I've mentioned the craze for Luosifen which led to 6 million sheep following each other to Liuzhou over the CNY holiday to try a dish half of them hoped to hate.
But it's not the only insane craze.
Back in summer 1998, when I was living in Hunan, there was catastrophic flooding which wiped out the soy bean harvest.
Thousands of farmers were hit by disaster. A couple of the more enterprising kind started making a kind of snack product using wheat flour rather than the hard-hit soya flour normally used in their cuisine.
Basically they made wheat gluten strips which they slavered in chilli. These they called S: 辣条; T: 辣條 (là tiáo), 'spicy strips' and sold them outside schools for mere cents.
Latiao - image from Meituan food delivery app.
A billion dollar industry was born. Most of the customers were and still are schoolchildren who went crazy for the addictive if not nutritious snacks.
According to an article in Global Times, China's uber-nationalist State-owned English language 'newspaper', latiao has gone viral globally. I don't believe a word of it. In China, yes. Globally?
Have you or your children, grand-children, great-grand-children even heard, never mind fallen for this?
For the record, I've never eaten them.
A non-hysterical history of the craze is here.
https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2024/02/stripped-down-the-story-behind-chinas-favorite-snack/