News outlets and social media accounts across the Western Hemisphere were ablaze with blessings for Bob Dylan on Tuesday as the folk legend celebrated his 75th birthday.

In China, where Dylan made his concert debut just over five years ago, the reaction was underwhelming, despite the fact that a number of modern-day rock musicians cite him as a crucial influence in their work.

On Baidu Tieba, a Reddit-like forum platform with over 300 million active users, the big day was marked only by a solemn post in a forum dedicated to Dylan that read “The forum’s so quiet on his birthday.” That post has since elicited a handful of “Happy birthdays” in response.

Homages to the singer were also hard to come by on Zhihu, China’s most popular knowledge-sharing platform akin to Quora. As of Tuesday, the most popular questions related to Dylan were “Why did Bob Dylan start painting?” and “What do you think of [Dylan’s newly released album] ‘Fallen Angels’?” — to which a user offered the plaintive response: “Just don't be like Bowie and release a new album and die.”

On streaming service Xiami, a platform that attracts fans of Western music, Dylan has around 65,000 followers. By comparison, China’s “godfather of rock,” Cui Jian, who has cited Dylan as a key inspiration, has almost half a million.

On the day before Dylan’s birthday, pedestrians on the streets of Beijing struggled to identify the musician from several photographs depicting him in his youth up to the present day.

Graduate student Xiao Qi, 24, resorted to wild guesses: “He’s a politician? Or some kind of revolutionary? Maybe a drug dealer?”

Twenty-eight-year-old IT technician Huang Junjie, though equally unable to conjure up a name, did have some insights to offer. “I think he probably understands people. Maybe he’s a lawyer, or in sales,” Huang said. “His eyes look like he can see right through a person.”

A lack of recognition for Dylan was also made apparent prior to his 2011 Shanghai concert, which disappointed some observers outside of China who had hoped he would use the concert to spur debate about China’s political system. On the China side, matters weren’t helped when the Shanghai-based newspaper Xinmin Evening News mistakenly printed a photograph of country music legend Willie Nelson in their coverage of the concert.

Despite Dylan’s less-than-prominent profile in Chinese pop culture, he is cited by several of Chinese rock’s biggest stars as a primary source of inspiration.

Among them is singer Wang Feng, currently one of China’s biggest rock stars. Though Cui Jian, whose early style was influenced by Dylan, is credited as bringing rock to China, Wang is widely considered to have brought it into the mainstream. His carefully cultivated rock star image has earned him a place on the panels of Chinese TV’s biggest talent shows and has made him a poster boy for countless marketing campaigns. He is also married to megastar actress Zhang Ziyi.

Wang’s 2009 album “Belief Flies in the Wind” was seen by many to be a tasteful nod to Dylan’s 1963 hit “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

But when Wang released the song “Hero” the following year, however, many felt the homage had turned to outright plagiarism. Dylan’s China-based fans upbraided Wang with accusations that, barring its Chinese lyrics, the song was little more than a sped-up version of Dylan’s 1994 “You Belong to Me.”

But criticism didn’t stop Wang’s song from becoming immensely popular. It even became the official anthem of the Beijing Guoan Football Club for a period of time.

Zhe Xiahou, a Beijing-based music producer and audio engineer, believes that Dylan’s following in China, though limited, can be attributed to the work of Cui Jian. “I think the biggest influence Dylan made on China is through Cui Jian,” Zhe said.

“He was really influenced by Dylan. If anything, Dylan made it into Chinese rock through him.”

Additional reporting by Anthony James.

(Header image: Bob Dylan performs during a concert at the Shanghai Grand Stage, April 8, 2011. Liu Xingzhe/Sixth Tone)