Young people in China are becoming more rebellious, questioning their nation’s traditional expectations of career and family
It’s interesting because people are people and it doesn’t matter where you are born.
If you look at it from a birds eye view you will see a younger, smart generation trying to fight it’s own governments.
It’s not USA vs China vs Russia vs Europe etc. it is the younger generation vs the old generation. Currently each generation is fighting it’s own government and slowly realising how poor they have done in the last decades.
Nobody wants war.
I’m waiting for Gen Z to realize that they’ve grown up interconnected and have the ability to coordinate like no one ever could before and when they realize that I expect them to flip the monopoly board.
This is exactly why the billionaires are dismantling the current social media platforms. Organizing is the only threat they truly fear.
As phrased in a recent anti-union campaign by Amazon: Watch out, your co-workers might be “vulnerable to organizing”.
Can you expand on how billionaires are dismantling social media?
did you miss what happened to twitter?
No. I don’t see how it was “dismantled.” Can you explain?
Rate limiting and heavily pushed “premium” options have made Twitter near useless for large scale organizing.
600 posts a day makes it nearly useless for organizing?
Its capitalist owners rendered it useless for political organization.
This is just repeating the claim. Can you explain how so?
I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It’s not true to say we’ve “grown up interconnected”, by the 2010’s, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn’t a grand a unifying “american culture”. At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90’s could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we’ve all become atomized, there’s a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that’s not “the culture”. There is less genuine engagement with a “the culture”, and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.
You know, along those lines, there’s also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can “coordinate”, yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you’re doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would’ve thought that tech literacy would’ve gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don’t know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.
I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can’t, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we’re kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we’ve seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don’t learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won’t), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they’ve grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.
In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They’re all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I’ve seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don’t really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I’m wrong.
Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that’s maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.
It’s kinda been that way since the internet has been readily available.
It’s been that way since the 1960s at least.
No war but the class war
Boomers want a war.
I actually think that the biggest damage the parents of the Boomers committed was glorifying their war stories. Don’t get me wrong, I probably would have too so I’m not saying this out of judgement. But I think the Boomers grew up feeling like the only way to prove themselves was to fight as hard as their parents did. And when there weren’t any Nazis to be found, they found fights with anybody they could.
… including their own children.
Idk, if I was young and rich I probably wouldn’t give a shit about changing anything. I’d maybe even invest in anything that promised to keep things the same
Don’t trust anyone over 30.
Im over 35 and I know better than to trust myself!
glares at reflection in mirror
Amazing arc, like watching the last 120 years in the US compressed down to a couple decades. From rural to industrial powerhouse to the kids going “fuck this shit”.
What’s next?
It’s like watching a speedrun: Capitalism any%.
Next? Some of them have to be thinking “wait, this is a communist country, isn’t it?”
I don’t think anyone think of China as a communist/socialist country for a very long time. Maybe except older generations and tankies.
Ironically, I have met more tankies in six month on lemmy than my 18 years growing up in China. It is truly a wild culture shock that I didn’t expect. LOL.
A “tankie” isn’t a communist anymore than an American Republican wants individual freedom.
Anyone that supports China is going to say it’s communist, and anyone from the right shitting on China is going to say they’re communist.
But both groups are pretty much the same and no one should listen to either
The CCP doesn’t even claim that China is communist though. Idk where you’re getting that from.
The CCP doesn’t even claim that China is communist though
Can I get a source for the communist party of China saying they’re not communists?
The CCP are communists though. There is no denying that. That doesn’t mean they think China is a communist country. Communism to them doesn’t just mean the communists are in power. Communism to them is more of an ideal they aim to work towards.
That’s not a source…
And it’s like saying American Republican voters want personal freedom.
It doesn’t matter what someone says if their actions are the opposite
it’s not that ironic if you look at lemmy’s origin.
What’s next?
A gigantic Lemmy instance?
They already have two.
Civil war, if our current trajectory is any indication.
deleted by creator
Yes blame the “youth” when the average age of our politicians is 65. Makes perfect sense.
Gullible people are partially to be blamed.
What you mean like the fucking Boomers who keep voting for these pieces of shit? Yeah I agree.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
China is already essentially an authoritarian dictatorship. There’s no big leap to fascism for them, they just need to fetishize the military and act more nationalistic than they already do. They’re already prejudicial, blaming minorities within for all sorts of problems, attempting to control speech and thought, etc.
deleted by creator
Pretty sure this is happening all over, not just in China.
Its just a generic filler article that gets posted about young people every year or two.
“Quiet Quitting” was the thing in 2022.
“Great Resignation” was the thing in 2021
You can find articles about this in 2019, 2016, omfg all over the place in the wake of 2008, “Jobless Recovery” from 2004 to 2006, in the 90s it was “Slackers” and in the 80s it was “Punks” and in the 70s and 60s it was “Hippies” and then back to Beatniks and Anarchists and of course, the old crowd favorite, Pinko Commies.
This is just a more recent mash up of the “China Bad” and “Nobody Wants To Work Anymore” meme
deleted by creator
This is just a more recent mash up of the “China Bad” and “Nobody Wants To Work Anymore” meme
LOL, spot on.
Can say I’ve definitely “stopped striving”, don’t know if it’s from Long Covid, living paycheck to paycheck cause my pay gets min/maxed for the business, personal infighting thanks to Fox News and Republican bullshit tearing apart and killing families over vaccinations, or maybe it’s just the weather 🤷♂️ lol fuck
yea even the young zoomers i see at uni seem slow
they are also fat
摆烂 bai3lan4
A slang term that means “stop striving”, I’d say it’s loosely akin to the phrase “quiet quitting” but a bit more general.
Fuck yeah China! (not the government)
Fuck the CCP. China is cool.
The problem with The Rat race is, even if you win, you’re still a rat.
I’ll say this some time and someone will tell me I’m an idiot for quoting some awful person, but right now - not knowing if it is a quote or not - I love this
I’ve always thought the value of quotes (when they have any) is based entirely on their content rather than who spoke them. A smart quote from an awful person is still smart. And a dumb quote from a smart person is still dumb, like that definition of insanity one that often gets attributed to Einstein.
I’m sure there’s some sort of logical fallacy to be said about negating the quality of a quote based on the person who said it. Like, if Einstein said it, then it must be smart. If Hitler said it, then it must be evil. Etc.
Yeah, it’s an appeal to authority.
Well, you got me curious.
Seems like the first use was in a life magazine article by someone who didn’t want to take explicit credit, so chances are it was something thought of by his students. And then it was repeated by various comedians over the years.
For what it’s worth, my quick skim of the author, William Sloane Coffin’s wiki makes him seem like a pretty great guy.
This is a great quote, I also like to say (especially in places like airports or government buildings):
It’s not a rat race, it’s a rat queue.
One of the behavioralist psychologists, I think it was Pavlov, ran an experiment on dogs where he shocked them for both bad behavior good.
Eventually, the shocks had no effect.
Leaned hopelessness. Can’t escape the effect regardless of your efforts so eventually you stop trying
Wait so you’re telling me abusing dogs results in a negative outcome?
Shit who would have thought!
I really enjoyed this story format. It showed the strength of photographic journalism
EDIT: i present to you: the duality of humanity.
Warms my heart to see the youth choosing to walk the Rebel Path.
Removed by mod
die 👯
Late stage capitalism is a blight of humanity, there’s gotta have to be some sort of revolutionary changes to society at the rate this is all headed. The world is not healthy right now.
I’m pretty sure we’re watching society slowly collapse.
Funny, people in the USA have been doing that for 20+ years
Weirdly TikTok only shows me streets full with fentinels in USA. I don’t know if that’s propaganda or is it real bad out there
Propaganda. Every city has one or two neighborhoods (usually full of working class minorities) where police dump the homeless and addicts from everywhere else. Each of those areas has one or two particularly bad streets that look like shit and make for great fear mongering.
At the risk of sounding like propaganda myself… Just because you don’t witness poverty and crime doesn’t mean it is propaganda. US has a major homeless and drug epidemic that is getting worse. It is easy for those with money to put it out of sight and ignore it.
I’m visiting China for the first time right now for 2 weeks and I must say I’m very impressed with how clean the cities are and the lack of homeless and drug addicts.
In the US my old house in OKC has been broken into twice by homeless and my parent’s house in Miami twice as well, and their car stolen twice. Walking to work in Brooklyn, people are literally sleeping on the sidewalks under trash bags every night as everyone walks past like they aren’t there.
Even in my my home town in Vermont, population under 10,000, there are always homeless people out in the cold begging and sleeping in tents in the woods. These people have given up on life, or given bad luck, or addicted to drugs.
I haven’t seen any of that in China so far. Sure there are some areas outside the city centers that are more depressing looking, lack much personality, and have run down buildings but at least everyone has a home, a job, and is taken care of. People here seem to have more respect for themselves and for others. It is part of the culture here.
Everyone I talk to here says it is incredibly safe. In fact, today I saw my first 2 police cars on the highway for the first time a week into my trip. And we’ve been driving an average of 3 hours per day everywhere between Shenzhen and ChengDu (visiting factories ). There are many cameras everywhere but there isn’t a need for hundreds of police to patrol the streets non-stop like in every city in the US. I haven’t heard a single siren the entire trip either - in cities of 20 million. You won’t find that in NYC which has half the population. Just some thoughts I wanted to share, thanks for reading.
Oh there is absolutely poverty. I’m specifically referencing what the commenter above me was discussing, which is a trend on social media of finding a bad area of town, taking pictures from 40 different angles, and presenting it as though American cities are nothing but miles upon miles of tent encampments and despair. I will admit I have only ever lived in the rust belt, so it may very well be like that in other places, but in general you see one or two small areas of extreme poverty mixed with working class, a few rough-ish neighborhoods adjacent to those, and the rest is pretty quiet, if not always the most affluent. By your description, it sounds like Chinese law enforcement keeps closer tabs on people through mass surveillance rather than active patrolling. Personally I’d rather have more crime and fewer government CCTVs, but to each their own.
Side note: here at the airport you check your flight information by just walking up to a screen and it uses facial recognition to instantly pull up your flight information, gate, seat, etc. lol. Completely different comfort level with cameras here haha…
100% propaganda. Since Andrew Callaghan did his good faith SF video, every nut in the country in need of a haircut grabs their camera and shitty mic to go do bad gonzo journalism from skid row in order to dunk on people experiencing hell. Or worse, clout chase off of people experiencing hell.
Fuck the rat race all over.
They just like me fr
Can a Chinese speaker clarify something? “Let it rot” in other sources is 摆烂 (Bải làn) which translates as “showed away” When I translate “let it rot” I get either 让它腐烂 (simplified) or 讓它腐爛.
What’s the difference? How does showed away become let it rot?
This is another case of a foreign word don’t have a good translation in English (and vise versa). Both 摆烂 and 让它腐烂 don’t have the same tone as “let it rot”.
To me, “let it rot” means watching something collapse with a sense of enjoyment. I cannot recall a Chinese word with this exact sentiment of the top of my head. But I can try to explain both Chinese words.
“让它腐烂” is the literal translation of “let it rot”, word for word. It don’t have the cultural and sentimental meaning behind it, merely stating the fact. More like “let the leave rot in the compost pile”.
“摆烂” is probably what the article is referring to. Its meaning is similar to civil disobedience, and 躺平 (“lay flat”, another word that was popular couple years ago).
“摆” means put, “烂” means something poorly made, broken, etc. “摆烂”, together as a word, means “displaying a broken (bad) attitude, no matter the outside influence”. However, “烂” also means rot, which is probably where the translation “let it rot” came from.
The original usage is much more playful, like your cat would lay on the floor no matter what toy or treat you give it, then it is 摆烂. But with the recent increase in pressure for many young people in China. 摆烂 and 躺平 (lay flat) become more of a act of civil disobedience and refusal to participate in the broken system/economy.
So 摆烂 is not a exact translation for “let it rot”, but they do share the meaning of “no action” and the sentiment of joy. And “let it rot” sounds much cooler and concise than my explanation.
Hey I just wanted to say thank you for the breakdown. The intricacies of translation are interesting.
Ditto. Respect for anyone who not only knows two languages well enough to explain one in the other, but is willing to share that knowledge.
Thank you for your kind message. China is my cultural root, and both its culture and language are of great importance to me.
I was very active on r/translator before I left reddit. It is my great joy to see that I still have opportunity here to convey Chinese cultures to kind strangers on lemmy.
Is there a Lemmy community for that?
I would love to have one, but I have yet to find an alternative.
Could you create one?
The article title sounded like they were letting the system rot, but if they’re laying flat then the metaphor is that the people are laying and rotting? Or did I misunderstand
That is what I mean when I say there is no exact translation.
摆烂 doesn’t mean see the system collapse, merely displaying the lack of interest to participate. So the speaker is displaying the 烂 (bad attitude, rot), not the system. I believe 摆烂 is more akin to “civil disobedience” or “quit quitting”, than “let it rot” (if anything, it is closer to the literal meaning of “let me rot”).
I want to make it more clear in my original comment, but I was afraid it would be too verbose and distract the reader.
I also read that as “quiet quitting”. Would you try to translate that from English to Chinese could cause all kinds of linguistic issues.
Thank you for the commentary. I figured there was some cultural and lingual baggage that was the difference.
Crazy when an authoritarian country like China that can just execute people when they don’t stay on message, get way off message and say shit like this. Boomer’s who bitch about people not wanting to work anymore, this lets me truthfully respond with “even with a gun to their head, today’s hopeless work is probably worse than death”
Edit: Looks like I pissed off some tankies, too bad fuckers, China is an evil country with black souled sons of bitches at the helm, and that’s as an American with even more disgusting darker souled miserable sons of bitches at the helms of our branches of government. Get real and get over it. Xi is a Winnie the Pooh looking CUNT that can go fuck himself!!!
China is a authoritarian country, but it doesn’t have the resource and political will to capture and kill every person that doesn’t align with CCP.
Things can get pretty ugly (like death, torture, or removal of livelihood) for strong anti-governmental message, like bridgeman; significant public figure expressing dissent (even as a joke), like Bi Fujian, the host of the most popular variety show; or significant public event like wuyi (乌衣), Quanmei, and other activist in the chained woman incident.
But Chinese government is not going to kill someone for saying “I am so fucking overworked”. Arrest for telling the story to foreign media (which obviously is neither humane nor legal, I am not trying to defend CCP), maybe, but not worth any more serious punishment.
Schroedinger’s Communist:
The country is ruled by wealthy elite, but still communist. The government is incompetent, but also all powerful.
It’s a fascist dictorship, and only as powerful as it’s enforcers are loyal.
If things get bad, it can collapse overnight.
The country is ruled by wealthy elite, but still communist.
“This polygon has three sides, but it’s still a triangle.”
More like:
This square doesn’t have any corners, but still a square because it told me. Also don’t trust that square, it lies about everything
Love how y’all hate anti lockdown protesters in USA but cheer them on in China.
I thought this was kind of an old meme by now? I seem to remember it being reported on in english media by the late 2010’s, like 2018/2019, and the half-life of memes is pretty bad anyways + I would assume english media would get around to these things somewhat after they’d been spent anyways.My bad, I was thinking of “躺平”, lying flat, as mentioned in the article.
In any case I think there’s definitely like, an element of this reporting that is, you know, relatively obvious in the amount of bias. You might compare this to, say, if china reported on like, growing incel movements, or something, as evidenced by the spread of andrew tate. Or, maybe better, the quiet quitting movement. They’re not technically incorrect, and those are pretty significant problems, but it’s also, you know, there’s a reason why they’re choosing to report on that, and not like. I dunno, something else. Say, toxic work culture. Sigma male grindsets. The total inverse, you will rarely see reported on by, you know, the fucking wall street journal. I have a skepticism for the motives of the media, is basically all I’m saying. I agree with the memes though the chinese government and chinese society et large kind of blows chunks, similarly faulted as is most of modern society broadly.
