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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

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.
  - throwawayay02 5y ago
    The article does mention censorship in social media.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    From the article > But Douban, another social-media site, has banned several online groups promoting the concept. It’s safe to assuming in China the social media is just an extension of the state.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  "property prices are completely unaffordable" Oh, such a unique problem, there is no chance that it's being driven by some global factors and events, like avaliability of cheap credit, right? "getting married is an ironclad social requirement" Typical in traditional / conservatice societies Fertility rate in Spain and Italy is below 1.3 and we have no clue how to address it.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    > Fertility rate in Spain and Italy is below 1.3 and we have no clue how to address it. There are alredy too many people in this world... we don't live on farms anymore, so that we'd need many kids to help work on them... the only problem currently is, that our pension systems and some of the economic systems depend on more and more people producing and that we have yearly growth (instead of sustained business).
    - Guthur 5y ago
      This is such a moronic statement. If you really really want to limit population then limiting the number of children is a absolutely terrible and potentially catastrophic way of doing it. Who is going to replace and look after that rapidly aging population? Or is complete collapse your goal?
      - xyzzy123 5y ago
        Do you have a modest proposal for limiting population - that isn't contraception? Are you thinking soylent green, or more like logan's run?
        Tade0 5y ago
        Education of women is a strong predictor of low fertility rates. Send the girls to school and they won't have to rely on a future husband to sustain themselves later on.
        5y ago
strangeattractr 5y ago
Very astute, the form of the struggle is the same therefore the degree of the struggle must be the same too. In the same way that a famine isn't a big deal because we've all got to figure out where our next meal is coming from.
civilized 5y ago
The hilarious part is how the Chinese Communist Party's official propagandists and elite Chinese academics are using their bully pulpits to explicitly shame anyone who contemplates giving up on the rat race. Imagine you go to nytimes.com one morning and the US government and Harvard professors have written op-eds scolding you, demanding that you work hard to "ensure a happy life" or you will be "unjust", "shameful", and "disappoint your parents and the taxpayers." You might get the vibe that they protest too much, and your well-being is actually the least of their concerns. To be fair, the Chinese would probably find NYT op-eds from the Great Awokening era equally hilarious and self-undermining.
- fttx_ 5y ago
  That happens. In fact, that exact genre of op-ed is so common it’s been made into a meme. Millennials and avocado toast etc.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    It's my perception that those op-eds are very much in the contrarian minority, a far cry from being the central position of the media institution. They're roundly and immediately mocked, and the majority of coverage in mainstream newspapers is much more sympathetic to the antiwork extreme than the bootstraps one.
    - civilized 5y ago
      Yeah, if anything, US is the mirror image, where all prestige media is filled with complaints about how bad The System sucks and how it is the cause of every hapless individual's inevitable burnout and despair.
- naveen99 5y ago
  The us fed has an explicit goal of maximum employment too (along with low inflation, although I bet they are more flexible on inflation).
- rchaud 5y ago

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.
- throwawayay02 5y ago
  The article does mention censorship in social media.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  From the article > But Douban, another social-media site, has banned several online groups promoting the concept. It’s safe to assuming in China the social media is just an extension of the state.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"property prices are completely unaffordable" Oh, such a unique problem, there is no chance that it's being driven by some global factors and events, like avaliability of cheap credit, right? "getting married is an ironclad social requirement" Typical in traditional / conservatice societies Fertility rate in Spain and Italy is below 1.3 and we have no clue how to address it.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  > Fertility rate in Spain and Italy is below 1.3 and we have no clue how to address it. There are alredy too many people in this world... we don't live on farms anymore, so that we'd need many kids to help work on them... the only problem currently is, that our pension systems and some of the economic systems depend on more and more people producing and that we have yearly growth (instead of sustained business).
  - Guthur 5y ago
    This is such a moronic statement. If you really really want to limit population then limiting the number of children is a absolutely terrible and potentially catastrophic way of doing it. Who is going to replace and look after that rapidly aging population? Or is complete collapse your goal?
    - xyzzy123 5y ago
      Do you have a modest proposal for limiting population - that isn't contraception? Are you thinking soylent green, or more like logan's run?
      - Tade0 5y ago
        Education of women is a strong predictor of low fertility rates. Send the girls to school and they won't have to rely on a future husband to sustain themselves later on.
        5y ago

strangeattractr 5y ago

Very astute, the form of the struggle is the same therefore the degree of the struggle must be the same too. In the same way that a famine isn't a big deal because we've all got to figure out where our next meal is coming from.

civilized 5y ago

The hilarious part is how the Chinese Communist Party's official propagandists and elite Chinese academics are using their bully pulpits to explicitly shame anyone who contemplates giving up on the rat race. Imagine you go to nytimes.com one morning and the US government and Harvard professors have written op-eds scolding you, demanding that you work hard to "ensure a happy life" or you will be "unjust", "shameful", and "disappoint your parents and the taxpayers." You might get the vibe that they protest too much, and your well-being is actually the least of their concerns. To be fair, the Chinese would probably find NYT op-eds from the Great Awokening era equally hilarious and self-undermining.

fttx_ 5y ago
That happens. In fact, that exact genre of op-ed is so common it’s been made into a meme. Millennials and avocado toast etc.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  It's my perception that those op-eds are very much in the contrarian minority, a far cry from being the central position of the media institution. They're roundly and immediately mocked, and the majority of coverage in mainstream newspapers is much more sympathetic to the antiwork extreme than the bootstraps one.
  - civilized 5y ago
    Yeah, if anything, US is the mirror image, where all prestige media is filled with complaints about how bad The System sucks and how it is the cause of every hapless individual's inevitable burnout and despair.
naveen99 5y ago
The us fed has an explicit goal of maximum employment too (along with low inflation, although I bet they are more flexible on inflation).
rchaud 5y ago