Youthology on China's Vulnerable Generation

Youthology, “China’s Vulnerable Generation”[1]
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Youthology is a Chinese marketing company that attempts to connect brands to young people and young people to brands, and as a part of their business publishes articles on youth issues on their blog. I have no idea how many people read it, or how much influence it has.  I find their choice of issues interesting, generally well written and at times quite daring (one young woman wrote about her first sexual experience). 
 
The text translated here is that last of a series meant to sum up 2024 and preview 2025.  The focus is on China’s vulnerable generation, by which I think they mean people born since 1995, who will be turning 30 this year.  The piece is too long, a bit unstructured and ends abruptly, without a conclusion, after a final statistic on the sad state of mental health among China’s young people.  As this suggests, the tone of the text is unsparingly bleak:  the China Dream has stalled and no one knows what to do about it.
 
Chinese young people inherited great expectations from China’s phenomenal economic rise, which began to slow in the 2010s, and from the democratization of China’s higher educational system.  For this generation’s parents, opportunities were everywhere, and a good education was a good way to get ahead.  Getting a good education was difficult, however, because places in China’s universities were too few for the many striving to make it, so China sensibly invested in higher education and succeeded in making room for vastly more students.  This ringing success has fallen flat because the job market has not kept up with university expansion.  Consequently, China’s vulnerable generation, raised by ambitious, entrepreneurial parents to compete just like they did, outdid them in educational achievement, but find themselves in a limbo defined by a flat job market, stagnant salaries, and high prices, especially for real estate.
 
What’s a youngster to do?  The answer is not at all obvious, and Youthology wanders through 20 pages of analysis and observations, asserting that Chinese young people are experiencing the same problems as Japanese and South Korean youth:  living online, avoiding commitments and entanglements, working even though they don’t really want to, relying on their parents…They know what they don’t want, because that’s what they have, but they don’t know what they do want, or how to get it.  Their Confucian heritage has meant that China, Japan, South Korean, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore all invested massive amounts of energy in education as they modernized, and these educational systems have been seen as the keys to worldly success, and hence worth the considerable stress placed on students (and parents).  When this worldly success proves elusive, the educational system responds by increasing the stress levels, which at some point become unbearable.
 
This appears to be where China is now:  school is a marathon, but nobody wins.  China surely is not as bleak as described in this piece.  People respond to stress in different ways, and many Chinese young people surely achieve success and happiness, both within and outside the system.  At the same time, the description offered by Youthology probably describes the experience of the majority of Chinese young people, which is a challenge for China’s authorities, because if it makes the young people more conservative and less rebellious, it also leaves them unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives.
 
Translation
 
It is commonplace to try to sum up a decade in one word.
 
One example is Japan's "enlightened” or “relaxed” generation.  These are people born around the time of the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s who have been deeply affected by the economic downturn, the shrinking job market, and changes in Japan’s social structure. They came to be pessimistic about their future careers and family lives and to question the traditional "spirit of struggle," choosing to evade what society expected of them and pursue inner peace and personal freedom. Otaku culture and ACG[2] became the symbols of this generation. Unlike their more pragmatic predecessors, they tend to immerse themselves in anime, video games, and the virtual online world. As someone put it, "they don't drive cars, don't buy famous brands, don't exercise, don't drink, don't travel, and are indifferent to love." Their "enlightenment" is reflected in their rejection of social expectations.
 
Contemporary South Korea's "N-po generation" has also been deeply affected by the social pressure brought about by rapid economic development, and social values have changed dramatically particularly following the 2008 financial crisis. This generation has abandoned many on the responsibilities having to do with marriage, childbirth, home buying, and interpersonal relationships, etc. expected by traditional society. This change is reflected in a sharp decline in marriage and fertility rates, the impact of which continues. The N-po generation mainly pursues a free and individualized lifestyle, and the rise of K-pop has become a particular symbol of this generation. The act of rejection points toward what they seek to replace through looking within.
 
China is currently living a similar moment. After achieving ultra-high growth rates of 10% per year between 1978 and 2010, China's economy has slowed every year since 2011, setting aside the sharp fluctuations of the pandemic period. The dividends brought by reform and opening up and the real estate boom are a thing of the past, and some people now jokingly say that young people now have to clean up mess after the party.[3]  This generation of young people has enjoyed the fruits of educational democratization, and in general are much more competitive on the job market than previous generations, but they also feel powerless in the face of that market’s fierce competition.  In addition, the cost of living continues to rise while salary growth has stagnated.  This generation lives and seeks recognition on social platforms, displaying both openness and conservative values. They grew up with access to material wealth but seem more disheartened than their parents.
 
There are different ways to sum up this generation of young people. For example, psychology professor Peng Kaiping 彭凯平 (p. 1962), Dean of the School of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University, once carried out a survey of the psychological characteristics of young people born in the 2000s, and on this basis argued that this generation seems almost "bipolar.” They are hopeful, but also anxious. They possess vast sums of information yet lack practical experience and face a wide array of choices and pressures having to do with life and employment.  He characterized them as being “halfway between involution and lying flat.”[4] 
 
Using one word to sum up a particular group of people during a particular a period of time will inevitably involve a certain amount of statistical violence, but labeling the world and understanding oneself has become a kind of comfort and provides a bit of clarity in an environment of uncertainty.
 
This article is the last in our annual review. We have attempted to find our own term to sum up Chinese young people, today and going forward, and among the many possible choices pessimistically agreed on “vulnerable 弱势.”  Like Japanese and South Korean youth in the recent past, Chinese young people, when compared to their parents’ generation, are as or more vulnerable in terms of the economy, discursive rights, and mental outlook. 
 
Those Who Have Been Squandered
 
In recent years, the working condition of young people has been shrouded under three dark clouds.

The first two clouds are the unemployment rate and the value of work. Today, it is common both for people to be unemployed and to quit a bad job before finding a better one (luoci/裸辞lit., “naked resignation”).  So on the one hand, as the economy slows down, many companies optimize and seek efficiencies, meaning that there are fewer jobs to be found; on the other, the sense of value work provides has plummeted, so that “work identity” no longer means what it once did.  For many people, whether they physically leave their jobs or not, their minds are elsewhere.
 
The third dark cloud is AI, known as the "fourth technological revolution."  At present, AI companies are talking about AI as a tool, in an effort to assuage young people’s fears of being replaced.  However, as one online commentator put it, the productivity unleashed by AI tools and the direction of workplace change are:  from the present situation dominated by “a handful of smart and diligent creators + a large group of hard workers with high overall quality + a constant flow of traffic and subsidized resources,” to a new situation, still dominated by “a very small number of super-powerful individuals (IQ/skills/power of action) + a small handful of extremely clever actors +  the fuel or ammunition (algorithms) to take what they want.” In the old situation, the costs were basically people; in the new situation, it is algorithms.
 
The remaining question is where the majority will wind up – those not smart enough or without the power to execute as needed.
 
Not only will wealth and power be further concentrated in large companies with abundant resources, but in addition, the felt value of work will also be intensively rarefied in these new technology giants that claim to be "changing everyone's life." For most workers who tend to believe work is merely a monthly salary, providing neither value nor fun, their situation will worsen as they become the ultimate cogs in the machine. In the past, we talked about people in the workplace in terms of "human resources," but at present their value as actual resources is diminishing.  In the future, when people still need the workplace for the sake of stability, but the workplace no longer really needs people, many people, even if they remain in the workplace, will feel that they have been “squandered.”
 
An additional question is:  once they have been shunted aside by efficiency, how will the social system support this huge group of workers with their massive spiritual and economic needs? 
 
This is the environment in which the vulnerable generation finds itself. It is increasingly dependent on the system but is powerless against it and can only passively wait for the system to get better.
 
Speaking more specifically about the vulnerable groups in this situation leads us to discuss a series of “passivities:”
 
1. Passive competition, passive lowering of expectations
 
It is becoming increasingly difficult to find a job. In 2023, more than one-fifth of young people aged 16-24 in China were unemployed. The number of college graduates has increased, but the economy is growing slowly, and the growth of high-tech companies such as large factories has also slowed. In recent years, the job market has been particularly tough on young people. Pulse’s [Maimai/脉脉, China’s Linked-in] "2024 Workplace Survival Insights" shows that in 2021, 2022, 2023 and the first half of 2024, the talent supply and demand ratio increased more than six times from 0.32 to 1.29 to 1.98 and 1.97, which is equivalent to a change from everyone having a choice of three jobs to one in two candidates finding no job at all.
 
The entry level for job hunting has also risen. Some positions now require that candidates graduate from key universities in China and have a foreign M.A. degree, whereas in the past, neither was required.  Government jobs may no longer be an iron rice bowl [i.e., offer lifetime employment], and young people have to work hard to get one:  between 2014 and 2025, the number of civil service positions open to graduates of technical colleges shrunk from 9% to 0.13%.
 
At the same time, with the development of AI technology, young people are facing the pressure of "skill transformation." The future is becoming more and more uncertain, and hard work at school cannot guarantee a high-paying job. The idea that “studying is useless” is becoming a reality. On the one hand, the anxiety of prospective college students about “choosing the wrong major” and losing at the starting line is getting more serious; on the other hand, many people put their hopes on side jobs that are unrelated to their majors. And of course, examples of undergraduate and graduate students delivering food and working as security guards for a living have long been commonplace in public opinion.

2. Passive "suspension[5]"
 
Work is more of a simple source of income than ever before, and people put up with jobs they dislike in the hope of finding a better job and life in the future. Consequently, salary and benefits are the most important things, and the value and meaning of the work itself are not so important. The survey results of the Southern Metropolis Daily Poll Center for young people show that 61.4% of the respondents believe that work is mainly for "making money," while only 36.8% think of work in terms of "realizing one’s personal potential.”  State-owned enterprises are still the first choice in youth employment preferences.
 
With the slowdown of economic growth, people's demand for work has become stronger, contributing to a “wait and see” mentality in which people cling to the job they have in the face of an overall unfavorable situation.  A 2024 survey comparing China, Japan, South Korea and the United States illustrated that Chinese teenagers are the most afraid of not finding a job and have the hardest time accepting the idea of not working: nearly 80% of Chinese high school students said that "they should take a job even if it is not ideal," a much higher percentage than high school students in the United States (61.1%), South Korea (55.9%) and Japan (30.2%). Work is a pain, but young people's desire for work remains high.
 
3. Passive overwork
 
 Overwork is common. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the International Labor Organization (ILO), in 2023, the average Chinese worker put in 49 hours per week, exceeding the statutory working hours by 11%, setting a new 20-year high and reaching the highest level in the world.
 
One of the current dilemmas surrounding the idea of “work” is that work is meant to give people dignity, and there is no dignity without work, but it is work itself that currently most deprives people of their dignity. The self-image of young people in the workplace is declining year by year, the neutral term “worker” being replaced by images of “social animals” or even “beasts of burden.” 
 
Nonetheless, many young people continue to practice “voluntary involution.”
 
A cross-national 2024 survey comparing China, the United States, Japan, and South Korea illustrates that Chinese high school students are the most confused about their future careers but remain the most willing to invest a great deal of energy in their pursuit. More than 60% of Chinese high school students are willing to invest more than 60% of their energy in their work, which is higher than South Korea (53.3%) and almost twice that of their American and Japanese counterparts (32.4% and 31.6%).

4. Passive odd jobs
 
The proportion of informal employment has increased. From 2008 to 2017, the scale of China's informal economy experienced double-digit growth, accounting for more than one-fifth of GDP, and the number of informal employees reached 159 million. In 2021, more than 60% of companies made use of flexible employment, and more than half of companies are maintaining or expanding the scale of flexible employment, mainly to reduce costs.
 
In recent years, the number of food delivery drivers and online car-hailing drivers has increased significantly. The total number of registered drivers on online car-hailing platforms has exceeded 100 million, with more than 20,000 new drivers registering every day. At the same time, the number of new daily registrations for food delivery drivers exceeds 20,000. Too many people are pursuing the same market, and the average income is decreasing. The myth that you can earn more than 10,000 RMB (approx. 1365$US)  a month through crowdsourcing has been shattered.
 
A survey published in the People's Forum found that these “atomized groups” existing outside the workplace system have the lowest sense of happiness. They do not think society is fair, they tend to believe that inequalities are too great, and they are the group with the strongest sense of relative deprivation. They face more challenges and uncertainties in work and life, including: unstable income, lack of social security and welfare, poor working conditions, limited career development, high psychological pressure, low social status, and lack of legal protection.
 
5. The Outsourced life   
 
One of the difficulties faced by contemporary young people is that they are constantly forced to "outsource" their lives, especially under the double crunch of economic hardship and the accelerated pace of life. The idea of returning to their “ideal” [i.e., normal] lifestyle often becomes a luxury . In this state of "passive acceptance", pre-packaged meals are the most representative "life outsourcing" products. Even if people know that fast food is not the healthiest option, there is not much room for choice. After all, it is difficult for many people to take the time to make three homemade healthy meals a day.
 
"Brain rot" [i.e., due to too much time on social media] is another typical example. Even if we make a New Year’s resolution not to engage in brain rot, it is not clear what we are meant to replace social media with.  For people who have worked all day and who will have to work again tomorrow, finding stimulation other than on their cellphone is not cheap in terms of time or energy, which means that people will invest their time in “nutritionless information.”
 
6. Passive "awakening"
 
When facing a highly programmed and homogenized social structure, young people gradually realize that they are like NPCs (non-player characters) in a game. They go to school and get a job, buy a house, have children, pay their mortgage, retire, get sick…This series of life steps has been simplified into a fixed pattern, and young people are expected to follow various established paths. Whether it is getting into a good university, finding a good job, or buying a house and getting married, these are all regarded as signs of "making it".
 
Society still has only one definition of success. In a highly homogenized competition, we can only compare who earns more, whose house is bigger, and who achieves financial freedom sooner.
 
Some people have tried to get off the track and into the wilderness, but many of them then experienced the "curse of freedom." The responsibilities and uncertainties that freedom brings made convinced many bloggers who left their jobs go back to work.

7. Passively accepting one's status
 
Opportunities for social mobility are unequal, and the myth of welfare is gradually declining.

From 2000 to 2024, enrollment in higher education in China increased from 12.5% ​​to 60.2% for age-appropriate groups. Education has been democratized, but the employment opportunities needed for social development cannot meet the rapidly expanding educated population, and idea of "poor families producing great children" has once again become a myth.
 
A 2024 article in Sociological Review by Wang Yuanchao 王元超 and Zhu Bin 朱斌found that in the past decade, the "class ceiling" and the "class floor" effects have become increasingly obvious. In the 2006-2010 period, there was no significant difference in the income of people from different family backgrounds. Since 2012, however, the income of those born worker and farmer families has begun to be significantly lower than those born to elite families, and this gap has widened every year.
 
Even if people from working-class and peasant families climb into the elite class, their income remains significantly lower than that of people born into elite families; and even if people from elite families fall to the working class, they are more likely to climb back out. Counterintuitively, the "long shadow effect" of family background is more obvious in private firms that seem to pursue the logic of rationality and efficiency maximization.
 
8. Forced loss of health

If we had to use one word to describe the health of contemporary youth, it is would be "crispy skin cuipi/脆皮" [an Internet term used by young Chinese referring to the “brittle” nature of their own health]. Chinese students' sports performance has been declining year by year. Skin problems, emotional distress and sleep disorders also plague college students, and hair loss problems are appearing earlier. According to a survey by the Southern Metropolis Daily Poll Center, 83.5% of Generation Z are very concerned about their hair loss, and 73.4% get upset when others talk about how much hair they have.  Those born after 1995 are particularly sensitive to such issues.
 
Emotional distress expresses itself through physical symptoms. Physical examinations of young people find that arthritis of the neck, obesity, liver problems, nodules in the breast or thyroid, hypertension, and high uric acid are all common problems, most of which are related to bad life habits created by a high-pressure lifestyle.
 
9. Passive abandonment of marriage and love
 
Dating and getting married may mean a decline in class position. As in South Korea, young people in China have also begun to turn against the idea of love and marriage as well as that of having children.
 
Faced with the choice between career and love, more and more young people seem to give priority to their careers. According to the 2023 "Survey Report on College Students' Marriage and Fertility Concepts" released by the China Family Planning Association and other institutions, the common pursuit of college students, regardless of gender, is to "establish a career before starting a family." Even teenagers on the cusp of adulthood are not very interested in love. According to a survey report released by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Social Sciences Academic Press, in 2022, 42% of college students are unmarried and want to stay that way, and only 25% want to find a partner.

The current reality of marriage is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for rural men to get married, and urban people are increasingly unwilling to get married as well.  Whether they are forced to be single or have chosen to be single, their motivation it is largely due to the pressures of life today. People decide not to have children because its cost-benefit ratio is low:  the unlimited responsibilities of childcare, which lead people to have no money, no time, no energy, and no hope, are sufficient to make many people pessimistic. Children have become consumer goods rather than productive tools. The pessimistic but realistic joke is that after spending all your money, time, and energy to get your child into a top-level university, you still have to find them a job, buy them a house, and take care of their children. In China, where marriage and childbirth are highly linked together, the reduced willingness to give birth has also lowered the willingness to get married.
 
10. Passive living off of parents
 
In the process of growing up, many young people gradually discover that their parents are not as reliable as they imagined. This discovery has led to an unprecedented reflection of and criticism of the nature of the family. The media has widely reported on the tendency to break with one’s family, but at the same time, many people also find it difficult to slough off their economic dependence on their parents, and in fact have no choice but to rely on them. They may well mouth slogans about personal independence, but they still have to rely on their parents to buy a house, get married, or even find a job.

Today’s young people generally had access to much more material wealth growing up than did their parents, which makes them think that they should have better lives, but on becoming adults, they find that they can neither realize their dreams nor repay their parents. The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang 阎云翔 (b. 1954) has noted that young people born in the 1980s and 1990s grew up under conditions of material wealth and high expectations, in the sense that their parents brought them up to have a promising future that would allow them to repay their parents.  The children naturally grew up with a debt of gratitude and great pressure, but reality has made it difficult for them to be as filial as they hoped to be.
 
From a practical point of view, choosing to be a "full-time child" makes sense from a cost-effectiveness perspective - being with parents can guarantee a comfortable life and three worry-free meals a day, while if you go out on your own you basically have to share a rent and eat pre-packaged meals in your tiny room.  Such a class downgrade may be unbearable. Living with parents is also like a preparatory state before marriage, although it may reduce the probability of marriage, as in Japan where many people remain single and live with their parents even after entering middle age.
 
People who are afraid to move on
 
During the Heisei Depression – also known as the “lost twenty years” – that followed the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in the early 1990s, young people experienced a strong sense of emptiness, and their social lives came to be reduced to their private lives. Japanese cultural critic Uno Tsunehiro 宇野常宽 (b. 1978) summarized two situations in which young Japanese people found themselves at the time:
 
1. The Heisei Depression, which was originally regarded as the beginning of the economic collapse, has become a long-term state, which means that the myth of economic growth undergirding post-war Japan has collapsed, and a world that once promised that hard work will make you rich has gradually turned into a world in which you will not be rich even if you work hard.
 
2. Continuous uncertainty brings continuous anxiety, and young people cannot bear a society which is free but cold and difficult.  The Aum Shinrikyo sarin incident (an indiscriminate poisoning in a Japanese subway station in 1995) is an accurate reflection of the existential pain spreading through Japanese society at the time.  Society could not give people meaning and value. A world that once found meaning through hard work had turned into a world where no meaning could be found even by working hard.
 
Many young people in China have started to see the same two things in their own lives. Once the grand narrative of collectivism and the subsequent narrative of growth through individual effort both failed, people began to hold two paradoxical attitudes at the same time:  seeking “overall affirmation;” and constantly applying negative terms to oneself.
 
On the one hand, faith that one can realize oneself in society has taken a big hit, so that individual identity is not based on actions ("what I am doing" "what I have done"), but instead on status ("what I am" "what I am not"). People no longer pursue success through self-realization but instead seek recognition of their self-image or their personality. When faced with problems, people no longer "change the situation through behavior," but seek solutions by "thinking about ways to gain acceptance."
 
Therefore, the standup comedian Fu Hang's 付航focus on “passion” hit the mood of the times. His message is that even if you graduated from a junior college and work as a security guard, there will always be someone like Fu’s wife to tell you, "Be true to be yourself, and someone will love you."[6] Every year, the Pangdonglai 胖东来corporation[7] distributes part of its profits to employees "not because you do well, but because you want you to be well."  Otome games [story-based romance video games] that provide all-round affirmation have exploded, followed by AI emotional companion apps that have been pre-programmed with the model of “recognition-understanding-concern” to fill the need for passive recognition due to the fact that “proactive action is not possible.”

On the other hand, even if young people still want to "achieve something" in their hearts, they are still gradually coming to position themselves as ordinary people, passers-by, non-playable characters.  They are the background against which things happen and as such unimportant. Reducing their self-perception to the lowest level is a way of keeping the power to see themselves as a failure in their own hands. In other words, to reduce the fear of failure, they first see themselves as failures, and then affirm themselves through denial, forcing themselves into an emotional balance which fends off falling apart.
 
The following kinds of psychological vulnerabilities are also more common among this generation of young people:
 
1. Early onset anxiety
 
Compared with previous generations, the pressure of finding a job and making a living hits people at a younger age, and they bear the pressure of precocious maturity.  Their standards of comparison and the things for which they are competing are higher than those of former generations, and the surfeit of information at their disposal amplifies the difference between survivors and losers. The success stories of the rich and of their peers aggravates ordinary people’s sense of loss. In addition, this generation that grew up with the Internet and has been on social media since childhood has also been exposed at an earlier age to the survival anxiety of the adult world.
 
In a 2022 survey of those born since 2000, First Financial Daily found that this group was more worried about high housing prices than those born between 1995 and 2000. They were also more worried about losing their jobs in the future due to the bad economy and that their future jobs would be replaced by AI.

2. Postponement of childhood
 
The boundary between childhood and adulthood seems to have blurred. Criticism of the young for relying on their parents appears to have disappeared, and the reproach that they are “big babies” seems now disconnected to economic reliance and refers more to immature psychological behavior.  For their part, young people instead hope that their parents will get richer and become reverse "helicopter parents." Achieving dependence as an adult is difficult, and traditional milestones (such as marriage, having children, and buying a house) are either postponed or cancelled.
 
Psychologically, more and more adults are also regressing back to childhood. On the Internet today, when the subject concerns middle-aged parents with good living conditions, the comment section will be full of young people asking these “adoptive parents” whether they “still need children.”  Although to some extent this reflects the collective sentiment of a certain group, young people’s hope to get rich overnight and to be taken care of is real. 
 
In addition, many people need to spend time healing childhood trauma and fulfilling needs neglected when they were young, such as buying toys for themselves and going to theme parks.

3. The Crisis of elder care
 
In 2023, China's number of births will experience a seventh consecutive year of decline, from 9.56 million in 2022 to 9.02 million. By 2050, when those born in the 1980s and 1990s – at China’s peak fertility moment – begin to retire, each elderly person will have only 1.5 workers to support them, while in 2020 there are five.
 
According to the estimations of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, public pensions will be exhausted in the next decade. A 2022 survey of those born since 2000 by China Business News found that this group is more anxious about the future pension problem than those born between 1995 and 2000. Nearly 60% of those born since 2000 hope to plan for their retirement early on, and the importance of retirement greatly exceeds that of settling down, getting married, and having children.
 
4. Transferring autonomy     
 
There is a current trend in which parents exercise greater decision-making power over the dating and marriage of their children.   Blind dates and marriage proposals are usually initiated by parents. In some regions, bride gifts and dowries are still important marriage customs, and parents may intervene for economic reasons in the choices their children make.  Many young people believe that respecting their parents' opinions is a manifestation of filial piety, and since they need their parents' financial support, they will give all the more weight to their parents' opinions.

5. Lingering East Asian values
 
Many people are caught between modern and non-modern: part of them wants to give up, but most still dream of visible success, returning home covered in glory and making their parents proud. Social media advocates for value diversity and calls for everyone to be themselves, but the social values ​​recognize another template. Most people still believe that a person should attend schools recognized as the best, get a job with the government or a big company after graduating, a stable high-paying job allowing them to buy a three-bedroom, two-living-room apartment in a city center, get married and have children.  After which the cycle repeats itself, wash, rinse, repeat. 
 
In an environment where people share the same goals and evaluative frameworks, everyone winds up competing rather than cooperating. Everyone is trying to do better than everyone else. Even within the family, parents do everything they can in the hope that their children will have better lives than theirs, and young people compare themselves with their parents. If they cannot reach the level of their parents, they will be seen as failures and will lose face for their parents.
 
Individuals who have deeply internalized such values from an early age will it find it difficult to choose a lifestyle based on personal peace of mind.  They may identify themselves as ordinary people, but "being an ordinary person" is still not the life ideal of most people, and at best is a kind of "resignation to fate.” Even if it is not for the sake of bringing honor to the family, one should at least create value for society, accumulate a certain amount of wealth for the family, and stand out among one’s peer group.  This is the way to be presentable which is to say to save face.

However, the reality that upward social mobility has become difficult means that "it is truly hard for a poor family to produce a noble son."  Even those talented grade-grubbers who manage to get into top universities are unable to capitalize on their degree and get the high-income, ideal job of their dreams. They wind up feeling disillusioned because all their hard work and successful exams did not produce the desired result, and they feel like a victim of the system.[8]

Young people rely on their parents. At the same time, under the influence of the culture of filial piety, many people are unable to make up their minds to practice "subject separation" and cannot establish their independence from their parents.
 
6. Defensive Conservatism
 
Compared to young people born before 1995, who grew up in an atmosphere of "Beijing welcomes you", "living together in the global village" and "making friends from all over the world," all of which speak to idealism and progressive spirit, the new generation of young people grew up in an environment of "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy, short videos, and fan circle culture.

Idealism is gradually receding as the impact of reality sinks in. The rebellious spirit of today’s young people may not be as strong as that of their parents. Yan Yunxiang believes that in terms of ideology, the younger generation is not much different from their parents and may even be more conservative.

Part of the formerly open, adventurous, and rebellious spirit has been replaced by various defensive behaviors: in order to protect themselves on the Internet, people prejudge others and practice self-censorship to avoid conflicts and misunderstandings. The complexity of human nature is hidden behind the "three correct views" [worldview, view of life, and values]. People are used to quickly categorizing and labeling everything, which easily forms opposing camps and makes constructive communication difficult. Everyone retreats back to their comfort zone, swiping through the content chosen by the algorithm, hiding in the willingly and carefully constructed information cocoon to avoid being hurt.
 
There is an obvious withdrawal from society, family affection/friendship/love are gone, and many people live a singular [lit. “odd,” as in odd and even] life without company, and refashion themselves in the online world. When people's values ​​do not connect, they protect themselves in various ways, such as through practiced indifference 淡学, dating apps, disclaimers, or irony [lit., goutou/狗头, a dog head meme]. There is less communication between the two sexes, and once they feel uncomfortable in the relationship, they will flee, break up, and withdraw.
 
In today’s world, young people have become more conservative in order to protect themselves: they date in order to get married, and seek out partners of appropriate socioeconomic status, and avoid uncertainty and risks in relationships; in their work lives, they pay more attention to stability and security, tending to choose jobs in the government or in large corporations, meaning fewer entrepreneurs; in making decisions, they tend to take their parents' opinions into consideration so as to gain more support and security; in terms of finance, they save their money, buy fewer funds and stocks, looking for financial security and avoiding high-risk investments.
 
Online, people learn about problems such as class solidification and economic downturn, after which they “clear-headedly” choose the "correct" low-risk lifestyle, to the point of adopting a zero-failure mode: "If you fall down, stay down."
 
7. Subjective downgrade
 
Pessimism is spreading throughout society and has become a chronic disease of the era, and one of the main symptoms of this is loss of confidence.
 
Long-term surveys carried out by Martin K. Whyte, a professor at Harvard University, and Scott Rozelle, a professor at the Center for Chinese Economy at Stanford University, reflect the changes in social sentiment over the past 20 years.  In the past, most people believed that the family economy had improved over past five years, and they were also optimistic about the coming five years. The number of people who thought this way grew over time, reaching more than 70% in 2014. But by 2023, only 38.8% of people felt that life was getting better, and the proportion of people who were optimistic about future improvements fell to less than half. At the same time, more people were pessimistic about the future, with the proportion rising from 2.3% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.
 
In Chinese society, it is still a common view that hard work will be rewarded, but young people do not believe this as much as middle-aged and elderly people do. The Blue Book of Social Mood, jointly released by the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Social Sciences Academic Press, shows that those born in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s have the strongest belief in struggle, with more than 60% sharing this belief.  Those born in the 1980s believe slightly less, but among those born in the 1990s and after, the percentage believing in the positive value of struggle has dropped to 47.32% - the worst generation. 

The general self-depreciation, social and economic vulnerabilities and inferiority complex may also explain the phenomenon that young people do not seem to be as strong as the elderly. A study published in the People's Forum found that in the short period between 2013 and 2017, young people, regardless of what kind of work they do or what kind of voice they have, came to believe that their social status has declined. Young people's acceptance of inequality has diminished as well, and most believer inequalities are too great.

8. Actively return to your own life, but to a limited extent
 
The mentality of young people is that they know what they don't want, but they don't know what they really do want, and they don’t know how to fix the problem. Their sense of malaise has shifted from a focus on work to a larger focus on life, and the buzzwords have changed from the unrealistic "lying flat" to the more practical "gap year" and "relaxation".
 
Many popular workplace buzzwords in recent years reflect young people’s attempt to regain some sense of control. For example, some people choose avatars that look stupid, hoping that bosses will ignore them.  Such behavior expresses feelings of work fatigue and abandonment of the idea of progress on behalf of the many other workers who dare not act rashly.
 
Some people who have no choice but to live with the pressure of work begin to practice a kind of “life division,” in which they no longer see their work self as “human.”  For example, they may dress randomly for work (“disgusting outfit”) and not buy brand clothing or eat with other employees, choosing in fact to give as little of themselves to work as possible, regaining a bit of control in the only way they can.
 
Short escapades of all sorts, urban outdoor wear, etc., are also modes of relaxation and defiance to a certain extent. Young people can “escape”, but few actually quit the game, and most of the time they are powerless, and continue to play the rules of a game they don’t identify with. Just as the desired life can only be realized on a “gap day”, this short break seems like an interlude of respite in order to adjust to the working conditions.
 
9. Social disorder
 
The anthropologist Xiang Biao once said that from the late 1970s through the late 1980s, the broad reforms during this period improved the lives of most people. Beginning in the 1990s, however, and  especially in the 2000s, economic and social development trended toward differentiation. With the development of the market economy, the gap between the rich and the poor widened.
 
As a result, the grand social ideals of the older generation are closely related to their own life experience, while many young people lack this feeling of having participated. They cannot find their place in a grand narrative, and because they similarly lack a sense of belonging with regard to specific people and things around them (their local world, or what Xiang Biao calls their "nearby"[9]), they can only express their sense of belonging to the "big" things they imagine through slogan-like symbolic statements and abstract concepts and ideas.
 
10. Emotional illness is widespread
 
The number of young people who are depressed or anxious continues to rise, and young people have the worst emotional state of all age groups. The China National Mental Health Report (2019-2020) shows that young people aged 18-34 have the highest anxiety level; at the same time, people's mental health level has dropped significantly compared with ten years ago.
 
Young people's emotional problems are becoming more and more serious, especially in the context of fierce competition in education.  Their mental health has been seriously affected, as described by the author Huang Deng (黄灯b. 1974)in her non-fiction work My Second-Class Students: "From elementary school to university, the fierce competition in education has erased students' personalities, and fatigue has become their spiritual background. Parents and middle school teachers are often powerless to do anything about it and can only watch ‘factory education’ turn individuals into standardized components."
 
As a result, emotional problems tend to emerge at a younger age. Through longitudinal comparison, the China Youth Research Center found that between 2015 and 2020, the sense of hope of primary and secondary school students decreased by 11.8 percentage points.
 
Notes

[1]青年志, “中国的“弱势一代”, published on Youthology’s WeChat Portal on January 3, 2025.

[2]Translator’s note:  In simplest terms, “otaku culture” is practiced by young people who live in relative isolation at home, often in their room, and ACG is an abbreviation for “anime, manga, and games.”  In a larger context, both refer to a Japanese youth culture that emerged beginning in the 1990s when Japan entered a period of extended economic difficulty.  Young people choosing this culture largely disengaged with the world of work and struggle and sought solace in an increasingly rich online world.  Similar trends subsequently followed in South Korea, China, and throughout much of East Asia.  “Slacker culture” in North America is similarly identified with videogames and a lack of interest in work and getting ahead.  

[3]Translator’s note:  I’ve done my best here with an untranslatable pun in Chinese:  hongli/红利, literally “red profits,” more colloquially “bonus,” or “dividends” is what everyone reaped during the boom; young people are now left with heili/黑利, literally “black profits,” which to my knowledge is not a word in Chinese,  but in context it is clear that it refers to the downside of profits, the negative consequences of profits.

[4]Translator’s note:  Both of these terms are often used to describe Chinese young people.  “Involution” (neijuan/内卷) refers to over-work, harvesting one’s patch past the point of productivity; “lying flat” (tangping/躺平) means, dropping out, refusing to play the game.

[5]Translator’s note:  Suspension (xuanfu/悬浮) is a concept made popular among others by the anthropologist Xiang Biao, and “indicates a state of being in which people move frequently, conduct intensive labour, and pause routine life—in order to benefit fast and then quickly escape. People keep moving, with no end in sight, instead of changing their current conditions, of which they disapprove. As a result, frantic entrepreneurial energy coexists with political resignation.”  See here for additional information. 

[6]Translator’s note:  Fu Hang was one of China’ most successful standup comedians of 2024, and his message is one of positivity and self-care.  See here for a YouTube clip of his comedy and here for further information on Fu.

[7]Translator’s note:  Pangdonglai is a provincial company that manages grocery stores and malls.  It is known for its customer service and for its excellent treatment of its employees.

[8]Translator’s note:  What the text actually says is “they become Kong Yiji,” a character from a well-known Lu Xun story, a wanna-be scholar from the late Qing period unable to change with the times after the Republican Revolution – I know this is not the only interpretation of the story – “or even 985 detritus.”  985 is the Chinese way to refer to top-level or “key” universities.

[9]Translator’s note:  For more information on Xiang Biao’s ideas on this point, see here.