A rundown of 2012's pop culture events reveals the rise of the underachiever mentality and a preference for excesses.

The year 2012 was supposed to bring about the end of the world; instead, it brought us galloping horse-style dance moves. Well, you can certainly interpret it as the end of civilization as we proudly hail it. Gangnam Style is tawdry, and everyone loves it - to the point of becoming sick and tired of it, and that includes both the authentic one and its countless imitations.

If real dance is what you crave, 2012 saw the return of Shen Wei, the Chinese modern-dance choreographer who made it big in the Big Apple. His Near the Terrace Part I was originally staged topless.

Had he been allowed to do the same in Beijing, his show would have turned into a mass media event. Another dance to remember, a full-length dance drama in this case, was Yang Liping's Peacock, which elevates ethnic performing arts to a new height. A snippet shown on the national television was the only segment during the New Year's Eve gala, watched by a billion or so people, that could be called high art.

Those with vocal talent have found renewed hope as the Chinese edition of The Voice gained an audience never matched in size since television singing contests made the first splash in China in 2006.

It minted a slew of new stars. But how far each of them can go remains to be seen. A new trick, or a new program format licensed from overseas, usually works for a fraction of the time it is effective elsewhere. Credit it to Chinese-style speed, which accelerates everything, not only the buildup of bullet train networks but also the shelf life of entertainment products and even the downfall of certain officials.

The phrase "Chinese-style" was popularized by the late leader Deng Xiaoping. Nowadays, it is applied indiscriminately, such as "Chinese-style road crossing", which means you ignore the traffic light and cross the street with a crowd who equally ignore the traffic lights.

"Chinese-style pickup" refers to another crowd - of parents who wait outside schools in their cars, tricycles and bicycles to pick up their kids, hence forming a traffic bottleneck.

We Chinese may have congenital deficiency in the genes of humor, but we are making up for it in abundance with our rise in wealth and stress. At the beginning of the year, a Tang Dynasty poet was featured in a torrent of cartoons, doing things a great poet is rarely portrayed to do.

But Du Fu holding a machine gun or riding a motorcycle or a white horse - but not Gangnam Style, mind you - made him the busiest literary celebrity of the year.

Until Mo Yan surpassed him with his Nobel prize in literature.

Du Fu would not have won the coveted prize if he were living in contemporary China. He had great compassion for the downtrodden, sure, but his style is the opposite of "hallucinatory realism", a description that may fit Li Bai better if you search among his contemporaries.

The author of Red Sorghum is big on sex and violence - in contrast with Du Fu, whose depiction of "silvery light on her arm" made readers blush. Suffice it to say, subtlety is not a virtue in contemporary arts and literature. For one thing, subtlety would have put to sleep those aversive to cultural specifics.

Just like the Nobel jury, Chinese filmgoers are into bright colors and exaggerated characters. The year's biggest movie is set in a country where men who changed sex to women are more alluring than women - or men.

The slapstick comedy Lost in Thailand has convulsed tens of millions in guffaws - to the tune of almost 1 billion yuan in box-office gross. The central character is someone with an IQ lower than Forrest Gump but an uncanny ability to elicit laughs with dim-wittedness.

Painted Skin: Resurrection, the second money-making Chinese movie of the year, is a romantic fantasy set in a mythic time and place. The costumes are gorgeous, and the photography is better than the story.

In 2012, many realized that we have collectively shifted from so-called tasteful highbrow fare to one of pungency. We need big doses of spice to keep ourselves from dozing off into a stupor induced by both the mediocrity of the avalanche of entertainment thrown at us and the boredom afflicted by our inconsequential lives.

Someone tried to present Peking Opera performers in bikinis, while the biggest singing duo is Phoenix Legend, who transformed catchy folk songs into kitschy dance mixes.

Gastronomically, A Bite of China, a television documentary, showcased foods and recipes from across the nation, awakening the public to the culinary delights that surround us but we had taken for granted - not limited to the spicy kind, though. The high production values and unique narrative skills combine to make the series the mouth-watering talk of the nation, let alone raising the prices of those ingredients mentioned in the program.

One demographic unable to afford some of those foods is diaosi, a self-deprecating term coined by online game communities and now referring to young underachievers who have accepted the status quo and are almost enjoying it.

A typical diaosi is someone who does not possess physical charm, family background or career optimism. Very often, it is a young man unable to find a date and preferring to stay home at the computer and stay away from socializing.

But collectively, they can create a virtual hurricane and launch attacks against the rich and the beautiful. It may be a testament of the triumph of the diaosi that the box-office record for a domestic film set by Painted Skin: Resurrection, a fantasy starring three of the best-looking actors in China, was soon snatched by Lost in Thailand, featuring a trio of diaosi type.

Diaosi are most afraid of the question "Are you happy?" which the national television CCTV insists on firing at random passersby. For them, happiness often equals masturbation in solitude, which they claim is their unique way of respecting the female body and not deflowering it.

Diaosi are also proud of their intelligence. They subconsciously place themselves in the position of the Sherlock Holmes-like Judge D and turn around to ask "What's your take, Yuanfang?" That has made Yuanfang, the Tang Dynasty ace detective's assistant, into a belated celebrity.

Diaosi may download a pirated copy of Mo Yan's novel, but they can hardly get through the first chapter. For them, a soap opera about time travel can take them back to an imperial court where they can imagine themselves to be the princes or princesses, or an online adventure tale will get them through numerous hurdles and finally face to face with a huge crate of unexcavated treasures.

Diaosi are also the power behind some of the real-life celebrities who stage real-life battles, some of which spill over to the southern gate of Beijing's Chaoyang Park. That is the place where people of opposing political views like to gather and get into occasional physical scuffles.

Still, the biggest showdown of the year, the one between self-appointed fraud fighter Fang Zhouzi and promotion-savvy race car champion-cum-best-selling writer Han Han, remained in the virtual space. Even the fight between kung fu stars Zhao Wenzhuo and Donnie Yen was only verbal while Jackie Chan keeps spreading love around, mostly to the powers-that-be.

As the Year of the Dragon winds down, the imperially fierce mythical animal that supposedly represents the Chinese race looks increasingly like the sarcastic Eddie Murphy-voiced Mushu Dragon in the Disney cartoon Mulan.

No wonder, at the end of the year, some expert posited the theory that Chinese are the descendents not of the dragon, but of the sheep. You can say that a diaosi is a dragon in a sheep's skin.

Contact the writer at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn.