On restless nights in Beijing, Liang Ce places her phone on the bedside table, lowers the volume of rain sounds until they are barely audible and closes her eyes.
In her mind, she is back in Harbin, at her grandparents' single-story house in Heilongjiang province. Raindrops fall one by one from the eaves. Inside, her grandparents move about the room. Everything feels safe.
"Sound is like a safe house for me," said Liang, 31, who works for an education company. "When you feel frustrated, it can be very hard to get the comfort you need from the people around you. But you can simply type in a keyword and find it."
Podcasts are a weekend fixture for Liang. She chooses what to listen to according to her mood: a relaxed show hosted by a couple while doing housework, crime stories when she has company, a book-discussion episode when she wants to focus, and a slower-paced podcast to ease her toward sleep.
"Without sound or fragments of information coming into my ears, my brain just feels stuck. I instinctively want to put something on to fill the silence," she said.
When pressure at work builds into something heavy but difficult to define, Liang deliberately searches for content that can help her break it down. One podcast prompted her to ask herself a simple question: Was the pressure coming from her supervisor, from herself or from expectations she had set too high?
She applied the method to her own situation."Once the pressure becomes specific, it drops by half," she said. "The other half, I will solve through action."
Listening also gives Liang a way to connect with friends. One podcast about a comedy competition left her and a friend deeply moved. It described how two female stand-up comedians had begun preparing their next set as soon as the previous season ended, working harder and with more composure than their male counterparts.
"We both felt so uplifted after listening," Liang recalled.
Liang's relationship with audio is deeply personal, but it reflects a much broader shift in the listening habits of young Chinese.
According to The Power of Dialogue: The Public Value of Chinese Podcasts, jointly released in 2025 by Fudan University's Center for Information and Communication Studies and the Xiaoyuzhou app, users aged 18 to 35 accounted for more than 83 percent of Xiaoyuzhou's podcast listeners.
Data from iiMedia Research show that China's audio entertainment market reached 611.01 billion yuan ($90.07 billion) in 2025 and is projected to expand to 741.58 billion yuan by 2029.
