The Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of ‘carnival’ has been widely used as a framing device to study different aspects of Chinese Internet culture. This article moves further to suggest that the productiveness of semiotic carnival leads to the politics of naming in China’s specific context. As of 2012, China has the largest number of Internet users in the world; until recently, besides ‘netizens’, there were no particular ‘names’ (i.e. terms) for them. Some scholars have argued that Internet users in China are just ‘users’ – not ‘netizens’ – because their online practises and the broader political context in which they are situated do not imply a specific degree of citizenship. Therefore, naming is crucial for the online practise of carnival in China. It may be fine for Internet users without such names to amuse themselves and others via the carnival concept, but if they want to challenge dominant government norms, they definitely need ‘naming’ as ‘cement’ to build a ‘hegemonic’ or ‘popular identity’ as an ‘empty signifier’ in order to homogenise all particular online demands into an equivalent chain to challenge the opposite of the frontier. Hence, this article focuses on the phenomenon of the online semiotic carnival to explore ‘naming’ patterns among Web users who practise it in order to build a sense of identity. In particular, this article explores three different – but intertwined – signs and concepts. The first is diaosi, which nowadays describes regular Chinese citizens facing daily struggles (but used to be more associated with the English term ‘loser’). The second is zhaos, which describes the political ‘other’. The third is xiaofenhong, or ‘Little Pinkos’, which refers to patriotic youth who push for a positive public image of China and denounce criticism of the country. These three terms illustrate the carnivalesque nature of naming politics in China; more specifically, the online semiotic carnival contributed to the ‘naming’ of Chinese Internet users, who turned the semiotic carnival into a means of building identity. The article concludes that the semiotic carnival is included in China’s governance system, serving as a ‘safety valve’ rather than a ‘pressure cooker’.