Diaosi, Chinese slang for “underdogs,” first appeared on the Chinese Internet in 2010, capturing the discontent with, and the determination to overcome the uneven playing ground amid, the cutthroat competition in China. Popular initially among less-privileged youth, the word soon went mainstream and viral, becoming the most popular term by 2012, the year Xi Jinping took power.¹ A large-scale survey conducted in 2014 reported that three-fifths of the 213,000 respondents self-identified as diaosi.² With young Chinese from diverse walks of life embracing the term, a team of researchers declared in 2015 that diaosi constituted the most significant identity-making event in China in recent years.³ As it entered its sixth year, diaosi would be overtaken by sang (“bereavement”), a new youth cultural phenomena akin to beatnik/hippie/punk culture in the West, albeit with Chinese characteristics that captured deepening youth frustration with widening gaps in educational and economic opportunities in a rapidly changing Chinese society.⁴

Emerging in 2016, sang soon replaced diaosi as the new buzzword. Frequently used as an adjective, sang connotes loss, deprivation, powerlessness, and hopelessness, registering a decisively more passive and pessimistic outlook on life than diaosi.⁵ The sang phenomenon manifested itself in a variety of youth catchphrases and memes that amplified the weary and suffering human body.⁶ Surveys reveal that urban youth in their twenties and early thirties were the leading demographic group who related to diaosi and sang sentiments and adopted diaosi and sang phrases and memes in their daily life. The popularity of these digital phrases and memes eventually led to the rise in 2021 of tangping (“lying flat”), yet another youth trend that advocated for a life away from the rat race. Framed as a “nonviolent, noncooperative, and passive resistance’ against the authoritarian state by the Western media,⁷ tangping became the top trending term in China in 2021.⁸

This article sets out to trace the origin, evolution, and impact of this particular type of youth cyber culture, which we call DST (daosi, sang, tangping) for easy reference and to differentiate it from other more upbeat youth trends in China. What conditions have given rise to the arrival of the DST phenomena and what accounts for the metamorphosis of youth sentiment from diaosi to sang to tangping? This article explores the generative mechanisms of DST and examines the motivations, perspectives, and actions as well as reactions of major stakeholders involving political, technological, economic, and public interests. It further examines the nature and characteristics of DST and its means of expression and circulation. It seeks to tease out common threads running through all three periods while laying out the intricate relationship among the major stakeholders involving the DST participants, the Chinese state, and the commercial sectors. In what follows, we will describe each phenomenon in a broad stroke, following a chronological order, with a main focus on the origin, contributing factors, and characteristics of the DST phenomenon. This bird’s-eye view hopes to serve as a foundation for future research on the interplay between culture, politics, and commerce on the transformation of a particular brand of Chinese youth culture.

A compound word of sexual nature in Chinese that describes someone who licks or kisses up, diaosi is literarily and figuratively a sucker or a loser who kisses up. Self-identified diaosi embraced the term with good humor, turning biting satire into playful self-mockery, which has come to define the style of diaosi, making it cool and admirable.⁹ As opposed to the more privileged youth of inherited wealth and power, a typical early diaosi was an Internet-savvy male college student with ample native intelligence but limited financial means and family connections to secure social mobility and romantic partners. One running joke among the bachelor diaosi was their collective desires for beautiful young women—what they called nvshen (“the goddess”)—who presumably would only date fuerdai (“the second-generation rich”), Chinese slang referring to the children of the rich and powerful. Diaosi became “losers” for their repeated failure in securing dates with goddesses.¹⁰ Diaosi’s underdog status concealed the groups’ intense drive to overcome. One popular diaosi catchphrase was diaosi de nixi (“diaosi strikes back”), which referred to one’s ability to beat the odds and eventually obtain wealth and marrying a goddess. With mostly single young males “congregating” on the online diaosi forums, misogyny prevailed. Diaosi objectified women, grading them by appearances and sexual appeal and ranking them into either goddesses or female diaosi. Up against their privileged counterparts, diaosi named the time they lived as the era of pindie (“competition of dads”) and came to equate themselves with “self-made” men. Hanhan (韩寒), a best-selling novelist and race-car driver of humble origin, claimed himself “a pure diaosi from the rural area of Shanghai,”¹¹ which set him apart from “the second-generation rich.”¹²

In a playful twist, young, Internet-savvy IT workers, a core group of self-claimed diaosi, facetiously called themselves manong (“code peasants”) and their jobs banzhuan (“moving the bricks”), which captured the repetitive nature of their coding jobs while showing off their highly sought-after IT profession, seen as a symbol of success. White-collar office workers called themselves dagongren (“laborers”) while creative practitioners and academics identified themselves as yingshi mingong (“film and TV migrant laborers”) and xueshu mingong (“academic migrant laborers”). But the irony was lost in mainstream media’s initial framing of diaosi. Mainstream media coverage characterized diaosi as an individual or a group of people of lower social strata doing the real manual labor of “moving the brick’ ” at minimum wage and associated diaosi with losers or the subaltern.¹³ ifeng.com, of the independent but prostate Phoenix New Media, offered the first comprehensive coverage of diaosi in February 2012.¹⁴ Within a few days, Tencent News followed up with its own full coverage.¹⁵ NetEase soon followed suit, publishing “Diaosi, don’t feel ashamed of yourself; sisters do like you,” and “Loser, Otaku, and Diaosi.” ¹⁶ The common conception of diaosi in mainstream reporting was people of rural origin with little social, cultural, and financial capital (see figure 1).

In reality, the self-identified diaosi were college-educated youth in affluent coastal cities,¹⁷ with Shanghai having the highest diaosi identification rate (76.14 percent).¹⁸ The style of humblebragging prevailed among the Internet-savvy urbanities, eventually crystalized for the mainstream media of diaosi’s more elite status. As diaosi’s disposable income fueled China’s nascent virtual economy, Chinese Internet companies quickly positioned to tap into diaosi’s purchasing power. Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, China’s biggest cell phone company, called himself the leader of diaosi, and promoted Xiaomi’s first smartphone release in 2011 as a phone made for diaosi.¹⁹ Other companies soon followed suit, rushing to capitalize on diaosi. By early 2012, Sohu imported Knallerfrauen (2011–2015), a German TV sketch comedy, and gave it a Chinese title, Diaosi Lady (屌丝女士), never mind that the literal meaning of the original German title is closer to “the spicy lady” or “firecrackers.” The show was more successful in China than in Germany. Martina Hills, the show’s lead actress, was later invited to join the production of a similar Chinese sketch comedy called Dior’s Man (屌丝男士, 2012–2015). In April 2012, when Titanic 3D (2012) was released in China, the film was marketed as a typical diaosi strike-back narrative, with the “lower-class” Jack capturing the heart of the pale and beautiful “upper-class” girl, Rose.²⁰

Diaosi found expression through low-budget, parodic, and farcical dramadies, which surged during the first half of the 2010s. Fast-paced and short (ranging from four to twenty minutes per episode), many of these web series were designed to be mobile-phone friendly, capable of generating millions of hits and thousands of comments in a short time span. Dialogue from these shows easily entered ordinary people’s daily lexicon.

Though an act of rebellion against the status quo, diaosi ultimately conformed to the established narrative of social mobility, which celebrated success.²¹ State media eventually came to wearily endorse diaosi but sought to address the underlying social problems that led to the rise of it. On November 3, 2012, People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ran an article, “The Greatest Power Stimulating China Moving Forward,” for the party’s eighteenth National Congress,²² which coined the term “diaosi mentality” (屌丝心态). At the conclusion of the National Congress of the CCP, Xi Jinping, the newly anointed CCP leader, launched an anti-corruption campaign to clean up malfeasance within party ranks seen as contributing to the rise of “diaosi mentality.” As the party’s wariness over youth negativity grew, a new term, “positive energy” (正能量), appeared in 2012 that called for uplifting messages as antidotes to the negative energy of diaosi.²³ As a direct response to the growing diaosi wave, Xi made a speech in early 2013, urging young people to “dare to dream” and “contribute to the nation’s revitalization.”²⁴

In August 2013, Liao Hong, the president of People’s Daily online, spoke at a conference admonishing the Chinese Internet to generate positive energy rather than functioning as a pressure-relief valve.²⁵ The term positive energy was elevated to become an official guideline at the Central Forum on Arts and Literature in Beijing in October 2013, after Xi gave a speech to remind artists that cultural creation should induce positive energy.²⁶ The Chinese state launched a sustained Internet Cleansing Campaign from 2013 to 2015 to wipe out “coarse” languages, including the very term diaosi.²⁷ The Diaosi phenomenon dwindled by the end of 2014.

Barely two years after the disappearance of diaosi, a new youth online phenomenon in the form of shared expressions and memes of dejected sentiment quietly crept in. An assortment of despondent catchphrases such as “feel like my body is hollowed out,” “just want to lie down,” “I am almost a wasted person,” “the human world is not worth it,” etcetera, appeared on the Chinese Internet. These catchphrases soon evolved into popular Internet memes; one of which was the now iconic “Ge You Slouch,” the image of a skinny, balding, and middle-aged man sagging on a couch staring blandly into the distance. The man, Ge You, happened to be a well-liked comedian in China known for playing underdog characters in film and TV dramas. The couch meme is a screenshot from the Chinese sitcom classic I Love My Family (1994), in which Ge You played an idler living a parasitic life on the couch of a good Samaritan who kindly took him in. The couch scene occurred when family members urged him, whom they nicknamed loafer (二混子), to find a job and move on. In response, he threatened suicide but then quickly slouched back on the couch, complaining that he was too weak to work. The image was repurposed to epitomize feelings of apathy and exhaustion. “Ge You Slouch” spawned a variety of pictorial memes and multimedia remixes of creatures, from cute animals to cartoon characters, lying flat.

While diaosi was represented largely in web dramas, sang was expressed mostly in pictorial memes. A survey done in 2017 ranked “Ge You Slouch” as one of the six most popular sang memes.²⁸ An online article written by a citizen journalist, “Seeing Ge You Slouch Everywhere; Sang Culture All the Rage,” appeared on July 12, 2016, linking “Ge You Slouch” to the great resignation among young people who felt trapped and with no will or desire to fight.²⁹ Sympathetic toward the feelings of youth entrapment, the author predicted that a culture of sang was on the horizon. The article soon went viral, and by September 2016, the term sang culture was adopted by a major party newspaper, Guangming Daily, which urged Chinese youth to boycott sang culture.³⁰ The intervention by Guangming Daily brought the notion of sang culture to wider mainstream media and public attention. Businesses reacted quickly, eager to cash in on yet another potentially lucrative youth trend. A new milk tea brand, Sang Cha/Sung Tea (丧茶), which was a joint effort by Ele.me (饿了么, “Hungry?”), a food delivery application, and NetEase News, a news feed application, appeared in late April 2017, with its first store in Shanghai opening to instant popularity (see figure 2).

Sung Tea was positioned to counter China’s most popular milk tea brand, Hey Tea/Happy Tea (喜茶). Sung Tea stores sold six types of tea, with sang-inspired names ranging from “My-ex’s-life-is-better-than-mine red tea” to “No-end-to-work-overtime-and-no-hope-to-get-a-raise green tea” and “You-are-left-with-nothing-but-sickness oolong tea.”³¹ Sung Tea soon became a sang icon. So much so that the state media People.cn published an article, “Don’t Drink ‘Sang Tea’ Added with Mental Opium,” urging people to boycott Sung Tea.³² Criticism from state media did not deter other brands from adopting similar sang designs to reach the lucrative sang market. Slogans such as “Hopeless Yoghurt” and “Negative energy coffee” proliferated, transforming sang from an emotional expression into a purchasable commodity.³³

The rise of sang owed much to the unprecedented growth of digital technology and economy in China. China’s economic growth rate dropped from 9.6 percent to 6.6 percent from 2011 to 2018; yet the digital economy’s share of China’s GDP increased from 9.5 percent to 34.4 percent during the same period. According to CNNIC data, broadband ports in China surged from 188 million to 762 million from 2010 to 2017.³⁴ Internet users increased from 298 million in 2008 to 839 million in 2018. The rapid growth of the digital economy shifted labor-intensive activities from the previous manufacturing industry into the digital sector, burdening young tech workers with the so-called 996 work schedule (in office from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week). According to a survey in 2016, employees in Internet companies worked longer hours than people in other industries.³⁵ China’s fast-developing mobile technology and instant message apps such as WeChat further extended working time, with employers bombarding young employees with work-related messages 24/7.³⁶ The overdrive of China’s online sector took a toll on young techies. From 2013 to 2018, the average sleep hours of Chinese dropped from 8.8 to 6.5 hours. The top-ranked “sleepless cities” were Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shenzhen where more than 60 percent of Chinese Internet companies were located.³⁷

If the diaosi generation benefited from the expansion of digital technology and connectivity in their aspirations for success, the sang generation fell victim to commercial forces that exploited diaosi buzzwords to encourage ever-expanding online labor without due compensation. Unlike diaosi whose satirical expressions belied their hidden ambition and desire to succeed, sang was genuinely burned out and wished to quit, or at least hit a pause. The discontent erupted into the 996. ICU online campaign in 2019, crying out that “developers’ lives matter.” A 996. ICU repository appeared on GitHub, an online community where programmers worldwide share code and software tools. The repository received thousands of stars within a few days, making it the top trending topic on GitHub. Tech workers drew up a blacklist of hundreds of Internet companies requiring overtime work, either coercively or tacitly.³⁸ On the list were Alibaba, JD.com, ByteDance, and Huawei, China’s largest digital companies.

The rise of sang contradicted China’s state campaign of national rejuvenation/the Chinese Dream touted by Xi Jingping. The Chinese dream demanded Chinese youths to perform assiduously as workers and consumers so as to serve the collective needs of the Chinese society. Upward mobility through hard work, which sang called out as exploitative labor practices, was endowed with the national purpose of making China strong and prosperous.³⁹ Socialist collective values and capitalist individualism were now seamlessly integrated into the narrative of national rejuvenation. Yet individual youths who contributed to China’s exceptional growth suffered, their benefits slipping away as prices soared and incomes stagnated. Housing costs increased almost 20 percent from 2015 to 2017, especially in first-tier cities where technology companies were located and where young techies resided, making it practically impossible for the young to buy an apartment and start a family. Stagnation led to the prevailing sense of fatigue and hopelessness, which emerged as the most popular catchphrases of sang. Indeed, though inheriting humor and parody from sang took a gloomier and decisively pessimistic turn. Memes of psychological woes, such as insomnia, social phobia, and depression, and memes of physical woes, such as aging, hair loss, stomach discomfort, infertility, and even death, became predominant during the era of sang.

The evolution of youth online culture from diaosi to sang was further shaped by the evolution and variation in digital platforms. Diaosi was the product of the earlier platform of Sina Weibo, in particular the more traditional community-based Baidu Forum. The arrival of more diverse platforms and applications on video streaming sites such as Youku, Bilibili, and TikTok; music platforms such as NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music; social networking sites like Douban; and question-and-answer website zhihu.com led to the loss of a core community, the bedrock of diaosi. During the era of sang, relevant memes and catchphrases spontaneously spread throughout the whole network on diverse media platforms. The more focused diaosi subsequently gave way to a more diffused sang.

Bilibili.com, a video streaming platform for user-generated videos, became the most popular platform for sang. The platform’s most prominent feature is the bullet comment, a subtitle system that displays user comments as streams of moving subtitles overlaid on the video playback screen. Previous comments become part of the video content for future viewers. It creates a chat room experience where users watch, resonate, and interact with others. Many videos on the website went viral as the result of bullet comments. As young people shared their pessimistic feelings by collectively venting through bullet comments, the People’s Daily stepped in, accusing bullet comments of spreading negative energy.⁴⁰ Stricter regulations were called for, leading to Norms for the Administration of Online Short Video Platforms and Detailed Implementation Rules for Online Short Video Content Review Standards in January 2019, banning short videos, including titles, bullet comments, and memes purportedly promoting sang culture, suicide, and pessimistic views of life.⁴¹

One feature distinguishing sang memes was the emphasis on bodily suffering and its visual exhibition. The incessant and obsessive focus on the body eventually led to the rise of yet another youth online cultural phenomenon, the lying flat movement, or what the Chinese call tangping, a term that emerged in 2021.

What ushered in the era of lying flat was an iconic posting made by a Baidu Forum user, Kind-Hearted Traveller, in April 2021, with the subject heading “Lying-flat is the right thing to do.” In the post, Traveller, whose real name is Luo Huazhong wrote that “lying flat is my intellectual movement of philosophy. Only by lying flat, man became the measure of everything.”⁴² Probably not by coincidence, the declaration was posted on Baidu’s Population Forum (人口吧) at a time when China was anticipating the release of a national census predicting a looming demographic crisis of an aging population and low birth rates. Traveller’s posting equated the posture of lying flat with the need for bodily autonomy and for escaping the trap of mandatory childbearing. His became the manifesto of the lying flat movement.⁴³

A high school dropout born in 1990, Luo traveled around the country, getting by with minimum needs while working part-time jobs. He documented his minimalistic lifestyle through online posts. To earn a few quick bucks, Luo travelled to Hengdian, the world’s largest film production backlot, to play minor roles, including appearing as a dead body, literarily “lying flat,” in a variety of costume drama films and television serials. As Luo put it, “Life is about lying flat in different forms.” One or two months of performing death by lying flat could easily keep him afloat for an entire year. Luo’s minimalistic practice earned him the nickname of the “Master of Lying-Flatism.”⁴⁴

Lying flat became the trendiest term in China by 2021. Numerous memes about tangping were posted online, with young adults claiming to be lying flat and quitting the rat race, what the Chinese called “involution.” Compared with diaosi and sang, lying flat was a more explicit physical demonstration of refusal to participate in China’s national rejuvenation campaign. Public sentiment in China to lying flat was ambivalent. While some celebrated tangping as a manifesto against materialism and the state-capitalist system, others denounced it as nihilistic escapism.

The Seventh National Population Census was eventually released on May 11, 2021, confirming the slowest population growth in PRC history.⁴⁵ On May 20, 2021, Nanfang Daily, a party newspaper from Guangdong providence, ran a commentary with the heading “Lying Flat Is a Shame, Not Justice.”⁴⁶ The same day, Guangming Daily, which was instrumental in leading the debate on sang in 2016, published an article by Wang Xingyu, the branch party secretary of the School of Economics and Management of the China Institute of Labour Relations, making it clear that “the ‘lying flat group’ clearly posed problems for China’s economic and social development” and that “we should be concerned about the ‘lying flat group’, particularly at a time of slowing birth rate.”⁴⁷ The article urged society “to cultivate a positive working environment for these young people and to promote positive values through the joint efforts of the state, society and schools.”⁴⁸ By May 28, 2021, Li Fengliang, the dean of the Institute of Education at Tsinghua University, published an article on China Science Daily and its public account on WeChat, denouncing tangping as “an extremely irresponsible attitude, which disappoints not only the youths’ parents but also millions of taxpayers.”⁴⁹

In an effort to avert a demographic crisis, China officially announced the Three-Children Policy on May 31, 2021, relaxing birth quota from two in recent years to three children per household moving forward. The state-allocated target in family planning was a reminder to young people that their bodies belonged to the state and served at the pleasure of the state. Lying flat renewed attention to the body as a locus of power struggles where the presence of the party-state loomed large. One meme that became popular among the lying flats was “green chives” (韭菜), a vegetable in China frequently linked to fecundity for easy growth and harvest. In recent years, green chives became a metaphor for ordinary Chinese toiling away to serve the rich and powerful.⁵⁰ The companion meme is the image of a sickle, a tool for harvesting that happens to be the symbol of the Communist Party, which has had a long tradition of disciplining and regulating the bodies of Chinese citizens. The only way for the green chives to escape from being harvested by a sickle was to lie flat because “a chive lying-flat is difficult to reap (躺平的韭菜不好割).” Green chive’s purported nourishing effects on male virility and female fertility makes lying flat an emancipatory act of evading harvest.

In July 2021, an article in Deutsche Welle linked tangping to the Three-Children Policy, predicting that the Chinese government would not be amused with youth withdrawal, especially at a time when China was trying to boost birth rates to ensure economic growth.⁵¹ The article used tangping’s own slogan, “Don’t buy a house, don’t buy a car, don’t get married, don’t have children, don’t consume,” to capture the phenomenon. Sure enough, the concern over the lying flat phenomenon prompted the Chinese government to issue the Double Reduction (双减) measure in July, banning all for-profit, after-school tutoring programs to ease cost and pressure of child education.⁵² In August, the Supreme People’s Court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security published guidelines on labor law violations, signaling to the Big Tech firms the need to relax the notorious 996 overwork culture.⁵³ The same month, Xi Jinping mentioned that development opportunities should be afforded equally to more people to discourage tangping.⁵⁴

Young Chinese construct playful narratives of personal and social experience through web dramas, online catchphrases, and memes, as well as multimedia remixes, which allow the emergence of new forms of communities, identities, and authenticities. As political participation remains off-limits, online communities in China create, share, and trade playful memes and short videos as a form of civic participations. In discussing the rise of the satirical TV programs that merge entertainment and politics, Jeffrey P. Jones highlights sarcastic expressions as an important mechanism for public engagement with legislative and electoral politics.⁵⁵ Though there is limited room for civic engagement and electoral politics in China, satire has become the dominant mood of expression in DST, evolving from diaosi’s playful optimism to sang’s sardonic pessimism and to tangping’s languid humor. In what he calls “cynicism,”⁵⁶ Peter Sloterdijk contends that irony and sarcasm can be a form of ideological subversion that rejects the official culture.⁵⁷ As Jones observes, ordinary citizens routinely encounter mediated politics through seemingly pedestrian pursuits of pleasure, distraction, curiosity, community, sociability, and happenstance.⁵⁸ Political engagements are thus embedded in everyday cultural discourse and practices on and offline. Looking at the specific instance of the Chinese Internet, Guobin Yang notes that “play has a spirit of irreverence. It always sits uncomfortably with power… . Chinese Internet culture, in general, is enlivened with this spirit of play.”⁵⁹ Thomas Poell and colleagues argue that Chinese “netizens” have positioned themselves as a distinct component of the public who monitor social events discreetly while hiding behind the screen.⁶⁰ The collective and anonymous identity of netizens allows for civil participation and group solidarity without revealing individual identity.

The prevalence of satirical memes and remixes as both an outlet of expression and evasion of detection in China are the result of Internet censorship. Rather than eliminating political expression, Astrid Nordin and Lisa Richaud argue that censorship engenders the prevalent use of coded language in political satire.⁶¹ The extensive use of humor can be seen as coded political resistance. In the 2000s, the buzzwords “river crab” (hexie, homophone of “harmony”) and “grass mud horse” (caonima, homophone of “fuck your mom”) as parodies of the government censorship stood out for their wide circulation. More than wordplays, these expressions are frequently accompanied by images, videos and music, and other forms of multimedia representations. Egao (online spoofs or wicked for fun), for instance, is a form of online parody that uses digital technology to make visual collages.⁶² Satiric and ludicrous, egao playfully subverts a range of authoritative discourses and provides a vehicle for comic criticism and emotional catharsis. Bingchun Meng notes that egao “shares an artistic tradition with parody and satire” and “an anti-establishment spirit with medieval carnivals.”⁶³ Digital technology and networks brought new dimensions to the ancient tradition, furthering the fusion of entertainment and politics in China, establishing China-specific nonconfrontational cultural politics. Political connotations disguised in visually stimulating and pleasurable forms make the text more likely to be widely shared and remembered. As scholars observed a decade ago, visual trickery, symbolic manipulation, parody, humor, and intense interaction have become essential practices in China’s online repertoire.⁶⁴

On the other hand, recent studies on the Chinese Internet have sought to move beyond the singular focus on civic participation and political engagement. David Kurt Herold, for example, proposes to study the Internet as an online forum instead of a tool for political resistance.⁶⁵ Using the metaphorical notion of “online carnivals” to counter the perception of the Internet as a public sphere, Herold argued that the Internet serves as the “second life” of Chinese people, and carnivalesque empowerment “can be far more democratic (people-rule) than any representative democracy.”⁶⁶ Scholars such as Haiqing Yu and Shaohua Guo further propose an alternative framework to look at the Chinese Internet. Addressing the dichotomy between control and resistance in scholarly and journalistic discourses, Yu shifts the focus from the usage and function of the Internet to how ordinary people imagine their relationship with the Internet.⁶⁷ By elaborating metaphorical views on the Internet as jianghu (the milieu or community in the Chinese martial arts world), battlefield and playground, Yu showcases the framing of the Chinese Internet by its users and goes beyond the binary power struggle to reflect more on the cultural-historical legacy and the quotidian needs of pleasure-seeking. Employing the concept of “the network of visibility,” Guo shifts the focus from “what has been censored” to “what is visible,” which highlights the negotiations and dynamics among multiple actors, including divergent layers of the state, netizens, and business.⁶⁸ Through a detailed description and situated analysis of landmark events in different sociohistorical periods, Guo showcases “the evolution of the Chinese Internet” by presenting and contextualizing the competition among diverse players for “visibility” and legitimacy, which are measured by market popularity and content authority. Yu and Guo’s approaches shed light on the nuances and complexity of the DST culture by directing us to look at how users make sense of their practices and how the youth online subculture is cocreated by multiple participants. As Richard Dawkins put it in his seminal book The Selfish Gene, which introduced meme as analogous to the gene, a cultural unit that can spread by replicating itself,⁶⁹ Internet memes or other means of expression do not emerge unless users respond to it, alter it, and enact it. User participation and the pleasure derived from participating thus become the driving force for the survival of memes and other online expressions.