The Chinese language magazine Yaowen-Jiaozi unveiled its annual list of top buzzwords for 2025 on December 3, with ‘resilience’ claiming the top position as the most significant term capturing China’s current social and economic climate. The selection, based on rigorous sociological and linguistic analysis, serves as a cultural barometer reflecting evolving social trends and collective public sentiment across digital platforms.
Amid rising global uncertainty fueled by unilateralism, protectionism, and intensified technological blockades, ‘resilience’ has emerged as the defining concept in China’s response to external challenges. The term appears frequently in government documents and media reports through derivatives including ‘development resilience,’ ‘economic resilience,’ ‘supply chain resilience,’ ‘foreign trade resilience,’ and ‘manufacturing resilience,’ highlighting the nation’s commitment to high-standard opening-up and steady economic transformation.
The list also captured a remarkable cross-strait cultural phenomenon originating from Taiwanese lawmaker Wang Shih-chien’s fiery council remarks criticizing government inefficiency. Mainland netizens transformed his intense delivery into a viral electronic rock track titled ‘Useless,’ which subsequently became a widespread meme template on Douyin and other platforms. The humorous contrast between being ‘calm, composed, and masterful’ versus ‘rushing about, tumbling and scrambling’ resonated across the Taiwan Strait, turning a political sound bite into a shared pop culture moment.
Other notable entries reflect diverse social developments. The Jiangsu Football City League (‘suchao’) has emerged as a viral amateur sports phenomenon surpassing professional leagues in live audience attendance. The intelligent era has accelerated lexical expansion with AI-related terms like ’embodied intelligence’ and ‘huoren gan’ (sense of being a real person), reflecting a growing cultural desire for authenticity amid AI-generated content saturation.
New vocabulary also mirrors evolving economic models, including ‘guzi’ (phonetic adaptation of ‘goods’) representing the booming market for anime and gaming peripherals, and ‘digital nomads’ describing location-independent professionals. Humorous meme formats like ‘prefabricated XX’ (critiquing prepackaged experiences) and ‘basic A, non-basic B’ (contrasting simplicity with extravagance) further demonstrate how linguistic innovation captures shared emotions and social commentary.