“Officially diagnosed as X”: self-diagnosis memes as semiotic critique in post-pandemic China

This study examines how young netizens in post-pandemic China use novel diagnostic metaphors to articulate embodied distress and everyday critique. Focusing on the meme “officially diagnosed as X” on Xiaohongshu (RED), it draws on Critical Metaphor Analysis within a qualitatively driven mixed-methods framework. The analysis shows how mundane or absurd entities (e.g. fictional personas or food items) are reworked into self-diagnostic labels that make bodily and affective vulnerability publicly intelligible. Beyond stylistic play, these metaphorical diagnoses foreground the “sick body” as a moral and cultural site for negotiating dominant norms of health, productivity, and normalcy, while enabling shared feelings of exhaustion, precarity, and ironic detachment, and supporting everyday adjustment in contexts where crisis is experienced as ordinary. The practice is internally ambivalent: while exposing normative pressures, it may also reproduce diagnostic classifications and shift structural critique into symbolic expression. The study contributes to debates on diagnostic metaphorical novelty, affective politics, and vernacular meaning-making in contemporary Chinese youth digital culture.