To Be Young in China

For two days, Rocky had been playing video games in the tiny apartment he shares with three other men in Shanghai, a city of 23 million. He left only once, to buy food. The games “help me relax,” he said. “It helps me escape. I feel so tired.”

In June, the 32-year-old quit his job as a salesman with a traditional Chinese medicine company. His monthly wage was a meager $400. Rocky has had nearly a dozen jobs since he graduated from college a decade ago. His mother, who lived in a poor village in Shandong, a province a few hours north of Shanghai by train, died in May.

“I feel so guilty. She worked so hard to try to give me everything, and I could never do anything for her,” said Rocky, who requested that only his English name be used because he’s embarrassed by his poverty. “I feel so lost. I am such a loser. There is such a huge gap between my reality and my dreams. I feel so old.”

Rocky is part of a generation in China known as the post-’80s. Born in the 1980s, they’ve seen rapid change as China moved from a Maoist state to a market-oriented economy characterized by rampant consumerism and unprecedented inequality. Because of the country’s one-child policy, many of them are only children. They’re the first generation to grow up with the Internet, and in turn, have had more access to information – and perhaps greater exposure to individual censorship.

They’ve also had more access to higher education, yet their schooling has been in a system infused with an ideological curriculum that the Chinese Communist Party strengthened after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where pro-democracy demonstrations were crushed. They’re vastly different from their parents.

Chinese society has long been worried about the post-’80s and what will become of them. They’ve been called spoiled, irresponsible, materialistic, lazy and confused. “They are described as China’s lost generation,” said Minna Jia, who researched the age group while obtaining her doctorate at the University of Southern California. “People say this generation only cares about money, about themselves.”

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor

via SHANGHAI: China’s young adults: Directionless, unhappy, but unlikely to rebel – World Wires – MiamiHerald.com.