Chinese cartoonist, Xiao Bai, wins Japan's International Manga Award

Forget panda diplomacy, China is now moving in on a staple of Japanese culture, manga, as Chinese cartoonist, Xiao Bai (小白) wins the fourth International Manga Award.

The award was established in 2007 to encourage non-Japanese manga to “Enhance the voice of Japanese pop culture and subculture,” according to then Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso, who said he wants to make it “like the Nobel prize of manga.”

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Japanese manga, a form of comics and print cartoons, is one of Japanese’s most well-recognized cultural exports, as cartoons like "Doraemon" and "Dragon Ball" can be seen in every corner of the globe.

Eligibility for the International Manga Award is limited to “Up and coming foreign manga artists whose base is overseas.”

The Chinese Xiao Bai fits the bill.

Although artists from Hong Kong have previously won this competition, Xiao Bai is the first mainland Chinese artist to take gold.

French, Spanish and Thai cartoonists won silver awards this year, announced Japan’s Foreign Ministry. The contest received 189 entries from 39 countries and territories, including Brazil, Belgium, Spain and Kazakhstan.

According to WantChinaTimes, Xiao Bai’s winning comic was “Si Loin et Si Proche” (“So Far and So Near”), which was published in Belgium last year. It was her first full-length graphic novel.

“Exploring love, friendship and other questions of life, the work tells the story of a girl studying at Beijing University who encounters a young boy claiming to be her son,” writes the online paper of the winning entry.

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Spoiler alert: The boy turns out to be her son from the future.

A signature of Xiao Bai’s work is that her stories have almost exclusively all female characters -- the majority of whom have tattoos -- no coincidence considering that as Xiao Bai is also a tattoo artist.