For many young Chinese, the future doesn’t look so great: The job market is dire, wages are falling and competition seems endless. To cope, some are recreating scenes from the early 2000s, when the economy was growing rapidly.
They are sharing images online of internet cafes, high-rises covered in blue glass and unusual youth sub-cultures. Here is how one post reads:
You get up to the sound of your mom’s voice. It’s a traditional weekend in 2008.
After breakfast, you accompany her to the hair salon. On the way in which, you cross buildings with blue home windows.
She takes you to KFC for lunch, your favourite.
As soon as it will get darkish, you go house. You suppose to your self, if solely day by day may very well be this pleased.
In memes, animations, old photographs and retro playlists posted online, people are recalling brightly colored exercise equipment; the ping of QQ, an early messaging platform; traditional dark-wood living room furniture; and the song “Beijing Welcomes You” from when China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics.
The trend has given rise to a digital subculture known as Chinese Dreamcore. It’s more than just nostalgia, online creators, artists and experts say. The genre serves as a “new type of digital pain reliever for young people in modern times,” as one blogger put it.
It is an aesthetic that echoes a nostalgia and dreaminess popular elsewhere, like the revival of 1980s style in the United States, captured in the fandom for shows like “Stranger Things.”
On Chinese social media sites, posts described as Chinese Dreamcore often begin with the idea that one has traveled back in time to wake up in one’s childhood home.
Han Xiaoqiang, an associate professor at Southeast University in Nanjing who studies media, described such posts as a form of fantasy and wish fulfillment, a bit like Doraemon, the Japanese anime character who goes back in time to help his friend build a better future.
“They use nostalgia to return to a dream because they can’t change anything,” he said. “Their childhood dreams were brilliant, but as adults they find society isn’t what they expected,” he said.
Chinese Dreamcore’s primary fans are from Generation Z, born in the late 1990s and 2000s. They witnessed the rise of the internet and China’s rapid transformation from a still-developing country to a major power, rivaling the United States. For many of them, scenes from their childhood had simply vanished.
In addition to grainy, low-resolution photos and videos of buildings and urban landscapes in the early 2000s, Chinese creators are also making eerie mash-ups of those familiar scenes — a reflection of the subconscious, hazy memories of one’s childhood.
In a book of drawings published last year, Ai Kewei, a 35-year-old artist in Chengdu, combined memories from her childhood, like elephant-shaped playground slides and high-rise buildings topped with structures that she imagined to be alien spaceships. She remembers vividly the heat of the sun on long slow days; how everything around her was blue, including the water dispensers and the hand soap her family used.
Ms. Ai also recalls the sense of change once the internet arrived.
When her family installed their first computer, she spent every day exploring the internet. “You didn’t know what would happen tomorrow,” she said. “Things were developing fast, but you felt the future was unpredictable and full of imagination.”
Ms. Ai thinks that one reason people are attracted to Chinese Dreamcore is that they long for the simplicity of the dial-up era. “I think many people still miss the harmony and beauty of the early days of the internet — that feeling that the world would unite and that feeling of connection,” she said.
For Li Haoran, who makes animations, her work is about saving parts of her childhood. The home where she grew up in Henan Province was demolished. She depicts scenes from the 2000s like swan-shaped pedal boats, as well as futuristic skyscrapers and buildings covered in the white tiles that were common at the time. These objects, she said, give her the “sensation of being hugged.”
“When I and many others see them, we feel a sense of familiarity,” she said.
The disappearance of those familiar and comforting hallmarks from the past is why Chinese Dreamcore is so emotionally resonant. Looking at these images, viewers “suddenly realize that they are losing something,” said Huang Heshan, a Beijing-based visual artist, whose series “Too Rich City” is seen as one of the early examples of Chinese Dreamcore.
Since the term began appearing on social media in the 2020s, Chinese Dreamcore has gone more mainstream. The aesthetic has appeared in video games, books, advertising campaigns, dinnerware at hot pot restaurants and packaging for medicine.
Some have taken a more literal approach to remembering the millennium. Liu Yujia, a 24-year-old photographer from Jilin, has traveled to more than 230 Chinese cities to capture architecture from the 2000s — a time when Chinese cities tried to outdo each other with new buildings that reflected an embrace of the future, sometimes to gaudy and strange effect. As a child, he stared in wonder at those buildings, which have steadily been replaced by sleeker and more modern versions.
His photos include European-style castles, revolving restaurants and high-rises adorned with sci-fi-esque domes, geometric shapes, dramatic facades and, in one case, a large arrow — which he described in a caption as “pointing to the future.” Mr. Liu will spend a year traveling and photographing these buildings before they are gone.
China has not censored Chinese Dreamcore content, but state media have warned of the dangers of idealizing the past. An essay in a social sciences journal published by the Chinese province Gansu’s propaganda department said that, while Chinese Dreamcore provided an emotional outlet for China’s Generation Z, its “potential risks should not be ignored.”
“If Generation Z becomes uncontrollably immersed in the fantasy of Dreamcore, it could trigger cultural symptoms” such as existential crises and “hidden ideological threats” that could undermine young people’s development of “a healthy worldview and core values,” the article said in January.
While previous generations of Chinese artists used nostalgia and vintage iconography to criticize periods of political turmoil like the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Chinese Dreamcore is to some relatively superficial.
“It’s more like a trendy hashtag,” Mr. Huang said. “How many people can truly extract something valuable and profound from this hashtag remains to be seen and depends on whether it inspires any lasting work.”
Ms. Ai, who returned to China after studying in Britain, argues that the point of Chinese Dreamcore is not to criticize this current moment in China, which she said was still full of opportunity and progress. To her, it is about addressing the sense of dislocation in the face of rapid technological change and uncertainty.
“It is about trying to find like-minded people also navigating this state of confusion or vulnerability. It’s looking for a virtual space where everyone can be at ease for a minute,” she said. “It’s seeing one’s sadness and saying, ‘I have it too.’ That’s healing, isn’t it?”
