Exhausted by the pressure to succeed as a photographer, Litsky Li accepted a better offer: quit work to become one of China’s growing legions of children paid by their families to stay home.

A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.

Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.

Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.

Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.

  • @rustyfish@lemmy.world
    English
    1•11 months ago

    Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.

    So…they are unemployed?

    • @CanadaPlusEnglish
      7•11 months ago

      It says right there there’s a salary. She’s nepotistically employed as a caregiver.

      If you think that’s not a “real job”, that’s basically a cultural judgement, which I guess you can make, but then there’s dudes that think only steelworkers have a real job.

        • @CanadaPlusEnglish
          0•11 months ago

          I did skim it. If you’re not saying it’s not a real job that just doesn’t apply to you, sorry for bringing it up.

    • ghost_laptopEnglish
      2•11 months ago

      Why would you want for young people to work? Is your idea for a utopia to have 15 year olds working at a McDonalds for minimum wage?

      If the youth can focus on studying and improving themselves that is what they should do. Maybe it is because of the strong US “work ethics” but where I live unless you are under extreme poverty you focus on studying until you are 25 at least. We have free healthcare and education, so we have it much easier than people in the US, though.

        • ghost_laptopEnglish
          -2•11 months ago

          I didn’t say she was 15, it was an example because that’s the reality in the US.

          • @iopq@latte.isnot.coffeeEnglish
            1•11 months ago

            Nothing wrong with working after school when you’re 15, my friend worked a few hours scooping ice cream

            Not everyone will use every waking hour studying

            • ghost_laptop
              -1•11 months ago

              Yes, yes there is something wrong, I’m not saying you need to be every waking hour studying, but forcing young people to work is something would only happen under the current capitalist system and it is done to get cheap labour, not because of X or Y.

              • @iopq@latte.isnot.coffee
                0•11 months ago

                He wasn’t forced to work, he just wanted some spending money above what good parents have him. What’s wrong with that?

                It’s not like scooping ice cream requires special skills