A product of China's now-defunct "One Child Policy", a sizeable proportion of the nation's millennials have had their nests well-feathered during China's "golden era" of sustained prosperity, which saw the nation leapfrogging to become the world's second largest economy. Theirs are the so-called "4-2-1" generation: much-better times saw them grow up as a single child each pampered by two working parents and their respective grannies.
Sure they have had their years of hard grind as they faced unrelenting competition for admission to university, not to mention a prestigious one. But once they graduated, they were generally assured of a more secured future.
No longer. A host of deep-seated domestic and global challenges are catching up on China in a "perfect storm" of changes, and opportunities, "not seen in a hundred years", as flagged up by President Xi from time to time.
As China is trying to cope with a much more hostile external environment and systemic domestic economic challenges, job opportunities for graduates have dwindled, compounded by a record-high supply of 12 million new graduates a year. This comes at a time when the Fourth Industrialization is re-shaping how lives and work are organized and distributed, resulting in disappearance and sea-change of many job requirements. The prohibitively-high cost of raising a family including housing and education adds to a sense of frustration and despair.
Their hopelessness and negative feelings, however, are not commonly shared by their parents', let alone grandparents' generations, who had weathered much worse times, often with untold personal sacrifices.
All this is well captured by The Economist (17 August 2023) expose China's defeated youth.
It will take time, perhaps a decade or so, for China's young generation to adjust to these new realities.
In any case, against all odds, China's trajectory appears to be on track to unfold a new era of renaissance, where the current "defeated" youth will have to rise to unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Click here.
