The people in China who end up becoming creators of tech- and culture-related content — the kind consumed by China’s billion-strong wang min (网民) — are often those bottle-half-full Chinese youths who dropped out of U.S. universities. These are the modern 邯郸学步 types: they have not truly mastered the foreigners’ stuff, but have already managed to forget whatever little they knew about their own ancestors.
Take a simple example. Suppose you are interested in the term wang min, as I am, so you run a search. What are the top results? The usual suspects: Wikipedia, Baidu Baike, and their countless copy-paste offspring. And what do these geniuses tell you? 网民 is the Chinese translation of the American word “netizen.”
Yes, you heard that right — wang min is an American word!
Here’s Bai-du-Bai-ke: “网民泛指通过计算机和互联网进行网络活动的人群.” (“wang min is a general term that refers to groups of people who interact with each other through computers and the internet.” 百度百科.)
And Wi-ji-Bai-ke: “网路用户，又称网友、网民（英语：netizen），一般是泛指网络使用者…来自英语的Netizen，是混成词，语源自互联网（Internet）及公民（citizen）两套概念。” (“Internet user, also called internet friends or wang min, a general term for internet users… originated from the English ‘netizen,’ a blend of ‘internet’ and ‘citizen.’” 维基百科.)
Yes, you heard it.
American word.
Right.
So the story, apparently, goes like this: somewhere in the land of freedom and global leadership in everything — including fooling wang min worldwide — someone coined “netizen” out of the two American words “internet” and “citizen.” Then a few Chinese people who can’t read English but can read American realized, with brilliant originality, that wang min would make the perfect translation.
Give me a break.
First off, if wang min already existed and was then used to make the translation, would that not imply that wang min was already a word in Chinese before the translation? If so, talk of the Chinese term having “originated” from the American word would make no sense.
Secondly, if that logic were correct, then yan min (烟民) must have originated from the American word “smoker,” and gu min (股民) must be a translation of “retail investor.” That is obviously nonsense.
The word wang min does not come from “netizen.” It comes from min (民). And min is older, heavier, and far more dangerous than any borrowed tech slang.
What “Min” Has Always Meant
In ancient China, society was divided into liang min (良民) and jian min (贱民). Liang min were legally recognized persons. Jian min were closer to property — sellable, transferable, compensable if destroyed. Even there, the word min was already doing strange work: sometimes meaning a person, sometimes merely a body.
A side note: 影视圈的人古代算什么人？贱民里面最低等的是倡优。倡是妓，优是唱歌的。
If you were fortunate enough to be liang min, you likely belonged to one of the four classes — shi (士), nong (农), gong (工), shang (商) — scholar, farmer, artisan, merchant. You held no noble title, no official office, no hereditary privilege. You were not a fu mu guan (父母官), a “parent-official.” You were simply min.
And that word carried a particular civilizational weight.
In classical political language, min were the mass upon which legitimacy rested. “Min neng zai zhou, yi neng fu zhou” — the people can carry the boat; the people can overturn it. 《尚书》说：“天视自我民视，天听自我民听。”又说：“民能载舟，亦能覆舟。” The emperor referred to them as zi min (子民), “my children.” The magistrate was a fu mu guan (父母官), parent to the people.
Confucius described the relationship with brutal clarity: the virtue of the gentleman is like wind; the virtue of the people is like grass. When the wind blows, the grass bends (“君子之德风，小人之德草。草上之风，必偃。”). He also said, “min ke shi you zhi, bu ke shi zhi zhi” — the people may be made to follow, but not necessarily made to understand (“民可使由之，不可使知之。”).
Laozi added: empty their minds, fill their bellies (老子说：“虚其心，实其腹。”). Governing a large state is like cooking a pot of small fish — don’t flip it too often or you’ll ruin it (“治大国若烹小鲜。”).
Strip away the politeness, and five subconscious associations emerge — associations that every Chinese speaker intuitively grasps when hearing the word min, even if they cannot articulate them.
First: min means a big mass of people. Not a handful. Not a circle, but a population.
Second: min carries the idea of gen feng (跟风) — following the wind. Herd instinct. The Confucians did not invent this, but they sanctified it. Grass bends. That was not an insult; it was a political model.
Third: min suggests vulnerability — easily fooled, easily manipulated, often used. Historically governed, directed, fed, disciplined.
Fourth: min implies structural disadvantage. Min do not hold office. Min do not possess titles. They live within arrangements made by others.
Fifth: min evokes children. Zi min (子民). Fu mu guan (父母官). The people need protection. The state is the parent. Paternal governance is not an accident of rhetoric; it is embedded in the word.
These meanings do not need to be taught. They are cultural sediment. Now go tell that to the idiots at Bai Du.
Enter Wang Min
Now fast forward.
Take the traditional liang min (良民). Put a smartphone in every hand. Add Wi-Fi. Install JD, Alibaba, Baidu, WeChat.
You now have wang min (网民).
The hardware is new. The infrastructure is modern. The sociology, less so.
Wang min signals scale — hundreds of millions, billions. It implies a mass, not individuals.
It also quietly carries the idea of gen feng. Online trends surge. Rumors spread. Algorithms replace the Confucian gentleman as wind. The grass still bends — only now the wind is viral content, conspiracy theories, influencer economies, outrage cycles.
Wang min also inherit vulnerability. They consume content produced by a small minority. They are nudged, steered, harvested for attention, monetized through traffic. Structural asymmetry persists. The fu mu guan has morphed into invisible algorithmic governance.
They remain perennially disadvantaged — not necessarily poor, but structurally downstream from those who design platforms and shape narratives.
And they remain children in one sense: in official language, they are ren min when dignified, qun zhong when addressed locally, but rarely sovereign actors. They are protected, guided, occasionally corrected.
Yet here lies the twist.
Because of their sheer number, wang min sometimes become wind. Online storms gather. Issues are amplified. Policies shift. The old maxim that min can carry or overturn the boat reappears in digital form.
Grass, under certain atmospheric conditions, produces weather.
Back to the Juicy Word
It is said that when the October Revolutionaries — many of them peasants — stormed the Winter Palace and entered Tsar Nicholas II’s wine cellar, they found Lafite, Latour, Margaux. Within a short while, they were drunk on wines once reserved for royalty.
If you are unaware of the deep history packed into the plain-looking word min, then wang min may seem like moonshine — a cheap slang term for people online.
But if you understand the cultural sediment behind min, then wang min is not moonshine. It is wine once poured for kings — and, at the same time, the king of the wine.
The word tastes modern.
But the vintage is ancient.
And once you know that, you cannot un-know it.
Yego’s Chronicles 