Digital Resonance as Youth Resistance: Navigating Structural Pressures and Mental Health in Contemporary China

Abstract

In response to intense structural pressures, youth in contemporary China increasingly articulate mental distress online, transmuting individual grievances into collective cultural and political resistance. This study asks how young people appropriate the architecture of Zhihu, a major Chinese knowledge-sharing platform, to accomplish this transformation. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, we introduce “digital resonance” as an analytical concept explaining how personal pain is transformed into a shared critique of the social order. A mixed-methods study ( N  = 8,280 posts; N  = 30 interviews) reveals a digital field characterized by anger toward familial and academic authorities. We argue this resonant field is ambivalent: it shelters vulnerable youth while fostering performative identities conditioned by platform capitalism. These digital spaces are thus crucial sites for identity negotiation and challenging macrosystemic norms, demonstrating how platforms are both symptom of and response to deep-seated social contradictions that reconfigure youth agency and resistance.