The existing issues of youth unemployment, gender inequality and political depression among Chinese youth have been intensified in China's Post-COVID-19 era. A mad language called “fa feng” is emerging on the Chinese Internet in this time of malaise. I propose the concept of “performative madness” to tell the multifaceted frustration beneath the entertaining use of the Internet slang “fa feng", which has been dispersing widely into mundane discourses and is actively used in wider sociocultural contexts to refer to various rebellious actions. I capture multiple forms of the everyday practice of performative madness across the digital and physical world based on participative observation on a popular Chinese social media platform. Drawing on various forms of data that include online posts, ethnographic interviews, personal writings, and art pieces made and shared by the interviewees, I argue that performative madness is a strategic utilization of the rebellion potential of madness. It releases madness from the realm of metaphor and materializes it in the real-life collective actions. It restrikes youths’ hope, but not necessarily optimism, towards the more autonomous political subjectivity, better gender equality, and a career that promises more possibilities of upward mobility and senses of meaning.