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China urges its people to struggle. Some say no

171 points by tchalla 5y ago

anothernewdude 5y ago
When you do succeed in China they dismantle your company and make you disappear apart from the occasional "proof of life". Add that to the 996 work week (72 hours!) and I can understand why you wouldn't play ball.
- p_l 5y ago
  996 meme is essentially the Chinese version of American companies telling that you need to "hustle", ignoring or outright violating labour standards. It's a very much capitalist practice pushed by successful private (or as private as it gets in China) entrepreneurs among the rich (who of course don't really work that much).
  - anothernewdude 5y ago
    No, the meme is tangping. Laying down and not working. That's the meme the new Chinese generation are sharing.
petercooper 5y ago
https://outline.com/kqn4Kx https://outline.com/kqn4Kx
bserge 5y ago
Isn't it the same everywhere in the world?
- iliekcomputers 5y ago
  Pretty much. The FIRE movement is very popular, even in other developing countries like India. Very few people want to work a 9-5 for the majority of their lives. The idea about this being defiancy in China is the only real difference, I guess. In other (not as authoritarian) countries, this is just a personal choice, not a political statement. Things like these getting banned from social media seems pretty absurd.
- peteretep 5y ago
  Most rich governments are a lot more chill about dissent.
- frogcoder 5y ago
  Yeah, everyone wants to chill, even be unproductive sometimes. The difference in China is that this kind of expression is censored online and attacked by the news media. WTF.
iseethroughbs 5y ago
So this article is about a silly meme among Chinese youth. The urge to struggle is "young people are expected to work long hours, buy property, get married and have children". Unlike any other country.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  In China all four expectations are ramped up to the max though. Long hours means 9 AM to 9 PM 6 days a week ("996"), property prices are completely unaffordable, getting married is an ironclad social requirement and, thanks to the one-child policy, every young person has four grandparents and two parents breathing down their neck to produce offspring. And oh, your life is largely determined by your performance during the gaokao exam, so you've spent your entire childhood cramming for it. Also, I doubt there's any other country aside from maybe North Korea where the sentiment "I want to be lazy!" is a censorable offence.
  - iseethroughbs 5y ago
    9AM to 9PM 6 days a week matches what the US went through during the Industrial revolution. The one child policy has been replaced with three children. Also the article doesn't speak about any of it being censored. The fact a commenter in state media said "this is shameful" is not censorship. The fact it's hard to find T-shirts with the meme also isn't censorship, unless we have evidence of someone trying to sell such T-shirts and being censored. What you say is a great example of how you can take some half-truths and spin them into a propaganda narrative. You just want to make sure China looks bad, for some reason. No shades of gray in this country with over a billion people. All fits into a simple narrative, doesn't it? In the western world, young people often need two jobs just to survive. No they don't have houses either. Laying down and memeing online is often not even an option, censorship or not. Why do we need to villify China about a problem that's literally world-wide? Does it simply feel better to know someone is worse out there?
    - Taniwha 5y ago
      loosening the one child policy to 3 doesn't change anything for couples today who are supporting 2 sets of parents - it's not making more brothers and sisters for them.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
I wonder how much of this is the skewed gender ratio for men. Traditionally one of the drivers for earning more was of course a family. Now that you have to compete for a dwindling supply of the opposite sex just to have more responsibilities without any traditional patriarchal privileges it makes it less attractive. New forms of entertainment and "socializing" eliminate the boredom. We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe.
- fiddlydiddly 5y ago
  > dwindling supply of the opposite sex Why is there a dwindling supply? > traditional patriarchal privileges What are these?
  - cammikebrown 5y ago
    Boys are favored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_preference_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_preference_in_China
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      ... and girls are murdered (same in ie India)
      - Y_Y 5y ago
        To clarify, this seems to be driven by selective abortions (unless the reported SBR of ~1.2 is faked).
        seszett 5y ago
        For the last 30 years, parents whose first child was a girl were allowed to have a second child (not everywhere, but this was still for many hundreds of millions of people). That's actually more than enough to explain the skewed ratio, even though selective abortions likely also have had a noticeable impact.
Clewza313 5y ago
Scifi fans may recall Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net (1988), which features the "Singaporean Anti-Labour Party", who sound an awful lot like the Chinese tangping movement. The irony is that Singapore has loosened up a bit in the 40 years since, with the (actual) opposition Labour Party gaining a toehold in Parliament and various government campaigns to encourage arts and creativity (with varying levels of success), while in China the very concepts of political opposition or not being a busy worker bee are clearly anathema.
- eynsham 5y ago
  Do you mean the Workers’ Party? It doesn’t really fit the term ‘Labour’ since the NTUC is pretty much entirely government-controlled. And yes, from ~1980-2020 we’ve gone from no opposition to over ten opposition MPs and multiple opposition GRCs(!) but it is also worth pointing out that from 1963-1980 parliament went from 37-13 (PAP-BS) to that. If one buys Thum Ping Tjin’s analysis, elections since the 1980s have become more unfair even as the opposition’s share of the core has increased.¹ > The first of the two turning points was in the 1950s, specifically 1954–57, when the increasing demands of the people of Singapore for self-determination meant that universal suffrage could no longer be denied by the colonial government. In response, the colonial government kept the vote generally fair but sought to limit voters’ choices of candidates through anti-democratic legislation and regulation, like detention without trial and the infamous “subversives’ clause” of the 1957 Constitutional Agreement, which prevented anyone arrested (but not necessarily convicted) for subversion from running in the next election. This policy was then continued and amplified by the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, using lawsuits, harassment, arrests, and other measures, until the 1980s, when the will of the people for wider representation and greater accountability in Parliament became inexorable. > Up to that point, voter choice was restricted by limiting their choice of candidates. However, from around 1984–1991, a second shift took place, in which legal and regulatory changes made the elections less fair, and qualitative factors were introduced to discourage voting against the PAP. The elections were fundamentally redesigned to maximise electoral outcomes for the PAP. That is the situation which remains today. 1: https://newnaratif.com/a-brief-history-of-elections-in-singapore/ https://newnaratif.com/a-brief-history-of-elections-in-singa...
627467 5y ago
The only part that seems different from the rest of the world is the urging part. ie. In many countries youth unemployment have been high and no one seem have been caring about it https://www.bbc.com/news/57406236 https://www.bbc.com/news/57406236
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  The rest of the world doesn't have a 72 hour work week.
  - Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Citation needed; "hustle" and "crunch" culture in some parts of the rest of the world and some industries encourages working ridiculous hours. Some economies force people to work multiple jobs just to try and keep their head above water. Some cultures expect people to be engaged with their work, or have their work as a hobby outside of work hours ("do you contribute to open source in your free time?").
    - robjan 5y ago
      Here's a citation. Nearly everywhere in the world working hours are decreasing apart from China https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
      - andrey_utkin 5y ago
        Fascinating data! Thanks for sharing. Interestingly, China and Hong Kong are having a crossover moment right now: HK has a downward trend, and China has an upward trend.
    - wutbrodo 5y ago
      > Some cultures expect people to be engaged with their work, or have their work as a hobby outside of work hours ("do you contribute to open source in your free time?"). Is this actually still a non-negligible factor in tech hiring? I've never had anyone ask me this (and never shared my github), though I believe it existed in the past. But I can't imagine it's accurate to say that this is "expected" in a labor market as absurdly tight as tech is. I think what's perhaps the case is that you're mistaking opportunity for expectation; for those with little experience and no credential, open source work is an open-to-all foothold to showing your ability. This is one of the _good_ things about tech hiring, that makes us less blindly credentialist: try getting a job in (eg) finance without a college degree by showing off participation in a non-professional project. That's the model I have of open source's role in tech hiring. Am I missing something?
est 5y ago
> Some say no China's hippie moment finally happened.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  The productivity gains from automation were almost completely funnelled into the richest pockets, increasing inequality and making the “rat race” more gruelling for everyone participating in it. If we solve this distribution issue, a lot of people will opt to do that. We’ll lose a lot of bank tellers, gas pump operators, and insurance sellers but, in return, we’ll get a lot more poets and dancers, dreamers and storytellers. And lots of people who won’t give us anything of importance besides being part of the human family.
  - MathYouF 5y ago
    >If we solve this distribution issue I recall some shaggy bearded 19th century German philosopher who wrote a book on this. Thought he was pretty popular with the Chinese government. I'm surprised to hear they're still having problems with distribution 100 years later.
    - HKH2 5y ago
      The Great Chinese Famine resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Distribution was one of the biggest problems, and that was when the CCP was actually communist. Maybe it's just not feasible to effectively govern over a billion people. Even though I strongly disagree with it, I can understand why Mao wanted the Cultural Revolution; splitting up a country is far less desirable.
      - MathYouF 5y ago
        I'm highly sympathetic to the goals of communism and agree that the problems it's trying to solve exist and are inherent in our current system of economics. But one doesn't have to read much history to see that the prescribed methods offered for solving the problems laid out in The Communist Manifesto haven't been successful in any implementation tried in the 20th and 21st centuries. At this point I consider any communist who doesn't admit the ideology's massive failures to be either ignorant, or disingenuous, because if someone actually wants to solve the problems with the capitalist system, they have to admit what has been tried and failed so far. I do hope one day we'll find new solutions to the distribution problem that don't create other massive problems like we've seen, because the issues inherent in capitalism won't go away without acknowledging its failures either.
eunos 5y ago
I dont understand why the Economist hyping memes like "lying down" and conflate it to the communist party. Should Caixin hyping up FML,YOLO or other TikTok memes and relate them to Biden and Trump?
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  You're comparing a party with an individual; a fair comparison would be to compare it with the Democrat or Republican party. That said, the US still has the illusion of being a democracy and its people having a will of their own, which isn't as much of a thing in China. That said that said, "western" media does tend to make China into a uniform mass, while in reality it's much bigger, richer, more populous and more diverse than Europe and the US combined.
  - Haga 5y ago
    Do you refer to the minority Disneylands in the Han ethno state?
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    As it happens, this article is also pointing out that the country is not a monolithic mass of CCP robots executing orders to increase production.
  - eunos 5y ago
    Well I use the leader names as metonym to the current administration. It's Biden admin not Democrat admin. > will of their own Do you think CCP still unilaterally assign jobs to the Chinese people along with weekly quota or something? I argue that these feeling of tiredness and hopelessness is less about CCP than long working time hours which also common in East Asia.
    - Koiwai 5y ago
      I assume you missed the "illusion" part?
- rchaud 5y ago
counternotions 5y ago
China needs to expand its frontier — or create the illusion of — to create hope of once again booming gains for the younger generation. Territorial expansion will revive creative energies among the youth.
- Vaslo 5y ago
  I don’t understand this comment. Do you mean they need to expand into their current unoccupied land, or do they need to claim territory adjacent to them belonging to other countries? Are you referring to Taiwan here?
  - counternotions 5y ago
    All of the above, plus space exploration. Not condoning, merely pointing out what’s already in motion.
    - swiley 5y ago
      From the outside China doesn't appear to be short on space.
      - benque 5y ago
        Not that I agree with the root comment, but China is not that large without Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Inner Mongolia. These provinces also have the least population densities - the terrain doesn't support it.
    - Vaslo 5y ago
      I just can't agree with what you are saying given all the land and resources they already have - sounds like the Chinese version of Nazi Germany's "Lebensraum" to me. But you have a right to an opinion and I hope it doesn't come to that.
      - bostonsre 5y ago
rjsw 5y ago
There was a related article recently in the Guardian [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire-life-why-people-in-china-are-rejecting-high-pressure-jobs-in-favour-of-lying-flat https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire...
villasv 5y ago
“Lying flat is standing up, horizontally.” Gotta love the creative ways people will find to retrofit some artistic meanings to grow it into something stronger. The people who wanted to just lay flat were not really trying to make a statement, but now it will inevitably be perceived as one. The whole article is a disservice to these folks, who'd be better left unknown.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I think choosing not to participate in the “rat race” is a powerful statement. I write code for fun and, incidentally, I get paid for it, but, for every one like me there is a dozen who are only doing that so they can afford to pay their rent. If I couldn’t get paid to write code and solve problems with that, I’d have to do something else, perhaps something I don’t enjoy at all, in order to provide for my family. If you can completely avoid doing that, congratulations. You win.
- gdsdfe 5y ago
  they're posting them selfs in social media ... no they don't want to be left unknown
- dalbasal 5y ago
  The first guy quoted wants to be like Diogenes. Diogenes didn't just live in his barrel quitely wanting to be left alone. He was a subversive figure, criticising and challenging everything: Plato, Alexander, Athenian nobles, sensibilities and social assumptions of his day. He was a famous troublemaker, and that's why we know of him today. I'm sure some Greek dude did really just want to be left alone.. we just don't know his name. Obviously, I'm not justifying China's paranoid response to any kind of cultural subversions or provocation. Proverbial barrel dwellers are a necessary critique, IMO. The salience of their message can be an important important signal or backpressure. You could make analogies to the US in the 60s, Japan in the 00s and I'm sure lots of others.
  - nxc18 5y ago
    You can make analogies to the current, active antiwork movement. I think it is pretty clear that all of society is poorer for the existence of these people. Perhaps China’s ability to keep a lid on it is one small part of their relative economic competitiveness.
nathias 5y ago
Working more than 40h per week should be illegal around the world just like selling yourself into slavery is. This is socialism only by name.
2Gkashmiri 5y ago
In india, many jobs are low paying to a point you either have to shuffle between 2 or 3 jobs for metropolitan people or good enough and the companies "expect" you to stay late. 60-80 hour week is common. The idea is, if employee a isnt going to work 80 hours for this job, fine, leave and there are 20 more willing to do just that because for them, this is better than nothing. I easily work 80+ hours, partly because im the proprietor of my law office. Employees, well they get 10-5-6 day so the rest its just me and other hardcore associates. India has a huge problem of service industry being overworked and underpaid.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Globalisation on wealth at its finest. Educated, and talented, or simply already rich are leaving Asian countries, and go live for a vacation like employment somewhere in Dubai, or Singapore, while everybody else, but much more people already downtrodden have to stay. People think this reduces the competition for people staying, but in reality its the opposite. - In big companies, it means more people vying for prised promotions. - It means less opportunities in service industry, as there is not much richer people to service. - And there are less small businesses doing something worthy, as people who can do that, chose to do that in Dubai, or Singapore - The really rich not only go to live abroad these days, but, more than ever before, take their moneys go to live somewhere else with them.
egeozcan 5y ago
I'm very surprised how similar to planking this seems: It's just that there's arguably more meaning behind it.
luxurytent 5y ago
Netflix and tangping
SMAAART 5y ago
Is the rat race making us all Depressed and Anxious? Isn't this part of the overall understated minimalism movement? Chop wood, carry water.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  I would be a lot more depressed and anxious if I wasn't sure if the neighboring tribe would murder my tribe in the night. Minimalism is great in a civilized society where you can do your own thing and be left alone, but you don't get a civilized society without a widespread social contract built on an economy.
  - ewmiller 5y ago
    There’s obviously much more nuance to our choices in the modern world than “live in a work-till-death society” or “live as primitives in the woods.” For instance, many other developed nations take twice as much time off (or more) compared to American workers and seem to be doing just fine.
    - bostonsre 5y ago
      Yep, I agree. I just mean to say that the simple peaceful life that some are able to attain nowadays is possible due to the way our society is currently setup. Banding together in larger and larger tribes has been required because other people were doing the same and other people put their tribe's well being ahead of others. Whether they like it or not, those living the simple peaceful life are a part of our tribe and they benefit from the protection that our tribe provides.
  - kar5pt 5y ago
    Do you have evidence to back this up?
    - bostonsre 5y ago
      Not exactly, but which part are you referring to? I just made the assertions by thinking through our history from stuff I've read before and putting myself in the shoes of people in the distant past. Life was absolutely brutal in the past and I think we're all incredibly lucky to live in the time that we do now.
RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
I find the Economist's choice of wording to translate this message quite intriguing. How about another way of putting it: "China encourages its people to strive".
- Clewza313 5y ago
  It's an intentional tip of the hat to Communist sloganeering about "class struggle".
  - RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
    Indeed; but I don't think it is "class struggle" that China is promoting to its people. It would seem to me that the Economist made an conscious attempt to conflate Xi's advocation of continued "class struggle" within CCP with what is being "urging" as seen in the current affairs; to quote: > Such ideas ("Tangping") are at odds with the Communist Party’s rhetoric. Its leader, Xi Jinping, likes the word “struggle”. In 2019 an official summary of a speech he gave to young officials included more than 50 mentions of it. Struggle is an art, he told them. “We must be good at struggle.”
- clydethefrog 5y ago
  The nice thing about The Economist is that they wear their preference about Anglo classical liberalism proudle on their sleeve. Their international reporting is wonderful and you quickly learn how to read their information between their bias, because there is no other magazine reporting weekly about African and South American regions.
bencollier49 5y ago
The US urges its people to struggle too doesn't it? Isn't this site a good example?
- bostonsre 5y ago
  Maybe they did during ww2 and other wars, but isn't the key point in the US that you have the opportunity to struggle if you want? I don't recall seeing any government propaganda that implores you to work hard.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    The federal minimum wage hasn't changed in 12 years. Tipped labour can be legally paid $2.13 an hour. What need is there for wasteful propaganda when struggle is baked right into economic policy?
    - bostonsre 5y ago
      I made no claim that it's an easy struggle for those that try. The parent was saying the US encouraged struggle like China, but I don't think that's the case.
AndyMcConachie 5y ago
"Many people in their 20s and 30s grumble that hard work no longer rewards them with a better quality of life." I think the Economist is confusing China with the USA. This is how people in the USA feel, not people in China. China just eliminated extreme poverty and its people have continually been getting richer. Meanwhile people in the USA have been steadily getting poorer since the 1970s. The Economist has been predicting China's failure for decades now and it hasn't happened yet. Maybe it never will. And maybe the publication that was originally founded in the 19th century to promote slavery in America and opium into China is just full of shit.
- janeroe 5y ago
  Are you a citizen of the United States? If it were possible would you swap your citizenship with an average Chinese?
steve76 5y ago
It's amazing how much easier life is when bad people go away. The hard work of your parents. Yeah sure. What was that? Emptying machine guns belts into college students, steam rolling them with a tank, and then flushing the flattened remains down the toilet? Or butchering children, selling their meat as steak and eating them during the cultural revolution? Or industrial organ harvesting? Or smuggling elephant tranquilizer causing millions to OD? Or today. Cooking up a virus that just committed one of the worse mass murders in history over soy bean tariffs? You are a monster. In the face of you, your children just went limp and want to die. Hundreds of millions of them. How tragic. All for what? Marx? Your fairy tale and lies you tell yourself that you can do what you want to anyone and not have any consequences? That you are above laws and any attempt for a happy life and to restrain your barbarity is slavery? There are a few naive people in the USA who think they nice their way out of problems, that not standing up for themselves and rushing to self criticism provides credibility. No. They stepped in dog mess because they are still a foolish child and now spreading it all over my home. Thank God I'm not in China. How horrible. I wouldn't go limp. I would live my life at night when everyone is asleep. Sleepwalk during the day. Pay lip service. Make my own money and probably keep it in a backup hidden. And then get the hell out of Dodge first chance I get. I would be a truly awful person, for no other reason besides Karl Marx, the one white European man who has reversed millennia of human rights and lawfulness and civility and horrifically murdered more people than any other.
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
I find this movement very similar to Buddhism or Christianity teaching, in the sense that you give up material world as the circumstances are such that you can not win. If you perceive world where every man mad political system as practical implementation is aristocracy then understanding that there is no democracy, socialism, communism (as they are just a flavor of the same system) will lead you that there is split on two group of people those who are aristocrats and those who are slaves. Only difference is that "good" aristocracies give more rights and more resources to their slaves. So, as each aristocracy must have slaves to exist (which will turn at some point to robots and AI) they have to advertise production of more slaves. In that regard in Buddhism and teaching of Christ to escape vicious cycle of you or your children being wolfs or sheep, only way to escape is to exercise nonviolent resistance and give up on the entire game.
- janeroe 5y ago
  But Buddhism doesn't teach to give up the material world. Quite the opposite. It states there should be a balance. The middle way. Dalai Lama was even cancelled by twitter users for that. He said that his successor, if a woman, must be beautiful (since she would be working with people and people care about looks). An appalled journalist asked: "but isn't the internal qualities all that matter". Dalai Lama mentioned the necessity of balance infuriating some of the viewers who then cancelled him.
  - NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
    In that explanation (same like Catholicism is in Christianity) I see divergent from the original teaching, due to simple reason as that would put a wrench in the gears of the aristocratic society. The teachings of the Buddha was aimed solely at liberating sentient beings from suffering, your mentioned "middle path" is pulling out of the context of the original meaning of the middle path. In case of Buddhism middle path was referring to pushing own body to extremes in order to gain enlightenment. Budha was killing his own body in the process, which was prevent him to attain enlightenment. Reason why your mentioned path is wrong it that along those lines one can arbitrary choose min and max limits of the function and choose the middle. So to give a very crud example "if murder is not ok, than acceptable number of murders is 0 and on the other end we have 8 billion people so middle is 4 billion?" In same sense your version says that between slave and aristocrat there are many levels of gray, but in fact slaves are just a slaves and aristocrats are aristocrats, being in the game just helps aristocrats and prolongs the cycle of suffering.
Bayart 5y ago
Archive without paywall : https://archive.ph/VtO3p https://archive.ph/VtO3p
wombatmobile 5y ago
This article is based on "an internet user" who "posted this brief description of his simple, stress-free life". That's a pretty low bar for journalism. But wait, "The post went viral." What does "viral" mean in a nation of 1.3 billion people? The article doesn't say. All it offers by way of quantitative data is: "More than 60% of over 240,000 respondents to a poll on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, said tangping was their idea of the good life." https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Distinguishing-Disinformation-from-Propaganda.pdf https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Distinguishin...
- rchaud 5y ago
  It's not journalism, it's commentary delivered in an overly formal style that's intended to denote intellectual gravitas. The Economist does 0 (and I mean zero) investigative work. They read the papers like everyone else, and will dig up bits from IMF/World Bank reports and think tanks to fill out the rest of the article.
liminal 5y ago
My impression from watching (not very many) Chinese films, is that struggle and suffering is considered the greatest virtue. Where American films seem to imply that people should rise up and fight injustice, Chinese ones seem to say that life is suffering and real heroes are the ones who bare it stoically.
- Koiwai 5y ago
  At least there is The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/

171 points by tchalla 5y ago

When you do succeed in China they dismantle your company and make you disappear apart from the occasional "proof of life". Add that to the 996 work week (72 hours!) and I can understand why you wouldn't play ball.

p_l 5y ago
996 meme is essentially the Chinese version of American companies telling that you need to "hustle", ignoring or outright violating labour standards. It's a very much capitalist practice pushed by successful private (or as private as it gets in China) entrepreneurs among the rich (who of course don't really work that much).
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  No, the meme is tangping. Laying down and not working. That's the meme the new Chinese generation are sharing.

petercooper 5y ago

https://outline.com/kqn4Kx https://outline.com/kqn4Kx

bserge 5y ago

Isn't it the same everywhere in the world?

iliekcomputers 5y ago
Pretty much. The FIRE movement is very popular, even in other developing countries like India. Very few people want to work a 9-5 for the majority of their lives. The idea about this being defiancy in China is the only real difference, I guess. In other (not as authoritarian) countries, this is just a personal choice, not a political statement. Things like these getting banned from social media seems pretty absurd.
peteretep 5y ago
Most rich governments are a lot more chill about dissent.
frogcoder 5y ago
Yeah, everyone wants to chill, even be unproductive sometimes. The difference in China is that this kind of expression is censored online and attacked by the news media. WTF.

iseethroughbs 5y ago

So this article is about a silly meme among Chinese youth. The urge to struggle is "young people are expected to work long hours, buy property, get married and have children". Unlike any other country.

Clewza313 5y ago
In China all four expectations are ramped up to the max though. Long hours means 9 AM to 9 PM 6 days a week ("996"), property prices are completely unaffordable, getting married is an ironclad social requirement and, thanks to the one-child policy, every young person has four grandparents and two parents breathing down their neck to produce offspring. And oh, your life is largely determined by your performance during the gaokao exam, so you've spent your entire childhood cramming for it. Also, I doubt there's any other country aside from maybe North Korea where the sentiment "I want to be lazy!" is a censorable offence.
- iseethroughbs 5y ago
  9AM to 9PM 6 days a week matches what the US went through during the Industrial revolution. The one child policy has been replaced with three children. Also the article doesn't speak about any of it being censored. The fact a commenter in state media said "this is shameful" is not censorship. The fact it's hard to find T-shirts with the meme also isn't censorship, unless we have evidence of someone trying to sell such T-shirts and being censored. What you say is a great example of how you can take some half-truths and spin them into a propaganda narrative. You just want to make sure China looks bad, for some reason. No shades of gray in this country with over a billion people. All fits into a simple narrative, doesn't it? In the western world, young people often need two jobs just to survive. No they don't have houses either. Laying down and memeing online is often not even an option, censorship or not. Why do we need to villify China about a problem that's literally world-wide? Does it simply feel better to know someone is worse out there?
  - Taniwha 5y ago
    loosening the one child policy to 3 doesn't change anything for couples today who are supporting 2 sets of parents - it's not making more brothers and sisters for them.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago

I wonder how much of this is the skewed gender ratio for men. Traditionally one of the drivers for earning more was of course a family. Now that you have to compete for a dwindling supply of the opposite sex just to have more responsibilities without any traditional patriarchal privileges it makes it less attractive. New forms of entertainment and "socializing" eliminate the boredom. We are seeing a sociological experiment in action across the globe.

fiddlydiddly 5y ago
> dwindling supply of the opposite sex Why is there a dwindling supply? > traditional patriarchal privileges What are these?
- cammikebrown 5y ago
  Boys are favored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_preference_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_preference_in_China
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    ... and girls are murdered (same in ie India)
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      To clarify, this seems to be driven by selective abortions (unless the reported SBR of ~1.2 is faked).
      - seszett 5y ago
        For the last 30 years, parents whose first child was a girl were allowed to have a second child (not everywhere, but this was still for many hundreds of millions of people). That's actually more than enough to explain the skewed ratio, even though selective abortions likely also have had a noticeable impact.

Clewza313 5y ago

Scifi fans may recall Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net (1988), which features the "Singaporean Anti-Labour Party", who sound an awful lot like the Chinese tangping movement. The irony is that Singapore has loosened up a bit in the 40 years since, with the (actual) opposition Labour Party gaining a toehold in Parliament and various government campaigns to encourage arts and creativity (with varying levels of success), while in China the very concepts of political opposition or not being a busy worker bee are clearly anathema.

eynsham 5y ago
Do you mean the Workers’ Party? It doesn’t really fit the term ‘Labour’ since the NTUC is pretty much entirely government-controlled. And yes, from ~1980-2020 we’ve gone from no opposition to over ten opposition MPs and multiple opposition GRCs(!) but it is also worth pointing out that from 1963-1980 parliament went from 37-13 (PAP-BS) to that. If one buys Thum Ping Tjin’s analysis, elections since the 1980s have become more unfair even as the opposition’s share of the core has increased.¹ > The first of the two turning points was in the 1950s, specifically 1954–57, when the increasing demands of the people of Singapore for self-determination meant that universal suffrage could no longer be denied by the colonial government. In response, the colonial government kept the vote generally fair but sought to limit voters’ choices of candidates through anti-democratic legislation and regulation, like detention without trial and the infamous “subversives’ clause” of the 1957 Constitutional Agreement, which prevented anyone arrested (but not necessarily convicted) for subversion from running in the next election. This policy was then continued and amplified by the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, using lawsuits, harassment, arrests, and other measures, until the 1980s, when the will of the people for wider representation and greater accountability in Parliament became inexorable. > Up to that point, voter choice was restricted by limiting their choice of candidates. However, from around 1984–1991, a second shift took place, in which legal and regulatory changes made the elections less fair, and qualitative factors were introduced to discourage voting against the PAP. The elections were fundamentally redesigned to maximise electoral outcomes for the PAP. That is the situation which remains today. 1: https://newnaratif.com/a-brief-history-of-elections-in-singapore/ https://newnaratif.com/a-brief-history-of-elections-in-singa...

627467 5y ago

The only part that seems different from the rest of the world is the urging part. ie. In many countries youth unemployment have been high and no one seem have been caring about it https://www.bbc.com/news/57406236 https://www.bbc.com/news/57406236

anothernewdude 5y ago
The rest of the world doesn't have a 72 hour work week.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Citation needed; "hustle" and "crunch" culture in some parts of the rest of the world and some industries encourages working ridiculous hours. Some economies force people to work multiple jobs just to try and keep their head above water. Some cultures expect people to be engaged with their work, or have their work as a hobby outside of work hours ("do you contribute to open source in your free time?").
  - robjan 5y ago
    Here's a citation. Nearly everywhere in the world working hours are decreasing apart from China https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
    - andrey_utkin 5y ago
      Fascinating data! Thanks for sharing. Interestingly, China and Hong Kong are having a crossover moment right now: HK has a downward trend, and China has an upward trend.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    > Some cultures expect people to be engaged with their work, or have their work as a hobby outside of work hours ("do you contribute to open source in your free time?"). Is this actually still a non-negligible factor in tech hiring? I've never had anyone ask me this (and never shared my github), though I believe it existed in the past. But I can't imagine it's accurate to say that this is "expected" in a labor market as absurdly tight as tech is. I think what's perhaps the case is that you're mistaking opportunity for expectation; for those with little experience and no credential, open source work is an open-to-all foothold to showing your ability. This is one of the _good_ things about tech hiring, that makes us less blindly credentialist: try getting a job in (eg) finance without a college degree by showing off participation in a non-professional project. That's the model I have of open source's role in tech hiring. Am I missing something?

est 5y ago

> Some say no China's hippie moment finally happened.

rbanffy 5y ago
The productivity gains from automation were almost completely funnelled into the richest pockets, increasing inequality and making the “rat race” more gruelling for everyone participating in it. If we solve this distribution issue, a lot of people will opt to do that. We’ll lose a lot of bank tellers, gas pump operators, and insurance sellers but, in return, we’ll get a lot more poets and dancers, dreamers and storytellers. And lots of people who won’t give us anything of importance besides being part of the human family.
- MathYouF 5y ago
  >If we solve this distribution issue I recall some shaggy bearded 19th century German philosopher who wrote a book on this. Thought he was pretty popular with the Chinese government. I'm surprised to hear they're still having problems with distribution 100 years later.
  - HKH2 5y ago
    The Great Chinese Famine resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. Distribution was one of the biggest problems, and that was when the CCP was actually communist. Maybe it's just not feasible to effectively govern over a billion people. Even though I strongly disagree with it, I can understand why Mao wanted the Cultural Revolution; splitting up a country is far less desirable.
    - MathYouF 5y ago
      I'm highly sympathetic to the goals of communism and agree that the problems it's trying to solve exist and are inherent in our current system of economics. But one doesn't have to read much history to see that the prescribed methods offered for solving the problems laid out in The Communist Manifesto haven't been successful in any implementation tried in the 20th and 21st centuries. At this point I consider any communist who doesn't admit the ideology's massive failures to be either ignorant, or disingenuous, because if someone actually wants to solve the problems with the capitalist system, they have to admit what has been tried and failed so far. I do hope one day we'll find new solutions to the distribution problem that don't create other massive problems like we've seen, because the issues inherent in capitalism won't go away without acknowledging its failures either.

eunos 5y ago

I dont understand why the Economist hyping memes like "lying down" and conflate it to the communist party. Should Caixin hyping up FML,YOLO or other TikTok memes and relate them to Biden and Trump?

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
You're comparing a party with an individual; a fair comparison would be to compare it with the Democrat or Republican party. That said, the US still has the illusion of being a democracy and its people having a will of their own, which isn't as much of a thing in China. That said that said, "western" media does tend to make China into a uniform mass, while in reality it's much bigger, richer, more populous and more diverse than Europe and the US combined.
- Haga 5y ago
  Do you refer to the minority Disneylands in the Han ethno state?
- Clewza313 5y ago
  As it happens, this article is also pointing out that the country is not a monolithic mass of CCP robots executing orders to increase production.
- eunos 5y ago
  Well I use the leader names as metonym to the current administration. It's Biden admin not Democrat admin. > will of their own Do you think CCP still unilaterally assign jobs to the Chinese people along with weekly quota or something? I argue that these feeling of tiredness and hopelessness is less about CCP than long working time hours which also common in East Asia.
  - Koiwai 5y ago
    I assume you missed the "illusion" part?
rchaud 5y ago

counternotions 5y ago

China needs to expand its frontier — or create the illusion of — to create hope of once again booming gains for the younger generation. Territorial expansion will revive creative energies among the youth.

Vaslo 5y ago
I don’t understand this comment. Do you mean they need to expand into their current unoccupied land, or do they need to claim territory adjacent to them belonging to other countries? Are you referring to Taiwan here?
- counternotions 5y ago
  All of the above, plus space exploration. Not condoning, merely pointing out what’s already in motion.
  - swiley 5y ago
    From the outside China doesn't appear to be short on space.
    - benque 5y ago
      Not that I agree with the root comment, but China is not that large without Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Inner Mongolia. These provinces also have the least population densities - the terrain doesn't support it.
  - Vaslo 5y ago
    I just can't agree with what you are saying given all the land and resources they already have - sounds like the Chinese version of Nazi Germany's "Lebensraum" to me. But you have a right to an opinion and I hope it doesn't come to that.
    - bostonsre 5y ago

rjsw 5y ago

There was a related article recently in the Guardian [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire-life-why-people-in-china-are-rejecting-high-pressure-jobs-in-favour-of-lying-flat https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/the-low-desire...

villasv 5y ago

“Lying flat is standing up, horizontally.” Gotta love the creative ways people will find to retrofit some artistic meanings to grow it into something stronger. The people who wanted to just lay flat were not really trying to make a statement, but now it will inevitably be perceived as one. The whole article is a disservice to these folks, who'd be better left unknown.

rbanffy 5y ago
I think choosing not to participate in the “rat race” is a powerful statement. I write code for fun and, incidentally, I get paid for it, but, for every one like me there is a dozen who are only doing that so they can afford to pay their rent. If I couldn’t get paid to write code and solve problems with that, I’d have to do something else, perhaps something I don’t enjoy at all, in order to provide for my family. If you can completely avoid doing that, congratulations. You win.
gdsdfe 5y ago
they're posting them selfs in social media ... no they don't want to be left unknown
dalbasal 5y ago
The first guy quoted wants to be like Diogenes. Diogenes didn't just live in his barrel quitely wanting to be left alone. He was a subversive figure, criticising and challenging everything: Plato, Alexander, Athenian nobles, sensibilities and social assumptions of his day. He was a famous troublemaker, and that's why we know of him today. I'm sure some Greek dude did really just want to be left alone.. we just don't know his name. Obviously, I'm not justifying China's paranoid response to any kind of cultural subversions or provocation. Proverbial barrel dwellers are a necessary critique, IMO. The salience of their message can be an important important signal or backpressure. You could make analogies to the US in the 60s, Japan in the 00s and I'm sure lots of others.
- nxc18 5y ago
  You can make analogies to the current, active antiwork movement. I think it is pretty clear that all of society is poorer for the existence of these people. Perhaps China’s ability to keep a lid on it is one small part of their relative economic competitiveness.

nathias 5y ago

Working more than 40h per week should be illegal around the world just like selling yourself into slavery is. This is socialism only by name.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago

In india, many jobs are low paying to a point you either have to shuffle between 2 or 3 jobs for metropolitan people or good enough and the companies "expect" you to stay late. 60-80 hour week is common. The idea is, if employee a isnt going to work 80 hours for this job, fine, leave and there are 20 more willing to do just that because for them, this is better than nothing. I easily work 80+ hours, partly because im the proprietor of my law office. Employees, well they get 10-5-6 day so the rest its just me and other hardcore associates. India has a huge problem of service industry being overworked and underpaid.

baybal2 5y ago
Globalisation on wealth at its finest. Educated, and talented, or simply already rich are leaving Asian countries, and go live for a vacation like employment somewhere in Dubai, or Singapore, while everybody else, but much more people already downtrodden have to stay. People think this reduces the competition for people staying, but in reality its the opposite. - In big companies, it means more people vying for prised promotions. - It means less opportunities in service industry, as there is not much richer people to service. - And there are less small businesses doing something worthy, as people who can do that, chose to do that in Dubai, or Singapore - The really rich not only go to live abroad these days, but, more than ever before, take their moneys go to live somewhere else with them.

egeozcan 5y ago

I'm very surprised how similar to planking this seems: It's just that there's arguably more meaning behind it.

luxurytent 5y ago

Netflix and tangping

SMAAART 5y ago

Is the rat race making us all Depressed and Anxious? Isn't this part of the overall understated minimalism movement? Chop wood, carry water.

bostonsre 5y ago
I would be a lot more depressed and anxious if I wasn't sure if the neighboring tribe would murder my tribe in the night. Minimalism is great in a civilized society where you can do your own thing and be left alone, but you don't get a civilized society without a widespread social contract built on an economy.
- ewmiller 5y ago
  There’s obviously much more nuance to our choices in the modern world than “live in a work-till-death society” or “live as primitives in the woods.” For instance, many other developed nations take twice as much time off (or more) compared to American workers and seem to be doing just fine.
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    Yep, I agree. I just mean to say that the simple peaceful life that some are able to attain nowadays is possible due to the way our society is currently setup. Banding together in larger and larger tribes has been required because other people were doing the same and other people put their tribe's well being ahead of others. Whether they like it or not, those living the simple peaceful life are a part of our tribe and they benefit from the protection that our tribe provides.
- kar5pt 5y ago
  Do you have evidence to back this up?
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    Not exactly, but which part are you referring to? I just made the assertions by thinking through our history from stuff I've read before and putting myself in the shoes of people in the distant past. Life was absolutely brutal in the past and I think we're all incredibly lucky to live in the time that we do now.

RyEgswuCsn 5y ago

I find the Economist's choice of wording to translate this message quite intriguing. How about another way of putting it: "China encourages its people to strive".

Clewza313 5y ago
It's an intentional tip of the hat to Communist sloganeering about "class struggle".
- RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
  Indeed; but I don't think it is "class struggle" that China is promoting to its people. It would seem to me that the Economist made an conscious attempt to conflate Xi's advocation of continued "class struggle" within CCP with what is being "urging" as seen in the current affairs; to quote: > Such ideas ("Tangping") are at odds with the Communist Party’s rhetoric. Its leader, Xi Jinping, likes the word “struggle”. In 2019 an official summary of a speech he gave to young officials included more than 50 mentions of it. Struggle is an art, he told them. “We must be good at struggle.”
clydethefrog 5y ago
The nice thing about The Economist is that they wear their preference about Anglo classical liberalism proudle on their sleeve. Their international reporting is wonderful and you quickly learn how to read their information between their bias, because there is no other magazine reporting weekly about African and South American regions.

bencollier49 5y ago

The US urges its people to struggle too doesn't it? Isn't this site a good example?

bostonsre 5y ago
Maybe they did during ww2 and other wars, but isn't the key point in the US that you have the opportunity to struggle if you want? I don't recall seeing any government propaganda that implores you to work hard.
- rchaud 5y ago
  The federal minimum wage hasn't changed in 12 years. Tipped labour can be legally paid $2.13 an hour. What need is there for wasteful propaganda when struggle is baked right into economic policy?
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    I made no claim that it's an easy struggle for those that try. The parent was saying the US encouraged struggle like China, but I don't think that's the case.

AndyMcConachie 5y ago

"Many people in their 20s and 30s grumble that hard work no longer rewards them with a better quality of life." I think the Economist is confusing China with the USA. This is how people in the USA feel, not people in China. China just eliminated extreme poverty and its people have continually been getting richer. Meanwhile people in the USA have been steadily getting poorer since the 1970s. The Economist has been predicting China's failure for decades now and it hasn't happened yet. Maybe it never will. And maybe the publication that was originally founded in the 19th century to promote slavery in America and opium into China is just full of shit.

janeroe 5y ago
Are you a citizen of the United States? If it were possible would you swap your citizenship with an average Chinese?

steve76 5y ago

It's amazing how much easier life is when bad people go away. The hard work of your parents. Yeah sure. What was that? Emptying machine guns belts into college students, steam rolling them with a tank, and then flushing the flattened remains down the toilet? Or butchering children, selling their meat as steak and eating them during the cultural revolution? Or industrial organ harvesting? Or smuggling elephant tranquilizer causing millions to OD? Or today. Cooking up a virus that just committed one of the worse mass murders in history over soy bean tariffs? You are a monster. In the face of you, your children just went limp and want to die. Hundreds of millions of them. How tragic. All for what? Marx? Your fairy tale and lies you tell yourself that you can do what you want to anyone and not have any consequences? That you are above laws and any attempt for a happy life and to restrain your barbarity is slavery? There are a few naive people in the USA who think they nice their way out of problems, that not standing up for themselves and rushing to self criticism provides credibility. No. They stepped in dog mess because they are still a foolish child and now spreading it all over my home. Thank God I'm not in China. How horrible. I wouldn't go limp. I would live my life at night when everyone is asleep. Sleepwalk during the day. Pay lip service. Make my own money and probably keep it in a backup hidden. And then get the hell out of Dodge first chance I get. I would be a truly awful person, for no other reason besides Karl Marx, the one white European man who has reversed millennia of human rights and lawfulness and civility and horrifically murdered more people than any other.

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

I find this movement very similar to Buddhism or Christianity teaching, in the sense that you give up material world as the circumstances are such that you can not win. If you perceive world where every man mad political system as practical implementation is aristocracy then understanding that there is no democracy, socialism, communism (as they are just a flavor of the same system) will lead you that there is split on two group of people those who are aristocrats and those who are slaves. Only difference is that "good" aristocracies give more rights and more resources to their slaves. So, as each aristocracy must have slaves to exist (which will turn at some point to robots and AI) they have to advertise production of more slaves. In that regard in Buddhism and teaching of Christ to escape vicious cycle of you or your children being wolfs or sheep, only way to escape is to exercise nonviolent resistance and give up on the entire game.

janeroe 5y ago
But Buddhism doesn't teach to give up the material world. Quite the opposite. It states there should be a balance. The middle way. Dalai Lama was even cancelled by twitter users for that. He said that his successor, if a woman, must be beautiful (since she would be working with people and people care about looks). An appalled journalist asked: "but isn't the internal qualities all that matter". Dalai Lama mentioned the necessity of balance infuriating some of the viewers who then cancelled him.
- NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
  In that explanation (same like Catholicism is in Christianity) I see divergent from the original teaching, due to simple reason as that would put a wrench in the gears of the aristocratic society. The teachings of the Buddha was aimed solely at liberating sentient beings from suffering, your mentioned "middle path" is pulling out of the context of the original meaning of the middle path. In case of Buddhism middle path was referring to pushing own body to extremes in order to gain enlightenment. Budha was killing his own body in the process, which was prevent him to attain enlightenment. Reason why your mentioned path is wrong it that along those lines one can arbitrary choose min and max limits of the function and choose the middle. So to give a very crud example "if murder is not ok, than acceptable number of murders is 0 and on the other end we have 8 billion people so middle is 4 billion?" In same sense your version says that between slave and aristocrat there are many levels of gray, but in fact slaves are just a slaves and aristocrats are aristocrats, being in the game just helps aristocrats and prolongs the cycle of suffering.

Bayart 5y ago

Archive without paywall : https://archive.ph/VtO3p https://archive.ph/VtO3p

wombatmobile 5y ago

This article is based on "an internet user" who "posted this brief description of his simple, stress-free life". That's a pretty low bar for journalism. But wait, "The post went viral." What does "viral" mean in a nation of 1.3 billion people? The article doesn't say. All it offers by way of quantitative data is: "More than 60% of over 240,000 respondents to a poll on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, said tangping was their idea of the good life." https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Distinguishing-Disinformation-from-Propaganda.pdf https://www.ned.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Distinguishin...

rchaud 5y ago
It's not journalism, it's commentary delivered in an overly formal style that's intended to denote intellectual gravitas. The Economist does 0 (and I mean zero) investigative work. They read the papers like everyone else, and will dig up bits from IMF/World Bank reports and think tanks to fill out the rest of the article.

liminal 5y ago

My impression from watching (not very many) Chinese films, is that struggle and suffering is considered the greatest virtue. Where American films seem to imply that people should rise up and fight injustice, Chinese ones seem to say that life is suffering and real heroes are the ones who bare it stoically.

Koiwai 5y ago
At least there is The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/