McDonald's Brings Back Wang Leehom 23 Years Later — This Time With Fries

In 2003, Wang Leehom stood in a McDonald's, threw on a pair of headphones, and delivered a Chinese-language hip-hop track that would burrow into a generation's brain. The song was
我就喜欢
("I'm Lovin' It"), the Mandarin counterpart to McDonald's new global tagline — and it was everywhere. In stores, on TV, and in the heads of millions of Chinese kids who are now adults with their own spending power.

Twenty-three years later, McDonald's China is reaching back into that memory bank — and the brand knows exactly what it's doing.

To mark the 23rd anniversary of "i'm lovin' it 我就喜欢," McDonald's has brought Wang Leehom back. But this time, he's not alone. He's joined by Wang Sulong, a singer-songwriter whose own rise mirrors a younger generation's soundtrack, for a co-branded theme track called
我就喜欢薯条
("I'm Lovin' Fries"). Both have been named official "我就喜欢" ambassadors.

The song isn't a straightforward remake. McDonald's mined social media for real, fan-generated content — the kind of oddly specific fry love that people have been posting for years — and wove it into the lyrics. Creative fry-eating techniques, inside-joke enthusiasm, the works. The result is a duet between two eras of Chinese pop, staged around the menu item that needs no introduction.

Beyond the song: a full-scale fry takeover

The music is the headline, but the campaign stretches well beyond it. Starting July 1, over 8,000 McDonald's locations across China rolled out limited-edition fry-adjacent items: a thick mashed-potato bacon meat-sauce double beef burger, Italian-style spicy tomato rocker fries, and six collectible "Crispy Fry" series merch pieces that fans can get their hands on. The soft-serve cone is back at its classic 2 RMB price. Roughly 100 stores are being fully converted into "我就喜欢" themed spaces.

That last detail is worth sitting with: McDonald's is redecorating a hundred physical restaurants around a tagline and a song. It's the kind of move that only makes sense for a brand whose catchphrase doubled as a genuine cultural artifact.

Why this lands

Most brand anniversaries are PowerPoint-safe. This one is built on something stickier: a piece of music people actually remember, performed by someone they still care about, paired with a collaborator whose presence signals that the brand isn't just talking to the 30-somethings. McDonald's isn't simply replaying the old track — it's letting fans write the new one, literally. Pulling fry references from social posts turns the campaign into a conversation rather than a broadcast.

The fries themselves are a smart anchor, too. They're the menu item that's always been bulletproof across demographics — kids, teens, hungover adults, suits between meetings. Making them the centerpiece sidesteps the headache of choosing a hero product and lets the campaign feel universal without being vague.

The scale is McDonald's-scale (8,000 stores, 100 themed locations, merch, menu innovation, live events), but the emotional logic is surprisingly tight. A tagline that's outlasted most marriages. A pop star who hasn't needed reintroduction in two decades. A younger musician who makes the room bigger. And fries — which nobody needed convincing about in the first place.