袁莉2026年9月8日 Dongyan XuOne 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.过去两周，中国热门网站哔哩哔哩上最火的视频之一是一份半开玩笑半认真的流浪汉生存指南。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.视频建议睡在能得到“物资”补充的垃圾桶附近，用纸板隔绝潮气，并避开监控摄像头。该视频的观看次数超过600万次，并一度跃居该网站热门视频的第二名。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.”观众戏称其为“青年大学习”（共青团政治教育项目的名称），并称其为“2026年年轻人的必修课”。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.中国共产党多年来一直试图让“正能量”成为中国互联网的主导情绪。它规定，网络平台应大力宣传经济成就、对党的感恩以及对中国未来的信心。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.在灾难、丑闻或特别粗暴的政府行动之后，不满情绪偶尔会爆发。但最近的情况感觉有所不同。这种悲观情绪是持续的。它已经成为日常社交媒体信息流的一部分，有时甚至会演变成具有颠覆性的内容。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.中国的经济增长正在放缓。旷日持久的房地产崩盘侵蚀了许多家庭最大资产的价值，同时工作变得更难找，也更缺乏保障。随着这种低迷状态的加深，越来越多的社交媒体用户放弃了愉悦、顺从的公开表现，转而构建出一种反叙事——它们虽有时会被审查删除，却难以被轻易驳斥。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.在小红书、抖音、微博和其他热门平台上，可以刷到无数关于微薄工资、工作岗位稀缺、房地产贬值以及对未来担忧的帖子。一些人将自己的苦难化作黑色幽默。另一些人则借题发挥，假借官方帖子和标签，将宣传变成嘲弄的精彩表演。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.中国的审查机制仍然控制着互联网。但长期的经济困境使得中共越来越难以维持其对国家现状偏好的叙述。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.7月，中国官方公布的青年失业率达到17.9%。目前有超过2亿人（占全国劳动人口的四分之一以上）从事政府所谓的“灵活就业”——这实质上就是一个庞大的零工经济。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.在小红书上，一个敦促人们捂紧钱包的标签已被浏览近1.2亿次。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.中国年轻人求职困难，正在逃避婚姻和生育。那些曾经循规蹈矩走上安稳道路的中年人现在却觉得他们人生中的重大决定可能已经变成了累赘。“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.“在这种大环境下，如果你没买房、没买车、没投资、没早结婚，你就赢了，”小红书上的一篇帖子写道。帖子称，最努力拼搏的80后可能是最大的输家。该帖子获得了近2000次点赞。The criticism sometimes extends to forbidden territory — the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, and Communist Party rule.这种批评有时会延伸到禁忌领域——中国领导人习近平以及中国共产党的统治。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.去年11月，抖音上一条解释成语“遗臭万年”的帖子评论区炸了锅。用户隐晦地影射了习近平，在中文对话中，习近平通常被简称为“他”。一条评论写道：“他简直是独一档的存在。”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.以网名“李老师”闻名的李颖在X上运营着一个受欢迎的账号，作为不受审查的中国信息集散地。他和他的团队密切监控着中国的社交媒体圈。他说，今年他们看到悲观甚至颠覆性的帖子和评论数量呈“指数级”增长。“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.”“回想2022年，如果我们看到一条嘲笑习近平的在线评论，我们会认为它值得分享，因为很少有人敢说那样的话，”李颖说。“今天，你能看到太多这样的内容，根本都引不起注意了。”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.李颖说，随着经济衰退，人们开始提出以前根本不需要思考的问题。许多用户可能没有意识到，他们的个人抱怨可能会被视为政治性的。例如，他说，小红书上的一些政府工作人员在互相比较自己已经有几个月没领到工资了。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.对于社交媒体用户来说，他们各自的帖子可能感觉像是个人的反思或抱怨。但将它们汇总起来，却勾勒出一个与官方所宣扬的进步与繁荣叙事格格不入的中国。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.还有些用户则在蓄意将社交媒体作为表达异议的工具，并以此颠覆官方宣传。抖音上一个宣称中国共产党是世界上最伟大政党的视频引来了4.1万条内容基本相同的评论，评论中是一排排的流泪表情符号，中间穿插着斜杠和反斜杠。一段赞扬共产党的视频吸引了4.1万条内容几乎完全相同的评论，评论中排满了哭脸表情符号。 via XThe 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.当用户聚集在政府和官方媒体账号上时，这种策略变得尤为有效。上个月，一家官方媒体发布的帖子声称中国在明朝就发明了载人飞行，比西方早了几个世纪。该帖子引发了许多讽刺性评论。“如果一天听不到中国赢了的消息，我就会出现戒断反应，”其中一条评论写道。“我们什么时候才能发明双休日呢？”另一条评论写道。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.维也纳大学当代中国政治学教授顾克礼(Christian Göbel)将这种策略称为“颠覆性放大”。用户并不是建立自己的受众群体，而是搭乘官方帖子的传播便车，同时破坏其原本想要传达的信息。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.在过去的10年里，中国的互联网审查变得越来越严苛。这使得海量的悲观帖子和讽刺评论变得尤为引人注目。与此同时，很难弄清楚为什么有些帖子能留存足够长的时间直至疯传，而另一些帖子却很快消失。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.一种可能的解释是，过于严厉的监管可能会损害流量和广告收入。另一种潜在的解释是，推荐算法让零散的怨言得以互相找到彼此。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.最近几周，当我打开我的小红书时，我惊讶地发现，前30篇左右的帖子几乎全都是关于经济绝望的，其中许多帖子有成百上千个赞。推荐搜索的结果可能更加令人沮丧。其中一个是：“中国就业还有未来吗？”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.政府曾试图压制负能量。2023年，国家安全部将“唱衰中国经济”的努力定性为安全和政治问题。去年，互联网监管机构命令平台压制有关努力工作或受教育无用的言论，以及过度传播悲观情绪的网络梗和段子。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.4月，国家安全部发表了一篇文章，指责一家未具名的外国组织资助“躺平”网红，以“腐蚀中国青年的思想”。“躺平”在中国年轻人中成为一种日益增长的趋势，他们认为面对暗淡的经济前景，奋斗是徒劳的。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.这一指责引发了另一种反叙事。在微博上的一个相关标签下，用户将“躺平”与工作岗位稀缺、低工资和高压的工作日程联系起来。一些人质疑政府是不是急了。“骡子不干活了，地主就赚不到钱了，”一位评论者写道。The ministry closed the article’s comment section.国安部关闭了该文章的评论区。“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.”“我不知道这是否真的能被控制住，”顾克礼说。“任何试图让这一切消失的叙事都是对正在受苦的人们的一种侮辱。”袁莉为《纽约时报》撰写“新新世界”专栏，专注中国及亚洲科技、商业和政治交叉议题。翻译：纽约时报中文网点击查看本文英文版。