Liu Xinting, "Contemporary Youth"

Liu Xinting, “Why are Contemporary Youth Increasingly ‘Unhappy?’  Focus on the Living Conditions of China’s Youth”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Introduction

For our second text on youth culture in China, we have chosen to translate Liu Xinting’s “Why are Contemporary Youth Increasingly ‘Unhappy?’”  Liu is a rising young scholar in the Chinese Literature Department at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou who works on various topics in contemporary Chinese culture (to situate her within the world of scholarship in China and elsewhere, Wang Hui praises Liu for her review of Zygmunt Bauman’s Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor in Wang’s 2015 article on “China’s Entry into the Era of the ‘New Poor’”). 

In the text we have translated here, Liu focuses on China’s online generations, those born in the 1990s and 2000s, exploring and explaining their “unhappiness,” largely created by soaring real estate prices and uncertain employment prospects.  Her specific focus is on the emotional response of these educated youth to this perspective of diminished expectations—or outright failure—as expressed through their online life, i.e., their creation and circulation of memes.

In China this youth mood, and its memes, fall under the rubric of “sang 丧 culture.”  The basic meaning of sang is to lose something through death, and hence it is associated with mourning and related moods of dejection and depression.  Sang culture is immediately ironic, since the young people are “mourning” something they have never had, and as befits our current reality, a consumer culture has grown up around sang—Liu mentions sang music and sang tea…which are surely ironic as well.  Beyond irony, however, China’s youth feel an overwhelming sense of fatigue bordering on paralysis, because the amount of hard work required to succeed is staggering, while at the same time hard work is no guarantee of success, and yet dropping out is not an option. 

Liu situates her work in the longue durée of studies of youth subcultures, mentioning particularly Birmingham subculture studies and the notion of “textual poaching.”  The Birmingham school portrayed youth subculture, particularly in post-war Britain, as a form of healthy resistance, challenging older ideas that subcultures were a form of “deviance.”  “Textual poaching” is part of “fan studies,” an attempt to see youth engagement with popular culture as positive and empowering instead of passive and dependent.  Taking inspiration from Žižek, Liu argues that China’s youth are expressing neither resistance nor empowerment—neither of which seems possible—but are simply finding creative ways to find pleasure in the pain of the moment—a moment that may last most of their lives.  In some ways, they are trolling themselves, and chuckling as they do it, because trolling yourself is funny, at least for awhile.
 
Liu’s argument is theoretical rather than empirical; she cites no surveys of youth attitudes and interviews no young people.   Freya Ge nonetheless confirms that Liu’s description resonates with her and her friends:
 
“Students in my high school like to call themselves ‘mouse people 老鼠人,’ an Internet term which refers to people who have no confidence in themselves and no ability to change things.  Some students feign a ‘hopeless’ attitude, saying that they are too weak and useless to deserve anything good. The ‘effort’ they make is in fact a kind of passive resistance, while they are still unwilling and unable to give up due to their own aspirations and family expectations. Other classmates say things like, ‘this bad grade doesn't matter, because I only deserve to go to a crummy university anyway.’  Others say ‘I don’t want to live, but I don’t dare to die 我不想活了，但也不敢死.’   There are also some students who clearly know their grades are poor and feel bad about it, but still spend a lot of time online chatting and playing games. The exchange of despair among the students has turned into a new kind of carnival. Compared with former generations, students are now facing more extreme peer pressure and more difficult assignments. Due to their limited ability and knowledge, the only coping mechanism for dealing with unhappiness seems to be the playful expression of pain.
 
Furthermore, most Chinese young people are not houlang,  those who are good-looking, intelligent, with rich and powerful parents, and this knowledge feeds sang culture as well.  There are several statements on Zhihu, China’s online Q & A community, that earned over fifty thousand likes and that speak to this.  One representative statement is: ‘Most people look out at the glorious world, examine their very ordinary existence, and envision the long, hopeless future that is about to start, finally realizing that the glory is always someone else's.’ In addition, as 2020 draws to a close, more and more people are starting to post year-end summaries on the Internet, and sang culture is also evident here. The most common statements include remarks like ‘I haven't accomplished anything this year,’ and ‘I always feel down 我总是觉得丧,’ to which they add their memes.”
 
In sum, Liu Xinting’s text is interesting both as an example of a kind of statement that circulates on China’s internet, and as a window into the somewhat bleak lives of China’s “fortunate” educated youth.
 
A technical note:  We suspect that most of the memes Liu mentions in her text would be largely meaningless to readers of our site, so we added links to the images.  Because of our own technical limitations, and certain difficulties posed by the platform on which this site is based, the appearance of these images is not always very professional.  Our apologies—but in this instance, imperfect images are better than none.  To return to the text after viewing an image, click on the back arrow in your browser, and not on the X in the image.

For other texts on this site dealing with Internet themes, click here.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
‘The symptomatic expression of the rejection of mainstream ideology by sang culture or positive losers is a kind of cynical mockery. In other words, their rejection or resistance does not point toward a new, alternative life path, but rather to a kind of ‘illusion of resistance’ that grows out of the pride of seeing through the deception, the self satisfaction that comes from understanding that, in the words of the author Eileen Chang, ‘life is a gorgeous robe crawling with fleas,’ the excitement of saying ‘no’ to consumer culture.  Sang memes are animated by a desire to disrupt and destroy, and knowingly miss the point; ‘zombie font’ cruelly mocks the absurd self-deception of mainstream success aphorisms by twisting them up in irony.  Like the best ideological analysts of the 21st century, the ‘zombies’ have punctured the surface and seen the reality, boldly proclaiming that ‘the emperor has no clothes.’”
 
“On this basis, ‘sang culture’ achieves a high degree of acceptance of existing reality while seeming to resist, a paradox reflected in a calm acceptance of their own lack of success and unhappiness.  In the face of those goals that should inspire them, positive losers cunningly choose to admit failure, incompetence, and vulnerability. This proactive recognition of failure also means that failure is not a cause for humiliation and psychological trauma for the subject, because ‘I have always been useless.’ This is the most interesting part of ‘sang resistance.’ It uses creative cultural reproduction activities as a counterattack to ‘paralyze’ the success story of hard work.  But as a clear and definite expression of the subject’s capacity to act, as an expression of individual resistance to the dominant ideology, it can only be expressed as a mixture of dispiritedness and self-mockery, and while they are disappointed with the fatigue that they feel, all they can do is smile at getting nowhere.”
 
“The name given to the ‘precariat’ is indicative of these new changes to work and the workplace. With the continuing expansion of higher education and structural employment challenges, it is more and more difficult to find stable employment and to advance in the workplace. Flexible labor has replaced career ambition, floating contracts have replaced permanent security, and young people no longer have a job worth holding onto for a lifetime, as their parents did.  Even more important is that, in terms of work intensity and stress, white-collar careers are increasingly resembling those of workers on the assembly lines of giant companies, with many repetitive, tiresome, easily replaceable jobs, while at the same time, the welfare, salary, and social status of white-collar workers are taking serious blows.

Abstract theoretical terms such as ‘post-Fordism,’ ‘post-industrialism’ and ‘consumer society’ point precisely to the following reality:  traditional blue-collar workers no longer enjoy long-term jobs with high security and stable benefits, and white-collar workers in urban office buildings are becoming ‘blue-collar’ and ‘low-level.’ Burning themselves out in jobs where they exhaust themselves for nothing and run around aimlessly is the ultimate despair that crushes the ‘zombies.’ It is in the sense of suffering oppressive exploitative labor, repetitive body movements, and loss of individual sovereignty that zombies become the best spokesmen for the precarious working status of the generation. They call themselves the demeaning name of ‘social livestock’ and they ridicule and help one other in online ‘social livestock tea rooms.’  As the 1980s generation enters the career promotion bottleneck phase of their lives, the term ‘workers preparing for retirement 退休预备员’ refers to frustrated employees who are young but eager to retire and draw their pension as soon as possible.”
 
“At a time when the precariat embraces a degraded identity symbolized by social livestock and zombies, mainstream values advocate a kind of ‘entrepreneur-of-the-self’ world where everyone should run their life as a business: ‘Becoming an entrepreneur-of-the-self means managing your employability, assessing your debt, and stemming a decline in wages and income.’ If this theoretical concept is too dry and abstract, the current norm for China's middle class—what is called ‘financial freedom’ or ‘high net worth individuals’—is clearly the new interpellation of the subject.

According to the imagined definition of ‘winner’ that has flooded social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, what you should do is:  complete your educational self-investment while in high school, so that your success in the battle of the university entrance exams catapults you into a first-tier city like Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, and then at the pinnacle of your happiness, take on debt to buy one or more properties in first-tier cities. 

Next you need to invest in stocks, funds, and various wealth management products, exercise risk control and hedge your assets in the vast sea of capital markets, and unrelentingly liquidate your positions at the top of the Shanghai securities composite index……At this point, while most people are sweating like zombies on their ghostly plantations, you're sitting in your apartment on Beijing's East Second Ring Road, happily perusing a philosophical tome on dispiritedness. From this perspective, economic misery and material poverty are no longer social or economic problems, but stories of investment failures, or ‘market rewards’ in the always fresh story of success as told by the winner.”
 
Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
In 2017, the sang wave hit.  “Sang culture” climbed onto the stage bearing the clear marks of an internet subculture, propelled by various memes, its own popular music (sang songs), its own style of writing (zombie font[2]), and even successful commercial products like “sang tea,” all speaking to the spirit of a new age.  Not the “burning culture”[3] of those determined to succeed, nor the rebellious cry of the rock-and-rollers, but rather the story of the unhappy and dispirited, best expressed by the meme of “Ge You’s paralysis.”[4]  The “sang slackers” we currently see around us have reached zombie 2.0 level, and are currently deepening their disheartening pleasures by establishing goals [literally “flags” in English in the original] for themselves which they will never achieve, always imagining they will get motivated, while remaining in fact listless garbage.  They tend to panic after occasional moments of pleasure and often blame themselves for their laziness.
 
This creative production of "sang culture" and its "slackers" seems at first glance to fit very well with the “resisters” of classic Birmingham subculture studies.[5] First, sang culture exhibits standard practices of "textual poaching"[6] as understood in cultural studies. Typical expressions of sang culture—such as sayings like “failure is not frightening, what is frightening is that you continue to say things like this," or "all roads lead to Rome, but some people were born in Rome"—hunting out well-known inspirational aphorisms and subjecting them to the irony and ridicule of semantic reversal. With the exception of somewhat controversial selection of lazy egg,[7] the four “king” memes of sang culture (Pepe the frog, salted fish with long legs, BoJack Horseman and Bobby Hill) have no direct connection to sang, and their origins can be found in the integrated production of the cultural industry as criticized by the Frankfurt School.  After the netizens (the "positive audience" emphasized by Cultural Studies) have reworked the memes for their own entertainment, they become completely divorced from their original setting and take on new semantic codes, symbolic representations of what had once been inside jokes for a small number of people. 
 
Second, sang culture expresses a clear call to resist, and responds with initiative and creativity, boldly deconstructing the internal contradictions of the mainstream culture’s "success learning" and pointing directly at the absurdity and nothingness behind hard work. Thus, Ji Chunsheng, the character played by Ge You in the 1993 television show I Love My Family, a slovenly, lazy, self-pitying "social waste" genuinely resonates with young professionals. A "salted fish" (another play on words:  “salted 咸” is pronounced in the same way as “idle 闲”), who has no desire to be a champion, completely rewrites the meaning of the Hong Kong film director’s Stephen Chow's (b. 1962 ) aphorism that "a man without dreams is no different from a salty fish"—the subtitle of his autobiography.  

Whether it is the jeering mockery of sang culture or the subversion of happy consumerism through sang marketing, the flavor of its resistance to the culture industry and the values of hard work stands out clearly. All of the theories born during the middle of the twentieth century, at the high point of the youth subculture moment—resistance-incorporation, fan studies, and textual poaching theory—can fruitfully be applied here.
 
Scholars also see sang and the subsequent emergence of the category of “Zen 佛系youth”[8] as "a form of moderate resistance based in discursive creativity and debates over meaning." What is interesting is that, while most scholars interpret “sang” and “slackers 废柴”[9] as the young people’s expression of resistance, for the “positive losers” themselves, however, it is more a matter of a sheepish reconciliation with the established order. If sang culture uses its creative memes to attack and destroy the popular narrative of motivational aphorisms and success study, declarations such as "I am a zombie" nonetheless acknowledge and affirm the judgement criteria of mainstream values.
 
First, the symptomatic expression of the rejection of mainstream ideology by sang culture or positive losers is a kind of cynical mockery. In other words, their rejection or resistance does not point toward a new, alternative life path, but rather to a kind of “illusion of resistance” that grows out of the pride of seeing through the deception, the self satisfaction that comes from understanding that, in the words of the author Eileen Chang, “life is a gorgeous robe crawling with fleas,” the excitement of saying “no” to consumer culture.  Sang memes are animated by a desire to disrupt and destroy, and knowingly miss the point; "zombie font" cruelly mocks the absurd self-deception of mainstream success aphorisms by twisting them up in irony.  Like the best ideological analysts of the 21st century, the “zombies” have punctured the surface and seen the reality, boldly proclaiming that "the emperor has no clothes."
 
On this basis, "sang culture" achieves a high degree of acceptance of existing reality while seeming to resist, a paradox reflected in a calm acceptance of their own lack of success and unhappiness.  In the face of those goals that should inspire them, positive losers cunningly choose to admit failure, incompetence, and vulnerability. This proactive recognition of failure also means that failure is not a cause for humiliation and psychological trauma for the subject, because "I have always been useless." This is the most interesting part of “sang resistance.” It uses creative cultural reproduction activities as a counterattack to "paralyze" the success story of hard work.  But as a clear and definite expression of the subject’s capacity to act, as an expression of individual resistance to the dominant ideology, it can only be expressed as a mixture of dispiritedness and self-mockery, and while they are disappointed with the fatigue that they feel, all they can do is smile at getting nowhere.
 
What we see in the positive losers, the sang culture and Zen youth is precisely a fragile and melancholy dispiritedness, a showy posture of self-indulgence; it is less gentle resistance than anguished questioning. It is characterized by physical paralysis and Zen detachment, expressing the helplessness of being exhausted while still accomplishing nothing, and at the same time joking about the running around for nothing. From Taiwan’s "22K[10]" to mainland China’s "losers 屌丝,[11]" this "weak/pitiful/helpless" posture is to some extent shared by all classes of the youth generation in contemporary China.
 
The Intergenerational Emergence of the "Precariat:" The Plight of the Positive Loser
 
The youth culture of the 1990s generation finds itself in a totally different political and economic context from that of their parents. Although it has clear links with previous generations, in terms of cultural preoccupations and meaning production, what it seeks to resist and chooses to criticize are all closely related to the structural transformation of the political economy on a global scale. The emergence of the precariat, coupled with the continuing rise of China's real estate economy over the last two decades, have given rise to a survival dilemma and a cultural dilemma for the slacker youth of the new generation.

This means that the aesthetic gap between this generation and older generations is no longer the kind of commonly understood gap created by the advance of modern linear time; in other words, the aesthetic tastes of those born in  the 1990s are unique, and not simply a reproduction of the differences we observe between those born in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. An overemphasis on the idea of “generations” may lead a simplified understanding of the aesthetic rupture in today's mass culture. Looking once again at sang culture, at zombies, at the Zen generation, at the positive losers and at the diaosi, all are closely linked to a changing political and economic structure.
 
First, in terms of social structure, as youth subcultures, sang (and later Zen youth) highlight the developmental difficulties and psychological anxieties of the younger generation. This is not merely a structural problem clumsily explained as "stratification" and limited social mobility, but more of a generational rift highlighted by youth poverty. The leap in China's housing prices over the past decade means that members of the younger generation recently arriving in cities are facing tougher competition for limited resources. The "only children" of the young generation have spontaneously arrived at a demoralizing consensus: no matter how hard they work, they cannot keep up with soaring housing prices in first-tier cities.

This reality, which has been dubbed "the death of the middle class," is particularly painful those born in the 1990s and even the 2000s, who are known as the "quasi-middle class 准中产" or the "middle class reserve forces 中产后备军." In this kind of  fierce competition where working hard does not always pan out while not working hard always makes things worse, young people have gradually come to recognize a sense of the futility and absurdity of striving. In fact, since the occurrence of the subprime crisis in the United States in 2008, people all over the world (and especially young people) in the throes of globalization are suffering from high housing prices, high unemployment, unstable employment, heavy debt, drug dependence... The generational crisis continues to deepen. This is why BoJack Horseman, the heir to Sartre's "existential nihilism," is so popular around the world. The problem is that he is understood neither by the 1960s generation—what is considered the “pillar of mainstream society” —nor by the 1970s generation, once seen as “heaven’s favorites.”
 
The name given to the “precariat” is indicative of these new changes to work and the workplace. With the continuing expansion of higher education and structural employment challenges, it is more and more difficult to find stable employment and to advance in the workplace. Flexible labor has replaced career ambition, floating contracts have replaced permanent security, and young people no longer have a job worth holding onto for a lifetime, as their parents did.  Even more important is that, in terms of work intensity and stress, white-collar careers are increasingly resembling those of workers on the assembly lines of giant companies, with many repetitive, tiresome, easily replaceable jobs, while at the same time, the welfare, salary, and social status of white-collar workers are taking serious blows.

Abstract theoretical terms such as "post-Fordism", "post-industrialism" and "consumer society" point precisely to the following reality:  traditional blue-collar workers no longer enjoy long-term jobs with high security and stable benefits, and white-collar workers in urban office buildings are becoming "blue-collar" and "low-level." Burning themselves out in jobs where they exhaust themselves for nothing and run around aimlessly is the ultimate despair that crushes the “zombies.” It is in the sense of suffering oppressive exploitative labor, repetitive body movements, and loss of individual sovereignty that zombies become the best spokesmen for the precarious working status of the generation. They call themselves the demeaning name of “social livestock” and they ridicule and help one other in online "social livestock tea rooms."  As the 1980s generation enters the career promotion bottleneck phase of their lives, the term "workers preparing for retirement 退休预备员" refers to frustrated employees who are young but eager to retire and draw their pension as soon as possible.
 
At a time when the precariat embraces a degraded identity symbolized by social livestock and zombies, mainstream values advocate a kind of "entrepreneur-of-the-self" world where everyone should run their life as a business: “Becoming an entrepreneur-of-the-self means managing your employability, assessing your debt, and stemming a decline in wages and income.” If this theoretical concept is too dry and abstract, the current norm for China's middle class—what is called "financial freedom" or "high net worth individuals"—is clearly the new interpellation of the subject.

According to the imagined definition of "winner" that has flooded social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo, what you should do is:  complete your educational self-investment while in high school, so that your success in the battle of the university entrance exams catapults you into a first-tier city like Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, and then at the pinnacle of your happiness, take on debt to buy one or more properties in first-tier cities. 

Next you need to invest in stocks, funds, and various wealth management products, exercise risk control and hedge your assets in the vast sea of capital markets, and unrelentingly liquidate your positions at the top of the Shanghai securities composite index……At this point, while most people are sweating like zombies on their ghostly plantations, you're sitting in your apartment on Beijing's East Second Ring Road, happily perusing a philosophical tome on dispiritedness. From this perspective, economic misery and material poverty are no longer social or economic problems, but stories of investment failures, or “market rewards” in the always fresh story of success as told by the winner.
 
If "sang", "Zen youth" and "positive losers" are still resisting, then what they are resisting is in fact the shame felt by this subject in the face of failure.  And the only way they can "resist" is by declaring to the HNWI (High Net Worth individuals) that “I am already a salted fish,” “I am already a zombie.”  They take the initiative and respond to the crush of social reality with self-deprecating sarcasm and thus achieve an inner harmony and a certain acceptance by this same social reality. In such ironic reversals we see that the sarcastic misappropriation—or graffiti-like destruction—either of “paralysis” or of “Zen,” sabotage the self-operating subject, and finally produce an exaggerated mood of cynical self-satisfaction and an ironic pose of “observing from the sidelines.” This is not so much a culture of resistance as an adaptation to and tolerance of the structural difficulties faced by the young precariat. This is the new cultural representation of the "marriage of self-contempt and cynicism" in the new electronic generation identified by the Italian media theorist Franco Berardi (b. 1949).
 
The Online Cynical Subject:  A New Pleasure Model for Jouissance Culture
 
Neither sang nor positive losers are adequately explained by currently dominant subculture theories.  One overemphasizes the place of resistance in the subculture and overlooks the compromised tone of the resistance culture which appears in the form of criticism. Another attributes everything to generational differences, which papers over new variations in the cultural representations of the younger generation, who are digital natives. Exploring the representations of the subject and the subject’s mode of desire are becoming a new direction of theoretical inquiry.
 
In 2013, the Marxist theorist Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949), who is popular around the world, arrived in Seoul, South Korea, to co-launch the “Communist Hypothesis” conference with Alain Badiou (b. 1937). What Žižek, a thinker from what used to be the Eastern bloc, heard on the streets of Seoul, a site he sees as a vestige of the politics of the 20th century, was not a soaring version of “The International” but instead, endless repetitions of Gangnam Style. "Flash mobs all over the world are currently imitating the song. Many audiences discovered in the song a disgusting appeal, or to put it another way 'they love to hate it,’ or, even more precisely, they enjoy finding this song disgusting, so that they repeatedly tease themselves with it to prolong their disgust.  The stupid coerciveness of this kind of obscene jouissance is exactly the deliverance that real art should give us."
 
The patterns of desire in youth cultures such as sang, Zen, and positive losers, have already been reshaped into what Žižek describes as the jouissance politics of "enjoying finding it disgusting" rather than the resistance politics of a classic subculture. It is precisely in the jouissance culture of enjoying disgust that criticism and resistance themselves become objects of desire. Jouissance is a word closely associated with Lacanian psychoanalysis. In contrast to Freud’s "pleasure principle," Lacan invented a socialized or politically constructed jouissance as opposed to a purely spontaneous pleasure. Jouissance surpasses simple pleasure. In Lacan's argument, the subject always tries to go beyond the many prohibitions imposed on him, but the result is not more pleasure, but instead pain. Lacan's definition of jouissance is the ambiguous state between pain and pleasure, that is, painful pleasure.
 
Jouissance culture means that resistance can produce pleasure, that criticism can create enjoyment.  Jouissance is a pleasurable process which is achieved by constantly tearing open wounds before they heal. The sting, the criticism, even the admission of impotence, now points not only to pain, but even more to a sweetness, a new mode of desire to endure pain so as to achieve bliss. Therefore, sang and positive losers surrender on their own initiative, and their passive dispiritedness completes their self-acceptance, announcing a new jouissance culture and subjective state:  the more clearly people grasp the cruelty of reality,  the more rationally their recognition of the dilemma of the precariat, the more sustainable the subjective pleasure produced by the sting of the recognition. 

The more people realize the bleak situation of the losers, the more deeply they realize their own lack of capacity, the more they can completely surrender and let life roll over them, the more they can actively enjoy the process of pain. This self-harmonization through the ridicule of failure, this abandonment of a “self-help cure” in search of a better self, arrives at the critical pleasure of self-rejection.
 
This is the cynical online subject produced by cyber space and cyber culture. The postmodern cynicism elaborated by the German philosophe rand cultural theorist Peter Sloterdidjk (b. 1947), Žižek and others is completely different from traditional (ancient Greek) cynicism. It is no longer a critical power that cynically and jealously keeps a distance from worldly interests, but instead a kind of ideological operation of "cynical rationality.” On the one hand, it is against mainstream ideology; on the other hand, cynicism itself is part of the game. "This cynicism is an abnormal 'negation of the negation' of official ideology." Cynical rationality has seen through the flaws and codes of the mainstream ideology, but the cynical subject does not believe that he has grasped the true secret, which is:   what the "zombies" have failed to see clearly is not the emptiness and powerlessness of striving, but how to actively float in it, pretending that they are refusing and resisting while actually making their peace with reality.
 
The unique media properties of online culture give rise to and aggravate the ironic and exaggerated gestures of the cynics. In contrast to the traditional view that "the production of irony usually involves the use of verbal contrast in the practice of conventional discourse, and the meaning can only be understood in the relevant cultural context," in online culture, "satire is a common phenomenon in various forms of digital communication."  The ironic meaning is produced through the emoticons, repetitions, etc., which are unique to cyber culture, and is intensified by the transformations of visual and video media.

For instance, the compliment "You are a good person" may be followed by a meme of someone sticking their tongue out, suggesting an opposite, provocative, meaning. In this sense, cyberspace provides a broad arena for the creative criticism of post-modern cynics. A meme "is simply an 'emphatic frame' that visually accentuates the irony."  At present, psychoanalytic Marxist theorists like Žižek not only watch with amazement as the world's flash mobs twist and dance, but also have to acknowledge that the internet-savvy around the globe are masterful in their use of cynicism.  This creates the illusion that what is culturally unique about the young generation is an originality that grows out of their adaptability to the new media, thus masking the cynical youth culture produced by the current plight of the workplace and housing prices. And classical subculture studies still see this as a resistance culture, ignoring its hedonic satisfaction, its compromise and surrender.
 
The sang subject and positive losers are hedonistic subjects of the online age, maintaining a critical, sardonic distance from mainstream ideology, making peace with themselves through cynicism even as they create constant pleasure amid the sting of failure. Suffering but joyful, sad yet excited—such is the paradoxical state of existence of this cynical online subject. It is in order to maintain this self-deprecating pleasure that online cynics continue to invent buzzwords such as losers, slackers, and zombies. Freud's pleasure principle is fleeting, while Lacan's experience of jouissance is timeless. Pop culture is rife with discourse bubbles, but the state of the subject, hidden under changing symbolic identities, will persist in this murky post-financial crisis era.
 
Positive Losers: The State of the New Youth Subject
 
“Sang” and “positive losers” have become typical culture representations of the critical accommodations of the digital generation, not only because of their online origins and means of transmission, and the cultural effectiveness of their constant online splitting and recreating Internet memes, but more importantly because their positive sarcastic attitude and their abandoned, exhausted bodies are the best metaphors for the state of the online cynical subject in the Internet era:  a paralyzed body and a hyperactive mind.  The mind grasps everything, down to the smallest detail, seeing through the deception, but the body remains physically impotent, while funny memes express inner anxiety and anger.  This paralysis, as seen in Ge You and the salted fish, also reflects a certain individual retreat in response to the increasing speed of modern civilization, as has been true from Freud’s time down to the present.  The resistance-accommodation of active losers, the cynical criticism and joyful pleasures of the Internet fatties 肥宅们,[12] are not means of arriving at the spiritual victory of self-consolation, but rather the adjustments and adaptations to the new "neuro-exploitation system" of capitalism, in Berardi’s terms.
 
In the 21st century, the Italian theorist Franco Berardi has carried forward Freudian theory, providing a digital upgrade to its core discourses.  He points out that while technology and the Internet have achieved stunning advances in speed and form, human beings are still trapped in a carbohydrate-based body that needs to maintain its basic metabolism, with the result that we are no longer psychologically or physically synchronized with the world of virtual reality we have ourselves invented, and we have neither the speed nor the capacity to take in everything that is now available. Symptoms of this include excessive time online, changing online identities, information anorexia... Our limited attention, mental energy, and sensitivity are being ruthlessly depleted in an age of ever more powerful core processors.

To cope with this massive, high-speed information space, the subject must repeatedly adjust and restructure his own perceptions and feelings.  The nervous system is in spasm, the brain is severely overloaded, and the cynical online subject emits a gasp of rage as he adopts Ge You’s posture of self-adjustment, and reacts to the shock of high-speed Internet with extreme physical paralysis.  Here indeed we see the “uselessness” of positive losers.
 
The “positive” side of this is that as the cynical online subject patrols cyberspace,  enjoying the process of online shock with painful pleasure and hallucinations of resistance, he moves into the hysterical stimulation of meme production. The rise of "meme culture" around the world is in fact a response to the strong and painful need for expression felt by the cynical subject. What is at stake is the pleasure of venting one’s discontent and soothing feelings of vulnerability through saying no, through feeling pain, through a vigorous expression of emotions. The fragile, sensitive, and delicate spirit of today's youth, together with the barrage of memes that express strong emotions, constitute an interesting dislocation and irony. It is in the context of a new digital culture and online capitalism that what we call sang culture, Zen youth, and positive losers display not the politics of resistance identified by classical subcultural studies, but an adaptation to and enjoyment of the electric shock of the speeding Internet.
 
Youth is a product of modernity and did not become a sociological concept until after the French Revolution. It is in the linear time perspective of modernity that the generation gap has become a unique problem in modern society. Due to the particularity of China's modern history compared with that of Western modernity, its economic transformations and cultural mutations are often described in terms of intergenerational rifts. Both the jeans and aviator sunglasses prevailing in 1980s, and the rise of two-dimensional culture in the 1990s, ultimately split into representation of specific subcultural styles. At present, cyber-culture is becoming a real mainstream culture, and the cyber-cultural subject is no longer the marginal working-class subculture of Birmingham cultural studies. 

Those who continue to insist on seeing a subculture as political resistance practiced by those at the margins, or who insist on affirming the dynamism of youth subjectivity, may well miss the point.  The “I don’t know and I don’t dare ask”—a humorous internet catch phrase common in contemporary youth culture—foregrounds the feeling of a fractured aesthetic generation gap. This is exactly the new cultural symptom of the digital age, a new subjectivity shaped by global economic, political and cultural transformations. It is not only a Chinese version of the world precariat, but also a new configuration of desire for self-enjoyment of the painful status quo.
 
Digital culture is creating  a new cynical online subject, and "Internet fatties", "sang" and "Zen youth" can all be regarded as symbolic representations of this new subject. As a cultural symptom of the new desire pattern of the young cyber generation, jouissance accelerates a fragile and exhausting "progressive disease". The youth subject is consciously acknowledging failure and incompetence in advance, and the tide of digital neuro-exploitation is leaving a series of cynical footprints and word bubbles on flashing computer screens.
 
Notes
 
[1] 刘昕亭, “当代青年为什么越来越’不高兴’？聚焦青年生存状态,” a reworking of an article originally published in the 2020.8 volume of Exploration and Free Views 探索与争鸣, a publication of the Shanghai Federation of Social Science Associations 上海市社会科学界联合会.  The version translated here was published online on November 10, 2020 on the Guancha website, among other places.
 
[2] Translator’s note:  One way to say “zombie”in Chinese is sangbi 丧逼, the sang being the same character as in sang culture, which shares a certain overlap with the idea of being a zombie or a ghost.  Zombie fonts are a part of meme life and youth subcultures in China and elsewhere.
 
[3] Translator’s note:  “Burning culture 燃文化”comes from a Tencent video launched in 2017, promoting the idea that “it is a good time to burn.” In contrast to sang culture, “burning culture”stresses young people enthusiastically, dynamically pursuing their dreams—and succeeding.
 
[4] Translator’s note:  Ge You was a character in a popular 1993 Chinese television show, noted for his extreme lack of drive and motivation.  The meme characteristically contains a play on words: “Ge You lying around 葛优躺” is pronounced in almost the same way as “Ge You’s paralysis 葛优瘫.”
 
[5] Translator’s note:  “Research on youth culture has been massively influenced by the pioneering work of the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Building to some extent on the Chicago School of sociology that had preceded it, the CCCS established the study of youth culture as an important dimension of the emerging academic discipline of Cultural Studies...The Centre’s analysis of youth culture was part of its wider political project, which was centrally informed by varieties of Marxist and post-Marxist theory: youth culture was seen, in the terms of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, as a site of struggle, in which the hegemonic power of the dominant classes might be challenged and contested. The CCCS researchers analyzed youth subcultures as expressions of resistance, in which young people made connections between their everyday experience and the wider inequalities of social class. The CCCS analysis suggested that engaging in subcultural activity involved working-class young people in acts of ‘double articulation’, firstly with the parental generation and secondly with political formations and agents of post-war social change. In the process, the CCCS account effectively challenged the pathological views of ‘deviance’ and ‘delinquency’ that had dominated both public debate and a good deal of mainstream academic research.”  See https://ddbuckingham.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/youth-culture.pdf .
 
[6] Translator’s note:  “Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture is a nonfiction book of academic scholarship written in 1992 by television and media studies scholar Henry Jenkins. Jenkins builds from a definition of "poaching" originally introduced by Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, where de Certeau differentiates between individuals who are "consumers" and others who are "poachers," depending on how they use resources put out by producers. Jenkins uses this idea to introduce his own term "textual poachers," which he uses to describe how some fans go through texts like favorite television shows and engage with the parts that they are interested in, unlike audiences who watch the show more passively and move on to the next thing. Specifically, fans use what they've "poached" to become producers themselves, creating new cultural materials in a variety of analytical and creative formats from "meta" essays to fanfiction, fanart, and more. In this way, Jenkins argues, fans “become active participants in the construction and circulation of textual meanings.” Textual Poachers was massively influential in the development of fan studies as a legitimate field of academic scholarship. At the time of its publication, it also introduced many new fans to media fandom itself.”  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_Poachers .
 
[7] Translator’s note:  This meme was originally Japanese.  Known as gudetama in Japanese and landandan 懒蛋蛋 in Chinese, the reference is a cartoon character produced by the Japanese company Sanrio. The name Gudetama is formed from two parts: the first is the ideophone “gudegude” which is used to evoke the impression of something lazy and lacking energy. The second part is from the Japanese word “tamago” which means egg.
 
[8] The term foxi 佛系, which we have translated as “Zen,”first appeared in Japan in 2014, and was used to refer to young men who had seen through and dropped out of much of life, a less extreme version of the hikiomori, who engage in extreme social withdrawal.  Later it was applied to youth in general.  “Zen” as used in English and French as slang for “calm” (“He failed his French exam but was pretty Zen about it”) is not an exact equivalent, because it is more positive than foxi, which suggests weakness and passivity, papered over by a faux-Buddhist attitude that “nothing really exists so nothing really matters.”
 
[9] “Slackers”(废柴) originated from the Cantonese.
 
[10] This is a reference to a program launched by the Taiwanese government after the 2008 financial crisis to try to encourage youth employment.  Employers receive a grant of 22,000 New Taiwan dollars a month (roughly 800 US dollars) when they hire a young person, who then receives the stipend.  The grant lasts only for one year, after which the employment usually ends, because it makes more sense for the employer to simply start over with another young person and take advantage of his free labor.   "22K" is thus a synonym for low pay--and little future--for young people.
 
[11] Diaosi, a sarcastic term coined after the rise of Internet culture in China, is commonly used to refer to unattractive people with low income.
 
[12] This term originally came from Japan, where it referred to people who spend all their time in front of the computer, snacking on high-calorie items and gaining weight.