ABSTRACT Egao (spoofing), a popular form of Chinese parody, employs humorous and mocking techniques in verbal and visual forms. Its grassroots nature often endows egao with an anti-authoritarian stance, but little scholarly attention has been paid to the increasing use of egao by Chinese public officials on social media. This article looks at this new trend by examining how local officials on the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, use egao. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque, we employ Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the online communication style of 54 official accounts on Douyin. We thereby highlight three key features of the dynamic and complex nature of power relations in contemporary political communication in China: how they represent ethnic minority cultures; how they use typical egao forms to parody rebellious characters and subvert traditional Confucian junzi images; and their use of ‘light’ egao to reconstruct ancient characters and heroic images through Gufeng and Wuxia genres. We argue that the power relations between officials and the grassroots are not subverted but rather disguised through a complex negotiation within the state’s promotion of cultural soft power, tourism, and economy, which is aligned with Xi Jinping’s political doctrine of ‘Telling the China Story Well’.