KUALA LUMPUR: Melaka's choice of Fan Bingbing as the friendly tourism ambassador is proving effective, as the state appears to be trending on Chinese social media, with searches for the term surging.
Fan's public relations manager, Jersey Chong, said the search for "Melaka" saw over 320 million searches over two days, based on the latest statistics from China's WeChat.
She said "Fan Bingbing" garnered 334,883,965 searches, and "Melaka" followed with 165,082,653 searches on the Chinese app on June 14.
Meanwhile, on June 15, "Fan Bingbing" had 461,138,243 searches, and "Melaka" had 161,972,679 searches.
The searches for Melaka even trumped searches for the Shanghai International Film Festival and Weibo Movie Awards Ceremony 2024.
"For comparison, searches for 'Shanghai International Film Festival' had 2,280,795 on WeChat, while the 'Weibo Movie Awards Ceremony 2024' garnered 3,472,115 during the same period," she said in a Facebook post.
Fan, who has 63 million followers on Weibo (a social media platform in China similar to X) and 4.1 million followers on Instagram, is often portrayed as the face of Chinese culture on the global stage.
She has starred in the Hollywood superhero movie 'X-Men: Days of Future Past,' as well as French and South Korean films.
In 2017, Fan graced the cover of Time magazine and was named one of the 100 Most Influential People.
She was appointed to promote Visit Melaka Year 2024 (TMM2024) and was in the state for a visit from June 14 as part of the campaign, which aims to promote Melaka as an ideal destination for tourists.