The Myth of China’s Creative Coffee

What's the real role of China's "sugar water" in cafes — often flashy, but with little coffee flavor.

Let me start with a counterintuitive fact: on Xiaohongshu, China’s Instagram, eight or nine out of ten cafés are pushing creative drinks. When foreign media cover China’s coffee scene, they also give these drinks a very prominent place. When you go to a coffee festival in China, you're almost buried under a wave of strange, over-the-top creative concoct…