America Had ‘Quiet Quitting.’ In China, Young People Are ‘Letting It Rot.’
Demoralized by a weak economy and unfulfilling jobs, young Chinese are dropping out, exploring spirituality and becoming more rebellious, presenting new challenges for Beijing
7 min
China’s ruling Communist Party wants the country’s young people to be ambitious, work hard and prepare for adversity.
Li Jiajia just wants to win the lottery.
Demoralised by a weak economy, unfulfilling jobs and a paternalistic state, young Chinese such as Li are looking for pathways out of the carefully scripted lives their elders want for them, putting themselves at odds with the country’s priorities.
After moving to Beijing from her hometown in southeastern China in April, the 24-year-old Li found her new job as a content creator 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.
The ever-present role of the state in daily life is stultifying, she said. Though she wanted to be a journalist in high school, she gave up when she realised how heavily the government censors the media.
She 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.
“I want to leave here and live the life I want,” Li said. “It won’t happen overnight, but for now, the thrill of scratching lottery tickets gives me a little break.”
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.
They studied diligently to get into prestigious universities, clocked gruelling 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.
Record youth unemployment that topped 21% this year has further dented confidence in traditional paths to achievement in China. Some, like Li, are also frustrated about other issues, such as violence against women in China or government efforts to prevent people from accessing foreign apps such as Twitter or Instagram.
Many are quitting their jobs and turning to meditation and other forms of spirituality. 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.
Others are flooding fortune-teller stands and Buddhist temples in mountainous areas, or exploring Chinese and Western philosophers and writers from Laozi to Hermann Hesse. Some are throwing “quitting parties” with banners celebrating their newfound freedom.
“This generation has had a lot of resources invested in them,” said Sara Friedman, professor of anthropology and gender studies at Indiana University, who studies Chinese society.
“They have worked really hard. They have been pushed really hard. And to then say, ‘I’m stepping out of this rat race, I’m opting out,’ is a pretty radical decision to be making.”
From ‘lying flat’ to ‘letting it rot’
Social-media discussions about temple visits and anxiety—a central preoccupation of many young Chinese—have surged in 2023, according to BigOne Lab, a research firm.
About 34% of surveyed respondents in their mid-20s quit or were considering resigning from jobs in China’s consumer internet sector—a major employer of young people—in the first half of 2023, according to China’s job-seeking and social platform Maimai.
Playing the lottery has become especially trendy for 20- and 30-somethings, whose purchases of lottery tickets helped push sales to $67 billion from January to October, a 53% jump from the previous year and averaging $48 per person in China.
Catchphrases describing the mood have worked their way into everyday discourse. First, in 2020, was the arcane sociological term neijuan, or “involution,” which referred to situations in which people work hard and compete without anyone getting ahead.
That was followed by “touching fish.” The phrase, borrowed from a Chinese idiom, referred to executing small rebellions at work, such as taking long toilet breaks, doing online shopping or reading novels in the office.
Next 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.
A survey conducted by Tsingyan Group, a research firm, last year found that approximately 96% of nearly 6,000 respondents in China were aware of people “lying flat” to various degrees in their vicinity. The concept held more appeal among people ages 26 to 40 than other Chinese, the survey showed.
“It’s a very passive form of resistance,” said Silvia Lindtner, an ethnographer at the University of Michigan. “It’s definitely a very difficult moment, but it could also be seen as a hopeful moment where there is pressure, in some ways, on the leadership.”
Echoes of the 1960s
In some ways the ennui resembles the “quiet quitting” phenomenon of post pandemic America—or, going back further, the rejection of social norms by young people across the Western world in the 1960s.
In those days, two decades of fast economic growth and wider affluence gave young people more choices than previous generations. Many responded by challenging their parents’ way of life.
In China, where open protests are rarely possible, young people are now rebelling in other ways.
“Lying flat is a latent resistance to the moral blackmailing of society,” said Amy Yan, a 27-year-old Shenzhen resident who once worked as a buyer for her family’s export business. When the business went bankrupt last year after her parents lost their assets in a financial scam, it reinforced her belief that she should give priority to her spirituality.
Even before the bankruptcy, she had decided that accepting the corporate grind and meeting traditional expectations of marriage and children would interfere with her desire to explore her spirituality.
Following the family crisis, she put her savings of $27,000 into supporting a tiny Taoist ashram she had started with a few fellow practitioners.
Coming into Beijing’s crosshairs
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 and avoid instability, but to help make China stronger in an era of great-power competition with the U.S.
In a speech at last year’s Communist Party congress, widely quoted in Chinese media, leader Xi Jinping laid out his vision for young people, urging them to have “ideals, courage, a willingness to endure hardship and a dedication to strive” to help “build a modernised socialist country.”
In a 2021 article published in the top party journal Qiushi, he specifically warned against “lying flat.” Discussions of the phenomenon have often triggered censorship online.
If all the young people who had dropped out of China’s labor force and relied financially on their parents were counted, China’s real youth unemployment rate could be as high as 46.5%, according to calculations earlier this year by a Peking University professor.
The Communist Party Youth League—with more than 70 million members—has published commentary on its official WeChat account criticising college graduates for having too much pride. Job seekers “should not refuse to enter the workforce due to the difficulty of finding a job or choose to ‘lie flat’ out of fear of ‘involution,’” the article read.
Greater affluence—but an uncertain future
Until recently, China’s economic progress seemed to be unstoppable, with per-capita incomes surging to around $13,000 in 2022 from less than $1,000 in 2000, according to the World Bank.
But economic growth has slowed. Many economists worry China could get stuck in the “middle-income trap,” in which a country’s progress plateaus before it gets rich. Per-capita incomes in the U.S. were around $76,000 last year.
Academic research shows that social mobility for many groups in China has stalled, meaning it has become harder for people without connections to get ahead.
Many employers that young people gravitated to, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, have been shedding staff amid weak growth and government clampdowns on the private sector. Tech salaries have declined in the past three years, according to Maimai, and opportunities for initial public offering payouts have faded, leaving many who used to work “996” schedules—9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week—wondering what the point was.
It is also true that many more middle-class young people—especially those without children and mortgages—can afford to drop out of the rat race today than in previous eras.
Some plan to leave: Net emigration from China, which fell to 125,000 in 2012 as the country’s economy boomed, rebounded to more than 310,000 in the first 11 months of 2023, according to United Nations data.
Others want to stay—but on their own terms.
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.
“I had a very urgent sense that if I didn’t listen to my gut and take a break to explore what I truly wanted to do in this world, it would be too late,” she said.
In the months following Huang’s resignation, she traveled to Dali, where she worked on a tarot-reading stand, took a training course in life coaching and learned to make pottery.
To Huang, lying flat is the opposite of being passive—it is a path for taking control of one’s own life when wading through uncertain terrain, she said.
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.
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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