic geography of Yunnan, a region associated with authenticity and cultural rootedness. Its imagery depicts idyllic tea plantations and workers in folkloric attire. This idealisation is in stark contrast to reality: non-Han cultures remain invisible in Chagee’s visual language despite Yunnan being one of China’s most ethnically diverse provinces, and the company’s 664-page NASDAQ prospectus contains no reference whatsoever to procurement practices or ethical sourcing – or in fact any reference that the crops are indeed sourced from Yunnan.
The place and price encoding is equally deliberate. Outlets sit in central business districts and upmarket malls, while the flagship Pagoda House teahouse anchors the brand in Singapore’s historic Chinese heritage. The pricing marks a major departure from earlier Chinese brands like Mixue: by positioning itself in a higher price segment, Chagee aligns with global notions of luxury. Its cup design strongly evokes Dior’s iconic Toile de Jouy tote bag, and by re-appropriating this style, Chagee effectively reverses the flow of cultural capital. It does not merely mimic Western luxury; it asserts Chinese heritage as an originary source of that luxury aesthetic.
The people dimension is where the tension with Singapore’s multiracial self-understanding is the sharpest. Of posts depicting individuals, 92% feature people who appear East Asian; only six include people with darker skin tones - and they appear exclusively in corporate social responsibility initiatives. Only four posts portray women wearing head coverings. This limited diversity is remarkable in Singapore’s context. While the brand claims to “connect the world through the wonders of tea” a quarter of its host nation, as well as the diversity of its birthplace, are invisible in its marketing communication.
The promotion goes deeper still. The brand name 茶姬 (Chagee) refers to Yu Ji, a famous Chinese opera heroine known for her devotion, patriotism and absolute loyalty, as she commits suicide for her lover, a military leader. The brand’s visual system merges modern luxury with traditional Chinese motifs, producing a heritage-anchored yet contemporary brand myth. But the imagery also reveals a bigger ambition to transform narratives: the Orchard Gateway outlet features an immense mural depicting a colonial British ship that serviced the tea and opium maritime trade. Read against official Chinese narratives of the Opium War as a period of national humiliation, this tea clipper can be seen as repurposed from a vessel of colonial extraction into a vehicle of soft power. A literal commercial vessel for a new era of Chinese cultural projection.
The brand operates on two levels simultaneously. On one level, Chagee is a commercially sophisticated tea company that has mastered the Western playbook of cultural branding. On another, the myths it constructs encode an idealised Sinocentric vision within a society that defines itself as multiracial. Whether consciously or not, Chagee’s brand building creates an aspirational East Asian Chinese default, exploiting the fluidity of “Chineseness” in Singapore to disguise foreign soft power ambitions as local cultural affinity.