29
votes
"Ai ni, laoji": China's Gen Z is breaking tradition by learning self-love (English)
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- The Buzzword Capturing Chinese Gen Z's Individualism
- Authors
- Sixth Tone
- Published
- Jan 6 2026
- Word count
- 897 words
Disclaimer: I'm very far from being an expert on up to the minute Mainland Chinese (Mandarin) memes, my circles rarely overlap with theirs, being Hong Konger Cantonese myself who sometimes dabble in Taiwanese culture. If there are Mainlanders on Tildes, please say hi, would love to hear your take.
Humble background context submission:
where Cantonese and Mandarin cultures do have intersection, is a shared history in our ancient language. First person pronouns tend to minimize the self, for humility, out of respect for the people we're speaking to, and respect for the honourable who aren't even part of the conversation (eg, a lord, ancestors, the groups we represent etc). To modern ears some sound really harsh: 在下 ("as your subordinate"), 鄙人 ("as an unlearned, ignorant person" - a scholar) 草民 ("grass citizen" - a civilian to a government official). These have all fallen out of daily use entirely, except for formal written communications, during first initial formal introductions, for emphasis, or irony. Sort of like our signing off letters as "your humble servant".
The modern Lao (老) in salutations (2nd / 3rd person) literally means "old". The usage is actually quite similar to English: commonly added to anybody endeared to us ( "Dear Old Pa" 老爸 ) or long time friends to us ("Good Old Wong" 老黃) or brands well known to us ("old familiar MacDonald's 老麥). I think a lot of North American people know LaoGanMa chili sauces, and that's 老干媽 , whose creator sold saucy noodles, and gave enough free lunches to poor kids they called her 干媽 (godmom), hence "good old godmom's brand". (Source, cn) . 老公 / 老婆 is commonly used today, Dear Hubby and Dear Wifey.
If we want to rudely boast or to berate, we might call ourselves 老子 / 老娘 / 你老爸 (for men, for women, and "your dad, which is me"), for emphasis.
So.....basically we would never address ourselves either in familiarity nor with endearment, and certainly not boastfully or with arrogant pride.
The Chinese equivalent of KnowYourMeme says this one came from a game charater who loves his mom, whose catch phrase is "Love ya, mum, see you tomorrow", from there to "love ya, me, see you tomorrow".
So yeah, it's refreshingly subversive and endearing. Some examples I found:
milk tea delivery minimum order is two cups. Normally, I would go without, but Dear Old Me says I love you, go ahead, my treat
popular sayings go, keep your head down work quietly and one day when you succeeded you'll wow them all. Dear Old Me says, love you, you're already astonishing right now
the mantra is, if I've made it to the top I can rest, but Good Old Me says it's not conditional on if, Love you, get some rest
I can't comment on how popular the game or this particular phrase was before it got sucked into being used as a catchall hashtag for SEO purposes like #short or #funny , though.
Cultural commentary. Every society has its narcissistic jerks, and they'll use this one to be even more disgustingly selfish and entitled. And yes marketing will make use of this. But, there are also many honest, hard-working people who don't have enough support or good self care. This meme will be a blessing to the latter group who might not have heard any affirmations growing up in a cut throat competitive zero sum winner takes all world, whose parents might strictly believe in hard knocks and never showing gentleness for fear of spoiling a child. I hope this fun little meme reaches those who can benefit from it, that even if no one is kind to them today, they can still have one person in their corner today, to be kind to them and tell them they're worthwhile as is, and loved.
(The article's title is "The Buzzword Capturing Chinese Gen Z’s Individualism: In a break with older generations, young Chinese are opting for self-love without first imposing hardships on themselves." I thought the topic title was snappier)
I'd love to hear @chocobean's words on this!
Holy moly this one is crazy new. It's nice how quickly our language and cultural barriers are breaking down, and I look forward to seeing the "backlash to the backlash to the thing that's just begun (Bo Burnham, Funny Feeling, 2021)"
I'll put down more of my thoughts soon, but in short yeah this is a fun and good one, and possibly thousands of years overdue
At the same time, that is wonderful. On the other hand, I can't help but feel sad(mourning by proxy?) about what may have been lost in the mean time.
All the strength and wishes to them though, of course!
Yeah, overall, today's cultures are so much kinder to everyone than ancient times. How much more love we could have experienced, and how many more wonders created, if people lived in gentler kinds. BUT -- today's the day to be extra kind, our of our way and counter culturally kind, so that we won't be shamed by future generations for which an unimaginable level of kindness will be taken for granted.
Isn't that going to be when this trend goes too far and becomes, say, US 80s hyper individualistic consumerism?
I think there's a few steps between "treat yourself to a milk tea" and the "fuck you, got mine" attitudes of the US in the 80s ... not to mention, cultural differences.
In addition to cultural differences, the economic situation is completely different. The US in the 1980s was booming, while this trend is in response to high youth unemployment and a fairly rough work culture (996, 007, etc)
Their work culture needs massive reforms but I don't know how they can do it. (Note: 996 is from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. 007 is from 0 o'clock to 0 o'clock, 7 days a week. ) Both are already illegal under the current legislation: no more than 8 hours a day regular time, not more than 36 hours per month overtime at 150% pay, and no more than 48 total hours a week. (996.icu, cn)
So obviously it's enforcement that's the problem.
People are falling apart with very little gained
I had heard of 996, but not 007 in this regard. That's impossible! Please say that's just like a meme or sarcasm based on the already insane 996.
Its somewhat tongue in cheek, usually referring to the high expectations of employers. However, I believe that the term comes from some companies expecting employees to sleep in the office (à la crunch culture at video game companies or anime studios, except all the time).
I heard sleep on site as well, or some manner of being on call 24/7/365.
I agree. But I'm responding to the comment anticipating a "backlash to the backlash", and I imagine 80s individualism is what will be pointed to as a consequence of this mindset.
Not so much hyper consumerism right now, they're kind of in a recession..... :3 if it gets taken up by the youth to further "lay flat" soft protest against involution, I anticipate government level blowback.
I wonder if we’ll see a relatively muted official response to the trend, with criticism coming more from older generations than the government. This 爱你老己 movement, while responding to the same poor economic and social situation in China, seems to be more innocuous than the earlier 躺平 or 摆烂 movements in the eyes of the Party, which received censorship and official condemnation.
Depends if they can successfully spin it as "keep gently consuming and yes buy that extra latte on credit" without it veering into "take a break, in fact take the whole week off, in fact 'Auntie I don't want to work hard anymore'" forever. Fan the flames for one while condemning the other.
Thanks for weighting in @Fal would love to hear more of your thoughts on this meme
Hi @chocobean good to see you! I'm on the go rn, so I don't have the ability to look into Chinese-language sources or cite all of my claims at the moment, so this is just my thoughts and not necessarily rigorous analysis.
If I had to guess, the Party would be interested in pushing the self-care aspects of this trend, and downplay its associations with the lying flat/let it rot trends from a few years back. We know that the Chinese government has used selective censorship effectively in the past to counter movements that may lead to collective action (King et al. 2013) and the lying flat trend was viewed unambiguously as having the ability to promote collective action (rejecting the current work culture/rat race), and was heavily censored for it (Yuan 2022 I believe?). Meanwhile (as you point out), this movement could be focused around its self-love and self-care aspects, promoting gentle consumerism instead of not working. While I can't do an in depth look into Chinese news sites, a cursory Google search finds that one of Xinhua's (Chinese state media) English-language Facebook pages has made a short post about the trend, playing up its self-care aspects (link). The Chinese government has historically had a pretty strong astroturfing network on its domestic social media sites (King et al. 2017), so it wouldn't be surprising to see similar treatment of this trend happening on Chinese news and social media.
Some good cultural context provided already, so I just have one other relevant thought: It's really interesting to me to see the current mood/shift in culture of younger Chinese and contrast it with the much older concern of Little Emperor Syndrome. My gut says that instead of a dramatic cultural shift we're simply talking about two different demographics: the Little Imperials who are the children of the rich (and still seen around the Western world with their absurd flaunting of riches while 'attending university'), and the rest of the younger generation in China.