Youth Pessimism Deepens in "Zero Covid" China. NewsWire

NewsWire: 6/28/22

• Chinese youth living under the government’s “zero Covid” policies have become increasingly disillusioned. Once known for their nationalism, young people are now vocal about wanting to leave the country. (The New York Times)
• NH: In recent NewsWires, we’ve written about the many facets of Chinese youth: socially liberal, frustrated with rising costs and job pressures, and yet, despite their complaints, intensely nationalistic. (See “The Rising Chinese Youth Generation.”) Even as a growing number of disillusioned young people proclaimed their desire to “lie flat” (see “Chinese Millennials Opting Out of the Rat Race”), there was little talk about leaving the country.
• But under China’s “zero Covid” policy, their disenchantment has grown. Now the new movement among urban professionals is the “run philosophy,” or runxue, which preaches leaving China for better prospects elsewhere. After Shanghai went into lockdown in early April, searches for “emigration” on the social media platform WeChat surged almost sevenfold. Immigration consultants reported being swamped with inquiries. Popular Weibo and WeChat accounts sprung up offering emigration tips.
• While runxue hasn’t triggered mass migration, it's hard to know how many people actually intend to leave. Emigration from China has become nearly impossible since the government banned "non-essential departures" in the name of Covid prevention. Last year, China issued just 630K passports, compared with an average of 10.8M annually from 2002 to 2017.
• In any case, runxue feels like a cry for help from young people who are also facing historic levels of youth unemployment and lack of upward mobility. What’s more, they’re fed up with the growing pressure from the state to have children in the absence of economic security or of any participation in their own governance. The phrase “we are the last generation” became an online rallying cry after a video went viral of a young man pushing back against police officers who warned him that the next three generations of his family would be punished if he didn’t go to quarantine camp.
• As our readers know, the fertility rate in China has fallen steeply for five years in a row and hit a dismal 1.15 last year. (See “Births in China Continue to Fall.”) And increasingly, this feels like a form of “soft resistance” staged by young people with little hope for the future.
• This growing resistance to childbearing was reflected in a recent report showing that few Chinese youth want to have children. The report was released by WhatYouNeed, a youth media brand and market research firm that polled over 20,000 respondents online, mostly young women between 18 and 31. Two-thirds said that they do not want to have kids. Another 28.4% said they were unsure, and only 5.7% want kids. This desire doesn’t vary much by relationship status: Among married people, just 14.6% say they want kids.
• When asked why they don’t want children, nearly three-fourths (73.2%) of respondents cited worries over the kind of social environment their kids would grow up in (e.g., educational pressures). This was followed closely by not being able to afford kids (71.8%).
• When asked how much is considered sufficient income to raise a child, the most common answer was a combined income of 30-50K RMB a month. As a comparison, the average monthly income in big cities is around 8.5K RMB a month.
• Researchers assumed that perhaps those living in smaller and less expensive cities would be more open to having children. They are, but the majority still don’t want them. Fully 76.5% of respondents living in Tier 1 cities (like Beijing or Shanghai) don’t want kids. In Tier 2 cities, it’s 65.3%; in Tier 3 cities, 64.7%.
• These are extraordinarily high numbers. While lockdowns have begun to lift across China, young people’s pessimism about the future remains. “Not bringing children to this country, to this land, will be the most charitable deed I could manage,” one Weibo user wrote recently under the hashtag #thelastgeneration. Shortly after, the message was censored.