Abstract
In post-2020 Chinese film and TV dramas, a non-hegemonic masculinity has emerged and gained popularity, which this article theorizes as the Beta-male imaginary. Originating from the ABO fanfiction trope and transcreated within contemporary Chinese screen culture, Beta-male protagonists are characterized by lingering emotions, average social positioning, and a retreat from hyper-competition. Alongside the viral meme wonangfei (hapless loser)—a pejorative resignified after 2023—they crystallize into a shared cultural shorthand for urban precarity and tacit resistance to Alpha hegemony and social Darwinism. Combining content analysis with platform-based reception studies, this article frames the rise of wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries as affective, ambivalent reconfigurations of male “softness” and “impotence” that unfold amid China’s post-2020 socioeconomic downturns. Through case studies of two actors, Guo Jingfei and Bai Ke—both frequently cast as wonangfei characters and rescripted by audiences as “Betas Going Mad” and “Betas with Husband Vibes” respectively—the article demonstrates how female-oriented consumer culture and the platformized circulation of affect sustain these non-hegemonic masculinities. Such portrayals offer audiences both emotional catharsis and social critique, channeling collective precarity, querying hegemonic norms, and renegotiating gender dynamics across public and domestic spheres. Yet these imaginaries remain ambivalent—unsettling patriarchal emotion-regimes while at times over-romanticizing precarity and softly reproducing inequality.
Introduction
Cultural productions with a distinct feminist awareness have been prominent in Chinese mainstream entertainment in 2024. This is evidenced by two 2024 releases: the Spring Festival blockbuster YOLO (Re la gun tang), a story of a woman’s physical and psychological transformation, and the critically acclaimed comedy-drama Her Story (Hao dong xi), which centers on two women in Shanghai whose lives become intertwined around the upbringing of one’s young daughter. Both works foreground female protagonists, echoing and enriching the “supreme heroine” storytelling within Chinese-language mediaspheres (Bai 2020; Lu 2026).
Alongside flourishing “supreme heroine” discourses, Chinese popular culture also breeds reconfigurations of men and masculinity. Characters portrayed by actors like Lei Jiayin as the ex-boyfriend in YOLO and Mark Chao Yu-ting as the ex-husband in Her Story exemplify what might be termed the Beta-male archetype—a kind of non-hegemonic masculinity characterized by softness, lingering emotions, and average social positioning. This form of masculinity, traditionally relegated to a subordinate position within male homosocial hierarchies, is gaining increasing visibility in media representations. Its rise unfolds against the backdrop of China’s post-2020 socioeconomic conditions, as well as the evolving feminist fantasies, critiques, and appeals.
The concept of “Beta” derives from Chinese netizens’ cultural appropriation and transcreation of Euro-American fanfiction tropes—specifically the ABO (Alpha/Beta/Omega) universe, also known as the Omegaverse. Rooted in wolf pack social hierarchy, this narrative framework stratifies human society into three biologically determined categories: dominant and aggressive Alphas, submissive and sensitive Omegas, and unremarkable Betas, who occupy an intermediate social position devoid of extreme characteristics. In early fanfiction narratives and masculinist online communities, Beta characters were often regarded as sexually unattractive background figures lacking the dominance, assertiveness, and biological distinctiveness that defined Alphas and Omegas (Ging 2019; Zheng 2015). Over the past 5 years, however, the concept has acquired new cultural meaning in the Chinese mediascape. It has been reimagined along two divergent lines, whether as an emotionally attuned partner of modest social standing in female-centered domestic dramas, or as a hapless underdog whose comic struggles and setbacks court broad audience empathy in urban and period dramedies. Chinese netizens directly borrow the English word “Beta” when referring to such characters in online discourse—a capitalized usage retained throughout this article. This distinguishes it from the pejorative “beta” circulating within Western manosphere communities such as r/TRP (The Red Pill subreddit), where the term anchors the misogynistic “alpha fux, beta bux” dichotomy (Ging 2019) and functions as an emasculating slur rather than a culturally generative imaginary.
The cultural resonance of the Beta-male archetype cannot be disentangled from its discursive kinship with other viral neologisms that have saturated China’s post-2020 digital sphere. Chief among these is wonangfei (hapless loser)—a compound term in which wonang denotes haplessness, and fei means useless or waste. Long embedded in everyday parlance as a blunt pejorative, the term was resignified as a viral meme after 2023, evoking the image of a punching bag battered relentlessly by life’s hardships. It is also frequently deployed in a tongue-in-cheek fashion to describe the Beta characters mentioned above. Following a similar logic, other pervasive neologisms, such as tangping (“lying flat”—the refusal to strive under systemic pressure), neijuan (“involution”—the intensification of competition with diminishing returns), and bailan (“letting things rot”—a resigned abandonment of effort), echo the connotations of wonangfei memes and articulate a weary refusal to participate in senseless rat races. These terms also suggest a disillusionment with self-cultivation amid economic stagnation. Together, they have consolidated into shared cultural shorthand for a post-2020 generation confronting labor market collapse, rising youth unemployment, and the collapse of conventional success scripts. It is within this broader landscape of collective precarity that the wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries acquire their particular cultural charge.
Notably, wonangfei is grounded in Chinese vernacular discourse, operating closer to real-life struggles, whereas “Beta” is a loanword from Anglophone fanfiction culture, projecting an imaginatively reproduced version of non-hegemonic existence. Similar to the diaosi phenomenon of the 2010s (Huang 2021, 2024)—a term for young males who feel marginalized by the dominant standards of successful masculinity—both “Beta” and wonangfei operate as fluid signifiers in post-2020 sociolinguistic practices. They oscillate between reality and fantasy, and are deeply entwined with audiences’ affective responses. By contextualizing “Beta” and wonangfei, the article positions these imaginaries as gendered inflections of the broader “lying flat” ethos prominent in the post-2020 milieu, where retreats from social Darwinism and hyper-competitive masculinity become both a survival tactic and a form of tacit resistance for precarious urbanites. It also points out that although wonangfei and Beta masculinities share the diaosi narratives’ self-deprecation and intermediate sociocultural stance (Huang 2021), they are more ambivalent, hybridized, and in some respects, strategically co-opt other identity locations to cater to gendered consumerism (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Eisen and Yamashita 2019).
This study employs a multi-layered analytical framework that integrates textual and contextual analysis of Beta-imaginary media representations, alongside platform-based reception analysis of audience discourses on Douban, Weibo, and Bilibili. A key concept guiding this analysis is the “affective economy” (Ahmed 2004), which traces how emotions enter the public life of society as objects that circulate and contribute to the construction and maintenance of the social order. Transposed into the digital context, this concept illuminates how emotions accrue social value within digital publics and orient audience engagement around shared imaginaries. Drawing on this theoretical lens, the framework enables an examination of how platformized media consumption produces and sustains the cultural resonance of wonangfei and the Beta-male imaginaries. By triangulating these approaches, the article first examines the intercultural exchange and sociohistorical constructs that enable the wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries to emerge as readable categories of masculinity within Chinese popular culture. It then critically traces the genealogies of anxieties surrounding “male potency” in cyberspace and the idealized, non-hegemonic masculinity shaped by female fantasy, positioning the rise of wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries as a seemingly gender-neutral outlet for the pervasive feelings of precariousness in China’s post-2020 landscape. Through two case studies—Guo Jingfei and the “Betas Going Mad” trope, and Bai Ke and the “Betas with Husband Vibes” trope—the research demonstrates how female-oriented consumerist culture and the platformized affective economy breed the popularity of these masculinities. Ultimately, the article contends that these affective Beta-male portrayals and their reception provoke a collective voicing of discontent with labor precarity and masculine brinksmanship. At the same time, critical scrutiny of the endearing construction of Beta-male imaginaries uncovers deep ambivalences in the gendered and class-based orders undergirding them. Such a reading, in turn, complicates the “softness” politics these popular media imaginaries are taken to embody.
Literature Review and Context
The ABO Universe and the Transcultural Making of Beta-Male Imaginaries
The term “Beta” is borrowed from the ABO fanfiction universe—a speculative biology troupe that developed within The X-Files (1993–2018) fandom in the 1990s and gained explosive popularity after surfacing in a Supernatural (2005–2022) kink meme board in January 2011 (Busse 2013; Zheng 2015). By stratifying bodies into rigid reproductive and instinctual roles, the genre enabled scenarios such as male pregnancy and heat cycles, catering to a predominantly female and queer readership invested in slash erotics and power asymmetries. When the trope was localized into Chinese danmei fandom in late 2011—a male-male romance genre shaped by Japanese boys’ love and by Western slash fiction (Yang and Xu 2017)—it underwent significant reconfiguration. Chinese adaptations shifted the emphasis from physiological domination to emotional intimacy, introducing greater fluidity in gender and power relations (Ge 2020).
Despite being initially marginal to the Alpha-Omega erotic dyad, the Beta figure has, in the post-2020 years, acquired new cultural resonance in China. It has permeated mainstream social discourse as a mundane descriptor for personality and social positioning. The Beta persona loosely coalesces around traits of professional mediocrity, relational passivity, and a conspicuous disengagement from the drive, emotional restraint, and authoritative dominance that have long been valorized in Confucian and socialist frameworks of masculinity (Song 2004; Song and Hird 2014). This symbolic cluster has also been taken up by female-oriented melodramas, which resignify “Beta males” to pair with “Alpha females” in “supreme heroine” narratives. In these reimaginings, Beta males are valued for their emotional engagement, domestic commitment, and willingness to opt out of masculine brinkmanship. The figure thus invites audiences to read him as a vernacular critique of patriarchal expectations. At the same time, less romanticized portrayals of Betas operate on a different affective register. Economically precarious and worn down by hyper-competition for jobs and resources, these characters tap into a collective sensibility shaped by the shared experience of socioeconomic stagnation and disempowerment—a condition that has intensified since the 2020 pandemic crisis. In this sense, the predicaments of Beta characters function as tacit commentary on the costs of neoliberal precarity, which extend well beyond gender categories. Such dynamics exemplify what Henry Jenkins (2006) terms “textual poaching,” as niche subcultural tropes are metaphorically appropriated and reworked to interrogate localized politics of gender, class, and identity.
Building on these transcultural appropriations and drawing on the interrelation between “Beta” and wonangfei established above, the article theorizes the Beta imaginary along two dimensions of post-2020 masculinity. The first foregrounds emotional resonance over declarations of impotence. Whether romanticized as supportive partners to Alpha females or depicted in their everyday struggles, Beta characters activate structures of feeling that exceed simple narratives of failure. Far from rendering them contemptible, their softness counterbalances dominant patriarchal masculinity, recasting these figures as potential embodiments of alternative masculine ideals or sites of emotional resonance for female audiences. The second dimension underscores the entanglement of female-oriented consumer culture with collective senses of disempowerment. This entanglement has rendered the evolutionary rules and Alpha-centric hierarchies of the original ABO universe largely inoperative. The Beta imaginary in contemporary China is a hybridized construct that registers the “crisis tendencies” of patriarchal legitimacy (Bridges and Pascoe 2014), while simultaneously foregrounding the imaginary’s emotion-evoking qualities. The result is a cultural formation that cultivates an expectation—or perhaps an enabling illusion—of challenging traditional Alpha hegemony and transcending the established frameworks of both gender and socioeconomic determinism. By reframing Beta masculinity along these lines, the article facilitates intercultural dialogue with Euro-American scholarship on gender-power dynamics while also complicating any simple reading of the ABO trope’s travel. It foregrounds the specific ways that collective precarity and gendered consumption re-code subcultural materials into potent contemporary imaginaries.
Hybrid Constructs of Beta Masculinities: Male “Softness” and “Impotence”
As gendered imaginaries circulating widely online, the hybrid constructs of wonangfei and Beta masculinities can be traced from two interrelated genealogies: evolving concerns surrounding “male potency,” and the idealized non-hegemonic masculinity shaped by female fantasy. Relatively, the former mirrors urban youth’s socioeconomic pressures under high expectations, yet also fuels polarizing online discourses that exacerbate gender antagonisms. The latter cultivates female-desired personas such as nuannan (warm men) and its marital variation “hands-on dads,” which rationalize complementary social roles and promote the feminized male ideals to Chinese women (Louie 2012; Peng 2021; Song and Hird 2014). Both trajectories converge in China’s post-2020 cultural landscape, where Beta masculinity emerges as a hybrid construct that absorbs and reconfigures earlier models of male “softness” and experiences of “impotence” under precarious conditions.
Over the past 15 years, anxieties over “male potency” have become increasingly pervasive in China’s digital spheres. Far more than sexual vigor, these concerns index the realm of socioeconomic efficacy. In 2010, the term weisuonan (despicable men) became a rallying insult among overseas Chinese netizens, targeting well-educated yet non-elite Chinese young men for their perceived lack of masculinity in transnational contexts (Zhang 2018). Around 2012, this lexicon of masculine precarity expanded with the viral spread of diaosi (loser), a self-deprecating label for young males of mediocre appearance and social standing. As paradigmatic forum discussions and memes narrate, the diaosi figure dreams of winning a “goddess” girlfriend, yet remains severely marginalized by the gaofushuai (“tall-rich-handsome”) masculine ideal. Beneath the abject self-positioning of diaosi linger real-life projections. These include, most notably, the financial performance anxieties of young white-collar workers and university students, coupled with their feelings of inadequacy in meeting dominant standards of “successful” masculinity. Some of these frustrations were maliciously channeled into self-victimizing imaginations that fueled misogynistic discourse online, from slurs like hei muer (“black wood ear”—women who frequently exchange sex for money) to broader antifeminist rhetoric within manospheres (Huang 2021, 2024). Others found comic release in early-2010s web series such as Diors Man (Diao si nan shi) and Unexpectedness (Wan wan mei xiang dao), which re-conceive and portray the ludicrous lives of diaosi men, receiving an enthusiastic welcome among young people (Cao 2017). Although state censorship curtailed the diaosi subculture after 2014 due to its cynicism and vernacular vulgarity, the underlying sense of masculine inadequacy neither vanished nor stayed contained within cyberspace. Amid the post-2020 realities of economic slowdown, youth unemployment, and the disintegration of aspirational “success” narratives, a diffuse sense of impotence has re-emerged through the spread of wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries.
The genealogy of male “softness,” meanwhile, is a fluid and historically layered construct. Scholarship has traced wen (cultural cultivation) as a core facet of ideal Chinese masculinity among the elite (Louie 2002), associated with literary talent and, in its modern iterations, with intellectual melancholy or enlightenment discourses (Lei 2022). Though constantly rescripted and imbued with shifting ideologies, soft masculinity has been recurrently pluralized and often romanticized through transhistorical archetypes, such as the fragile scholar and the Confucian-knight (Lu 2025; Song 2004), acquiring new cultural vitality across successive eras. The privileging of such “softness,” however, faced significant challenges in the early 1980s, as the global circulation of Japanese and Western “tough guy” screen images significantly reshaped perceptions of the refined male in mainland China (Zhong 2000). This shift was further evidenced by the concurrent prevalence of the derogatory term naiyou xiaosheng (“creamy pretty boy”), which critiqued men deemed handsome but effeminate. The popularity of such critiques indicated the once-diminished charm of soft masculinity in 1980s China.
If (trans)nationalist discourses dominated late twentieth-century gender debates, post-2000 China saw masculine ideals increasingly shaped by, and fluctuated with, the fantasies of women born under the one-child policy. This generation grew up with unprecedented gender awareness, avidly consumed popular culture, and gradually attained economic autonomy (Wu and Dong 2019). In their youth during the early 2000s, their preferences manifested as admiration for huayang nanzi (“stylish, tall-rich-handsome men”). This temporarily gave way in the 2010s to a pragmatic idealization of jingji shiyong nan (“economically practical men”), who meet basic marital expectations but lack the capital for upward mobility. The jingji shiyong nan trope emerged partly as a response to the shengnü (“leftover women”) panic that pressured unmarried women in their late twenties (Zeng 2024), and it reflected urban youth’s compromises amid marriage pressures and related economic concerns, especially the soaring housing costs in the 2010s. Yet as this generation achieved greater material stability, many began to resist the gendered pressures underlying the shengnü and jingji shiyong nan narratives (Wu and Dong 2019), pressing instead for more egalitarian affective bonds.
This evolving female subjectivity drove a broader revival of male “softness” in media production throughout the 2010s. Here, “softness” decentered literary cultivation and instead became hybridized with emotional availability, care-oriented domesticity, and a deliberate retreat from patriarchal authority. Korean Wave imports such as My Love from the Star (2013) and Descendants of the Sun (2016) popularized the “gentle oppa” ideal, while Chinese-language dramas like In Time with You (Wo ke neng bu hui ai ni, 2011) and Love is Not Blind (Shi lian san shi san tian, 2013) circulated the “warm men” imaginary—figures whose tenderness and companionship spoke to the emotional desires of independent professional women. Concurrently, reality shows such as Where Are We Going, Dad? (Ba ba qu na er, 2013–2017) reconfigured fatherhood from a distant authoritarian role to one emphasizing hands-on domestic labor and expressive intimacy, with male celebrities modeling “hands-on dad” personas (Nauta et al. 2022; Song and Hird 2014). These trends intersected with state pronatalist policies (e.g., two-child policy) and urban feminist critiques of men’s emotional and domestic disengagement. The ascendancy of “warm men” and “hands-on dads” reveals a broader discursive move from economic pragmatism to affective support as a valued currency of masculine appeal. In these popular media products, emotional intimacy became a commodified resource, packaged and circulated to cater to urban women’s desire for affective companionship and egalitarian partnerships.
Post-2020 Beta-male imaginaries represent a recombination of these two genealogies. Echoing but also revising the “warm men” and “hands-on dads” of the 2010s, Beta males introduce a more subdued, even passive response to societal expectations—features audiences readily code as wonang (hapless). They also depart from the bitter, sometimes misogynistic diaosi posture by presenting emotionally expressive, non-threatening masculine personas that resonate with working- and middle-class audiences in ways that are gender-inclusive. By structuring their imaginaries around a deliberate de-masculinization, Beta males retreat from patriarchal authority and competitive individualism. This move often locates them in women’s “friendzone,” where they become legible as objects of female sympathy, desire, and consumerist fantasy. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2004) notion of affective economy, this article situates Beta-male imaginaries within the broader affective landscape of post-pandemic China and examines how Beta characters navigate the “crisis tendencies” such as economic instability and the erosion of masculine authority (Bridges and Pascoe 2014). In doing so, it uncovers how precariousness may operate not merely as a condition of existence but as a mode of negotiating gender-class dynamics in China’s post-2020 digital publics.
Wonangfei, Precarity, and the Collective Affect of Post-2020 China
The meteoric rise of wonangfei as a neologism since 2023 is inseparable from two parallel developments in China’s digital entertainment landscape. The first is netizens’ playful grouping of actors like Lei Jiayin, Guo Jingfei, and Bai Ke under the label of the wonangfei saidao (hapless loser track). 1 The second is the viral spread of wonangfei wenxue (hapless loser memes). Together, these phenomena illuminate how a seemingly pessimistic vernacular has been transformed into a broadly resonant cultural imaginary.
The term saidao (track) is borrowed from China’s tech industry, where it originally designated emerging commercial growth sectors during the 2015 mobile internet boom. It has since broadened into a general metaphor for subcultural niches. The phrase wonangfei saidao, for its part, was a grassroots coinage rather than an industry initiative. Since 2023, netizens have been clustering actors who frequently portrayed hapless, ordinary men under this tongue-in-cheek label, celebrating them as unintentional specialists in middle-aged underdog roles. The designation captures a telling paradox for these role-specialist actors: what began as a marginal niche has attracted such surging interest that the track itself has become overcrowded and fiercely competitive—effectively “involuted,” leaving no room to “lie flat.” As the label gained traction, both the entertainment industry and the actors began deploying it strategically. They embraced the affective appeal of wonang—a state of hapless vulnerability—while insisting that their characters never tip into being entirely fei, or useless. 2 This distinction enabled them to court audience sympathy while sidestepping the pitfalls of “wrong career values” or “pessimistic” content that state media and cultural regulators aim to crack down on. 3
Running parallel is the viral spread of wonangfei wenxue (hapless loser memes) since late 2023. Though designated wenxue (literature), the phenomenon circulates primarily through memes and short videos with minimal text; hence, the term “meme” is used in translation while retaining the Chinese phrasing for contextual accuracy. Its defining rhetorical style is a sharp tonal reversal: an opening declaration of bravado that collapses, mid-sentence, into deflated self-deprecation. Exemplary Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok) videos such as You’ve Picked the Wrong Fight with Cotton (Ni suan shi re dao mian hua le) feature narrators declaring, “You dare mess with me? Well, messing with me is like kicking cotton!” Other memes, with lines like “Don’t test my limits, because I’ll just lower them,” wield self-deprecation as a passive resistance toward real-life pressures. Although contextually distinct, the entertainment industry’s wonangfei saidao and these online wonangfei wenxue phenomena generate intertextuality that celebrates vulnerability and resignation as a form of quiet resistance to the relentless demands of neoliberal productivity.
These twin wonangfei phenomena are, as earlier discussed, deeply embedded in the post-2020 economic downturn and the related proliferation of terms like tangping (lying flat), neijuan (involution), and bailan (letting things go) that articulate collective feelings of impotence. While earlier expressions of disaffection, such as the diaosi narrative and the sang (“feeling down”—performative melancholy and disengagement among youths) subculture of the 2010s, centered on individual frustration amid rapid economic growth, wonangfei indexes a more collective and systemic disillusionment. Traditional markers of hegemonic masculinity, such as career ambition and financial stability, are now subjected to more thorough deconstruction. Amid the globalizing precarity of the 2020s, hegemonic authority is increasingly seen as subjugating populations well beyond gender lines. Even so, within digital spaces, the gender-precarity nexus still manifests in frequent conflicting expressions. Thus, the seemingly gender-inclusive precarious imaginaries embodied by figures like wonangfei and Beta masculinity warrant further scrutiny.
To frame this precarity critically, the study dialogues with Hillenbrand’s (2023) account of precarious affective states documented among China’s underclass laborers—subjects whose vulnerability is shaped by the constant threat of political, economic, and social expulsion. The feeling of precariousness, however, extends beyond migrant labor and subversive activism; it saturates the everyday lives of most citizens through popular culture. Extending this precariousness paradigm from class to gender, the analysis that follows examines how the wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries coalesce in popular media, giving expression to the precarization of social institutions and intimate relationships, particularly within the realms of work and family.
Data and Methods
This study employs a qualitative research design to gain a deep understanding of the textual features and spectatorship dynamics surrounding wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries in contemporary Chinese popular films and television dramas. The research methodology encompasses textual analysis as its primary approach, supplemented by platform-based audience reception analysis, drawing on discourses from online social platforms including Douban, Weibo, and Bilibili.
Sample Selection and Justification
Through a purposive sampling technique, this study focuses on two prominent actors and their signature screen roles: Guo Jingfei’s portrayal of the beleaguered office worker Yu Huanshui in the 2020 web series If There Is No Tomorrow (Wo shi yu huan shui), and Bai Ke’s performance as the downtrodden clerk Jack Ma in the 2023 New Year film Johnny Keep Walking! (Nian hui bu neng ting). The selection is underpinned by three interrelated rationales.
First, the two actors are consistently identified by netizens with the wonangfei label in China’s entertainment industry—a colloquial designation for male stars whose on-screen personae epitomize middle-aged mediocrity and disempowerment. Evidence from the Hupu community platform, a hub for male-oriented interest discussions, corroborates this classification. As of February 27, 2025, a popular poll titled “Best On-Screen Wonangfei” listed 49 candidates. Among them, Lei Jiayin leads with 1,920 votes, followed by Guo Jingfei (1,222 votes) and Bai Ke (1,000 votes), all scoring exceptionally high ratings of 9.8 or 9.9 out of 10. 4 On Weibo, netizens further subdivide the wonangfei role-playing: Lei Jiayin is regarded as the “premium wonangfei” owing to his prolific presence in large-scale, big-budget screen productions. Guo Jingfei and Bai Ke, in contrast, are distinguished by more nuanced and emotionally specific performances. Guo is characterized as “the wonangfei who bites back when cornered,” whereas Bai is “the white-collar wonangfei whose diligence exudes a palpable sex appeal.” 5 These distinctions position Guo and Bai as more analytically productive case studies for examining the affective economies of Beta masculinity.
Second, the two roles are the most frequently invoked source texts for audiences discussing the actors’ Beta or wonangfei qualities, and both have generated public engagement substantial enough to render them analytically viable. Specifically, Yu Huanshui is the protagonist of If There Is No Tomorrow, a twelve-episode urban drama co-produced by iQIYI and Daylight Entertainment that premiered across Chinese video platforms on April 6, 2020. Based on the novel of the same name, the series follows Yu Huanshui, a marginal everyman ground down by humiliation at work, a failed marriage, and a friend’s betrayal, until a misdiagnosis of pancreatic cancer jolts him into an unlikely act of heroism. Despite its modest budget, it has accumulated 326,154 Douban ratings (score: 7.3), over 1.45 billion Weibo views, and 741,000 discussion threads under the series’ hashtag as of April 22, 2026. Notably, it is not the narrative arc as a whole but the clips of Yu Huanshui’s incremental breakdowns that have been most extensively commented upon, re-edited, and recirculated. Guo Jingfei’s “going mad” performance thus became the primary currency of audience engagement.
The other focal role, Bai Ke’s Jack Ma, comes from Johnny Keep Walking! a workplace satirical comedy released on December 29, 2023. The film opens with a round of corporate layoffs, after which factory fitter Johnny is mistakenly transferred to headquarters. Caught up in this “misplacement” incident, the HR manager, Jack Ma, is forced to conceal and maneuver around the situation to save his job. With 1,104,810 Douban ratings (score: 8.1) and nearly $180 million at the box office in mainland China, the film achieved wide engagement and considerable commercial reach on a modest budget—much like If There Is No Tomorrow. Bai Ke’s portrayal of the bespectacled, perpetually overworked Jack Ma particularly emerged as the film’s most affectively resonant figure, inspiring waves of actor-centered hashtags and fan commentary that exceeded the film’s own narrative reach. Audiences celebrated the endurance and modesty of this Beta male character, further dubbing him as exuding charming “husband vibes.”
The two performances articulate distinct yet complementary modalities of Beta masculinity that illuminate a broader cultural renegotiation of gender and aspiration in contemporary China. According to audience reception, Guo Jingfei’s Yu Huanshui embodies a “Beta going mad” archetype: confronted with a symbolic death sentence, he abandons the rationalized performance of docile subordination and weaponizes emotional excess—what netizens celebrate as fafeng (going mad)—to disrupt the very power structures that once subjugated him. Bai Ke’s Jack Ma, conversely, is romanticized and sympathetically framed as the “Beta with husband vibes”: a figure whose precarity is navigated through relational attunement and a quiet commitment to domestic and professional obligations. The model of Beta masculinity is thus proposed to be predicated on affective reliability rather than competitive dominance. Together, the two figurations register a social-psychological distancing from the Darwinian imperatives of success-ology and patriarchal authority, giving imaginative form instead to emergent gender configurations shaped by neoliberal exhaustion and the collapse of meritocratic promise.
Research Methods
The primary methodological approach is close textual analysis. Attending to narrative structure, character development, and thematic patterns across the selected works and their adjacent screen texts, the analysis focuses on key sequences—moments of quiet endurance and cathartic outburst from the Beta males—read as “public texts” (Dai 2015) that invite audience commentary, affective projection, and identification. These illuminate how Beta masculinity is constructed and negotiated within mainland China’s entertainment mediascape.
To complement the textual analysis, the study contextualizes its findings through the examination of platform-based audience reception data. Publicly available discourses on Douban, Weibo, and Bilibili, including short reviews, hashtag discussions, and user-generated video compilations, are collected to map the affective contours of spectatorship. These materials provide insight into how audiences engage with, interpret, and emotionally invest in wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries across digital platforms. By triangulating textual and para-textual evidence, the study aims to elucidate how wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries operate not merely as fictional representations, but as dynamic sites of affective negotiation and cultural critique that echo the wider socioeconomic landscape.
Performing Irrationality: Guo Jingfei and “Betas Going Mad”
Guo Jingfei (b. 1979) is a Chinese actor whose early career was rooted in stage drama before establishing himself as a versatile comic presence across film and television. Since his widely noted performance as the inept, middle-aged character Su Mingcheng in the family drama All is Well (Dou ting hao, 2019), Guo has increasingly gravitated toward middle-aged underdog characters. He has developed a recognizable performance mode in which prolonged suppression of humiliation, resentment, and exhaustion eventually ruptures into cathartic, destabilizing outbursts.
This mode finds its most concentrated expression in If There Is No Tomorrow, where Guo plays Yu Huanshui, a man misdiagnosed with terminal cancer. This misdiagnosis propels Yu to abandon years of docile endurance and reclaim his dignity through a series of chaotic reckonings, which see him boldly stand up to exploitative bosses, exposing corporate corruption, recovering long-overdue debts from a friend, and challenging his indifferent marriage. He transforms from a passive absorber of contempt into a fierce, disordered challenger of societal indifference and entrenched hierarchies. In the unconventional contemporary spy drama Enemy (Dui shou, 2021), Guo portrays the husband in a spy couple navigating daily life’s minutiae while completing espionage tasks with limited resources. The couple’s strikingly mundane, financially strained existence deviates from James Bond-style glamour and deconstructs the nationalist, hyper-heroic tropes typical of the spy genre. Overburdened by incessant life troubles, the character occasionally sheds his icy professionalism, erupting in explosive defiance. Guo’s more recent dramas, such as As Husband as Wife (Xiao fu qi, 2024) and Small Police Station (Zhu zhan, 2025), feature similar ordinary, frustrated, and occasionally emotionally disrupted Beta roles, though these later iterations are more modulated compared to the extremity of Yu Huanshui.
In the rationalist framework of modern society, “rage” and “craze” have long been coded as feminine pathologies—the madwoman, the hysterical mother, the crazy lady—while male emotionality has been systematically suppressed or delegitimized. This gendered asymmetry, which frames men as rational and women as emotional (Basow 1992; Connell 2005), has historically marginalized women’s emotional expressions while naturalizing male stoicism as the default register of masculine authority. Characters like Yu Huanshui offer a subversive, darkly humorous construction of male “madness” that challenges these gendered binaries. Yu embodies a concentrated, exaggerated version of the multifaceted pressures facing middle-aged working-class men in contemporary China, from professional failure and familial strain to existential stagnation. Living in a state of perpetual defeat and self-doubt, his expressionless face and physical softness signal a quiet failure to measure up to—and a retreat from—the hustle culture and aspirational striving that define modern masculinity. His attempts to maintain dignity only lead to further punishment. Using a company gift as a social prop during a family gathering, for instance, he ends up humiliated rather than admired. These episodes highlight the structural pressures of Alpha male hegemony across both professional and personal realms. The cancer misdiagnosis, functioning as a symbolic death sentence, catalyzes Yu’s decision to abandon the rational composure modern society demands. He weaponizes his emotions into a performative “madness,” upending the power dynamics that have long silenced him.
According to Foucault (1976, 171–72), since the nineteenth century, the perception of death has led “the individual [to] find himself, escaping from a monotonous, average life…Death left its old, tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.” Similarly, Yu Huanshui’s brush with death reactivates this lyrical core, performing the so-called “singular individuality,” or “madness,” that society’s rational mechanisms normally objectify, discipline, and confine (Foucault et al. 2006, 182). In the drama, Yu’s embrace of irrationality paradoxically reverses his social standing, earning him newfound respect, professional advancement, familial reconciliation, and even the repayment of debts. The cathartic force of this absurd reversal resonates powerfully with audiences. As of March 1, 2025, the hashtag #Guo Jingfei Acts Like Me: Better to Go Mad Than to Internalize Stress# on Weibo had garnered 1,052 discussions and 1.33 million views. On Bilibili, searches for “Guo Jingfei in Madness” yielded over 1,000 videos, with the most popular, titled “Guo Jingfei: My Spiritual Mentor,” amassing 210,000 likes and 2,800 comments since its upload on September 28, 2023. Comments such as “Let me act in one episode, I can’t imagine how satisfying it would be” and “I envy how he doesn’t stutter or cry when he’s furious” reveal a collective yearning to vicariously inhabit this “madness” as emotional release. 6 By linking Guo’s characters to the pronoun “I,” audiences project their own frustrations onto his performances, seeking solace in the virtual realm where “madness” can be safely territorialized and contained without rupturing the rational order of everyday life.
A scrutiny of Guo Jingfei’s “Beta Going Mad” portrayals and their cultural resonance reveals a subversion of patriarchal emotional regimes that have long policed gendered expressions of rationality and affect. Whereas norms valorize male stoicism while relegating overt emotionality to the feminized “Other” (Connell 2005), Guo’s characters destabilize this binary through performative eruptions of rage and madness. Certainly, the rationalist framework of modern society condemns such outbursts as threats to public order, pathologizing them through dividing practices of normalcy. But it is also the atomization, alienation, and emotional suppression endemic to this hyper-efficient societal machine that creates a pervasive need for catharsis. Virtual platforms thus become controlled zones where irrationality is safely simulated and subversively rehearsed. Within these spaces, prosumers, who are simultaneously consumers and remixers of online content, collectively engage the “Betas Going Mad” imaginary. Through it, they reconfigure masculinity beyond its conventional emotional strictures, venting accumulated stress without disrupting the outward composure maintained in real life. The digital mediascape in contemporary China, in this sense, allows the performance of “madness” to substitute for its real-world enactment, sustaining the rational surface of everyday life while offering a temporary escape from its constraints.
Romancing the Ordinary: Bai Ke and “Betas With Husband Vibes”
Bai Ke (b. 1988) first gained notice as a member of CUCN201, the online dubbing group that localized a Japanese comedy manga for Chinese audiences, and later cemented his “everyman” persona through the deadpan diaosi character Wang Dachui in the hilarious web series Unexpectedness (2013–2015). His mainstream breakthrough arrived with Johnny Keep Walking! where his portrayal of the beleaguered, perpetually overworked HR functionary Jack Ma went viral, earning him fan-coined labels such as “China’s top Beta male” and “Beta with peak husband vibes.”
As introduced earlier, Johnny Keep Walking! centers around themes of corporate layoffs, bureaucratic dysfunction, overwork culture, and worker precarity. Its narrative follows Johnny (Dong Chengpeng), a factory fitter mistakenly promoted to a corporate position, who gradually navigates this alien environment and, driven by idealism, ultimately exposes the company’s corruption at the annual party alongside colleagues Jack Ma (Bai Ke) and Penny Pan (Zhuang Dafei). Through quick montage sequences, the film’s dual-diegetic temporal framework juxtaposes the camaraderie of collective factory life in the 1990s with the alienating corporate realities of 2019. By applying the grassroots heroism of its trio—Johnny, Jack, and Penny—the film invites its audience to momentarily enter a dramatically lifelike utopia where everyday frustration and pressures find imaginative release. Within this fantasized grassroots activism, Johnny stands as the idealist civilian hero, Penny embodies a free-spirited independence, and Jack represents the diligent everyman ground down by workplace culture. Among the three, it is Jack who has most deeply resonated with audiences and earned their greatest affection.
Jack’s appeal is rooted in the recognizable texture of his exhaustion. He works constant overtime, wears a professional smile, masters corporate jargon, and prioritizes job security over dignity. He rationalizes systemic dysfunction with circular logic: “what exists is reasonable; ” “leaders must have exceptional qualities to become leaders.” His most charged moment comes when, cornered on a rooftop over whether to report corruption, he finally breaks: “I’m suffering too, I have a family to feed, what will they do if I lose my job?” Being another on-the-edge scene that echoes Hillenbrand’s On the Edge (2023), the outburst distils the physical, psychological, and emotional toll of neoliberal precarity among modern Chinese workers.
Paralleling Huang’s (2021) reading of the 2010s diaosi wordplay, Jack’s wonangfei and Beta-male imaginary is similarly constructed through an ambivalent class position oscillating between identifying with the economically dominant and recognizing the truly subordinate. The context is further complicated by neoliberalism and feminist consumerism (Peng 2021), as evidenced by female audiences’ gendered romanticization of this character. Among the 376,025 short reviews accumulated on Douban by February 28, 2025, five of the ten-most liked focused exclusively on Bai Ke, celebrating his “husband vibes,” crowning him the “Beta King of Chinese entertainment,” and capturing his affect through phrases like “destined punching bag,” “worn-down worker expression,” and “striking a chord with the human psyche,” each garnering over 10,000 likes. 7 On Weibo, hashtags like #Bai Ke, Husband Vibes# and #Bai Ke, Beta# amassed 1.1 million and 3,176 discussions, respectively, with nearly 30 million combined views. This romanticization extends beyond the single film, as seen in the 2023 melodrama Lady’s Character (Nǚ shi de pin ge). One of the most lauded scenes is when the female protagonist Yao Wei (Wan Qian) comes home exhausted from work, her husband Cheng Liang (Bai Ke) deftly moves a chair out of the way with his foot, unties his apron with one hand, and simultaneously envelops Yao in a comforting hug. The seamless choreography of these gestures prompts romantics to comment with wistful longing for such domestic solace: “I wish I had a Bai Ke, too. Coming home after a hard day and getting a hug like that would be wonderful.” 8
Stimulated by transmedia fan edits, memes, and social media discourse, the lovable Beta persona becomes both a performative script and a participatory cultural arena. Discursively distancing from domineering Alpha archetypes, it offers an image of masculinity that feels accessible and emotionally reliable. Unlike the earlier diaosi figure, which has been read as a predominantly male-coded and infrapolitical online phenomenon (Cao 2017; Huang 2021), Bai Ke’s current Beta imaginary adapts to—and is actively reshaped by—rising female consumerism. It also navigates the state’s stricter policing of “vulgar” or “pessimistic” online trends such as diaosi and tangping, while retaining a micrological attention to the textures of precarious life.
However, it remains questionable whether this Beta-based affective economy actually dislodges entrenched gender hierarchies or merely repackages them in more palatable forms. Scholarship on shifting masculinities cautions that softer, more sensitive styles do not necessarily advance women’s emancipation (Messner 1993) and may instead obscure or produce new inequalities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014). Read through this lens, Jack’s submissive, accommodating demeanor within a rigidly masculinist corporate bureaucracy aligns him with conventionally feminized roles. His placement in the “friendzone” of female colleagues suggests a narrative that ostensibly moves away from Alpha masculinity yet may also forfeit his capacity to disrupt the very gendered power structures it critiques. His precarity thereby mirrors and accommodates, rather than challenges, the constrained self-imagining of many women professionals, rendering this representation “more style than substance” (Messner 1993). The same tension surfaces in Lady’s Character. Although the “Alpha female vs. Beta male” dynamic seems to reconfigure domesticity and careerism, its resolution follows a familiar trajectory: the heroine’s eventual embrace of motherhood, facilitated by her supportive partner, echoes what scholars have identified as the contours of China’s neoliberal feminism (Peng 2021). The idealized Beta partner thus may merely offer women a temporary illusion of empowerment while gently reconciling them to the conventional roles of understanding wife and devoted mother.
Conclusion
The shifting landscape of Chinese screen masculinities is a partial but potent index of the broader cultural recalibration in post-pandemic China. As this article has traced, the genealogy of the “Beta” and wonangfei imaginaries—rooted in an intercultural transcreation of the ABO universe and a vernacular discourse of haplessness—has crystallized into a distinct archetype that departs from the Alpha hegemony. Whereas recent portrayal of traditional Alpha masculinity, such as the bossy CEO in Gentlemen of East 8th (Dong ba qu de xian sheng men, 2022) and the overbearing tycoon in Only for Love (Yi ai wei ying, 2023), have met with widespread criticism for their stereotypical dominance and disrespectful of women, the Beta-male figure has gained cultural traction precisely by embodying a non-hegemonic, emotionally attuned, and socially average masculinity. This transition, fueled by digital feminist critiques of “male chauvinism” and “toxic masculinity” (Huang 2024; Song 2022), reflects a heightened vigilance against the hegemony hidden beneath the guise of “protective” masculinity. It also underscores a tacit resistance to social Darwinist narratives and a growing appetite for representations that resonate with the collective precarity of the post-2020 generation. Channeled through the platformized affective economy, this reception dynamic reconfigures wonangfei and Beta imaginaries from often marginal, comedic side roles into widely accepted and even sought-after career tracks for Chinese middle-aged actors.
Commercial films and television series function as the “public texts” of our era—their public role has been further amplified by the ubiquity of social media. As Jinhua Dai (2015) argues, these “public texts” serve dual purposes: on the one hand, they provide a shared cultural vocabulary that shapes public discourse and fosters communal identification, allowing audiences to find pleasure and subjective recognition within them. The recent surge in Beta-male protagonists reflects this dynamic. Circulated through platforms such as Douban, Weibo, and Bilibili, their depictions of precarity offer an emotional release for post-2020 disillusionment. These embodied renderings of everyday struggles and quiet despair tap into a broader emotional-political spectrum marked by distrust toward hustle culture and the relentless demands of neoliberal competition. This affective alignment transforms the Beta archetype into a richly layered narrative space, where audiences find both catharsis and critique. Whether Bai Ke’s characters, whose meek endurance is romanticized and sympathetically framed as “Betas with Husband Vibes,” or Guo Jingfei’s explosive outbursts in his “Betas Going Mad” predicaments, such performances imaginatively reenact the collective survival experiences of post-2020 urban society.
On the other hand, these “public texts” ought not only to reflect but also actively shape and reproduce cultural norms, driven by the populace’s appetite for creativity and the goal of maximizing audience reach (Dai 2015). As seen in gender-centric analyses and audience discussions outlined above, Guo and Bai’s nuanced performances offer a counter-narrative to the hyper-competitive Alpha masculinity ideal. The cultural resonance of Beta imaginaries reflects a broader call for the reassessment of success, ideal masculinity, and emotional intimacy in post-pandemic China. Social Darwinism, meritocracy, and hegemonic masculinity marginalize not only women but also ordinary men burdened by pressures of performative success. Beta imaginaries, with their emotional authenticity and relational solidarity, thus provide a discursive space to negotiate urban working- and middle-class masculinities and femininities. Crucially, their non-hegemonic qualities intersect with China’s evolving feminist discourses, as women increasingly critique toxic masculinity and demand renegotiation of their roles in professional, familial, and marital contexts. Women’s empathy for Beta males—seen in online discussions romanticizing their vulnerability or applauding their defiance—turns Beta’s “failure” into a site for reimagining gender, power, and intimacy.
The rising cultural prominence of Beta-male protagonists has undeniably diversified gender representations in China’s mediascapes. Yet this trend also exposes a gender asymmetry: while Beta males are celebrated for their “relatable flaws,” female characters with similar wonangfei traits are either absent or narratively disciplined. Consider Jia Ling’s role in YOLO (2024): an initially hapless heroine finds symbolic redemption in a boxing match that transforms her physically and emotionally. Her journey, though framed as feminist empowerment, inadvertently reinscribes the neoliberal expectation that women must overcome their precariousness and constantly improve themselves to achieve societal validation (Peng 2021). Furthermore, the growing critical scrutiny on hybrid masculinities (Bridges and Pascoe 2014; Eisen and Yamashita 2019) prompts us to query the representativeness of wonangfei and Beta masculinities: do they genuinely embody the precarity born of structural oppression, or are they merely a commercialized appropriation of elements drawn from various marginalized and subordinated Others? It becomes essential to interrogate the contextualized manifestations of each form of precarity, along with the systemic forces that underlie them. It should also be noted that the emotive embrace of wonangfei and Beta-male imaginaries risks sliding into an escapist neoliberal fantasy—their romanticization and dramatization threaten to aestheticize individual precarity while obscuring the patriarchal nature of socioeconomic structures. Therefore, far from being mere spectacle, these portrayals should also be read as affective provocations, demanding collective action toward substantive equity and justice.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.