- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
- news@beehaw.org
The number of Chinese who believe that “hard work is rewarded” has collapsed among those born in the 1980s and 1990s.
They call themselves “rat people,” Chinese slang for young graduates who have given up on conventional success. They join the “lying-flat generation,” who reject the “996” grind (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week), refuse to date or marry, and scrape by on minimal consumption. It’s a dark, sobering self-portrait of a generation that was supposed to be China’s future.
The economic numbers explain much of the despair. China’s unemployment rate sits at 5.1 percent overall, but 16.5 percent for those aged 16 to 24. Youth unemployment peaked at 18.9 percent in August 2024 and remains elevated. And roughly 70 percent of unemployed 20-to-24-year-olds hold university degrees, as China’s skyrocketing higher education sector now churns out more degrees than there are jobs. Over 12 million graduates flooded the job market in 2025 alone – and even more will graduate this year.
China built the world’s largest higher education system. Enrollment jumped from 17 percent to 60 percent in two decades, and the number of university graduates rose from 7.5 million in 2018 to an expected 12.7 million in 2026. But the economy can’t absorb what the universities produce.
[…]
The result is a generation opting out. Some take temporary work while searching for something better. Others flee into graduate school to delay the reckoning. But a growing number have simply quit trying.
Survey evidence in the World Values Survey and China Family Panel Studies confirms the generational rupture. Chinese born after 1990 are far less likely to view work as “a duty to society” than their parents’ generation. The number of Chinese who believe that “hard work is rewarded” has collapsed among those born in the 1980s and 1990s.
[…]
The growing share of youth “lying flat” is especially alarming given how few young people China has. The demographics are working against Beijing. China’s fertility rate fell from above seven births per woman in the early 1960s to about 1.0 in 2024 – well below the replacement level. Births dropped to 7.9 million in 2025, the lowest since 1949. The total population fell by 3.4 million to 1.4 billion. The number of women aged 20 to 34, who account for about 85 percent of births, is predicted to shrink from 105 million in 2025 to just 58 million by 2050.
Beijing’s attempted fixes verge on parody. A 13 percent value-added tax on condoms and birth control, ending a three-decade exemption, took effect in January 2026. A $12.7 billion child-care subsidy offers families a lump-sum payment of about $500 per child under three. Neither policy addresses why young people aren’t having children: they can’t afford homes, can’t find decent jobs, and don’t see a future worth bringing children into.
[…]
China’s economic model emphasizes state direction and strategic control, and that’s increasingly out of step with a younger generation whose values around work, family, and personal fulfillment are rapidly changing. China can censor pessimism but it can’t manufacture hope.
[…]
The question is whether a state-led model can deliver the flexibility young workers need – or whether a generation of “rat people” represents the new normal.
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This is the kind of article that would get you banned from lemmy.ml. I should know, I was banned for pretty much this exact thing.
Yeah, as a big fan of a lot of what China does, and a socialist, I’ve noticed that some fellow fans have a tendency to try and reflexively push back against criticism, no matter where it comes from, because they’re used to any criticism being just capitalist propaganda.
It’s not helping the socialist cause. Neither are the anarchist purists. It’s important to recognise that nobody, and no system, holds the whole truth, and that what we really need to move beyond capitalism does not yet exist, so anyone who thinks that the Chinese system is the universal way forward is wasting their time.
Edit: Oh, and anyone who thinks the anarchists don’t have a point should look at what just happened in Minnesota. The people self-organised, without any outside direction, and responded effectively to resist an occupying force, and it was beautiful to see.
My thoughts exactly. China does a lot of things right but they also do a lot of things wrong. I feel like they’re not really an example of the virtues of socialism as much as they are of a centrally planned system that isn’t totally corrupted by capitalist interests.
Or rather, China does have lots of capitalist interests (after all, their system is basically state capitalism), which is why problems like the one this article talks about exist there as well. But thanks to their system they are less constrained by interests of existing industries, i.e. they don’t have a fossil fuel lobby trying to ruin the world just to squeeze a couple of decades of extra revenue out of it.
Very good point. I have had many nitpicky conversations about whether China is capitalist or not, and I’m beginning to come around to the label of state capitalism, because it does describe the essential part: the interests of capital not being able to exercise primary control over society. Instead, the state decides. In the US system, capital does what it likes without restraint.
Elsewhere in the West, sometimes the state has some ability to push back against the interests of capital, but mostly this is just used to keep the system stable. Universal healthcare is, after all, good for business. Many other policies which benefit us humans are only feasible because they primarily benefit the long-term health of the market. I am speaking from an Australian perspective.
The reason I subscribe to the state capitalism label is that China has an extremely capitalist approach to macroeconomics (see: the Belt and Road Initiative, exploitative investments in foreign infrastructure, the way they positioned themselves as the global manufacturing hub…).
Because of this they have a capitalist incentive to maximize the productivity of their human capital. That is to say, the state wants people to work a 996 week because it helps keep China competitive in the global capitalist rat race. I feel like a true socialist society would not have such interests and would, if anything, seek to minimize the amount of time its populace has to work.
I think that’s going to be a really big question for the next few decades - what happens in China when economic growth isn’t as easy?
Going through industrialization provided a lot of easy growth for the country, but that can’t continue at the same rate. What happens as things stagnant, Xi gets older, etc.?
deleted by creator
China can censor pessimism but it can’t manufacture hope.
Great line.
Yet again people realize that giving up living to make someone else rich isn’t worth it.
The Millennial Experience is universal after all
Lol cope
