Malatang is the Sichuan snack of skewered meat and vegetables cooked in spicy broth, shall henceforth be known as "spicy hot pot." Hot pot is a kind of dish where you use chopsticks to cook meat and vegetables in spicy and/or non-spicy broth.

Questions on the topic are mainstays on Q&A platform Zhihu, often attracting peppery responses from Sichuan users who deplore ignorance of the subtle differences between their many reddish regional concoctions. Several news outlets led with news of the new malatang definition—"in the future when you see 'spicy hot pot' you'll know right away that it's malatang," enthused Xinhua.

Hot pot is the grandfather of all of these dishes; maocai and malatang are distinguished from hot pot in that you get your own pot and someone else cooks it for you; malatang is further distinguished in that traditionally, the food is prepared on a skewer before being dropped in the broth.

While hot pot has been well-known across China for decades (and northerners have their own version, 涮羊肉 or "Manchu hot pot"), malatang only became popular outside Sichuan within the last decade or so. Vendors in other provinces are also not very consistent with how they name their dish: At many malatang restaurants today, the food doesn't come on skewers but simply a plastic dishes for the customers to choose from. Crucially, roadside stalls calling themselves malatang have a set-up that actually adheres more to the diagram's notion of "chuan chuan xiang."