Sun Liping on 2025 and Normal Life

Sun Liping, “The Two Things People Are Most Worried About, Which Can Also Count as a Belated New Year's Wish”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Sun Liping (b. 1953) taught sociology at Tsinghua University before retiring, and for decades has been a well known liberal intellectual.  In his retirement he has become a popular blogger, and many of his posts are translated on this site.  As I have noted before, he sees himself as someone who dares to speak the truths that others do not (about the pandemic, fertility rates, inequality, education), generally in a way that avoids getting him in hot water politically (but not always:  see here).  The post translated here continues in this vein, on the topic of the slowing economy and the widespread anxiety it is producing among children and adults. 
 
Everyone now knows that China’s period of high-speed growth has ended, and many fear that China’s immediate future will look like that of Japan or South Korea.  For pessimists, China’s slow-motion real estate collapse and heavy local debt burden strongly suggest that China may well experience something like Japan’s 30-year depression, particularly since China is having a hard time finding markets for the quantity of goods it can produce.  In South Korea, growth has sputtered as well, and society has become grindingly competitive and expensive.  In this narrative, hard work does not pay off, and joy and pleasure have largely disappeared.  The same thing appears to be happening in China, and in a poorer economy.
 
This is the message that Sun Liping delivers in his post.  Young people are anxious and depressed because the educational system runs them ragged, preparing them to compete for jobs that are becoming rare, less interesting, and less well-paying.  Adults stuck in these jobs experience burnout.  The China Dream has stalled, and no one knows what to do about it.  Sun’s plea is that someone pay attention to what is manifestly not working, and to somehow allow people to live normal lives. I think this plea resonates in much of the world.
 
Translation

The old giving way to the new is merely the nature of things, and I originally wasn’t going to write anything about the New Year, because in fact I didn’t know what to say.
 
But two little things I read on New Year’s day prompted me to share my expectations and wishes for the new year.
 
One was a passage from a blog by someone who calls themself “the beast.” They noted that back in the day there was a bit of slang in Latin American Spanish – “trabajar como los chinos,” or “work like the Chinese,” which everyone took as praise for the hard-working Chinese. 
 
According to internal statistics compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for the year 2024, Mexico was the winner in terms of hard work, with 2200 average annual work hours. The United States clocked about 1,800, and Japan, once famous for “dying from overwork” came in at 1,600 hours. China is not on the list, but if we use the average 49 hour work week announced by the Statistics Bureau last year, that puts China at almost 2500, leaving Mexico in the dust, to say nothing of the United States and Japan.  This is last year's data, and data from the first half of this year shows the number increasing.[2]
 
The other thing I read was a piece by Professor Lao Dongyan (劳东燕, b. 1974) of Tsinghua University entitled "Parents Can't Stand the Social pressure, So Why Do They Think Their Children Can?" (My guess is that Lao did not write this, but that it was compiled by others based on previous writings on her blog).  In recent years, the number of students suffering from depression has visibly increased, at younger and younger ages. My children used to tell me about a classmate who talked about engaging in self-harm, which you could see in the many marks on her wrists from having cut herself.  The girl talked about it with seeming indifference, and her parents did not seem to pay attention or consider it a big deal.   Recent online videos suggest that this reflects a widespread phenomenon among children in county-level middle schools.
 
Professor Lao says that the pressure and anxiety felt by children often originates with parents and teachers, whose anxiety comes from society at large, where they see that good job opportunities are getting increasingly scarce and competition for employment ever fiercer. This is why simply issuing an administrative order to reduce the academic burden on school children will rarely produce the expected outcome, and no fundamental solution is possible until the overall social environment is improved.
 
That said, parents and schools do have room for improvement and should do their best to bear the weight of the social pressure and not pass it on to the children, or at least not increase the pressure. If parents, who are adults, cannot bear the pressure of society, why do they think that their children can? While schools work on improving their own stats in terms of key performance indicators, might there not also be room for reflection and adjustment?
 
Writing about herself, Professor Lao noted:  “For me, 2024 was a year of self-healing. Since I finished my Ph.D. in 2004 and started teaching, I have never had a year like 2022-2023 in which I lost motivation for research. Virtually overnight, my inner world collapsed, leaving me with a strong sense of disillusionment. For about a year and a half, I was trapped in anxiety, frustration, and depression.  The upside is that this is a new experience for me; in my life to this point I have been guileless and positive. The downside is that when you lose your sense of meaning at my age, you have to choose between getting out of the game or plunging back in and renewing yourself, which means pulling yourself back from the brink. I am no longer young, but neither am all that old, and I don’t want to fake it for what remains of my career.  I spent more than half of 2024 in Toronto, using sabbatical leave saved up over eight years. I couldn't wait to be somewhere else, because things had gotten so bad that everything seemed meaningless and I had no energy for anything, including my academic work, other than taking care of the basic requirements of teaching.” 
 
One of these passages is about adults and the other is about children, but what they have in common is that both are living very badly.
 
Logically speaking, this should not be the case. We’re always talking about “overproduction” these days, something I have written about repeatedly.  What is overproduction? It means that we produce too much wealth, that our capacity to produce wealth is too great. We have so much wealth that our problem is finding markets for it. Of course, you can say that wealth is not everything, but wealth is still the basis for making our lives better.

Can it be true that we cannot use this incredible wealth to make people’s lives a bit easier and happier?
 
This is all the more worrisome when we think about our children. To improve their health, we can imagine prenatal examinations, postpartum centers, paid childcare, and new vaccines coming out virtually every month.  The marketplace is richer, with everything you could possibly imagine:  milk powder at hundreds or even thousands of RMB per can, well-crafted, modern, and of course expensive toys, and when they are a bit older all kinds of attractive games and entertainment.  Why can’t we give it our all for the children?
 
Surely it can’t be the case that we can't we use our energy and resources to make children's lives as easy and happy as possible?

In recent years, I have returned over and over again to one topic, which is that we need normality.  We need a normal society and a normal life. We all live the same short lives on this earth, in the course of which we encounter both happiness and sadness.  Why don’t we do our best to make sure people live like people? Maybe in fact this is the only society that will function normally, from a more secular or utilitarian perspective.
 
Now many people are worried about one thing in particular: young people are not having children, and the fertility rate in our society is declining. There are many reasons for this, but I think the most basic thing is to first let these potential parents live like human beings. They may not be too satisfied with what they achieve, but at least they will know they have lived and experienced the world. And having done that, maybe they will think that maybe they’ll give it a try, having a kid.

Notes

[1]孙立平, “人们最焦虑的两件事情：也算是迟到的新年祝愿,” published on Sun’s WeChat platform on January 2, 2025.

[2]Translator’s note:  How Sun could have statistics for the first half of 2025 is a mystery to me, but I can’t think of any other way to translate what he wrote.