China has last laugh on Japan with new 'Bad Girl' cartoon

Time was when Chinese cartoons were childish retellings of traditional tales or propaganda images peopled by rosy-cheeked peasant women, muscle-bound ironworkers and strong-jawed soldiers celebrating the Communist ethos.

Little P, the hero of Song Yang's Bad Girl comic book, is more likely to be celebrating her new low-slung jeans, complaining about her tough mother, or her latest mobile phone.

Reflecting China's changing social realities, particularly in cities, Little P wants to be China's first successful cartoon icon. Bad Girl is playing a lead role in transforming Chinese cartoons from poor-quality kids' stuff or dull propaganda to something far hipper, as the country competes with Japanese manga and Korean manhwa.

The red-haired Song Yang also works as a DJ, as a model, a TV host, a games designer and a musician. "I love to mix work and play," he said. "What I've done has been out of fun. I enjoy life just as everyone else does, going to pubs, parties and art exhibitions, but what differentiates my visits to these places is that I've always got an intention. I try everything within my reach to expand my personal experiences and accumulate resources for my cartoon creations."

Chinese people love cartoons and comics but they usually go for imports from Japan, South Korea or the US, something the government is keen to remedy by encouraging a local cartoon industry.

Last year, the government banned foreign cartoons during primetime TV to protect local business; SpongeBob SquarePants was proving too popular with local children. The government offers tax breaks to cartoonists, and schools have been established in four art and film academies to train more animators.

"I don't want to be a great literary giant or a pure artist," Soon Yang said. "What I want most is to see the establishment of an industrial pattern, a mechanism which is set up for the cartoon industry. I want to make it big; this will give me a hell of a lot of fun."

The Xinjiang native is incredibly prolific. Bad Girl has been used in an advertisement for Hugo Boss' Man fragrance, he's written cartoon versions of two famous novels, Animal Is Wild by Wang Shuo, and Jade Buddha by Hai Yan, his own graphic novel, A Penguin Sits At the Other Bank and a cartoon phone novel called Oolong Khan.

He's a founding member of Don't Be So Modern, a magazine which collects the works of Chinese cartoonists and has had an exhibition in the Dashanzi art district in Beijing. He also contributes a cartoon profile to the Beijing edition of Time Out, called Song Yang's People.

Song Yang's generation was the first to be able to watch Japanese and American cartoons as China opened up in the 1980s, and Japanese cartoons, especially Akira Toriyama's Dragonball Z, were popular.

"Every day I would copy 10 cartoons to show the girls in my class," Song Yang said. "My Japanese imitations eventually filled two large bags. Later, I began to feel copying others was not enough, and that I had my own ideas to express."