JY
correojiayun@gmail.com
Instagram: @fabricant_fang
Jiayun Yan (JY) is a Shanghai-based, Singapore-raised strategist, editor, and cultural researcher working at the intersection of Chinese youth culture, internet trends, and cross-border storytelling. She leads social media and content strategy at RADII Media, develops emerging-culture and trend reports with various creative studios, and has contributed to platforms like Sabukaru and Nero Editions internationally. Her work bridges Chinese digital culture, contemporary aesthetics, and global creative networks.
CV upon request
SELECTED WORK NERO EDITIONS
L’internet cinese è una lingua marziana
JULY 2025, NERO EDITIONS
Research, Cultural Analysis & Editorial Contribution
DESCRIPTION
JY contributed research and writing to Nero Editions, offering a deep exploration of the linguistic and cultural complexity of China’s internet ecosystem. Her article, “The Chinese Internet Is a Martian Language,” examines how Chinese netizens have developed a fast-mutating, highly coded, and often opaque linguistic universe that can seem alien—even to Chinese speakers outside specific platforms or generational cohorts.
Set against the backdrop of China’s dynamic platform landscape, the piece unpacks how memes, neologisms, inside jokes, and micro-slang form a semi-secret language that both reflects and shapes local digital culture. Rather than treating memes or buzzwords as isolated cultural quirks, JY’s analysis frames them as a living system of communication: adaptive, tactical, emotionally expressive, and deeply intertwined with platform governance, censorship filters, and collective creativity.
Through this lens, she situates Chinese internet language not as a novelty but as a cultural technology—a highly inventive communication method born from the need for speed, ambiguity, and coded expression. This “Martian language” is playful but strategic, hyper-local yet globally resonant, and constantly migrating across platforms like Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu.
For the article, JY brought her expertise in Chinese youth culture, meme systems, and digital behavior into a long-form narrative that makes complex online communication legible to global readers. She decoded the origins and evolution of key slang, traced how buzzwords emerge from specific subcultures, and explained how linguistic creativity becomes a tool for emotional release, social bonding, and navigating platform constraints.
She also connected these linguistic phenomena to broader cultural patterns—China’s post-aspirational youth mindset, the rise of niche aesthetic communities, the negotiation of identity on tightly moderated platforms, and the speed at which online jokes evolve into shared cultural memory. Her narrative framing ensured the piece remained both academically grounded and culturally alive, accessible to readers with little background in Chinese internet culture.