Fu Yu and Gui Yong on China's 1990s Generation

Fu Yu and Gui Yong, “The Five Intriguing Paradoxes of Contemporary Chinese Young People”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
When I visited Beijing and Shanghai in May of 2023, what surprised me most was that China was nowhere near over the pain and anger caused by the abrupt end of the zero-covid policy in mid-December 2022.  Particularly for many Chinese young people, the incompetence and cynicism displayed by state authorities at this juncture seem to have engendered a full-blown ongoing existential crisis.
 
Early in my visit, I met with two thirty-something people who work in the private sector in the general area of “culture.”  The pretext for the meeting was that we had worked at arm’s length on a vaguely common project, but I had never met either of them in person.  Nonetheless, they both poured their hearts out to me at length on the subject of the end of covid-zero.  One was furious, and said: “You would like to think that your government cares a little bit about you, but apparently not!”  The other was less angry than lost, confessing that “Nothing in my education has prepared me to deal with this.”  He talked at length about how he and his friends felt completely adrift and off balance; ultimately it seemed to me that he was in mourning. 
 
The conversation was long and intense, and I can only give the bare bones here.  The following day I asked a professor (whom I was also meeting for the first time) if what the two thirty-somethings said made sense to him.  Without a moment’s hesitation he said “yes,” confirming that many people in China are experiencing a sort of PTSD due to the end of covid-zero, complicated by the fact that they cannot talk about it – the regime having declared victory and moved on.  Virtually everyone else I talked to in China said some version of the same thing.
 
This extreme reaction makes sense once we understand that young Chinese see their government above all as competent – or at least they once did.  The Western media focuses constantly on authoritarianism in China, which has certainly worsened under Xi Jinping.  Authoritarianism worries some Chinese people as well, of course, but for others, it is simply baked in; China has always been authoritarian, but life goes on.  And for Chinese who choose not to focus on politics, life in China, at least before the pandemic, was pretty good. 

China has its problems, of course, but in terms of the basic infrastructure and services that makes life comfortable for its citizens (particularly those who are already well off), China is in many respects way ahead of North America.  China’s airports, trains, and urban transit systems put America’s to shame, and China’s cashless society means that you can navigate everything on your phone.  I don’t know how North American delivery services stack up against China’s – Amazon & co. surely made great strides during the pandemic - but you can get virtually anything delivered anywhere in China:  on the train from Beijing to Shanghai, I saw KFC delivered onto the train when we stopped at Jinan and Nanjing.  I assume bribes were involved, but it was still pretty impressive.
 
China’s covid-management called all of this into question.  The first year was hard, but China was proud; they had stopped the virus no one else could, if at great cost.  The second year was okay; China’s formula seemed to be working, but the sacrifices were still great, and people were less proud and confident.  The third year, everything fell apart.  While the rest of the world decided to learn to live with Omicron, China doubled and tripled down, multiplying lockdowns and controls although it was clear that the results were mixed, and that China’s people had had enough.  Then, in mid-December, following the late-November demonstrations, the authorities reversed course overnight and removed all controls and lockdowns, without vaccinating the elderly and without restocking the pharmacies.  Millions got sick and tens if not hundreds of thousands died while the Party-State declared victory and tried to change the subject.
 
The about-face looked awful from abroad, but our media is used to finding awful things in China.  There was some online outrage from China (see here), but I got no sense that the anger was more than skin-deep and simply assumed that China had moved on.  Actually, re-reading Xu Jilin’s piece on the “silence” of the Shanghai lockdown after having visited China, I get a greater sense of his message; he is talking about the huge emotional price everyone paid, and almost suggests that it could be a turning point for China.  I might add that when I saw Xu in China he told me that that piece was downloaded 20 million times before the authorities took it down because “even if it was moderate, they didn’t like me having that much impact.”
 
In any event, my sense is that for many Chinese young people (especially those who live in urban areas), the image of Chinese authorities as responsible and competent managers of the people’s business was deeply tarnished by the events of mid-December 2022.  Since their sense of patriotism was always a bit fragile (almost “transactional”), based on the notion that China performs better than other countries, the way authorities botched things in December might well mark a turning point in the relationship between China’s youth and China’s Party-State.
 
Such is the theme of the text translated here.  Penned by Fu Yu, a sociologist at Fudan University and Gui Yong, a professor at the Zhou Enlai School of Government at Nankai University, the piece was originally published last year in the Beijing Cultural Review, and the editors decided to republish in May 2023, suggesting that they too see a crisis brewing.
 
Based on long-term survey data that they do not share here, Fu and Gui argue that the 1990s generation of Chinese youth are caught in a dilemma:  raised in relative affluence, they assume material comfort and imagine a life based on pursuit of individual values, but the salaries they earn at work are no match for the “asset society” – one in which wealth is determined not by how hard or smart you work, but by what assets you hold, something largely determined by the luck of history.  This contradiction manifests itself in a set of attitudes that defines this generation: “lying flat” as a way of contesting authority; engaging in risky investments (crypto, etc.) in the hopes of “making a million by 35;” calling for a new economic order, or a return to the planned economy, as the only solution to their problem; and identifying with a strong state—the only agent capable of solving their problem for them.  The authors also note that this generation of young people lives within “online circles” (fan clubs, LGBTQ groups, etc.), which are not incapable of organizing for battle in the real world by mobilizing mainstream values.  The authors conclude that “should certain social mentalities radicalize further, we cannot rule out the possibility that this generation might raise questions about the current order, or even current ideology, to a certain extent.
 
I think there is no doubt that the ignoble ending to China’s covid struggle “radicalized social mentalities further.” 
 
Translation
 
The 1990s generation[2] is gradually becoming the backbone of our society, and their social mentality 社会心态 is largely indicative of the evolution and changes of our era. In the course of our long-term research on the social psychology of this group, we have observed a series of potential or emerging conflicts, which include dissatisfaction with the way economic benefits are currently distributed (see the notion of "lying flat-ism 躺平主义"), resistance to capital and work (see for example the expression "996.ICU" -  “working nine to nine six days a week lands you in intensive care "), non-identification with mainstream ideas of family and lifestyle (see expressions like "all parents are evil 父 - 母皆祸害" and "no dating, marriage, or children for me 不恋爱、不结婚、不生娃"), and finally conflicts between subcultural communities and the ideologies they espouse (see the examples of fan groups, feminism, LGBTQ, etc.). 
 
Unlike traditional conflicts that arise in a specific social and institutional context, where the core demands have to do with issues of economic distribution, generally expressed in fights over who gets what, as well as efforts and protests to protect certain rights, these new conflicts are based on the unique way young people think. Consequently, the widespread controversies in public opinion are not irrelevant "disputes over personal feelings," but can instead become the source of new social conflicts, or even the driving mechanism moving social consensus in one way or another. We need to understand the mentality of contemporary young people and the consequences this mentality might produce from the macro perspective of economic and social development.
 
Looking more concretely in terms of their social mentality, China’s contemporary youth display many paradoxes: they are on the one hand open-minded, pluralistic and tolerant, willing to accept controversial ideas, behaviors, and people, but at the same time they refuse to turn a blind eye to things that offend them, and there have been many instances of “turning people in online 一键举报” and “human flesh search engines 人肉搜索.”[3]  They closely identify with and take great pride in the development path of China and the Chinese people, yet remain confused and anxious about their own personal future. They embrace material things and aspire to financial freedom, yet they mock the wealthy elite. They would like to fall in love and spend their lives with their soulmates, but at the same time, they can’t be bothered to date or get married, and would rather just “lie flat” on the weekend with their cat.  In daily social life they flee connections, but they party all night online.  These paradoxes seem mutually contradictory, but they speak to something important about our era that has shaped the core concepts determining the way in which young people think and act, which in turn may become a potential problem for China's economic and social development.
 
This paper attempts to propose a set of analytical frameworks to deal with this. We argue that the key to understanding the social mentality of the young generation is related to the general context of the era:  this generation grew up during the period of China's rapid economic growth and we might call them the "affluent generation."  Once they grew up, however, they encountered the "asset society," in which the assets people owned gradually came to be more important than their performance in the labor market in shaping their life chances.  While the age of affluence has moulded the young generation's individualism and materialism, the asset society has imbued them with a sense of powerlessness and despair 底层感 [lit., “the sense of being at the bottom”], all of which has come together to produce a particular mindset that:  confronts power by “lying flat,” aspires to "financial freedom at 35," calls for a new economic order, and is happy to rely on a strong state.  Part of this mentality also reflects the online “circles” within which the young generation lives. 
 
The affluent generation is not only better off in material terms than previous generations, but also grew up during the period of China’s rapid growth in the 21st century.  The narratives of prosperity and growth,  embodied in epochal events such as recent successes in terms of urbanization, the popularization of higher education, and the spread of the Internet, together with  the collective memory of major historical events such as the successful hosting of the Beijing Olympics, China's leap to second place in the world in terms of economic output, and the fight against the coronavirus, constitute two logical threads that have shaped the mentality of the affluent generation.

Affluence is reflected in both material conditions and in social mobility in terms of education, work, and residence. More importantly, in the first 15 years of the 21st century, China's GDP maintained an annual growth rate of more than 7%, and a happy parallel was established between the upward personal journey of those born since the 1990s and the prosperous development of China’s future. If the collective memory—shared with the state—of the those born in the 1950s and 1960s was grounded in the experience of scarcity required by their pioneering efforts, the generational experience of those born in the 1990s—once again shared with the nation as a whole­—contained a vision of a young China and an affluent future. 
 
Economic growth has implanted two basic outlooks in the minds of today’s youth, namely individualism and spiritual pursuits grounded in material security.

Individualism is the pursuit of personal values, guided by personal interests, values, and ideas. In the era of the market economy, the state no longer has the moral responsibility to guarantee equal life opportunities for all, but instead harmonizes the market economy order, while the individual, as the agent in the market economy, takes center stage. When economic individualism becomes the spirit of the times, the young generation increasingly takes personal interests and values as the starting point for thinking about economic behavior.
 
At the same time, the abundant material base experienced by the young generation created the conditions for those born in the 1990s to go beyond subsistence concerns and pursue matters of ego and individualism, and ego and individualism as the spiritual markers of the age have been enlarged and extended as never before. Today's young generation is not only a generation that "lives for itself", but also a generation that understands and comprehends the world through individual experience.
 
By “spiritual pursuits grounded in material security” we are referring to a desire for a comfortable, free, full life experience, which presupposes relatively favorable material conditions.  This means that at the conceptual level, the young generation both values and despises material things.   The narrative foregrounding prosperity and growth shaped a myth of optimism regarding material life, and at the conceptual level created two latent contradictory orientations:  on the one hand, young people have the courage to aspire to an ideal lifestyle beyond material wealth, identifying with the notion that "wealth is only a by-product of the pursuit of dreams and self-fulfillment;" on the other hand, once their optimism collides with cold reality, this can fundamentally shake their confidence and expectations about their personal development.
 
The asset society and the plight of the latecomers
 
The role of finance in the economic system rises with the deepening monetization of the economy.  The financialization of the world economic system has not only significantly changed national governance and economic organization, but also profoundly altered the logic of wealth distribution and social differentiation.
 
Assets are playing an increasingly important role in the financialized economic system. Factors and resources that once could not (or were thought not to) be marketed and monetized (e.g., housing, entrepreneurial activity, public infrastructure) have been swept up in the wave of financialization and have become various countable and tradable forms of financial assets that are incorporated into the process of capital turnover and circulation. The logic of self-proliferation and the compound interest growth of capital take over, and asset prices, along with increasing financialization, display an upward trend that far exceeds the economic growth rate.

Globally, assets are becoming a larger share of national wealth, and the gap between groups with different initial asset holdings is rapidly widening, resulting in the phenomenon of "asset stratification." Those who acquired assets in non-market forms or at lower prices in the early stages of financialization have become the "nouveau riche," and have been able to leverage larger assets at lower costs during the financialization process. Thus, a new hierarchical system with the financial market as the pivot and the amount of assets as the mechanism is superimposed on the existing hierarchical system based on the labor market as the pivot and education, occupation, and income as the mechanism, which constitutes the basic logic of our understanding of the asset society and its conceptual consequences.

The full rise of the finance-driven asset society has likewise shaped core ideas at two levels.
 
First is the sense of powerlessness experienced by latecomers to the asset society. Financialization exacerbates the scissors gap between the return on labor and return on assets, a gap further widened by the compound growth and self-proliferation of assets; moreover the transmission of assets, dominated by factors involving ascribed status, only makes things worse over generations, so that the intergenerational reproduction of classes occurs in a way that is stable and free from legitimacy challenges. Asset prices and the speed of appreciation have replaced elite education and career access as the basis for drawing social lines, and those "small town test-takers 小镇做题家"[4] who had hoped to "leap from rags to riches 鲤鱼跃龙门 [lit., “the carp jumps over the dragon gate”]" inevitably run up against this unbridgeable asset gap. The expression “big money comes from fate, while little money you have to fight for" paints the most realistic picture of this sense of powerlessness.
 
Second is the sense of despair felt by the latecomers. The hierarchical system based on financial markets and assets makes possession of assets the key factor in determining life opportunities, which means that the career advancement and income growth obtained by the young generation through hard work in the labor market can only lead to improvement in quality of life and mentality if they are transformed into financial assets. However, due to the scissors gap, income growth often "fails to keep up with the rise in housing prices" and young people wind up "working to pay the rent", thus leading to a sense of being at the bottom.  Such feelings largely explain the popularity of Internet buzzwords such as "worker bee 打工人" and "involution 内卷," and also explains why even highly educated and high-income groups see their own socioeconomic status as low (see the use of self-deprecating terms such as “migrant finance worker 金融民工” and "coding peasant 码农," etc.).
 
When the affluent generation meets the asset society:  particularities of the social mentality of the younger generation
 
The superposition of the affluent generation onto the asset society has produced a certain mindset, manifested in the fight against power by "lying flat", the desire for "financial freedom at 35", the call for a new economic order, and the willingness to be part of a powerful state. 
 
(1) Fighting against power by "lying flat”

Why do young people "lie flat"? Setting aside value judgments and returning to the background and core concepts that shaped the social mindset of young people discussed above, we argue that we must pay attention to two issues:

First, this individualized and affluent generation aspires to be free from the shackles of external responsibilities.  Such shackles may come in the form of the ethics of the traditional family (as in the expression “There are three ways of being unfilial, and to have no posterity is the greatest of them”), from the work ethic of the collectivist era (as in the expressions “bitter struggle” and “think only of the collective 舍小家为大家), from the corporate culture of the workplace (e.g. "The 996 system is a great blessing!"), or from stereotypes popular in social opinion (e.g. "leftover women" [i.e., the derogatory term for women who delay marriage or decide not to marry at all]). In the eyes of the younger generation, since "I alone am responsible for my own life" and other social actors do not bear consequences for my life choices in moral or practical terms, then only "I" am qualified to decide my lifestyle, and only "my" interests, values and perceptions need be considered.
 
As a result, social behaviors that once appealed to larger values are now stripped down to rational calculations at the level of individual welfare. When these behaviors prove unhelpful at the level of individual welfare, young people naturally choose to resist such external responsibilities and role expectations. In our study, the main reason why many young people choose to "lie flat" on the issue of marriage is that they "think it’s a pain" and "worry about the loss of quality of life;" even for those who are already married choose to delay childbirth or remain childless because "childbirth affects career development" and "raising children is too expensive."
 
Second, young people who are unable to fulfill their material expectations are trying to break out of the structural dilemma of the asset society. When young people who expect to be "earning a million dollars a year ten years after graduation" realize how hard things are (i.e., that they can't afford to buy a house, get married, or have children), the huge gap between expectations and reality gives rise to confusion and anxiety about the future of their personal fate. Those young people who are unable to acquire assets through intergenerational transfer either work overtime in the labor market for extra pay in exchange for the possibility of acquiring assets or suffer in silence from the scissors gap between returns on labor and returns on capital in the face of accelerating asset prices. Although they seem to have “freedom of choice,” they find it difficult to break free from the structural fetters of power – no matter what choice they make – and they become "trapped in the system."

Facing a structural dilemma that individuals are powerless to transcend, "lying flat" becomes an effective strategy to bridge the psychological gap and escape the real-world dilemma:  "Once you have decided to 'lie flat,' there is no more ‘involution,' you just fake your way through work and punch out when quitting time comes.” From this perspective, "lying flat" also has the connotation of a confrontation with power.
 
When we understand "lying flat" in this broader context, it is not difficult to see that constantly deriding “lying flat” for its negative impact on society may well be counterproductive, in that it will only make young people who are eager to throw off constraints and problems all the more resistant.  Only by reshaping the consensus of social values and breaking the trap of asset society will it be possible for the young generation to cast aside "lying flat" and return to the expectations of mainstream values.
 
(2) Desire for "financial freedom at 35"
 
As personal interests and self-worth come to be more important than the material needs of survival, the younger generation tends toward post-materialism, and has the courage to no longer take material success as their life goal, and instead pursue "poetry and faraway places [i.e., success conceived in non-material terms]" existing beyond the material level. Nonetheless, all of this remains predicated on a certain material foundation. As a means to get to "poetry and faraway places," the choice of whether to work or not, or what kind of work to do, is essentially based on the return on investment. Consequently, in contradiction with the post-materialism in their evaluation of the meaning of life, the younger generation has a clear tendency to be materialistic in their work choices. Our survey data shows that even in the face of a difficult job market, more than half of college students refuse to compromise on "salary and benefits," and are more likely make concessions on issues of profession, position, location, and the nature of the company. However, the characteristics of the asset society have determined the scissors gap between return on labor and return on capital. Faced with an asset gap that cannot be bridged, work and struggle are no longer a means of self-fulfillment, but a burden.
 
Following the above logic, it is easy to understand why the traditional work ethic of struggle is declining among a young generation that believes that "choice is more important than effort;" why more and more young people are frequently job-hopping or even walking off the job 裸辞, and why they are not willing to "grow with the company." Because the younger generation has more diverse opportunities to "make money" and higher material expectations than the previous generation, working hard and delaying satisfaction have become a less rewarding choice.

The “crisis at 35” establishes a clear timeline for this anxious generation, in the sense that if they do not achieve "financial freedom" or have sufficient assets by age 35, then their spiritual pursuits (freedom, comfort, sense of accomplishment) are also at risk. When the rapid rise in asset prices threatens or even shatters the material foundation the younger generation is expecting, then “dreaming that your bicycle will become a motorcycle [i.e., hoping against hope for a miracle] is no longer a joke, but has become a "means of asset allocation".
 
A good example of this is the speculation in crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. It is not that young people who are smitten with crypto speculation lack common sense in finance or do not understand the risks involved, but instead that conventional means of accruing wealth have failed to provide what these people need. Similarly, according to data released by the Chinese Academy of Information and Communication Technology, more than 60% of telecom fraud victims were born in the 1990s, giving the lie to the traditional stereotype that only the elderly fall prey to fraud. The reason for this is that the material base on which the affluent generation relies to support their spiritual pursuits, together with the sense of powerlessness produced by the asset society, have come together to create the desire for financial freedom at 35, which in turn leads the 1990s generation to seek to achieve rapid accumulation of material wealth through unconventional means while "lying flat."
 
(3) Calling for a new economic order
 
The narrative of prosperity and growth has shaped the affluent generation’s optimistic myth of a rich material life. However, once this optimism runs up against the cold reality of the asset society, it can fundamentally shake the individual’s confidence and expectations in terms of personal development. Whether it is the "heart-wrenching questions" on Zhihu [a popular online site where you can ask questions of any – sort of a “super-Reddit”] that often exceed tens of millions of views (such as "How desperate are today’s youth because of housing prices?"), or the more than 100,000 Douban [another online site where people can exchange views] users who mocked themselves as "985 losers" [985 is a code word for China’s best universities]  – they are all talking about the same doubts and uncertainties that follow the shattering of the myth.  Therefore, all the praise lavished on the young generation (i.e., that they are "optimistic, confident go-getters") and the criticism directed at them (i.e., that they "can't stomach setbacks, and are always complaining") are nothing but two sides of the social mentality created by the affluent generation’s core notion of “pursuing spiritual goals on a material foundation.”

When assets become the key determinant of life opportunities, young people who work hard yet struggle to escape the feeling of being at the bottom inevitably attribute their personal situation to structures and systems that transcend the individual. This sense of blame echoes their everyday experiences and ultimately points to abstract or even false social antagonisms, such as generational conflicts ("housing prices are the exploitation of the young by the middle-aged"), conflicts with capital ("capital uses us to create a better world, but there is no place for us"), or even more abstractly, conflicts with the market ("free markets are free to speculate on housing prices").  In extreme cases, they even point their finger at the state. 

According to our research on several social media platforms, the young generation’s view of capital has flipped upside down over the past two or three years (by “capital,” we include the “996 system [i.e., working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week], the “alternating weeks system” [i.e., alternating weeks of five work days and six work days], the phenomenon of new recruits being paid more than existing workers, salaries being replaced by stock options, and super wealthy groups who obtain huge returns through capital markets).  While they once worshiped the super wealthy and embraced overtime as a way of topping up their salaries, they now suspect and resist capital and the strategies it employs.  The sense of being at the bottom of the asset society has been strengthened by stories in the news about those who are “unemployed at 35,” or “the sudden deaths of workers born in the 1990s,” and then the word “worker bee 打工人” exploded on the web in 2020.  It has reached the point that young people who have never really known the era of the planned economy are starting to feel nostalgic for the 1980s, when "jobs were assigned at graduation and the work units took care of housing."  Taking the civil service exam has once again become a popular career choice. The young generation is calling for a new economic order that will allow them to escape their sense of despair and realize their spiritual pursuits.

When public opinion allows, young people’s dissatisfaction with capital can turn into collective protest.  In March 2019, a project called "996.ICU" [“working nine to nine six days a week lands you in intensive care”] was launched on the open-source platform GitHub with the goal of exposing enterprises practicing 996.  In just two weeks, more than 200,000 people responded, and ultimately issued an “anti-996 license,” prohibiting those companies on the “996 list” from using the code generated on GitHub. Subsequently, the same people also launched a "955.WLB" [9 a.m. to 5 p.m. five days a week = Work-Life Balance] project, which rates over 1,300 companies and encourages people to "vote with their feet" and reject companies on the "996 list.”
 
It is important to point out that the 996 system is but one of the many manifestations of a deeper conflict, the root of which is, once again, the conflict between the desire of the affluent generation for a material foundation allowing them to pursue their spiritual dreams, and the despair they feel as latecomers to the asset society.   When Internet companies abandoned the 996 system, the young people who lost extra income did not achieve the “freedom, comfort, and sense of accomplishment” they had been dreaming of, and their reflections on and doubts about the existing economic order remain. 
 
(4) Identifying with a strong state

Many media reports and scholarly studies point out that the 1990s generation is extremely patriotic. We generally attribute this to affluent living conditions, the high level of education, and extensive media campaigns, but this ignores the ideological and social mentality of this generation. We argue that the individualism of the affluent generation means that their patriotism has its own unique form, while the sense of despair imposed by the asset-based society leads them to invest their hope in a strong country.
 
On the one hand, the young generation sincerely believes that China's political and economic achievements prove the superiority of the Chinese path, and this belief is not the result of propaganda they have ingested, but from their own daily life experience. When such beliefs meet with an outside challenge, the younger generation tends to consciously look for examples in their personal life experiences to refute and criticize these challenges. This is the only way we can understand why these young people are happy to be called “self-financed trolls” for the government 自干五.[5]   

On the other hand, the affluent generation, eager to free itself from constraints, no longer looks to the family or the collective as a source of meaning in their lives, but instead seeks something grander and more abstract, something that might counter the impoverishment of values and the hollowness of meaning accompanying individuation. Patriotism allows the younger generation to integrate their individual, mundane daily lives into a larger community without feeling any particular constraints. As a result, retweeting, liking, and commenting on patriotic content expresses not only personal feelings but also a collective sense of being part of a community.

At the same time, the sense of despair engendered by the asset society makes the younger generation long for an external force strong enough to break the logic that allows assets to determine life opportunities. The feeling of being an underclass is often defined in terms of wealthy groups, capital, and even the market, while the hope for a new economic order is pinned on the state. Younger generations aspire to be part of a powerful state in order to fight back against abstract or even fictional social antagonisms.
 
What should be pointed out, however, is that whether we are talking about beliefs grounded in personal life experience, or a pursuit of meaning to allow people to escape from their daily lives, or hopes invested in an outside force that will conquer a sense of despair, everything is predicated on the strength of the community. This means that when China’s economic development faces the risk of a downward spiral, it may trigger a series of crises of belief. Similarly, if the state proves unable to tame "evil" capital or is perceived to be part of the structural forces of the asset society, doubts and challenges may also be directed at the state. For this reason, we should take a sober and objective look at the current surge of patriotic enthusiasm among the younger generation and the expectations of the state in terms of performance and morality that this phenomenon conveys.
 
Living within circles: Subcultures and Youth Pan-ideologies
 
For the affluent generation, individualization has amplified and confirmed the value and meaning of "ego," and subcultural communities based on personal interests and values (e.g. fan circles, groups based on gender issues/LGBTQ, zodiac signs, animal protection issues, etc.) pay an increasingly important role in the process of youth socialization. These communities, located in cyberspace, offer young people struggling with a sense of powerlessness in the asset-based society the possibility of explaining reality and overcoming their status, and the spiritual pursuit of self-fulfillment is visualized in the form of the " idols 大神" recognized by particular communities. We refer to this condition as "living within circles".
  
Although there are occasional "out-of-circle" incidents, in general, circles are mostly "non-ideological," meaning that they exist in a relatively niche space, which is not in conflict with mainstream values, and has no clear political demands. However, this does not mean that such communities do not have the ability to construct frameworks that allow them to organize and mobilize. On the contrary, because they have their own theory and logic (e.g., gender issues/LGBTQ) or have developed specific behavior patterns and value judgments standard in the course of daily practice (e.g., fan circles), members can agree on values and behaviors, meaning that they can unite internally and exclude outsiders, and can both frame specific issues and become potential channels of mobilization. Therefore, they have a "pan-ideological" character.
 
Taking gender issues as an example, a few extreme gender communities have re-framed social issues such as the "three-child" policy and the gender ratios revealed in the seventh national census (arguing for example that "allowing couples to have three children will mean that women can’t find a job”), focusing public discussion on contradictions and antagonisms between different genders and different groups. Such a focus not only does not lead group members to reflect on their own thinking and framing of issues, but instead strengthens their in-group/out-group psychology.
 
Moreover, we see the effects this “pan-ideology” particularly prominently when the same social issue or public opinion concern is mobilized within different community frameworks, producing opposing values or action consequences.  For example, in the extremely influential “Boycott Xiao Zhan incident,”[6] Xiao’s fan group cited the principles of “maintaining public order and morals” when reporting the offending writings to authorities, while the “boys’ love” group cited the principles of “creative freedom” and “boycotting the works of inferior artists” to convince many brands to break with Xiao Zhan.  In this case, both Xiao Zhan’s fan group and the boys' love group used mainstream discourse to frame their particular value propositions, and both mobilized their communities and strengthened their community's identity and boundaries in the process.

From this perspective, both the fan groups and the gender community bear a certain resemblance to new religious movements. This resemblance is reflected both in the groups’ construction of social reality and shaping of psychological identity, as well as in their organizational mobilization and collective action.  Given the circles within which contemporary youths live and the fact that these groups readily exploit existing ideologies, we cannot rule out the possibility that extremism and populism will emerge as the groups frame particular issues, nor can we rule out the possibility of large-scale organizational mobilization should multiple issues come together. 
 
Conclusion 
 
We have argued in this paper that the affluent generation and the asset society constitute two contemporary contexts for our understanding of the core concepts of contemporary youth groups. The former has shaped an individualism characterized by taking responsibility for life opportunities and self-enhancement, pursuing freedom, comfort, and fulfillment above and beyond subsistence concerns; the latter has led to a sense of powerlessness and despair among latecomers due to the difference in asset-labor returns and the greater extent to which assets determine individual life opportunities compared to performance in the labor market.
 
This conjuncture has produced consequences in terms of social mentalities:  the first is the use of "lying flat" to resist power. The desire to be free from external responsibilities and the inability to achieve the desired material conditions have led the young generation to resist mainstream expectations in terms of marriage and work. The second is the desire for "financial freedom at 35." Since the income earned through labor is insufficient to meet their spiritual needs, the work ethic is declining, and high-risk, speculative behavior is broadly accepted. The third is their call for a new economic order. Individual life opportunities are determined by the asset structure, the labor market rarely provides a means to obtain the necessary wealth, spiritual pursuits fall by the wayside, so the younger generation yearns to destroy the existing economic order. Fourth is their identification with a strong state. Patriotism derived from individual experience allows this individualized generation to find a possible path out of meaningless and feelings of inferiority. The fifth is their circle-style life. These online circles, based on personal values and interests, provide the young generation with spiritual satisfaction and a source of values, and at the same time contain frameworks for mobilization and the organizational capacity for social action.

The affluent generation and the asset society have shaped the social mentality and cognitive patterns of contemporary youth and may generate new conflict patterns as young people come of age and enter the work force. Some of these negative tendencies may constitute potential risks to China's economic and social development, if they worsen under particular circumstances. In our view, there are at least three aspects that merit attention:

First, should certain social mentalities radicalize further, we cannot rule out the possibility that this generation might raise questions about the current order, or even current ideology, to a certain extent.
 
Given the ideological flexibility of these groups and their capacity to organize and mobilize their members, in the discussion of certain public issues, these groups could well link up with social antagonisms that are abstract, or even fictitious, but which have broad mobilizational appeal, simplifying the issues into a conflict over resources between generations or groups in the public policy process, stoking populist sentiments and limiting policy choices.  We cannot rule out the possibility that in certain periods or on certain issues there might be tensions between these groups and mainstream ideology (especially on issues of capital, gender, and family and children), in which the existing system might be the point of contention.
 
Second, if certain types of social mentality spread too far, this could lead to a decline in the capital dividends and a general lack of human capital, which could affect economic development.
 
The rapid increase in asset prices and the excessive promotion of aggressive investment strategies may exacerbate the low savings rate and high indebtedness of the younger generation, further generating structural financial risks and posing hidden dangers for the smooth functioning of China's economy. Human capital may face challenges in three dimensions: quantity, quality, and work ethic. In terms of quantity, the desire to "lie flat" dampens the young generation's willingness to have children; in terms of quality, the unbridgeable asset gap adds fuel to the fire to the idea that “staying in school is worthless;” in terms of the work ethic, the problem is not only the pain of “involution,” but also the reality of having to keep working to make ends meet. 

Third, should certain social mentalities grow even more extreme, it could lead to conflicts of values and the loss of social consensus; the development of new ideas about marriage and child-raising along with the flourishing of consumerism may well pose challenges at the society-culture interface. 

Ideas based on individualism have dissolved traditional values concerning marriage and child-rearing and portray certain individual choices and behaviors (such as gender minorities or people against marriage) as a “right to lie flat” again social inequalities.  Such ideas have a large impact on the young generation due to their ideological fluidity, which prompts them to circulate such ideas.  Consumerism combined with Internet finance provides a possible solution for those who are unable to satisfy their material needs through the income earned at work, and opportunistic behavior like speculating on Bitcoin, shoes, blind boxes, or NTF has become an investment strategy to realize “financial freedom.”   Consumerism echoes the wealth anxiety of the younger generation on a psycho-social level, leading to greater participation in such activities.
 
Notes
 
[1]付宇 and 桂勇, “当代中国青年群体耐人寻味的五重悖论,” published online by the Beijing Cultural Review/文化纵横 on May 17, 2023.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  The way generations are described in Chinese can be confusing.  The word for the 1990s generation is 90后, literally “after 1990,” which leads many people to translate it as post-90s.  What it actually means, however, is those born after January 1, 1990, and before January 1, 2000. It is even more confusing because some authors seem to use the term to refer to the “Internet generation,” meaning anyone born since the mid-1980s, for whom online life was an important part of their youth and adolescence. 

[3]Translator’s note:  Both of these terms refer to online “social justice” practices.  Yijian jubao/一键举报, literally “one-click reporting,” originated with a 2015 call from central disciplinary authorities for people to report corrupt behavior or government officials with one click on their cell phones or computers.  “Human flesh research engines” are similar to what we call “doxing” – i.e., outing people believed to have engaged in immoral behavior.

[4]Translator’s note:  The phrase xiaozhen zuotijia 小镇做题家, lit. “small town people who are good at taking tests,” is a derogatory term referring to people who manage to acquire the formal skills necessary to succeed in the educational system but who are generally incapable of doing anything in the real world. 

[5]Translator’s note:  Online trolls who support the positions of the Chinese government are known as the “fifty-cent party 五毛党” because at some point they supposedly received fifty cents - 五毛 – for each post.  Ziganwu/自干五 is a play on words which means something like “I’m bringing my own fifty cents,” in other words, “I am supporting my government because I want to, not because someone is paying me.”

[6]Translator’s note:  Xiao Zhan is an actor who has appeared in films having homoerotic overtones.  In late January of 2020, a member of the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own – the “boys’ love” group referred to in the text - began publishing fan fiction about Xiao Zhan, the content of which struck Xiao Zhan’s fans as pornographic.  They complained to the authorities, who eventually shut down the Archive of Our Own site in late February.  Members of this site subsequently took revenge by attacking brands Xiao Zhan was representing, and these brands cut ties with the actor.  The incident dragged on for several months, as the fan groups attacked one another in various ways, some calling on Xiao Zhan to “restrain” his fans.