China’s Youth Are Quitting the Rat Race to ‘Let It Rot’

Young people in China are becoming more rebellious, questioning their nation’s traditional expectations of career and family

By Shen Lu | Photographs by Gilles Sabrie for The Wall Street Journal
Jan. 8, 2024
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After moving to Beijing in April, 24-year-old Li Jiajia found her new job at a technology startup uninspiring. She said she has no desire to climb the corporate ladder, especially when the number of high-paying Chinese tech jobs is shrinking.

Li says she knows she probably won’t win the lottery. But when she plays, at least she can dream of a better life—most likely abroad. “It won’t happen overnight, but for now, the thrill of scratching lottery tickets gives me a little break.”

Demoralized by a weak economy, unfulfilling jobs and a paternalistic state, young Chinese are looking for pathways out of the carefully scripted lives their elders want for them.

A street in Beijing. Ng Han Guan/AP

Since China’s government cracked down on disaffected students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, most young people, who came of age in an era of rapid economic growth and rising affluence, have done what they are supposed to do—and been rewarded for it.

Sadayuki Mikami/AP

They studied diligently to get into prestigious universities, clocked grueling hours at fast-growing companies and followed traditional expectations of career and family, riding China’s boom to material success.

Many are still doing that. But a growing number of middle-class urbanites in their 20s and 30s in China have begun to question that trajectory, if not reject it entirely, as prospects of upward mobility fade.

More than two years of harsh government Covid controls left some pondering the role of the Communist Party and other sources of authority in their lives, or even the meaning of life and who they aspire to be—questions many had never contemplated before.
Chinese unemployment rates

Record youth unemployment that topped 21% this year has further dented confidence in traditional paths to achievement in China.

Many are quitting their jobs and turning to meditation and other forms of spirituality. Others are flooding fortune-teller stands and Buddhist temples in mountainous areas, or exploring Chinese and Western philosophers and writers.

Some are moving far from China’s megacities to start lives anew in places like Dali, a southwestern city famous within China as a hub for digital nomads and dropouts. 

Florence Lo/Reuters

Communist Party leaders have long worried young people could stir unrest, as they did in 1989. The party needs young people to get on board with Beijing’s priorities, not just to keep the economy humming, but to help make China stronger in an era of great-power competition with the U.S.

Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News

Catchphrases describing the mood have worked their way into everyday discourse. There was “lying flat,” a form of mundane resistance that involves dragging one’s feet at work or dropping out of the workforce altogether. Last year, the phrase “let it rot” spread to describe young people who have completely given up.

Huang Xialu quit her high-stress job as a product manager at one of China’s largest video-streaming companies in April, so she could focus more on spiritual retreats. For a long time before that, the 33-year-old said she had struggled with a lack of purpose.

Now she has become a certified life coach, helping individuals who are as confused as she was to find a way forward. Her income is less stable. But “I haven’t regretted quitting for a second,” she said.

Additional photo: Florence Lo/Reuters
Photo Editor: Cam Pollack
Produced by Brian Patrick Byrne

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