Semiotic Reconfiguration and Emotional Mobilization of Gufeng DJ Music in China’s Online Left-Wing Subculture: A Case Study of Douyin

Abstract

As short-video platforms have evolved into core venues for youth cultural expression and public issue deliberation, gufeng DJ music, originally positioned as pure entertainment and consumer musical product, has undergone semiotic re-encoding within online left-wing subcultural content, turning into an audiovisual signifier carrying social criticism, historical imagination and group identity connotations. Taking Douyin as the primary research field, this study adopts multimodal analysis and comment section discourse analysis to explore how gufeng DJ music shifts from ordinary background soundtracks into emotional triggers and subcultural identity markers. The persuasive and mobilizing power of such music does not stem solely from its musical text itself; instead, it is jointly constructed by the fragmented dissemination logic of short-video platforms, the polysemous interpretive space of gufeng imagery, the high emotional tension of electronic beats, collective audience decoding in comment zones, and secondary creation via user remixing. This communication mechanism lowers the participation threshold for young people to engage in politicized discourse, and consolidates emotional resonance and identity recognition within subcultural communities. Meanwhile, it risks over-emotionalizing complicated historical and social issues, reducing them to superficial symbolic labels and packaging them for entertainment consumption, which leads to semantic compression, information distortion and one-sided interpretive bias.