Will the CCP's militaristic values be enough to hold China's millennials together? (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
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When your maid keeps breaking your rice bowls, but she’s so beautiful you don’t want to sack her, what should you do? The 18th-century Qing scholar and politician Ji Yun solved this dilemma in Notes of the Thatched Abode of Close Observations: in his parable, the employer simply buys sturdier bowls made of iron, so his hot-but-clumsy serving-girl couldn’t break them.
After the Communists came to power in China in 1949, all workers were made similarly unsackable: private enterprise was abolished and workers were guaranteed employment and subsistence by the state. Under Mao, society was organised into danwei, administrative work units — and sometimes physically gated compounds — tasked with supplying accommodation, food, education and rudimentary healthcare in exchange for close political surveillance.
This material security was known as the “iron rice bowl”, after Ji Yun’s story: a social contract in which each worker could be sure of a position. But when Deng Xiaoping began the process of transforming China from a planned economy to a “socialist market economy” in 1978, that iron rice bowl was melted down for scrap in the country’s newly roaring manufacturing economy.
Since then, 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty. In the last 20 years, its annual GDP growth has remained above 6% — compared to 1.4% in the EU — and in some years has been as high as 14%. Today, China is less “iron rice bowl” than, as President Xi Jinping famously phrased it, “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”.
But the price of becoming competitive has been, well, competition. Beijing implemented policy changes in the late 1980s to foster competition between schools and students; entrance exams have never been so difficult. Meanwhile, a good university place is key to “making it”, while top performers in the gaokao exam — their equivalent to A Levels —become local media celebrities.
Nor does the race end after young people reach adulthood. Much as in the West, young Chinese adults face rounds of unpaid internships and, in Beijing, rents even less affordable than those in London. Job opportunities have become scarcer and more dependent on personal connections, while the cost of living has outstripped earnings growth.
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SubscribeGreat piece.
Chinese younger generations have experienced something different and entirely unique: exactly the same mass migration/urbanisation out of the countryside into cities as the West, only, way way faster, all compressed into under three decades. And the same breakdown of extended family structures and ties, and towards urbanised nuclear lifestyles, of other Confucian countries (Japan, S. Korea, Singapore etc), and the same breakdown I’m seeing now happening in Hindu India as well. Younger generations in the east clearly don’t think in the same way as older generations, but I see no evidence or indication at all that younger Chinese generations are buying into western liberal democracy. Western educated Chinese often end up becoming highly critical of both systems instead.
There is a muted echo of the youth of the boomers half a century ago, the western sixties counter-culture playing out, albeit under very different circumstances, albeit with Chinese Characteristics of you like. One thing missing for sure, is the explosion of a creative pop culture, everything from music to Warhol. Instead, we are seeing an explosion of merchintilist activity which is about to have profound effects on both China and the west. Perhaps it’s a Confucian thing.
I often wonder (too lazy to study it!) how much British+US counter-culture in the ’60s and ’70s was actually more top down than bottom up – that is to say, it was actively encouraged and patronised by the wealthy elite, presumably with the aim of atomising society to create more consumers. I’m reckon the Establishment in the UK knew what they were doing when they were publicly so offended by it all.
Interesting Idea. Pop culture of the time seems to put forward both ideas about individual choice simultaneously, perhaps darker version more prominent in the UK (‘welcome my son, to the machine’, and ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’) compared to the US with more optimistic narratives (‘born to be wild’). Certainly the 20th century felt like it had a lot more diverse voices around, and pop culture was a lot wittier compared with the 21st century, but likely I’m just looking back with the old rose tinted.
Yeah, thinking about it a bit more, I don’t think there was ever a great conspiracy – it was just rich people finding new ways to make money. Looking back, the punk scene looks like a clever way of turning teenager anger into an act of consumerism. And agreed, youth culture seems horribly bland and homogenised now in comparison, but maybe it is richer from the inside.
Prash, one thing I have always seen, from the people who produced Holbein, Descartes, Hume, Picasso, Elvis, Benjamin Franklin, Darwin, Einstein, Ford, Gershwin, da Vinci and on and on is they posess a creative genius along with IQ. IQ by nation, google it, is fascinating. As IQ is the best indicator yet of scholastic and economic outcomes within any society, it also shows a lot as nations
But IQ is one thing, and then there is this separate Q, the creativity Q which the people above also excelled at. Indians and Chinese have higher IQ than Westerners according to the tables, but I believe they have a lower of the mysterious creative Q.
China invented a lot 5000 years ago and then went into millenniums of sleep perfecting their static perfect culture where innovation was prohibited as Confucius had already stated which was perfect and the rest wrong, so innovation only could produce wrong as perfection was already known. Their great tests were merely to see who knew what is known. Anyone trying philosophy outside that would be destroyed. Low creative Q was selected. India did much the same. The West was 100% opposite (Islam between) because of the remarkably intellectual Christianity, thinking was how one moved up, the Church had thousands of Monks for hundreds of years hand copying the classic texts so they could be used to build on, 100 of the world’s 120 philosophers were Christians! The rest ancient Greek pretty much the rest.
You see it in China, they will not have a Renaissance, they are very intelligent, but the other Q is not really their thing.
Having worked in China I would say that both IQ and Q are closely related. We have no monopoly on Q.
Want to be successful? Copy Singapore. No resident visas for low skilled foreign workers.
Ah yes. Also have a robust no tolerance attitude to illegal activities of every description
I have that old The Who refrain in my head nearly constantly, Yank though I am. BLM, liberal sell outs to foreign nations…do they think they will be able to carve out their niches if the West falls?
Oh, I don’t know. They’re probably just witless surfers, too.
An interesting idea, and some of the youth radicals did eventually have a huge influence on Western culture and eventually and especially on the burgoning internet. However I don’t think this was planned – most history isn’t and we see strong patterns and links with the benefit of hindsight.
Flower Power, drug taking, long hair, rock bands were actively loathed by the Establishment, it now seems almost in an unhinged manner.
All authoritarian regimes in the 60s and 70s whether Right or Left tried to clamp down hard on youth culture.
Ms Harrington wonders if the Chinese millennial will ever rebel? I wonder if the Western millennial will do the same.
The actual rebellion for both East and West, a rebellion that will lift both East and West from despair (which the author cutifies as “millennial miserables”) does not lie in materialistic ambitions or in pretensions of rejecting the same via virtuous shopping/branding, it will come from individual decisions to find God.
The eradication of God from both Eastern and Western culture (via Communism in the East – which murdered God, and Socialism in the West that’s managed to do the same by replacing God w/the State ) is the problem. The solution is to allow God back in.
Thanks for the comment Daisy D. The problem is that the Unherd public doesn´t like to hear the word God written on their screens. They believe in reason only, they have lost any connection to anything else but their confused minds.
The men in this audience have most certainly lost all their hair by now ( a clear sign of the overuse of the encephalic grey matter) and the women (there are no other genders under the sun) are becoming ever more confused by their silly obssession with a hang over feminism that is only destroying their own femenine power.
Perhaps you could try a different word for your next post. I for myself understand what you are saying, but I guess we are becoming fast a minority in this new world of screens and takeaway food, gender fluidity and mental vacuum.
And thanks for yours.
When people rely on their own (extremely limited) reason, without giving proper attribution to the Source of Reason – which is God – we end up w/all manner of ills, including totalitarianism.
It’s beyond tragic that the West is falling prey to illiberal totalitarianism, where all ‘thought’ and ‘truth’ becomes purely subjective and so, completely unreasonable.
To confess faith is embarrassing for others, who fear for their social currency. To have faith in God is just more embarrassing label to fear so far, but heading into the category of the label of racist. Unless, of course the faith is Islam, where one will feign polite indulgence.
One of the main problems for me with this prescription is that the evidence against a good and all-powerful God is in my view overwhelming.
I’m nonetheless very interested in religion. I’ve just read Tom Holland’s book ‘Dominion’ which traces the roots of Western thought – including the modern progressive variety – back to Christianity and its belief in human beings having unique individual souls.
Religion can be very good for the believers, but not so good for the heretics or ‘pagans’.
Christianity came out of the desert.
In my life I lived many years remote, much in the Far North bush, but also in the deserts, the tropics a bit, and much in great cities and normal places.
In the extreme places, the Arctic and the very hard deserts the mysteries of Nature are close to the surface – in all urban, or all places where man lives, mysterious nature has receded, it left and the laws of mundane physics man holds are all which remains.
In the extreem remote lands where man has not imposed himself there still is mystry, one will see the inexpicable, the lines are not completely etched. The desert mystics are well known, they see it out there, as TE Lawrence and many other found – Nature in the real state is very cold, inhuman, it is not a happy place to humans, but grand as nothing else is, it sometimes, after a great deal of time alone, and after great hardship, lets you see glimpses of what is under the veil, and you catch quick sights of the real universe existence, and it is not like the human laws of physics. This is where the old Testament arose, and modern people will virtually never see that place again as we have beaten it back by our chatter and small mind perceptions till reality is one we make, and it is mundane and small. This is how humans believe now, secular, small, law of physics, live, consume, die, rather than ultimate.
“Religion can be very good for the believers, but not so good for the heretics or ‘pagans’.”
Christianity has also been very good for pagans.
it is also interesting to note that for every 1 person deliberately killed by the inquisition etc. 100 to 200 thousand have been deliberately killed by Atheists.
When you realise that for an Atheist, killing a man is no different to burning a lump of coal. ( just rearranging a few atoms) It is really not surprising.
I think you are right about this being the problem. But how do we go back to religious traditions and institutions that no longer have the power to make most people feel connected to God? Carl Jung said that what we need is a new “god image”, the implication being that the eternal and ineffable “God” is not directly comprehensible to humans, and that the images and stories we craft to portray God are culturally determined and are in need of revision. In other words, God doesn’t change, but our images of God are outdated and no longer work–especially for younger generations. I think this is a big part of the appeal of Jordan Peterson. He has showed us a way to bring “God” back without giving up on science and rationality. Or maybe it was Jung who did that and Peterson is just making the ideas comprehensible to modern (and English speaking) audiences.
Agreed, but there is one critical difference – China’s age demographics are set to become as bad as those of the west. It is difficult to imagine China in the future provoking, it’s by then much older generations, into geriatric revolution.
The one child policy has ended. Chinese couples are often now having 2 or 3 children.
Assuming they are aware of the events in Tianenmen Square in 1989 then no, I suspect it is very unlikely that China’s millennials will rebel in any significant way. Which is not to say the western states would not respond in the same way to any group that seriously challenged their power. These people are all the same.
Are you an anarchist Fraser? Your constant mantra is that all politicians are psychopaths etc.
We haven’t had a Great (state-induced) famine, Cultural Revolution, the Gulag, a Holocaust or Holdomor, so, no I don’t think the evidence stacks up that all politicians or systems are ultimately the same. It is a bit dismissive to the millions of victims of tyrannies to make this cynical comparison.
I am not sure if China’s millennials are going to revolt, but generation Z ( those, who are today 24 years or younger) are likely to do so at least in some way.
The very simple reason is that sex ratio for those age groups does not allow for balanced sexual relationships.
The average ratio of female/male for generation Z in China is 100/116, which means higher competition and rejection rates for the males and as a result higher perceived failure and resentment and readiness to do something about it.
This problem has already started to manifest itself and is not going to disappear for the next 20 years or more.
Present day China is also remarkable in another respect: no other society in human history has had such a large number of people with no siblings. Who knows what the long term psychological consequences of the one child policy are when aggregated to national level? Perhaps China’s astonishing rise over the last couple of decades is a direct (but unintended) consequence.
Mary, er…
“Under Mao, society was organised into danwei, administrative work units ” and sometimes physically gated compounds ” tasked with supplying accommodation, food, education and rudimentary healthcare in exchange for close political surveillance. This material security was known as the “iron rice bowl”,
Not quite. Mao’s Great Leap Forward – collectivisation among its other madnesses – killed anything up to 45million Chinese, the vast majority through starvation.
I don’t really see how your corrective – true as it is – refutes the passage you quote.
Sorry for late reply. I see your point but I thought Ms Harrington suggests that under Mao the peasantry had a bare subsistence guaranteed, but under the state, That’s what the “iron rice bowl” means, no? But that was a lie, as the rice bowl was empty (and the bowl itself probably melted down in back-yard smelter to make the insane steel production plan)
“Will China’s millennials ever rebel?”
If they are like far too many of our own young people – no; not while current conditions obtain.
But when those conditions break down in extreme economic collapse, brought about by the 25-year-long policies of the current ruling caste in the world; when millenials no longer care to work off their exasperation with the bad parenting they have had – the lack of love and discipline, meaning and goals – by transference, projecting their inward rage onto straw men and women put up for their scorn by their manipulaters in the political and academic spheres of society; when the big questions in their lives become not ‘Can I get a better type of smart phone?’ but ‘shall we have anything to eat this week?’, then I think we shall see a new kind of rebellion, i.e. against the oligarchs, the globalisers, the ‘woke’ – the whole Ruling Alliance of Big Money and the Far Left who (in the short and middle terms) have shared paramount objectives for quite some time now.
These goals have been Globalisation, Mass Immigration, and Making Government Unaccountable to those whom it rules.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Instead of parenting their children, many parents see their role as being BFFs who feel uncomfortable establishing boundaries. I’ve been teaching in Higher Ed for the past seventeen years and am disturbed at how much more authoritarian young people are these days. No-one’s ever stood up to them (parents, teachers, politicians) and we’re now reaching the apogee of that. Basically, we’re letting spoilt children dictate culture to us.
Society seem to have transformed children from chattel to deity without stopping in reality.
Hold that thought: it’s a good one with which to expose the myth of agency.
What made you decide to write that comment?
Not my agency 🙂
It’s an outlook really. I no longer view human societies purely through the prism of political systems. I think there are very long term trends, in tech and biotech especially, where humans have little influence on where they are heading. As in, notwithstanding what human believe about the decisions they make affording a direction, I don’t think they can control the direction in which algorithmic technologies and bio-edit technologies will take humanity. A pattern playing out in time and space if you like. We have very little control over where we are heading as a species and the least effective of what control we do have is political decisions. Not over atomic bombs, not over climate change, not over decisions about where gene-editing tech will take us.
A tad nihilistic I know, but believing all this does not stop me from having cultural opinions on everything and my own political stance.
Thank you for your interesting reply. I’m reading your outlook as relating more to the agency of humankind as a whole, rather than the agency of individual humans (which is what I had previously thought from a couple of your posts).
For those of you who have not already done so, make sure you read this blog:
https://www.algora.com/Algo…
Yes, Algo is a very apposite warning, thank you.
There are also two recently published very fine books on the subject, one by Clyde Prestowitz (a former Reagan advisor) and Nigel Inkster (former Director of Operations and Intelligence at M16-SIS). Both were reviewed in the Saturday FT a couple of weeks ago.
In essence their message is the same, China is on the march and we must ‘prepare for battle’.
Unfortunately, although not fatally, many of the Western so called Elite have already been “bought and sold for Chinese gold”.
As with many of my generation I thought our triumph over the wretched USSR would be end of this horror story. Sadly we must now realise it was only the ‘Hor d’oeuvre’, the main course is yet to follow.
Thanks for the book recommendations.
I found “On China” by Kissinger really good, it talks you through history, helps to understand Chinese culture and the way the Chinese think and act.
Yes Kissinger’s part in all this is quite fascinating, but we shall have to let History be the judge.
China and the Chinese are not and have never been one thing. Trends debated here are not universal. To link a bored disillusioned youth to war is a stretch. Even the PLA doesn’t really want it. If the author has read, and I’m sure she probably has, the author will know that the invasion of Taiwan is risky, this, despite the numerical supremacy, and its ventures in the South China Sea stretched and difficult to defend. China is complex. Don’t lump it all together.
Chinese empires have a history of collapsing from within.
“Millennial miserabilism” is a “keeper”. A good article, thanks. Now cue up the usual suspect Sinophiles.
I’m sure a vast population has a variety of personalities and opinions and and any outsider is bound to misunderstand the subtleties of China. That said, Xi and the CCP must feel they’re riding a tiger all the time and, to mix metaphors, wearing the emperor’s clothes. A bit like Putin and Lukashenko- how long can the big lies run alongside increasing personal autonomy which is a corollary for wealth- especially if increasing millions of Chinese travel and get education abroad?
I have long wondered whether they freely roam the internet abroad, or are tracked back home and refrain from doing so.
The paradox is that turbo-capitalist, internet culture giving rise to a revival of traditional family paradigms, pre-modern hierarchies and conservative religions. I just don’t wholly buy the view of conservatives like Harrington that all this technological capitalism is enervating traditional ways of life. Although in the tumult there has been a great deal of displacement and atomisation, the past forty years have seen a decline of modernism and the ‘meta-narratives’ regnant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (as the post-modernists show), in place of a kind of neo-paganism – whether from the left (The New Age, cultural particularism, a celebration of ‘indigenous cultures’), or the anti-humanist right (race realism, ‘bio-diversity’, a disdain for the metropolitan melting pot, the Jungian conservatism of Jordan Peterson et al). In the 1970s, Umberto Eco identified neo-medieval tendencies in western capitalist postmodernity. And indeed neoliberalism, then emergent, is very much not the classical liberalism of Adam Smith. Hayek and others reimagined the market from the Smithian field of rational human agency to something like a God-like superintelligence (“the market knows best”), analogous to the medieval God. There is no separation of powers under neoliberalism. Xi, declaring the market order ‘The Mandate of Heaven’ is simply taking neoliberalism to its logical conclusion.
And today, the ‘founders’ of quasi-monarchical corporations present more as ancient princes than classical economic actors. Arguably, the west has already made the shift from capitalism to neofeudalism.
Tech companies have had parochialising effects. The internet, far from facilitating globalisation, is reducing movement. During the pandemic, we have lived in ‘bubbles’ serving the digital markets from our homes. And even the managerial classes have rejected the city for hi-tech rural living while calling for borders to be closed until it’s ‘safe’. It seems we can live our ‘traditional’ ways of life from our family homes while fully integrated into global, digital markets.
Hence, China’s marriage of traditional Confucian ideology with hi-tech entrepreneurialism is not a contradiction. Similarly, in India it is less the older generations who have bought into the ultra-conservative Hinduism of the BJP than the tech-generation yuppies on the make in Bangalore.
More conservative beliefs are a natural corollary of neoliberalism as it evolves to dispense with the liberalism, becoming a regime of sovereign power.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sounds better in French.
Que?!
Is this your PhD dissertation?
It could be!
“Sang culture”. I would say this is something of a rejection of the collectivist/nationalism mentality, as people become more individual with later stages of capitalism. This is likely accelerated when large numbers of people are excluded from the system.
‘is politics just how we rationalise things that are happening anyway?’
Yes, become a libertarian, it’s the only way.
Here’s a brilliant essay on the issue Mary Harrington is attempting to tackle: https://www.nationalreview….
I have a dance program which can be understood by anyone with a double – digit I.Q.
Put your knife down
Oh, that was a short but dense and fascinating read, thank you! Will have to return to reread and explore all those linked references.
Nothing ever has just one cause does it.
Hopefully UnHerd will exclude itself from the current anti-China mania that’s fast brewing among western media outlets. It is becoming a trait seen far too often these days.
You never post unless it is to praise or defend China. No country is above critique, certainly not one that practices genocide.
He (she) like his (her) recent compatriot Major Plonker is an obvious Chinese stooge.
This time they have chosen a slightly more subtle nom de plume, but that wouldn’t be difficult.
However perhaps he (she?)is a former Mandarin at the FO?
That’s an intriguing possibility. The FO has always been full of appeasers and capitulards; maybe this is one such who takes work home?
Some years ago, before we left Hong Kong (HK) I seem to recall a senior FO man or perhaps even a former Governor of HK ( I think he was called Cradock) who used to go apocalyptic with rage about the building of the new HK International Airport to replace Kai Tak.
His argument was that the cost was needlessly depleting HK’s huge financial reserves, which would soon be ‘rightfully’ China’s.
Fortunately he was ignored to the great benefit of all HK’s inhabitants.
Not familiar with the UnHerd ones, but theres a few floating around on Project Syndicate. One has the name Jef Ford. I suggested he (or she) change the name to Ford Prefect, but didn’t get a response.
Paid shills.
They are a one-party ethnostate with concentration camps.
Massively exaggerated no doubt. The Muslim countries don’t believe it for one. There’s a genocide in Yemen though, with help from the US.
It’s interesting how easily people who don’t believe the MSM, do in fact believe the MSM when it suits. Generally during any war or Cold War. Happened for Iraq, Libya, Syria and on and on.
Well Eugene, tells us about ‘ The Great Leap Forward’ if you will, and if you have the time also the notorious ‘Cultural Revolution’.
The CCP spokesperson, in the form of one A.E. Tierney is, sadly, currently indisposed.
Eugene always seems to step in though, doesn’t he?
Yes, he plays a good devil’s advocate, but is slightly rude/intemperate for my taste.
It’s not the MSM publishing this kind of news about China, though. It tends to be written about by news publishers who aren’t considered mainstream, much like this one. Much of the MSM is favorable to China.
How are you getting on with your explanation of “The Great Leap Forward” Tierney old chap?
Does the CCP Ministry of Truth pay well?
“There is no smoke without fire”. Perhaps Mr Tierney would please kindly supply us with the equivalent Chinese saying?
Ooooo flung dung?
You have no excuse for the Nazi-style horrors your paymasters are inflicting on the Turkic peoples on your western borders. Go away.
“The Dogs Bark, the Caravan moves On”. My favorite Chinese saying. Bark on “Mr. Tierney”-you wear their collar.
The realisation that the CCP is evil is just dawning and we are just slowing down before turning and running in the other direction. Whether we have reacted soon enough remains to be seen. Love the Chinese by hating the CCP.