Whether you know it or not, for the past few months in China, everything has been classified neatly into three categories: the common, the arty and the “2B”. Be it your phone, your apartment or your personality, all are subject to the new system of categorization imposed by web-savvy youth.
It all started with a post on the social networking site Douban in October 2011, calling for people to upload three photos that they felt showed the difference between “the common youth, the arty youth and the 2B youth.” By the time the post closed, it had received 6,879 sets of photos. While not all of the images are ingenious, the three categories outlasted the post and entered the vernacular of young Chinese as a representation of their perception of the world.
The term “arty youth” (文艺青年) has been around for a long time. Literally, it means “literary and artistic youth,” young people who love books, music and the arts. They may be truly artistic, or they might just be people who dress and talk in accordance with the current arty fashion.
As being an “arty youth” has become increasingly trendy, using wenyi (文艺 art and literature) as an adjective has also become popular. For example, if you want to compliment your colleague on her taste in music, you’re never wrong if you say, “Your taste is very wenyi” (你的品位很文艺). Typical wenyi things include French movies, underground music and bars in places like Beijing’s Nanluoguxiang. You can forget about Chinese young people’s former favorite term, “petite bourgeoisie” (小资), which is positively barbaric compared to wenyi.
The term “2B youth” (2B青年), is not new, but the wildly popular Douban post made it a genre of its own. 二 (two) is Beijing slang, loosely interpreted as “silly.” Combined with the second character (another frequently deployed bit of slang), the term describes a person who is exceedingly simple-minded, clumsy or weird. When applied to things, the tone of this word carries a harsh connotation, but when applied to people, it’s not always meant to be derogatory. In most cases, a 2B person is anything but mean. They are more likely to be goofy, and their silliness harms no one but themselves. At times it’s hard to draw a line between arty and 2B; an authentic arty youth usually displays very obvious 2B qualities.
Young people who do not fall into either of those categories unfortunately are relegated to the “common youth” category (普通青年), i.e. an uninteresting, featureless person. Labeling someone a “common youth” is a true insult. If you can’t manage being arty, or arty and 2B, at least be 2B rather than common. That is, unless someone calls you an “arty youth”. Then, in accordance with the Chinese tradition of modesty in response to a compliment, you can reply by saying, “No, I’m just a common youth.”
Applying the categories to things, rather than people, follows the same logic and is fairly straightforward. In film, for example, Jia Zhangke is a director of wenyi movies, and Zhang Yimou is a director of 2B movies, while James Cameron is a director of common movies. Or phones: the iPhone is now ubiquitous enough that it has completed its transition from a wenyi phone to a common phone, while a copycat phone that looked exactly like the iPhone is 2B. Got it?
