In July 2024, ByteDance’s Douyin app—the Chinese version of TikTok—introduced a system through which live streamers are ranked on a six-tier scale of ‘health points’ (健康分 jiankangfen), with the platform now deducting points if live streamers commit offences including unhealthy behaviour, misinformation, and vulgarity (Li 2024). This is not the first time that vulgarity has been invoked as a reason for punishing or censoring online content, practices, and identities. In November 2023, Alibaba’s Quark search engine and content platform NetEase were both sanctioned by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) for their display and recommendation of vulgar keywords and obscene content (Dobberstein 2023; CAC 2023). In the same month, the China Netcasting Service Association (CNSA) described ongoing efforts to rectify online micro-dramas by taking down episodes containing pornographic, vulgar, or violent content (Global Times 2023). A massive nationwide campaign starting in March 2022 punished 200,000 live-streaming and video accounts for content including ‘pornography, ugliness, oddness, fake, vulgarity, gambling’ (Global Times 2022). In November 2021, authorities targeted content providers promoting ‘vulgar hype’ about celebrities (Long 2021). In July of the same year, Chinese badminton Olympian Chen Qingchen apologised on microblogging platform Sina Weibo for having profusely used a vulgar term (操 cao, ‘fuck’) throughout a match (Zhou 2021). In late 2016, fast food chain Call a Chick was ordered to suspend operations until they dropped product names and slogans that played on the homophony between ‘chicken’ (鸡) and ‘prostitute’ (妓), both pronounced ‘ji’ (Kou 2016).

I could keep listing examples, but in short: vulgarity has been a consistent category of Chinese internet governance for at least a decade. As a 2015 China Daily editorial titled ‘Thumbs Down on Vulgarity’ argued:

The Ministry of Education’s vow to say no to vulgar words used on the Internet is a welcome and necessary move to help promote a healthy society … [T]he ministry said the use of Internet words, some of which are vulgar ones, in TV programs, textbooks and dictionaries, has made it necessary to curb the abuse of coarse words online … Their creation has not only interrupted and sabotaged normal and friendly relations in the virtual world, but has also sometimes spread such infectious negative sentiments to the real world. 

Vulgarity, seen as a threat to societal health, is connected to the emergence of ‘new internet words’ (网络新词语 wangluo xin ciyu), which in the mid-2010s were becoming popular across wider groups of speakers. Thanks to the increasing accessibility of the internet, vulgar terms had started reaching vulnerable groups, influencing them negatively. ‘The virtual world should not become a domain that is not subject to the restraint of civilised words and deeds’, the opinion piece concludes, calling both media outlets and internet users to resist the use of vulgar words and contribute to a ‘purified’ online communication environment (China Daily 2015). Unfortunately for these governmental narratives, everyday life in China consistently tells a different story.

Low and Vulgar

On my last day of doctoral fieldwork in early June 2015, sitting on a high-speed train from Shanghai to Shenzhen, I was taking some notes about the various interactions with digital devices happening in the train car. While my attention was focused on my seatmate’s struggle to recharge his smartphone or the passenger sitting in front of me, who kept taking photos of me and probably posting them on his WeChat feed, a much more interesting conversation was unfolding in the next aisle, where four men had been playing cards for hours: 

操!!! [Cao!!! Fuck!!!]

屌 [Diao, ‘Dick’ (cool)]

操操操 [Cao, cao, cao! Fuck, fuck, fuck!]

牛逼 [Niubi ‘Cow pussy’ (cool)]

不要装逼了 [Bu yao zhuangbi la … Don’t show off …]

去你大爷! [Qu ni daye! Fuck your grandpa!]

In my field notes, I jotted this exchange down as a funny aside: throughout the previous six months, I had heard and read exclamations like these all over China and Chinese social media, and I had likely been part of similar conversations, as many of these vulgar terms entered my everyday vernacular. But when reading it 10 years later, I realise how a conversation like this captures a particular moment in time when different linguistic registers of vulgarity overlapped in Mandarin Chinese: swearwords and phrasings with regional overtones (牛逼 niubi, 去你大爷 qu ni daye), sexual expletives (操 cao, 屌 diao), and ‘popular internet words’ (装逼 zhuangbi). Just as older media like xiangsheng comedy and television did, the internet has played an important role in how vulgarity is created, circulated, and interpreted by Chinese speakers.

Academic research has thoroughly documented the impact of the internet on linguistic creativity, which is most evident in the realm of vocabulary (Crystal 2011: 78). While it is common to imagine that online interactions result in a cohesive ‘netspeak’ or ‘internet slang’, creative linguistic innovations contribute to fluid pastiches of linguistic resources shaped by social and technological contexts (Blommaert and Backus 2011). Ever since China’s first connection to the internet in the early 1990s, creative linguistic practices have sustained the emergence of words, acronyms, emoticons, and sentence structures that local speakers recognise as belonging to a repertoire of ‘internet language’ (网络语言 wangluo yuyan). In 2009, when I attended an intensive language course in Shanghai, one of the elective classes on slang and everyday jargon included a section on ‘new internet words’, testifying to the rapid institutional recognition of these new linguistic resources. Yet, among new internet words such as 网友 (wangyou, ‘internet friend’, to refer to users), 酷 (ku, homophone for ‘cool’), or ‘520’ (approximate pronunciation for ‘I love you’), something was missing: the vulgar terms that I kept encountering on social media and hearing around me on the street. This selective recognition contributed to the popular appeal of vulgar internet words, which remained relatively obscure and unofficial, becoming markers of generational difference and subcultural belonging (Clark 2012: 180).

As testified by yearly roundups of ‘new internet words’ compiled by Chinese news websites, the interest in this new form of linguistic creativity has persisted for at least a couple of decades (Wong 2016). And alongside interest comes the threat to linguistic norms and official discourse—even the simple ironic appropriation of an official keyword like ‘harmony’ (和谐 hexie) or the bei (被) passive construction are enough to unsettle governmental rhetoric (Nordin and Richaud 2014; Benney 2015). In turn, this sort of linguistic creativity invites suppression, which in China has historically operated through the appeal to vulgarity, obscenity, and similarly underdefined categories (Cai 2017). 

This is nothing new in the country’s modern history: a century before the emergence of ‘internet language’, Chinese intellectuals and censors debated the necessity to define and regulate ‘obscenity’ (淫 yin) in print media (Geng 2020). In the early 2000s, the ‘Clean Up the Screen’ campaign ( 净化荧屏行动 qinghua yingping xingdong) censored television shows for ‘promoting vulgar, narcissistic, crassly materialistic values’ including speaking non-standard Mandarin and using risqué language (Bai 2015). In 2007, Chinese regulators formalised the term ‘low and vulgar’ (低俗 disu) to expand the scope of obscenity and pornography to include a broader variety of social media content (Liang and Lu 2012: 118). Occasionally, leaks of policy memos and news media style guides offer a glimpse into the internet language that authorities find threatening. For example, a 2017 list of words banned from Xinhua News Agency reports includes terms that have long fallen into disuse, official political slogans from previous leaderships, acronyms popular among gamers, fandom-specific neologisms, as well as ‘dirty words’ and ‘vulgar phrases’ such as cao ni ma (操你妈, ‘fuck your mum’), zhuangbi (装逼, ‘showing off’), and danteng (蛋疼, ‘ball-ache’).

Ball-Ache

But what is a vulgar internet word? Let’s take ‘ball-ache’ as an example. According to the Baidu Baike wiki, danteng is a popular online buzzword, coined by Chinese players of the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft, which expresses an embodied reaction to boredom and extends to related feelings of shock or annoyance at something or someone (Baidu Baike 2024a). The entry notes that danteng clearly refers to male genitalia, but its use is by and large not gendered. In early September 2014, Du Hongchao, the director of the China Internet Communication Society, published a post on his WeChat profile in which he called for others to stop using ‘vulgar internet words’ such as danteng and contribute to a ‘pure’ online environment. After being reported on by the China Youth Daily (中国青年报) under the headline ‘Internet Celebrity Calls for Boycott of Vulgar Internet Words’ (Pan and Fan 2014), Du’s call was quickly answered by a tide of mockery and offence as internet users questioned his professional expertise and his credentials as an internet celebrity:

If you, like me, have never heard of this guy, please leave a like.

Control your sister! You’re really a ball-ache! Fuck your mum!

Let’s not say ‘your sister’, let’s say ‘hehe’: heheheheheheheheheheh.

I don’t know if this Du Hongchao is an internet celebrity, but what I know is that his mum is going to become one very soon.

A term like danteng illustrates the typical lifecycle of a vulgarity on the Chinese internet: emerging from a specific online gaming context and rapidly spreading to internet language, the word ends up in official guidelines for media sanitisation campaigns and is foregrounded by a commentator endorsed by state media, triggering popular outrage about the absurdity of the governance efforts.

Dick Hair

Many vulgar internet words share a similar trajectory from their origin, through their contested popularisation, and to their eventual incorporation in everyday language. One of the most widely discussed terms of this kind is diaosi (屌丝), a neologism that can be literally translated as ‘dick hair’, being a compound of diao, the Mandarin character for penis, and si (‘threads, hair’). But as multiple online discussions about the origin of this term conclude, its vulgar meaning was rather coincidental: in the early 2010s, members of a large Baidu Tieba forum board started being taunted by outsiders as diaosi, and instead of pushing back against the offensive nickname, they decided to embrace it (Szablewicz 2014). 

Image 1.

In the span of a few years, this term gained its popularity across communities and social groups in part because of its coarse playfulness as a vulgar neologism of opaque origin, and in part because of its flexibility as an identity marker for self-deprecating ‘losers’. Just as with danteng, celebrities played their part in generating outrage around the term. In February 2013, film director Feng Xiaogang posted a short story on Weibo, recounting the baffled reaction of a foreign friend to his explanation of the term: ‘I told him that here we take it as a honour, not as a shame, and he was completely confused: cultural difference, cultural difference,’ he said (cited in Geng 2013). Feng’s post generated heated debates between commenters who thought of themselves as diaosi and defended the term and others who agreed with his distaste for the term. Other celebrities chimed in with their opinion on the matter, including self-proclaimed diaosi author Han Han and tech entrepreneur Shi Yuzhu, with the latter even claiming he would copyright the term (Lin and Zhao 2022: 68).

Cow Pussy

Alongside diaosi, the stack of interview prompt cards I brought to my fieldwork interviews also included a couple of arguably vulgar terms that have already appeared throughout this essay: niubi and zhuangbi, which are part of a series of neologisms that combine praise and abuse, all ending in the suffix –bi, which in Chinese means ‘pussy’ or ‘cunt’. One of these terms, niubi (literally, ‘cow pussy’) means something close to ‘awesome’ or ‘cool’ and, while its origin is not confirmed, many sources connect it to Dongbei dialects from northeast China, hypothesising that its nationwide popularity followed internal migratory patterns in the 1980s and 1990s and its integration into Chinese internet language (Baidu Baike 2024b). As linguists recognise, niubi has been used so widely for decades that it has ‘lost much of its original shock value’ (Mair 2015). The other term, zhuangbi, is directly related to niubi, combining the verb zhuang (‘pretending’) with the bi suffix to indicate someone pretending to be awesome, or pretending to be something one is not. In most of my interviews, niubi and zhuangbi were recognised as staples of Chinese internet language that had already entered everyday spoken language, and no interviewees thought them to be that vulgar, despite their etymology being quite evident.

The edginess and versatility of the –bi suffix supported the creation of many other similar neologisms. Alongside established ones like 傻逼 (shabi, ‘stupid cunt’, idiot) or 二逼 (erbi, also written as 2B, ‘two cunt’, stupid), newer ones would emerge unpredictably, spreading on social media in a matter of days. Bi words multiplied by combining a variety of words with the vulgar suffix. Some were simply emphatic versions of an existing adjective (呆逼 daibi, ‘dumb’; 丑逼 choubi, ‘ugly’; 穷逼 qiongbi, ‘poor’); others relied on the combination of characters to evoke an abusive image (狗逼 goubi, ‘dog cunt’ for scum) or generate new meanings (苦逼 kubi, ‘bitter cunt’ for someone having a hard time). A few of them, like bige (逼格), were even meta-referential, pointing at more established terms in the –bi series (in this case, ‘having a zhuangbi quality’). 

In the summer of 2016, a short essay published on Jiemian News (界面新闻) takes stock of these linguistic developments and asks the question: ‘Have we become more tolerant of swearing?’ The answer provided by the author goes back to Lu Xun’s essay ‘On “Fuck”’ (妈的), discussing China’s ‘national curse word’ of the time, which by now ‘seems to have become a modal particle with little deterrent effect’ (He 2016). On the other side of the debate, many remain concerned: ‘How can the series of “bi words” be stopped from becoming more and more popular?’, asks a Zhihu user self-identifying as being born in the 1980s. ‘I don’t think the media in Western countries are full of “fuck” and “cunt”, right? … I don’t want my future child to be unable to speak normally with their friends without using the word bi,’ they continue.

Reclaiming Vulgarity

Through words like danteng, diaosi, and the endless series of bi compounds, Chinese speakers sustain a repertoire of ‘internet language’ that, much like Bakhtin’s carnivalesque speech, combines praise and abuse, momentarily overturning the hierarchy of official and non-official discourses (Lin and Zhao 2022: 69). This line of argument reinforces a specific theory of governance that sees Chinese authorities regulating the internet so that it can function as both a ‘safety valve’ and a ‘pressure cooker’ (Hassid 2012), clearly reproducing the divide between an official world of governmental power and the unofficial carnival of subversion. On the other hand, vulgarity is not always deployed as a tactic of resistance against authorities but can also be weaponised by some social groups against others.

As in the case of diaosi or bi words, mainstream cultural production and even official state media can also embrace vulgarity, short-circuiting critique and triggering anti-vulgarity debates among audiences. Many ‘vulgar internet words’ point towards a model of the carnivalesque that is closer to the one outlined by Achille Mbembe’s work on the postcolony. In his critique of Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, Mbembe (1992: 2) argues that vulgarity belongs not only to the dominated, but also to all systems of domination, which actively suppress it and coopt it to maintain control of the discursive arena, leaving all actors with no option but the constant renegotiation of vulgarity itself. In this reframing of the carnivalesque, resistance becomes a secondary question; what comes to the foreground is the necessity to account for the recursive loops developing around vulgarity as it is claimed by, attributed to, and taken away from different actors and social groups.

This essay is adapted from a chapter of the forthcoming volume Internet Vulgarities in China: Cultures, Governance, and Politics, edited by Jian Xu and Dino Ge Zhang for Amsterdam University Press.