China’s tech giants are finding the call of the metaverse just as irresistible as their American counterparts.

Companies like Tencent, ByteDanceNetEase and Alibaba are racing to build devices and software to shape a virtual marketplace that Morgan Stanley estimates will eventually be worth $8 trillion in China alone.

“Yuan yu zhou,” the Chinese translation for metaverse, has become something of a buzzword with the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) receiving at least 16,000 trademark applications containing the term as of February.

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While the full realization of the metaverse, presented as an ever-present interconnected ecosystem of virtual worlds replicating real life, is years away, some aspects of it…