An occasional reader brings this article to my attention.
I wrote about this in May, but it was earlier in the China watching site Whats On Weibo, here in April.
Question is: does this threaten China's productivity? Is it a thing? Short answer: I don't think so. Friends and colleagues long-term living in China say the same.
The idea is that young people in China are facing "involution" (horrid word...), 内卷, nei juan: which I'd rather translate as "rat race", running harder and harder for meagre return. So they choose to "lie down" (躺平), tang ping, rather than get out and work. Most doing this Tang ping, are the progeny of the single-child era. The sons and daughters -- princelings -- of rich folk. The rest can't afford to "lie down". That's a whole other story, by the way, the overworking of gig workers in China, and the punishments of those who try to fight for fair wages and conditions. But the rat race-fearing zoomers who are now lying down, perhaps just a minority.
And perhaps they the Chinese equivalent of similar trends outside China. There's the "stay-at-home phenomenon" in Japan, young Japanese males, not moving out of their apartments. There's the (often?) lackadaisical attitude of Zoomers in the US, UK, Australia.... In my time, in the sixties, it was "turn on, tune in, drop out". Yet we survived and prospered.
But then again, what do I know? I've been wrong in many of my predictions, including the hope that Xi Jinping would be a moderate leader, when he's turned out to be a re-born Mao.
Then again, again: there is indeed a problem in China with wage levels. It's true that China's working class has gained huge increases in wages over the last forty years. Since 1980, they've grown over 10% per year, every year. That means they double every 7 years. No other country comes near this performance. But it still means incomes well below those in Hong Kong, at around $US1,800 per year. This needs to change.
Some other links relevant to this:
