2023-07-28 14:52:54
by Irene Soave
Youth unemployment and frenzied productivity rates push young Chinese people to fall back on pocket money: they live with their parents, they are their maids, drivers, cooks, and earn (almost) normal wages
Some time ago, the buzzword on Chinese social media was tangping: lying down. Thus the young Chinese argued against a penalizing and excluding labor market, with difficult access and backbreaking productivity at every level, from the factory to management: rather than work under similar conditions, it was better to refuse the job. Today the problem has not been solved. Unemployment between 16 and 24 years of 21.3%, historical record; according to some economists, if the data also include young people who live with their parents and do only occasional jobs, it could reach 45%. And the country’s economic growth slowed down compared to forecasts.
However, the young people who were lying down, and especially their younger brothers (under 25 years of age) had to get up out of bed and sofa due to fatigue. And the job they have found, in many cases, of handyman for their parents: caregiver for grandparents, cook and chauffeur, babysitter, fixer, nurse, housekeeper. Instead of a salary, good old pocket money. Rather than doing nothing, the bitter implication, it’s better to go back to being a kid.
This form of exclusion from work also has a hashtag, which has gone viral on Chinese social networks in recent weeks, such as the Duban platform, where a group brings together four thousand, or Xiaohongshu: full-time children. And it defines thousands of stories.
Una Nancy Cheng, from Jangxji, #fullTimeDaughter: I trained as a teacher. At the last competition there were thirty thousand of us for three professorships. I do every contest I can find, but it’s so impossible. Jack Zheng, defector from tech giant Tencent, #fullTimeSon: I was answering seven thousand work messages a day, at any time. Now I stay with my parents. Jia Zhang, two sons: My business has been pulverized by the pandemic, now I am the driver and assistant of my parents. How is it going? Better. Her parents give her a salary of 8,000 yuan: about a thousand euros a month. the average wage in China.
Opposite comments. There are those who call them ken lao zu, using a popular saying: those who gnaw on old people to the bone, that is, they take advantage of their parents’ generosity. And the economists interviewed on the subject by the international media agree: not a viable long-term solution, and those who stay out of work for too long become too little updated to find a new one. But some state media praise this choice, explains economist Lu Xi of the University of Singapore to CNBC, portraying it as a movement of filial love, also prescribed by Confucius.
The young Chinese who choose this path are often educated up to a diploma or degree, and children of families who have encouraged and supported them to develop and who continue to support them, also offering them this sort of new welfare – but who then, having entered in the world of work, they collided with two opposite cases. Unemployment, and the difficulty of finding a place, on the one hand; for those who have found work, however, the amount of loads and requests in a society founded on very high productivity. And so they have chosen a third way: crushed between unemployment and overwork – a polarity not unknown even in more western latitudes – it is also possible to choose never to grow.
July 28, 2023 (change July 28, 2023 | 14:52)
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