Fuse-Bead Posts Outnumber China's Digital Detox Talk 70 to 1

Posts about fuse beads outnumbered posts using the language of quitting the phone by about seventy to one on Chinese social media between September 2025 and August 2026, according to Moojing Market Intelligence, with 6.5 million posts about fuse beads against about 92,000 for eight phrases for quitting the phone or going screen-free, so the vocabulary of digital detox exists in Chinese but remains small.

This article covers the first chapter of the full report, China's Analogue Economy, which set out to understand whether something like the Western "analog bag" trend is happening in China, and found that it is, although it has taken a different form, since Chinese consumers barely discuss reducing their phone use and instead take up crafts and hobbies.

Key figures

• About 92,000: posts using eight phrases for quitting the phone, September 2025 to August 2026, up from about 58,000 the year before
• 6.5 million: posts about fuse beads (拼豆) in the same twelve months, against half a million the year before
• 31 to 35: the age group in which the talk of quitting the phone peaks on Douyin
• 32.5 hours: average weekly time online in China in December 2025, according to CNNIC

Method and scope: social listening by Moojing Market Intelligence across Weibo, RED and Douyin, September 2024 to August 2026, which counts posts that mention a keyword, not purchases or the number of people involved.

What is the analog bag, and where did the trend start?#

The analog bag is a tote packed with a paperback, a journal, some crochet and perhaps a film camera, which young people in the West carry so that they have something other than a phone to reach for, and it is generally credited to Sierra Campbell, a creator who posts as Siece Campbell and who showed her TikTok followers her own version in August 2025.

Axios reported the trend in October 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary logged "analogue bag" as a new word in January 2026, and by the spring trend pieces had appeared across the United States, Britain and the Gulf, while the only hard number to circulate came from TikTok, which told Axios that about 1,600 posts had been tagged #AnalogLife in the first nine months of 2025, so the trend has always been louder in the press than in the data. The Western version also reaches well beyond record players and film, since the American craft chain Michaels reported in March 2026 that searches for knitting, crochet, embroidery, journaling and painting had risen 136% in six months, and we believe the impulse is shared, although it takes a different form in China.

Is screen time in China falling?#

Screen time in China is still rising, since the China Internet Network Information Center put average weekly time online at 32.5 hours in December 2025, 3.8 hours more than a year earlier and the highest in five years, so whatever Chinese consumers say about their screens, the analogue turn sits beside heavy screen use and has not reduced it.

CNNIC's figure is echoed by QuestMobile, which counted 186 hours a month on mobile apps for the average user, 8.4% more than a year before, and a 2026 meta-analysis in Current Psychology, pooling 67 studies of almost 130,000 Chinese university students, put the prevalence of smartphone addiction at about 28%. We believe the turn to crafts and hobbies is partly a response to rising screen use, although nothing in the data suggests that the use itself is falling.

How did we measure digital detox on Chinese social media?#

We took the words Chinese writers actually use for quitting the phone, from Chinese news coverage and from Douban groups devoted to the subject, instead of translating "digital detox" into Chinese and searching for it, because a translated keyword measures how often people use the translation and says little about how they actually talk.

Two of those Douban groups are 远离屏幕计划 (the "away from screens" project), which had about 43,000 members in October 2026, and 数字极简主义者 ("digital minimalists"), with about 34,000. The words fall into two families, words for quitting, such as 戒手机 (quitting the phone), 数字排毒 (digital detox) and 摆脱手机依赖 (breaking phone dependence), and words for what people do instead, which Beijing Youth Daily grouped in May 2026 under the heading 老派爱好 (old-school hobbies). We left out words that look relevant but are not, such as 离线 (offline), 断网 and 断联, which in practice pull in router outages, phone plans and the debate about switching off from work, and we read a sample of ten posts on RED for every keyword before using it.

How much do Chinese consumers talk about quitting the phone?#

Chinese consumers talk about quitting the phone far less than they talk about crafts, according to Moojing Market Intelligence, since eight phrases for quitting came to about 92,000 posts between September 2025 and August 2026, up from about 58,000 the year before, while posts about fuse beads alone came to 6.5 million and posts about crochet to 2.5 million.

Exhibit 1. Source: Moojing Market Intelligence, social listening across Weibo, RED and Douyin, posts mentioning each keyword, September 2025 to August 2026, all on one scale; conversation volume, not sales. Keywords were chosen from Chinese press and forum usage and checked against a sample of posts.

The phrase "digital detox" (数字排毒) does appear in China, and The Paper ran a widely shared piece in March 2025 under the headline "数字排毒风靡" ("digital detox is all the rage"), so our point is the narrower one that it appears mostly in headlines and much less in what people post. Posts about fuse beads grew from half a million to 6.5 million over the same two years, which is the subject of the report's second chapter.

Who talks about quitting the phone in China?#

On Douyin, the talk of quitting the phone peaks among posters aged 31 to 35, who are about 1.8 times as common in that conversation as on the platform as a whole, while on Weibo the same conversation peaks among posters aged 21 to 25, so the people who use the language of digital detox in China are quite different on the two platforms.

Exhibit 2. Source: Moojing Market Intelligence, social listening, September 2025 to August 2026, share of posters aged 16 and over by age group. Douyin does not report posters under 16, so both platforms are shown from 16. RED returns no age profile. Conversation volume, not sales.

The young Weibo conversation fits the study vlogs and "戒手机打卡" (quitting-the-phone check-in) posts that make up much of it, while on Douyin the 36 to 40 group is the second largest after the 31 to 35 group. The posters talking about fuse beads on Douyin are younger, with more than half of them under 31, against fewer than a quarter of those talking about quitting the phone.

Why does the Douyin conversation about quitting the phone run older?#

The hashtags explain it, since on Douyin the tags that travel with 戒手机 (quitting the phone) are dominated by the tags of one self-described family-education coach and by phrases such as "how to get your child off the phone", whereas the tags that travel with fuse beads describe a pastime and the places where it happens.

Exhibit 3. Source: Moojing Market Intelligence, social listening, Douyin, September 2025 to August 2026. A selection from the 25 most frequent hashtags on posts mentioning each keyword, in order of frequency; generic reach tags and near-duplicates are left out, and tags naming an individual are summarised. Conversation volume, not sales.

The hardware follows the same pattern, since posts about 戒网手机, "internet-quitting phones", are almost all about student phones that parents buy for their children, and that parental worry has a policy backdrop, because the Ministry of Education has told schools since 2021 that pupils should not, in principle, bring phones onto campus, and the Cyberspace Administration's minor mode, switched on across the main phone brands and apps in May 2025, limits children under 16 to an hour a day by default. When Southern Metropolis Daily investigated short-video parenting gurus in 2025, it found that more than 80% drew audiences by denouncing games and steered parents towards paid courses, and a 2025 study of nearly 5,800 teenagers in Shandong, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, linked adolescents' short-video addiction to how often their own parents were absorbed in their phones.

What does this mean for brands?#

In China the explicit language of digital detox is a parent's worry as much as a young person's resolution, so a brand that wants to understand what young Chinese consumers do about screen fatigue has to look at what they make and buy, since the conversation about crafts runs to millions of posts while the conversation about quitting runs to tens of thousands.

We believe that means two audiences where Western coverage of the analog bag sees one, with parents looking for ways to get their children off the phone and young adults looking for something to do with their hands, and the report's fifth chapter sets out what that means for how brands speak to each. The next chapter of the full report turns to the craft and hobby economy and the fuse-bead boom, which our article on China's online fuse-bead sales covers, and our guide to social listening explains what this kind of data captures and what it does not.