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From 'Bear Cave Street' to a Global Stage: Overseas Chinese Media Tour Visits Betop Technology, Meets 'Scream Aesthetics' Founder Xiao Di
Reporter 王子龙
On September 18, the 2026 'Chasing the Chinese Dream, Discovering Liaoning' overseas Chinese-language media delegation visited Dalian Betop Technology ('Betop'). Representatives from 17 overseas Chinese-language media outlets across 12 countries and regions, together with central Chinese media outlets, toured the company on site — a leading Chinese high-tech culture-tourism enterprise built around creating original IP and providing full-chain EPCO solutions for the culture, commerce and tourism sectors.
Betop Technology was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Dalian, having grown out of the Multimedia Research Center at Dalian University of Technology. Guided by its mission to 'create magical highlights for cities,' the company pioneered the 'Divine Beast Street' model, a new track blending culture, commerce and tourism. The 2025 launch of its giant AI super-intelligent agent 'Xiong Beibei' marked a new stage in the company's 'technology plus art' practice, achieving a leap from 'bionic installation' to 'intelligent life form' and offering a sustainable operating solution for truly integrating AI into culture-tourism-commerce settings.
The delegation learned that Betop is guided creatively by its 'Scream Aesthetics' philosophy, with creative design and innovative R&D as its core strengths, coordinating the combined needs of government, scenic areas, investors, the market and visitors across four core business segments: R&D and manufacturing of high-tech culture-tourism equipment, scenic park planning and design, digital content development, and investment, construction and operation of integrated culture-commerce-tourism complexes. Its main partners include government platform companies across China, major culture-tourism investment and urban investment groups, renowned scenic parks, and international digital entertainment companies, with CYTS (China Youth Travel Service) and the Shaanxi Tourism Group as strategic investors.
Betop has been told to have participated in planning and delivering more than 2,000 high-tech culture-tourism projects across over 100 Chinese cities, and manages more than 40 projects under operational trusteeship, successfully building city IPs and culture-commerce-tourism landmarks in many locations, earning wide coverage from central and Party media, major satellite broadcasters and media at home and abroad. The company has also received numerous national-level honors, including designation as one of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's first batch of technology innovation centers, the only Northeast China enterprise among the National Top 30 Growing Cultural Enterprises, an international science and technology cooperation base, a demonstration enterprise for innovative development in modern services, a national demonstration base for culture-technology integration, and a key national enterprise for cultural exports — holding more than 150 pieces of independent intellectual property.
The delegation found Betop's practice genuinely astonishing — an IP born from a single street in Dalian that has since taken root in more than a hundred cities across China and is now accelerating its push onto the world stage, prompting more than one visiting reporter to say they 'never expected this.' Several delegation members said this path — infusing cutting-edge technological installations with the genes of traditional culture, then exporting them into global performance and tourism settings — is exactly the kind of vivid material overseas media need to tell China's story well.
The delegation then held in-depth exchanges with Betop founder Xiao Di. A renowned installation artist and proponent of the 'Scream Aesthetics' theory, Xiao is known for works celebrated for their beauty, sense of life and sense of wonder. He is a leading talent under the National Ten-Thousand Talents Program, director of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's Technology Innovation Center (for large-scale bionic performance equipment), a member of the All-China Youth Federation, an innovation and entrepreneurship talent recognized by the Ministry of Science and Technology, a guest professor at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, an MTA mentor at Nankai University and Zhejiang University, and a judge at global invention competitions. He was also the first artist to bring Chinese bionic art installations overseas, and commands a following of more than 2 million across all platforms.
Xiao Di's installation art fuses technology, art, culture and artificial intelligence across multiple disciplines, marked by a distinctive 'mecha-punk' design style that blends Eastern and Western aesthetics, with influence spanning culture-tourism, events, concerts and electronic music festivals, and public art. He created China's first giant-beast IP urban park — Dalian's Bear Cave Street — which has become a nationwide benchmark for revitalizing underused urban assets and has since been replicated in cities including Shenyang, Urumqi, Changchun, Dezhou and Huaibei. His works — including the China Giant Horse, the Kirin Golden Glaze, the Phoenix Mecha, the giant bear Xiong Beibei, and the panda Yiyi — have repeatedly appeared on CCTV News and been reported by central and Party media.
On the international front, Xiao Di's 'Golden Giant Eagle' was invited to appear at the opening ceremony of the ADIB Super Football Cup in the United Arab Emirates, becoming a new highlight of China-Arab cultural exchange. His custom Lunar New Year installation art for the Year of the Snake and Year of the Horse, created for Macau's Shun Tak-New Century Group, was reported by Macau's Tourism Bureau and more than 500 media outlets at home and abroad, including PR Newswire. He also created the world's first officially Hasbro-licensed bionic Optimus Prime mecha, while other creations — including the Dynamic Tiger, the Golden Leopard and the Mecha Dragon King — have appeared at Spring Festival galas on major satellite broadcasters, concerts by stars such as JJ Lin and Tan Jianci, the Shanghai International Electronic Music Festival, and parades in cities including Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Dalian and Shantou.
Xiao Di told the delegation that he is working to build a large-scale cultural IP system similar to an 'Eastern Disney,' hoping to interpret the unique charm of traditional Chinese culture through his giant-beast IP series. The system will incorporate more interactive art installations, performance art, artificial intelligence and new-media outreach, with the goal of spreading and gaining global recognition for Chinese culture.
Betop Technology is understood to be continuing to replicate and expand its 'Bear Cave Street' model across the country while advancing its overseas market presence in parallel. Several overseas Chinese-language media representatives said they would carry what they saw and heard on this visit back to their countries of residence, to tell local readers the story of a Chinese original-IP enterprise that started in Dalian and is now heading out into the world.
