China Mobile has rolled out a light-touch promotional push starring actor Wang Yaoqing, pitching the carrier’s network as a seamless companion for festival travel and leisure. The campaign’s slogan — a playful pun that invites users to “pick a good network, pick China Mobile” — casts Wang as a “network experience officer” inviting consumers to test and enjoy an uninterrupted digital life.
The short message, published on Chinese platform Sohu, reads less like a product spec and more like a reassurance: uninterrupted video, smooth connections while eating, drinking and playing, and the luck of staying online through the holidays. The tone and timing — early February, immediately before the Lunar New Year travel and consumption peak — underline the campaign’s practical aim: to reassure current and potential subscribers that China Mobile’s network can handle seasonal spikes in demand.
The ad also reflects broader commercial and technological realities. China Mobile remains the country’s dominant carrier by subscribers and scale, and national carriers have increasingly promoted user experience as a differentiator as 5G networks mature. Messaging that foregrounds stability and everyday convenience responds to a market that now expects mobile services to support entertainment, payments and travel without interruption.
Celebrity endorsements are a familiar device in China’s advertising ecosystem, but the choice of a well-known actor and the framing of a branded “experience officer” point to a refined marketing playbook: humanize a vast state-controlled enterprise and translate network investments into relatable consumer benefits. For ordinary users making short decisions about which SIM to use or which operator to trust while travelling, such narratives can be persuasive.
There is a geopolitical and regulatory subtext as well. China’s telecom giants operate under close state oversight and form part of the country’s critical infrastructure. Public-facing campaigns that emphasize reliability and domestic reach serve both commercial ends and the wider policy objective of consolidating confidence in homegrown digital infrastructure.
For international observers, the campaign is not a technological revelation but a signal of priorities. As China’s carriers continue to commercialize 5G and experiment with premium services, much of the competitive energy in the domestic market will be spent on user trust and experience. That is as consequential for domestic consumption patterns as it is for China Mobile’s attempts to upsell services and retain its vast subscriber base.