Michael Schuman
In 1919, Lu Xun, one of modern China’s most influential writers, wrote a short story about a down-on-his-luck Confucian scholar named Kong Yiji. Having failed to pass the imperial civil-service exams, Kong is unwilling to keep a regular job and sinks into poverty. The other villagers show no sympathy for his plight or respect for his learning: “His speech,” recounts the tale’s narrator, the wine-warmer at a tavern Kong frequents, “was so dusty with classical constructions you could hardly understand him.” The villagers taunt and abuse him until, at the story’s close, his legs having been broken in a beating he takes for stealing, Kong drags himself out of the tavern with his hands, never to be seen again.
More than a century later, China’s educated young people have found a special affinity for the unfortunate Kong Yiji. By the official count, one in five Chinese aged 16 to 24 is unemployed, the highest level on record. Their hard-earned college degrees have diminished in value as a result of both the economy’s halting recovery from strict COVID lockdowns and an ideologically driven crackdown on private enterprise. Many educated young people face a choice similar to Kong’s: take a job beneath their credentials or fail to pay the bills.
One commentator on social media compared his college education to “a pedestal I can’t get down from, much like Kong Yiji couldn’t get out of his ‘scholar’s robes.’” An essayist went so far as to blame China’s leader, Xi Jinping, for the distress of today’s Kong Yijis, dropping a reference to another famous fable: “The economy is in the toilet, and unemployment is severe,” the essay read. “Rather than make Kong Yiji take off his scholar’s gown, how about stripping the Emperor of his new clothes?”
Censors scrubbed that essay from the Chinese internet. But the proliferating expressions of empathy with Kong Yiji suggest a mood of disenchantment that is notable in contemporary China. One of the hallmarks of the reform era had been a boundless optimism: Tomorrow would always be better than today. And for the most part, it was. With the economy in hyperdrive, the opportunities ahead seemed limitless, while the emergence of new technologies and easier access to international travel and better education made life feel freer, even under an oppressive Communist security state. The Communist Party was able to capitalize on these good feelings to solidify its grip on the country and build a degree of local support.
But recent years have brought reasons for pessimism. The go-go years of China’s economic growth have come to an end, and with them, the easy gains in welfare and free-flowing jobs. Three years of Xi’s unforgiving “zero COVID” pandemic controls, which locked hundreds of millions into their homes or placed them under other restrictions, exposed the regime’s capacity for irrationality and brutality. Xi is sealing off any remaining crevices for free thought with a campaign to reassert ideological and social conformity with the party line—more accurately, his own line, known as Xi Jinping Thought. That effort has brought greater censorship, the suppression of private education, and even limits on playing video games.
How the Chinese people truly feel about Xi and his agenda is almost impossible to determine in the absence of a free press or freedom of speech. Yet some statistics offer clues. Take, for instance, interest in entrepreneurship. The greater confidence a person has in the future, the more likely he or she will probably be to embark on the risky venture of starting a business. Only a few years ago, young Chinese were eager to try their luck in this regard. Incubators popped up across the country to accommodate a wave of start-ups. Now that enthusiasm has waned. According to reports from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which tracks trends in start-ups worldwide, the proportion of adults engaged in starting new companies has fallen dramatically in China recently, from 15.5 percent in 2014 to only 6 percent last year.
The Chinese aren’t starting families either. By the government’s own tally, the number of babies born in China dropped by almost half from 2016 to 2022, to a mere 9.6 million among a populace of more than 1.4 billion. Interestingly, the dramatic decline began immediately after the government finally lifted its draconian population-control policy, which had permitted most urban couples only one child. Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographics specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that the nosedive in childbearing “signals deep disaffection with the bleak future the regime is engineering for its subjects” and “can be read as a landslide vote of no confidence in President Xi Jinping’s rule.”
Of course, Chinese birth rates have been meager for years, which is why the country’s population is shrinking. The demographic trend is common across East Asia, including in Japan and South Korea. But Eberstadt maintains that the scale and speed of China’s plunge are extraordinary in times of peace and relative stability.
“These are developments that take a generation. These aren’t things that happen in six years,” he told me. In fact, Eberstadt struggled to find a period and place that has experienced an equivalent decline in modern times. The fall in births wasn’t as steep during the famine of China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–61), nor after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the rate of first marriages in China has plummeted by more than half since 2013, the year Xi consolidated his power.
“I think it’s got to be a big shift in mentality,” Eberstadt said. “It’s a shift towards pessimism” and “not having confidence that it is a good time to get married and bring children into the world.”
Rising pessimism may also account for the number of Chinese fleeing their country. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, more than 116,000 Chinese nationals were seeking asylum around the world at the end of 2022, a tenfold increase over the preceding decade.
Taken together, the statistics paint a picture of a society that is reluctant to invest in an uncertain future—one where many Chinese appear to be protesting with their wallets, wombs, and feet, and where the best and brightest see themselves in a literary character meant to symbolize irrelevancy.
Xi and his team haven’t shown much more concern than the hard-hearted villagers of Lu Xun’s story. An online post by the Communist Party Youth League and state broadcaster CCTV used the fate of Kong Yiji to scold the young and jobless as arrogant and lazy. Kong failed “because he couldn’t let go of the airs of a scholar and was unwilling to change his situation through labor,” the post lectured. Xi—who has said he opposes the “idleness-breeding trap of welfarism”—has told his nation’s struggling youth to learn to “eat bitterness.”
If the public mood continues to sour, the Communist Party will likely resort to greater repression to assert its will and enforce its unpopular policies. Xi could also continue to turn to nationalist causes, such as unification with Taiwan or control of the South China Sea, to rally the public behind him, potentially making his regime a greater danger to regional stability.
The official reading of the story of Kong Yiji as a parable about the scholar’s arrogance is telling. In fact, Lu Xun wrote the story to critique Chinese society: The old traditions were fading into an unknown future, but, by Lu’s reckoning, neither China’s self-serving leaders nor its heartless villagers seemed to care. In the end, the people at the tavern forgot about Kong Yiji and just presumed he had died. Will Xi Jinping do the same?
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