数字游民shù zì yóu mín

Digital nomad

jīn tiān zài hǎi biān shàng bān.今天在海边上班。Working by the sea today.

数字游民 is the Chinese word for “digital nomad”: a person, usually young, who works remotely online and moves between cities and small towns instead of going to an office.

Took off: 2025
Started in: The English “digital nomad”
Today: Current

What it means

It is a direct translation. 数字 means “digital” and 游民 means “wanderer”. The plain word for working from home or anywhere else is 远程办公, “remote work”.

In China it often means someone who leaves a big city for a cheaper, slower place and keeps working on a laptop: a programmer, a video maker, a person with an online business.

How people use it

It is current, both as a normal word and as a dream. People use it seriously about a way of life, and as a joke when they answer work messages from a café or a beach.

The doubts come with it. Sixth Tone noted that money is the biggest problem. One nomad in its report worried that she would lose her social and medical insurance when her company contract ended.

灯灯

我下个月想去云南住一段时间
wǒ xià gè yuè xiǎng qù yún nán zhù yí duàn shí jiān
I want to live in Yunnan for a while next month.
那工作怎么办？
nà gōng zuò zěn me bàn?
What about work?
带电脑去，当数字游民
dài diàn nǎo qù, dāng shù zì yóu mín
I’ll take my laptop and be a digital nomad.
羡慕！记得给我寄鲜花饼
xiàn mù! jì de gěi wǒ jì xiān huā bǐng
Jealous! Don’t forget to send me some flower cakes.

More examples

他辞职去大理当数字游民了。
tā cí zhí qù dà lǐ dāng shù zì yóu mín le.
He quit his job and went to Dali to be a digital nomad.
当数字游民听起来很酷，但收入不稳定。
dāng shù zì yóu mín tīng qǐ lái hěn kù, dàn shōu rù bù wěn dìng.
Being a digital nomad sounds cool, but the income isn’t steady.

Where it came from

The idea came into Chinese with the pandemic. Sixth Tone reported in May 2021 that before 2020, Baidu showed only a handful of results for the term, and that working from home made it attractive to young people.

Dali, in Yunnan, became the best-known base, with coworking spaces for nomads. One of them, Dali Hub, had more than 200 members in its first three months, according to the same report.

咬文嚼字 put 数字游民 on its list of the ten most popular phrases of 2025. Its definition: people with no fixed office who work remotely with modern technology, manage themselves well and are mostly young.

The original. There is no single image or clip; it is a word for a way of life. Sixth Tone’s 2021 report describes the nomads who gathered in Dali. Sixth Tone