Liu Zhenchao stands at a kitchen counter in Germany, filming himself making baozi, or Chinese steamed buns.

The 27-year-old student from Hefei, capital of China’s eastern Anhui province, chops onions and minces beef for the filling, then seasons it and mixes it by hand in a bowl.

But when it comes time to make the dough, he suddenly reaches for a cardboard box from a local supermarket.

Inside is a sheet of premade pizza dough.

“Both pizza dough and traditional baozi dough rely on yeast to ferment,” Liu told Sixth Tone, slicing the dough into neat rounds. “It allows the dough to expand, whether you steam it or bake it.”

Liu’s pizza dough baozi hack soon struck a chord with Chinese students abroad. Viewers called him a “genius,” marveling at a shortcut that eliminated the need to make dough from scratch and cut preparation time in half.

Like Liu, a growing number of Chinese students studying abroad are turning cooking videos into viral hits across Chinese social media. On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, the hashtag “international students hunong cooking” — using the term “to do something halfheartedly” — has amassed 2.1 billion views.

The trend dates back to March this year, when a Chinese student in Italy posted a video on how to make gong jin bao dan, or crispy-fried eggs coated with a sweet-and-sour sauce. His recipe tutorial video went viral, garnering more than 2 million likes and triggering a wave of netizens to attempt the dish and share their results online.

Chinese students are the largest overseas student population in the world, with over 570,600 Chinese going abroad in 2025 alone, according to China’s Ministry of Education.

For these students, improvised dishes from back home made with whatever ingredients they can find have become a category of their own, jokingly dubbed the country’s “ninth cuisine” after its eight official regional cuisines.

Comfort food

Liu traces his love of cooking to his childhood, when he spent hours watching cooking programs on TV.

When he arrived in Germany in October 2020 to pursue a master’s in engineering economics, it was only natural that he began cooking his own meals to cut costs; a meal at the school cafeteria cost 6 euros on average, but cooking at home kept his expenses below 5 euros, he said.

The choice was not only about saving money. Liu grew up with dishes known for their rich sauces, bold flavors, and vibrant colors.

The novelty of Western foods quickly wore off after he arrived. “The longer I stayed abroad, the more I found myself craving the familiar tastes of home,” Liu said. “Common Chinese dishes like stir-fried shredded potatoes with green peppers just suit my taste better than cheese and steak.”

Recreating those same flavors, however, was not easy. With many key ingredients unavailable in German supermarkets, he learned to improvise, replacing familiar ingredients from home with local ones. In one recipe, he uses Italian spaghetti in place of Chinese noodles, stir-frying it with green peppers and pork.

For Liu, cooking also had to fit around the intense pressure of studying. During exam periods, he would study from around 9 a.m. until midnight, so cooking had to be quick and simple, while also tasty and authentic.

“Good food is important to me,” Liu said. “During exam periods, when the pressure is already so high, if the food doesn’t turn out well, I feel like I have nothing to look forward to that day.”

When he launched his Douyin account in 2024, he initially wanted just to capture his everyday life abroad. But as he shared more of his life overseas, cooking gradually took center stage.

“I found that cooking is what resonates most with viewers online,” Liu said. He has since attracted more than 780,000 followers.

“Such content also has a particularly powerful sensory appeal,” Hu Zhiwen, a critical food studies scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, told Sixth Tone. Images of cooking can trigger memories of smell, taste, and texture, which resonate strongly with audiences, he said.

Food has also become a way for Liu to connect with his contemporaries abroad. He often invites local friends over to try his cooking, including the baozi he made with store-bought pizza dough.

“They found it magical because store-bought pizza dough is something they’ve seen all their lives, yet no one had thought to use it this way,” Liu said. “Some even tried making them at home.”

The food sometimes gives his friends ideas for innovating foods from their own cultures, too. His Italian friends, for example, compared Chinese dumplings to their own filled pastas.

Cooking can offer overseas students a path to independence, emotional comfort, and cross-cultural connection, Hu, the food scholar, noted. “When you are in a new environment, there is a natural desire to seek out things that make life feel more familiar.”

In China, where food is deeply woven into everyday life and regional cuisines offer enormous variety, cooking can be more than a practical necessity, Hu added.

“Chinese students will be particularly drawn to cooking when they move to places where the food culture is markedly different from what they grew up with,” he said.

For Chen Wan’er, cooking abroad was a different kind of challenge. She had barely cooked before leaving China, but after a month in the UK, she was making almost all of her meals herself — and not only for the economic benefits.

In a new country, seven hours away from her family and friends and with no close connections, cooking gave her days meaning and shape. Even when a dish didn’t turn out perfectly, she enjoyed the satisfaction of making something from scratch.

Chen began filming her cooking and posting it on China’s lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, but unlike Liu, she maintains a small audience of roughly 1,000 followers. Initially, she saw the account as a way to give her parents a window into her new life abroad, letting them glimpse her daily routine and easing their worries about how she was doing.

Her parents were surprised when they saw a video she posted of herself making mian geda tang, a northern Chinese homestyle dish of small pieces of dough cooked in soup. Chen grew up in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou, where noodles were not part of her family’s cooking tradition and flour was rarely bought. Now, living alone in Britain, she taught herself to make a dish she had never cooked before.

Away from home, Chen has discovered that she actually enjoys cooking without worrying about getting everything right. At home, she was often hesitant to cook with her mother nearby, reminding her not to make a mess.

“Here, I can just let myself go with no one watching over me. The fact that I can feed myself is already good enough,” Chen said. “I don’t have to worry about whether the kitchen is messy.”

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: Screenshots from Liu's cooking videos on Xiaohongshu.)