ZHU GUANG, a 25-year-old product tester, projects casual cool in his red Adidas jacket and canvas shoes. He sports the shadowy wisps of a moustache and goatee, as if he has the ambition to grow a beard but not the ability. On paper he is one of the millions of up-and-coming winners of the Chinese economy: a university graduate, the only child of factory workers in Shanghai, working for Lenovo, one of China’s leading computer-makers.
朱光（音译）是一个25岁的产品测试工程师，他穿着红色阿迪达斯夹克和帆布鞋，显得既休闲又时尚，上下唇那稀稀疏疏的胡须似乎在彰显他那有心无力的蓄须的抱负。本科文凭，上海工人家庭独子，供职于中国最大的计算机制造商联想集团：理论上，他是中国经济增长造就的数百万人生赢家之一，前途一片光明。
But Mr Zhu considers himself a loser, not a winner. He earns 4,000 yuan ($650) a month after tax and says he feels like a faceless drone at work. He eats at the office canteen and goes home at night to a rented, 20-square-metre (215-square-foot) room in a shared flat, where he plays online games. He does not have a girlfriend or any prospect of finding one. “Lack of confidence”, he explains when asked why not. Like millions of others, he mockingly calls himself, in evocative modern street slang, a diaosi, the term for a loser that literally translates as “male pubic hair”. Figuratively it is a declaration of powerlessness in an economy where it is getting harder for the regular guy to succeed. Calling himself by this derisive nickname is a way of crying out, “like Gandhi”, says Mr Zhu, only partly in jest. “It is a quiet form of protest.”
但朱先生认为自己是个失败者。他觉得自己只是公司里的一个无名小卒，做着单调繁重的工作，领着微薄的4000元人民币（650美元）税后月薪；白天在公司食堂吃饭，晚上回到20平米（215平方英尺）的合租屋房间玩玩网游；由于“缺乏自信”，他目前还是单身，短期内找到女朋友的希望也很渺茫。他恶搞般地用流行语称自己为“屌丝”，与中国千百万年轻人一样，他对这个词有着深深的共鸣。“屌丝”指代失败者，字面含义是“男性阴毛”，象征意义则是一种无力感的宣泄，因年轻人深感在当今的经济环境下，普通人越来越难获得成功。给自己安上这个讽刺的绰号是在表达一种抱怨，“就像甘地，表达一种无声的抗议”，朱先生半开玩笑地说。
Calling yourself a diaosi has also become a proud statement of solidarity with the masses against the perceived corruption of the wealthy. The word itself entered the language only recently, appealing to office grunts across the country, especially in the IT industry. A mostly male species, diaosi are often daydreamers with poor social skills and an obsession with online gaming. They are slightly different from Japan’s marriage-shunning “herbivore” young men in that fewer of them have chosen their station in life. Society has chosen it for them, especially with property prices climbing well beyond their reach. Several recent studies show that, while incomes across Chinese society continue to rise, social mobility has worsened. Yi Chen of Nanjing Audit University and Frank A. Cowell of the London School of Economics found that, since 2000, people at the bottom of society were more likely than in the 1990s to stay where they were. “China has become more rigid,” they conclude.
普通民众不无自豪地自称“屌丝”其实也是一种抗议富裕阶层贪腐行为的统一宣言。这个词汇新近进入中文即受到了白领们的广泛追捧，IT行业尤甚。“屌丝”绝大部分是男性，喜欢做白日梦，不善交际，并且酷爱网游。但与日本的不婚一族“食草男”不同的是，“屌丝”们极少出于自愿选择这一身份。在房价飙升，日益高不可攀的现实下，他们不得不无奈地接受社会给他们安排的位置。最近的一些研究显示，虽然中国社会各阶层收入都在提升，阶层间的流动性却降低了。南京审计学院的易晨（音译）和伦敦政治经济学院的弗兰克·A·考威尔（Frank·A·Cowell）发现，从2000年开始，社会底层民众向上流动的概率比90年代要低，他们得出的结论是，“中国社会阶层的固化在加剧”。
An online video sketch show, “Diaosi Man”, shown on Sohu.com, an internet portal, mercilessly mocks the tribe. Since its debut in 2012, the show’s episodes have been streamed more than 1.5 billion times. In one recent episode a man tries to impress his beautiful dinner date with how busy he is at his job. He then receives a phone call from work, apologetically takes his leave to go to the office and finally pops up again as a waiter when his date asks for the bill. In the same episode a frustrated new driver curses repeatedly at a Lamborghini in the next lane and screams, “Are you bullying me because I don’t know any traffic cops?” In the next scene he is in a neck brace and his nose is broken.
《屌丝男士》是一部拿屌丝群体开涮的网络短剧，自2012年在搜狐网开播以来，点击量超过了15亿次。在最近播出的一集中，男主角为了打动漂亮的约会对象，装出一副工作很忙的样子，他在接了一个工作电话后满怀歉意地离开了约会的餐厅，女孩结账的时候却发现服务员正是男主角。该集中还有一幕，男主角是一个狂躁的新手司机，他不停地咒骂着旁边车道的兰博基尼，喊道“是不是欺负我交通队没有人？”下一幕里他被兰博基尼的车主揍得鼻青脸肿。
Mr Zhu says what makes him a diaosi is that he is the son of factory workers. He is not fu er dai—second-generation rich—or guan er dai—the son of powerful government officials (it does not escape a diaosi’s notice that those two categories often overlap). He and his diaosi colleagues feel that, with connections or cash, they might have attended a better university and found a better job.
朱先生说由于父母是工人，他只能是个屌丝，而不是“富二代”或者“官二代”（屌丝们发现这两个群体常常是重叠的）。朱先生和他的屌丝同伴们认为，“富二代”和“官二代”有人脉有钞票，他们能够上更好的大学，找到更好的工作。
With after-tax income of nearly $8,000 a year, Mr Zhu would look to many people in China comfortably on his way to the middle class. He is among the lower wage-earners at Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai, but even many higher earners call themselves diaosi, or refer to themselves as “IT labourers”. Though their salaries are above average even in Shanghai—which had China’s third-highest annual urban disposable income per person in 2012 at 40,000 yuan—the cost of appearing successful is stratospheric. A fancy flat and a cool car are well beyond their reach. They are wage slaves who cannot hope to be gao fu shuai—tall, rich and handsome—and marry a woman who is bai fu mei—fair-skinned, rich and beautiful.
朱先生的税后年收入为8000美元，在奔向中产的道路上可以轻松秒杀很多人了，但在上海张江高科技园区，他的收入只能算中下水平。但那里的高收入人群也自称“屌丝”或“IT民工”，因为在上海这个全国第三富裕的城市（2012年城镇人均可支配收入达到40,000元人民币），跻身成功阶层的价码高得令人咂舌，一套高档公寓和一部好车远远超出他们的经济承受能力。他们是工资的奴隶，变不成高富帅，也娶不了白富美。
This might seem quite normal for a rapidly developing economy. But Zhang Yi, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank in Beijing, says this diaosi feeling of relative deprivation is a troubling consequence of China’s growing wealth gap. In an interview devoted to the subject for the website of Phoenix Television, a Hong Kong satellite network, Mr Zhang concluded that people at the bottom feel utterly alienated. They feel less hopeful than they did before of ever moving up in life, he said.
经济飞速发展之际，这一切似乎不可避免，但中国社会科学院的社会学家张翼（音译）表示，“屌丝”们内心的相对被剥夺感是中国贫富差距扩大带来的令人担忧的结果。香港凤凰卫视网站策划了一个关于“屌丝”的系列专题，张翼在接受该专题采访时总结说，社会底层的民众感觉他们被彻底抛弃，由于上升渠道越来越窄，他们也越来越绝望。
In spite of this, however, they do still represent a marketing opportunity. There are, after all, many more of them than there are millionaires, even though it can be difficult to define the target market. At Dianping, a website offering restaurant reviews and consumer deals, Schubert You targets very low-wage workers in smaller cities (earning about $150 to $450 a month) with coupons and group discounts. Mr You does not consider the IT workers of Shanghai and Beijing to be true diaosi.
尽管如此，这个群体仍然意味着营销机会，毕竟屌丝要远远多过百万富翁，但要定义目标市场却不那么容易。在大众点评网上，舒伯特·尤（Schubert You）专门针对小城市的低收入工人（月收入在150-450美元之间）提供优惠券和团购。尤先生并不认为上海和北京的IT从业人员是真正的“屌丝”。
But surveys show they believe they are. Last year Analysys International, a research company in Beijing, asked a broad cross-section of office workers if they saw themselves as diaosi. More than 90% of programmers and journalists and about 80% of food and service industry and marketing workers said they did. Those surveyed who least identified with being losers were civil servants, working for the government or the Communist Party.
调查却显示他们自我认同为“屌丝”。去年，北京一家调研公司易观国际（Analysys International）在多个行业的白领中开展了一项调查，询问他们是否自认为是“屌丝”。90%以上的程序员和记者，80%左右的饮食及服务业员工和市场营销人员给出了肯定的回答。调查还显示，公务员群体自认为是“屌丝”的比例是最低的。
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