This paper is based on an ethnographic study of a phenomenon which emerged in contemporary mainland China, zhai (literal translation: ‘residence’), which refers to a tendency towards staying indoors. Chinese media began in the mid to late 2000s to report on a trend among urban youth of labelling oneself zhai, a term that would come to be associated with a generation of Chinese that came of age alongside the expansion of the Internet and digital media. My research, conducted over a twelve-month period in Beijing prior to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, found that while zhai had lost popularity as an identity label, zhai behavior had become absorbed into mainstream youth culture. Research conducted among youth in the early stages of digitalisation in China found that, in offering spaces for engaging in semi-anonymous informal interactions, Chinese digital platforms provided youth with opportunities to experience relative freedom from hierarchical offline relationships (Clark 2012; Herold & Marolt 2011), as well as opportunities to interact with strangers in contexts where “people can be truly honest, in a way that is impossible in everyday interactions” (Cockain, 2012: 133). Today, as much everyday interpersonal communication in China has shifted to WeChat and other platforms offering different scales and parameters of sociality (Miller 2016), different forms of connectivity – and relationality – have emerged, complicating experiences of authenticity in youths’ interactions. This paper sheds light on these different forms in the context of zhai youth in urban China, and, in exploring some of the ways in which digital technologies facilitate the behaviour of zhai, probes the role of offline interactions – with people, places and things – in this context. In doing so, it speaks directly to a broader question: what are the impacts of intensifying digitalisation on relationality in urban China?
