In the public discussion around education in China, vocational school students have been labelled as losers and “low-quality groups”. In the hierarchical ideology of Chinese society, vocational school students are stigmatised in opposition to the modelling Chinese youth with a bright future. However, stigmatisation is not a static and objective reality, but is constantly interpreted and reconstructed in the interaction between the discriminated group and the social environment. This paper examines the dialectical relationship between group stigma under hierarchical social ideology and identity constructions of vocational school students through an internal lens. The semiotic analysis in this article revolves around short videos uploaded by a vocational school vlogger on a Chinese social media platform. The study shows that vocational school students reconfigured the differential axes of stigmatized identities and invented new identity subcategories in their discursive practices by performing and commenting on stigma. In the identity crisis of vocational school students, the fractal recursion of stigma becomes a strategy for vocational school students to position themselves. Vocational school students’ performance of stigma is neither a culture of group resistance nor a simple reproduction of hierarchical ideology. Rather, it is a negotiation of the destigmatization of personal identity through the reinterpretation of group stereotypes. By distancing themselves from the “criticized image,” vocational school students can create a socially acceptable image for their own benefit. This semiotic process is a social action of vocational students as marginalized groups in the education system trying to find their place in Chinese society.