废话文学 fèi huà wén xué
Saying nothing, at impressive length.
The short answer
OnlineFadingChecked November 2026
Feihua wenxue — “nonsense literature” — is writing that sounds substantial and conveys nothing. The genre's founding joke is a perfect circle: 听君一席话，如听一席话 — “hearing your words has been like hearing your words.”
In a chat
- 亮亮 Liangliang
今天天气怎么样？
What's the weather like today?
- 灯灯 Dengdeng
今天的天气，就是今天的天气。
Today's weather is today's weather.
- 亮亮 Liangliang
别搞废话文学了，到底下不下雨？
Stop the nonsense literature. Is it going to rain or not?
In the Dengdeng app, Dengdeng and his friends text you in Chinese every day, at your level.
How to reply
如果下雨，那就是下雨了。
If it rains, then it's raining.
When not to use it
- It is a game between friends. In a work chat, a 废话文学 answer can look like you avoid the question.
What it means
The format is a tautology dressed as wisdom. The founding line takes a famous saying and swaps its second half for a copy of the first; other classics of the school inform you that seven days apart feels like a full week. The pleasure is deadpan: the sentence is grammatically immaculate and semantically empty.
Chinese already had the base word: 废话 — filler, nonsense, words not worth saying — as in the blunt 别说废话, “skip the nonsense”. Attaching 文学, literature, completes the joke: empty talk is promoted to a literary movement.
How people use it
Use it as a verdict, not a compliment: the meeting summary that summarizes nothing, the announcement that announces nothing, the review padded out to a respectable length. 满满的废话文学 — “solid nonsense literature” — covers all of them.
The word found a second career with AI. Long generated passages read like nonsense literature at industrial speed: fluent, confident, and information-free. Calling a text 废话文学 is now a standard Chinese way to say it reads like slop, which makes this page the natural companion to AI垃圾.
Where it comes from
The meme took off on Weibo and Bilibili in 2021 and quickly became one of the year's most-quoted internet genres, with users competing to build the perfect self-consuming sentence. Its ancestors are ancient: circular proverbs, official speeches, and every meeting that ever ended without having started.
What kept it alive after the first wave faded is that the target keeps regenerating. Human boilerplate produced 2021's nonsense literature; autogenerated boilerplate produces today's. The genre named a permanent product, so it simply re-aimed at the new factory.
In use
2 examples听君一席话，如听一席话。
After hearing your words, it is as if I had heard your words.
他的总结满满都是废话文学，一点信息量都没有。
His summary is pure nonsense literature — zero information content.
The characters
Explore individuallyIndividual character meanings do not always explain the meaning of the whole word.
Sources
This guide is original Dengdeng editorial content, offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. The linked dictionary entries adapt CC-CEDICT under the same license.