One of the hottest videos on the popular Chinese site Bilibili in the past two weeks is a quasi-serious guide on how to survive as a homeless person.
Sleep near garbage bins where “supplies” are replenished, use cardboard to insulate yourself from the damp and avoid surveillance cameras, the video suggested. It was viewed more than six million times and was briefly ranked the site’s No. 2 video.
Viewers jokingly called it “Youth Study,” the name of the Communist Youth League’s political education program, and “a required course for young people in 2026.”
The Chinese Communist Party has spent years trying to make “positive energy” the dominant mood of the country’s internet. Online platforms, it dictates, should amplify narratives of economic achievement, gratitude toward the party and confidence in China’s future.
Discontent has occasionally erupted after disasters, scandals or particularly brutal government actions. But something feels different lately. The pessimism is persistent. It has become part of the everyday social media feed, and can sometimes turn subversive.
China’s economic growth is slowing. A prolonged property crash has eroded the value of many families’ biggest asset while jobs have become harder to find and less secure. As the malaise deepens, more social media users are abandoning a cheery, compliant public performance and creating counternarratives that censorship can sometimes erase but not easily rebut.
Across RedNote, Douyin, Weibo and other popular platforms, you can scroll endless posts about meager wages, scarce jobs, falling property values and fear about the future. Some turn their hardships into dark humor. Others hijack official posts and hashtags and turn propaganda into spectacles of mockery.
China’s censorship apparatus still controls the internet. But prolonged economic distress is making it harder for the party to maintain its preferred account of how the country is doing.
China’s official youth unemployment rate reached 17.9 percent in July. More than 200 million people, over a quarter of the country’s working population, now work in what the government calls “flexible employment” — essentially a vast gig economy.
A hashtag on RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, urging people to keep a tight grip on their money has been viewed nearly 120 million times.
Young Chinese struggle to find jobs and are retreating from marriage and parenthood. Middle-age people who have followed the prescribed routes to security now feel that their major life decisions may have become liabilities.
“In this environment, you’ve won if you didn’t buy apartments, didn’t buy cars, didn’t invest or didn’t get married early,” read one post on RedNote. People born in the 1980s who strove the hardest, it said, are likely the biggest losers. The post was liked nearly 2,000 times.
The criticism sometimes extends to forbidden territory — the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, and Communist Party rule.
In November, the comment section on a Douyin post explaining the idiom “yichou wannian,” — literally, “to leave a stench for 10,000 years,” or to be remembered in infamy forever — blew up. Users made veiled references to Mr. Xi, who is often referred to simply as “he” in Chinese conversations. “He’s in a league of his own,” one comment said.
Li Ying, known for his online alias, “Teacher Li,” runs a popular account on X that serves as an uncensored information clearinghouse about China. He and his team monitor the Chinese social media sphere closely. They’ve seen an “exponential” increase in pessimistic and even subversive posts and comments this year, he said.
“Back in 2022, if we saw one online comment mocking Xi Jinping, we considered it worth sharing because few people dared say things like that,” Mr. Li said. “Today, you see so much of it that it barely even registers anymore.”
As the economy declined, people started asking questions that they didn’t need to think of before, Mr. Li said. Many users may not have realized that their personal complaints could be considered political. For example, he said, some government workers on RedNote compared how many months they had gone without getting paid.
To the social media users, their individual posts might feel like a personal reflection or complaint. But collectively they offer an account of China at odds with the official narrative of progress and prosperity.
Other users are deliberately using social media as a tool of dissent, and they subvert official propaganda to that purpose. A Douyin video proclaiming the Communist Party to be the world’s greatest party drew 41,000 roughly identical comments with rows of crying-face emojis punctuated by slashes and backslashes.
The tactic becomes especially potent when users converge on government and state media accounts. Last month, a state-affiliated media post claimed that China had invented human flight during the Ming dynasty, centuries before the West. The post triggered many sarcastic comments. “I get withdrawal symptoms if I go a day without hearing that China has won,” one said. “When will we invent two-day weekends?” said another.
Christian Göbel, a professor of contemporary Chinese politics at the University of Vienna, calls this tactic “subversive amplification.” Rather than build an audience of their own, users piggyback on the reach of official posts while undermining their intended messages.
China’s internet censorship has grown increasingly ruthless over the past decade. That makes the sheer volume of the pessimistic posts and sarcastic comments all the more striking. At the same time, it’s difficult to know why some posts survive long enough to go viral while others quickly disappear.
One possible explanation is that policing too aggressively could hurt traffic and advertising revenue. Another potential explanation is that recommendation algorithms allow scattered grievances to find one another.
When I opened my RedNote in recent weeks, I was surprised to find that the first 30 or so posts were nearly all about economic despair, many with hundreds or thousands of likes. The suggested searches could be even gloomier. “Is there a future for employment in China?” read one.
The government has tried to tamp down on negative energy. In 2023, the Ministry of State Security portrayed efforts to “bad-mouth China’s economy” as a security and political issue. Last year, the internet regulator ordered platforms to suppress claims that hard work or education was useless, as well as memes and jokes that excessively spread pessimism.
In April, the Ministry of State Security posted an article accusing an unnamed foreign organization of funding “lying flat” influencers to “erode the minds of Chinese youth.” “Lying flat” is a growing trend among young Chinese people who believe that striving is futile in the face of a bleak economic future.
The accusation prompted another counternarrative. Under a related hashtag on Weibo, users connected “lying flat” to scarce jobs, low wages and punishing work schedules. Some questioned whether the government was desperate. “When the mule stops working, the landlord stops making money,” one commenter wrote.
The ministry closed the article’s comment section.
“I don’t know if this can really be controlled,” Mr. Göbel said. “Any narrative that would try to make this go away would be an insult to the people who are suffering.”
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