A growing category of 'virtual parents' on Douyin, China's TikTok style video platform, is filling an emotional gap for a generation shaped by China's grueling college entrance exam, brutal work hours, and parental demands for stability.
Vincent Zhang, 33, eats dinner alone in his Shanghai apartment, phone propped against his rice bowl, watching a middle-aged couple on Douyin tell him he has endured a lot and that it is enough. He calls them mum and dad. The couple is not his parents, has never met him, and broadcasts the same soft script to roughly two million followers on ByteDance's domestic Chinese video platform.
The market they have built is small but worth reading closely. Pan Huqian and Zhang Xiuping, a middle-aged couple from Anhui, sit at the center of a niche creator category BBC News calls "virtual parents": middle-aged performers whose short videos offer the unconditional warmth that many young Chinese say they cannot reliably get at home. Followers address the couple as 妈妈 and 爸爸 in the comments, share job news and breakups, and ask for birthday blessings. Vincent is one of them.
That category did not appear because Chinese youth are lonely in the abstract. It appeared because of a specific, nameable mismatch. Urban Chinese parents tend to deliver correction, demands for stability, and pressure around the timing of marriage and career milestones. A generation shaped by gaokao, China's single high-stakes college entrance exam, and the 9am-to-9pm, six-days-a-week work schedule widely associated with the tech sector says it wants something different: to be told they are already good enough. A near-two-million-follower account and the creator category around it are the visible response to that gap, a content market reacting to an unmet need in Chinese kinship, not a heartwarming internet oddity.
A sample line the couple reads on camera captures the appeal: "Are you tired from work and study lately? Don't push yourself too hard. Mum and Dad know that you have endured a lot." It is short, low-effort, and does not come with a follow-up question about when Vincent plans to buy a flat or settle down. BBC reporting places Vincent in that exact bind: his own parents, he says, never tell him he is good enough, and rarely ask how he is doing. The platform fills the silence.
Real parents are not villains in this story. They are working inside a culture that prizes stable government jobs, on-time marriage, and respect for a path their children may no longer want. Virtual parents are not saints either. Their warmth is a content product; intimacy is the commodity, and the comments section is the storefront. Flattening either side (parents as a corrective chorus, virtual parents as a wholesome antidote) distorts the mechanism that actually built the audience.
The question worth holding is not whether Vincent is lonely, but whether the category around him is a stopgap for a squeezed generation, a wedge that will reshape what urban Chinese families are expected to provide, or a quiet realignment of how kinship is built and chosen when the original version falls short. The BBC feature, reported by Eunice Yang with Andro Saini, documents the surface. The size of the gap underneath is the story.