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Thursday, May 28, 2026

From the TikTok Slop Abyss: Xiao Xiao, the "Chinese Kick/Junk Food" Girl

One of the most revealing TikToks of Xiao Xiao, the “Chinese Kick Girl”, is one in which she hauls a large speaker through the street, dressed in traditional Chinese children’s clothing. An AI narration explains in that familiar hollow, robotic female voice that she is off to work. We cut to her performing TikTok dances in a crowded street while passersby poke and prod her, smartphones raised, each hoping to capture their own viral moment.

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“Girl” is hardly an appropriate word for Xiao Xiao as she is 39 years old. She is a street performer from rural Sichuan, China, born with Seckel syndrome and primordial dwarfism. She stands just over a meter tall and weighs less than fourteen kilograms. Xaio Xaio’s father left when she was young, with her disability being given as the reason, so her mother raised her alone. The two receive modest government allowances from the local Disabled Persons Federation and Women’s Federation, which have supported them since 2011.

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Her body always appears worn, pained, covered in scrapes and bruises. Whether self-inflicted from the kicking and flailing that won her Western internet fame is unclear. In several videos she appears with a large wound across her face, which heals slowly over time into what looks like an unset broken nose. What caused it is never addressed, of course nobody in the comments section thinks to ask.



Scroll through the comments of any Xiao Xiao video and you will find image after image of shoes, switches, and paddles, objects associated with corporal punishment in the rural, impoverished households of the Global South, posted with gleeful suggestions of beatings. It is a particular kind of cruelty, one that reveals more about the commenters than they intend. There is something about Xiao Xiao, be it her size, her volatility, her unruliness, that triggers in a certain type of viewer a sadistic, primal desire to inflict pain. The same impulse drives the monkey torture communities that have flourished in the obscure corners of YouTube and TikTok: small, vulnerable, visibly distressed creatures made into objects of entertainment for a perversely sadistic audience.



It doesn’t seem that Xaio Xaio’s mother initially set out to become her exploiter. When her mother began selling homemade honey, she began filming her daughter to help sell it on a social media platform called Kuaishou. Their profile was a way to document their lives, build an audience, and sell honey that supplemented their government allowance. It worked well, and the account grew to 140,000 followers. People were drawn to Xiao Xiao, intrigued by her size, her expressiveness, and her volatility.

It was not the first time Xiao Xiao had been put in front of a camera – as a child she had appeared on television, paraded as a curiosity, her small body treated as spectacle. Her mother claims she was never compensated for these appearances.

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There are reports, difficult to verify, of a Chinese documentary or television segment featuring a child matching her description, a small girl from rural Sichuan with primordial dwarfism. Whether this is Xiao Xiao is not certain. Her name translates roughly to “little little,” a generic term of endearment applied to small children, which makes tracing her history through Chinese-language sources considerably difficult. She is not the only girl with primordial dwarfism to have received media attention in China under that name.

In August 2022, village officials reviewed the Kuaishou profile, found several videos to be inappropriate, and requested its removal. The Chinese government had begun cracking down on accounts deemed to showcase antisocial or inappropriate behavior around this period, so the account was permanently banned. When Xiao Xiao’s Kuaishou account was banned, rumors of her death began circulating online. She later resurfaced through Mei Niang Xinxin’s Douyin lives in mid-2023, and by September of that year a clip of the two was circulating across every platform globally.

Mei Niang Xinxin is a man in his forties from Sichuan who began featuring Xiao Xiao in his Douyin livestreams. A cross-dresser and singer with an established following, he is known for his loud, performative energy. Douyin live performance operates on a gift economy: viewers send virtual gifts during streams which convert into real money for the performers. The more compelling the content, the more gifts flow. Xiao Xiao’s presence, her dancing and the unpredictability of her outbursts, helped the streams generate significant engagement. Wolong appears in the background of several of these videos as well. She is another woman who exists in Xiao Xiao’s orbit without ever quite entering the frame fully.

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The power differential is obvious, but Xaio Xaio is a middle-aged woman who has been navigating these arrangements her entire life. She seemingly has spent nearly four decades being poked, prodded, filmed, monetized, and managed by people who benefit from her presence more than she does. Xaio Xaio naturally has a short temper, something local officials noted in their 2022 investigation.

The TikTok account @chinesejunkfood2023 reposted the clip with Mei Niang Xinxin in September 2023. It received 16 million views. Within days of the clip going viral, Western TikTok had named her “Kick Girl” first, then “Chinese Kick Girl,” then “Chinese Junk Food Girl” after the account that had introduced her to them. On FlopTok, a corner of TikTok organized around ironic celebrity worship and heavily edited fan content, she was absorbed into an existing collection of meme figures. Fancams were created, edits circulated, and a whole aesthetic apparatus was built around her image by people who had watched a twenty-five second video.

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In Latin America, Xaio Xaio’s distinctive hairstyle, her high pigtails bound with multiple rubber bands, loose pieces hanging down, spawned a trend called “Penteado Xiao Xiao,” were young women recreate the look on TikTok for their own engagement. During Halloween, Japanese TikTok users dressed as her, performing street dances in qipao, which generated its own cycle of “cultural appropriation” outrage from Chinese media.

In 2024, Xiao Xiao’s mother was allegedly jailed for exploitation. The details beyond this are sparse on English language Tiktok and the Chinese sources are difficult to verify through translation alone (a caveat that applies to much of what is known about Xiao Xiao’s life) where the distance between what happened and what was reported and what was then translated and then paraphrased on TikTok by an AI voice narration is considerable and worth keeping in mind.

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What is known is that someone stepped in to fill the vacancy her mother left. Reports variously identify this person as a coworker, a neighbor, a cousin, a collegue she had a crush on. The inconsistency is either a translation problem or a reporting problem or both.


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She is still livestreaming on TikTok. Recent videos confirm she is alive, which is worth stating plainly given that rumors of her death have circulated more than once. Whoever her current handlers are appear to be leaning into deliberate ambiguity about her age, listing it anywhere from 9 to 26 on her English-language profile. Xiao Xiao is being dressed in increasingly juvenile outfits: toddler-style princess dresses in soft pastel colors. The AI narrations added to her TikToks push the same angle, framing her circumstances as maximally pitiable to drive engagement. All of it is calculated to reframe her on-camera meltdowns as the endearing fits of a child rather than the justified rage of a grown woman who has spent four decades being managed by people who profit from her presence more than she does.



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