For years, China's ruling party sought to engineer the emotional atmosphere of its digital public square, mandating optimism as a kind of civic duty. Now, as economic pressures mount and lived experience diverges sharply from official narrative, that project is visibly failing — not through open rebellion, but through the quiet, persistent accumulation of doubt expressed by millions of ordinary people online. The machinery of censorship remains, yet it finds itself outpaced by the sheer volume of human feeling it was designed to suppress.