China’s Generation Z and the Digital Mirror: Reflections on Yun Sheng’s “Short Cuts”

William Yeakel
Oct 20
3 min read

Yun Sheng practices a form of culturatl cartography when writing for the London Review of Books: mapping the fault lines between aspiration and exhaustion, connection and isolation. The recent column, “Short Cuts: China’s Gen Z” (LRB, 9 October 2025), exemplifies that gift. In just a few pages, Sheng captures a generation that has never known life without the internet, that measures hope in exam scores and screen time, and that constructs community in the space between surveillance and self-expression.

The Landscape Described

China’s Gen Z, as Sheng presents it, lives in a paradox. It is the best-educated generation in the nation’s history, and yet, faces an economy that cannot absorb its talent. The term neijuan—often translated as “involution” is borrowed to describe a world where endless effort yields diminishing returns. The counter-gesture, “lying flat,” has become a quiet act of rebellion, a decision to refuse the race itself rather than lose it. Sheng treats these not as slogans but as social diagnostics, i.e., symptoms of a youth culture balancing idealism with fatigue.

Cultural Coping Mechanisms

Sheng’s column moves effortlessly from the job market to the media marketplace. The discussion of “vertical dramas,” those 90-second smartphone soap operas filmed in portrait mode, is particularly sharp. Sheng interprets their brevity and hyper-dramatized plots as perfect metaphors for a society living within the algorithmic now: high velocity, low commitment, infinite replay. Likewise, the analysis of “BL dramas” (boys’-love stories popular online despite official disapproval) shows how young audiences experiment with empathy and identity through semi-forbidden channels.

Equally telling is Sheng’s exploration of intimacy in the digital age. Many young Chinese are turning toward AI companions, game-based romance simulations, and even the strangely endearing “cotton babies” that substitute for real family life. In each case, technology mediates emotion, offering predictable affection in a world that feels economically and politically uncertain.

Strengths of the Essay

What distinguishes Sheng’s work is not merely observation but synthesis uniting economics, media theory, and moral psychology into a compact cultural analysis. The reader comes away with a sense that every short-form video, every fan community, every digital friend is a data point in a broader story: the re-engineering of hope under constraint.

The prose avoids sentimentality. Quoting the new youth slogan—“Better to be idle than to feed the capitalists”— is done without irony. It is the quiet logic of exhaustion, not revolution. That intellectual honesty gives the piece its authority.

A Few Reservations

As with most of the LRB’s Short Cuts, Sheng writes impressionistically rather than empirically. Conclusions rest on sharp intuition more than on fieldwork or survey data. Readers seeking statistical depth will not find it here. Yet within its genre, the essay succeeds: it transforms scattered anecdotes into a coherent social narrative.

About the Author

Yun Sheng is an assistant research professor at the Shanghai Academy of Sciences and a recurring contributor to the London Review of Books. Earlier essays have explored Chinese fan-fiction networks, the resurgence of Eileen Chang’s fiction, and the “hipster” aesthetic of Beijing’s millennials. A consistent thread runs across all ot this work: a fascination with how culture absorbs economic pressure and turns it into style.

Why It Matters

Sheng’s column invites reflection beyond China. The phenomena described, economic anxiety, attention-driven storytelling, the search for synthetic companionship, are not uniquely Chinese. They are global symptoms of a generation negotiating the costs of connection. In that sense, “Short Cuts” is not just reportage from abroad; it is a mirror, tilted eastward but angled toward all of us.