On September 18, a bus carrying another 47 people to a COVID-19 quarantine facility crashed in China’s Guizhou province, killing another 27 people and seriously injuring many others. -COVID policies. One of the top popular comments, which went spectacularly viral before being removed by censorship, asked, “What makes you think you wouldn’t be on that bus?”
For a generation of young Chinese whose lives have been reshaped through COVID policy, the disease is less threatening than the government. ” posted an acquaintance of mine, who had volunteered in Wuhan, China, at the beginning of the pandemic.
Many other young people have accepted that COVID-19 restrictions will be a component of their lives for the foreseeable future. A Shanghai resident in his early thirties described his life as “unimaginable. “or taking public transport will have to show a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 72 hours and for places like hotels and some hospitals, a negative test is required within 48 hours. He now gets a COVID-19 test after lunch each and every other, and waiting in line can take hours. Before you travel, even nearby, check for COVID-19 restrictions on your itinerary.
On September 18, a bus carrying another 47 people to a COVID-19 quarantine facility crashed in China’s Guizhou province, killing another 27 people and seriously injuring many others. -COVID policies. One of the top popular comments, which went spectacularly viral before being removed by censorship, asked, “What makes you think you wouldn’t be on that bus?”
For a generation of young Chinese whose lives have been reshaped through COVID policy, the disease is less threatening than the government. ” posted an acquaintance of mine, who had volunteered in Wuhan, China, at the beginning of the pandemic.
Many other young people have accepted that COVID-19 restrictions will be a component of their lives for the foreseeable future. A Shanghai resident in his early thirties described his life as “unimaginable. “or taking public transport will have to show a negative COVID-19 test result taken within 72 hours and for places like hotels and some hospitals, a negative test is required within 48 hours. He now gets a COVID-19 test after lunch each and every other, and waiting in line can take hours. Before you travel, even nearby, check for COVID-19 restrictions on your itinerary.
“It is at most unlikely that other people will live even an average life under all the strict regulations and regulations,” said Xu, a woman in her twenties who asked that only her last call be used. “It takes extra effort to be Array works for a growing e-commerce sector, where China has been the world’s largest market since 2013.
But this expansion has hit the wall of the pandemic. In April, when FP spoke to Xu, overall retail sales of customer goods fell 11. 1% year-on-year.
Xu’s company’s business has fallen by about 50% this year compared to the early part of 2021. Even among the orders placed, only a portion of them can be delivered smoothly due to logistics and supply chain issues caused by COVID-19 lockdowns. has drastically reduced its commissions, even as living expenses in Shenzhen, where he lives, have risen dramatically as COVID-19 restrictions have left empty shelves and trucks stuck in transit. Small hometown.
Xu is one of many young Chinese who struggle to find a task where they can themselves.
According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the unemployment rate for elderly Chinese aged 16 to 24 in July was 19. 9%, the highest since unemployment first became known through the age organization in 2018. Even before the pandemic, there were fears that China would produce too many graduates: by 2022, there will be a record 10. 76 million college graduates, a backlog of 1. 67 million graduates year-over-year. By the end of May, only 22% of male graduates and 10% of female graduates had signed an employment contract. (There is systematic discrimination against female staff in China, a pre-COVID-19 problem. )
The pandemic has also claimed many victims: in the first part of 2022, some 460,000 Chinese corporations filed for bankruptcy. This is in line with China’s GDP expansion: the economy grew by 0. 4% in the current quarter, the lowest rate of expansion since the first quarter. And even companies that have survived the pandemic are deeply risk-averse and avoid expansion. Unfortunately for businesses, consumers are equally distrustful; When your city can be locked down at any time, caution is the watchword everywhere.
Reports published through Zhaopin, one of the top recruitment sites, show that college graduates this year have a planned monthly salary of 6295 yuan (about $870), down 6% from 2021, and 55% of graduates say they have lowered their expectations. .
Even graduates of China’s most sensible universities are struggling to place assignments, in part because many of them missed the spring recruiting season due to stay-at-home orders and COVID-19 closures. On May 13, Fudan University’s School of Management sent out a letter asking seniors, hoping they can provide more homework for recent graduates. Young people who have already discovered a task run the risk of being laid off or having their wages reduced.
Another result is the reluctance to have children, not only because of the economy, but also because of the lack of medical resources under 0 COVID. When Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered the lockdown in December 2021, videos of pregnant women being denied mandatory medical care went viral. online; As a result, some women have had miscarriages. Such a tragedy has occurred in several Chinese cities due to strict COVID-19 policies. China’s National Health Commission has admitted that COVID-19 has contributed to the country’s declining marriage and birth rate.
The younger generation of Chinese is reluctant to have children, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. At the end of 2021, the annual number of new births was 10. 62 million, with an herbal growth rate of 0. 34%, the lowest since then. 1949. Even those numbers would possibly be too high; Many demographers that the country is already wasting people.
In May, a screening of a young man telling a police officer “we are the last generation, thank you” went viral on the web in China. The officer responded by warning that failure to comply with COVID-19 control and prevention policies will influence its next 3 generations. “Even though the video was temporarily censored, Weibo’s trending hashtags “latest generation” and “we are the last generation, thank you” were removed, Chinese netizens still use the word to express their dissatisfaction. with the government of the day and the depression about the future.
Liu, a graduate student at Peking University who asked to use only her last name, told Foreign Policy that she wasn’t sure she wanted to have children, but that if she wanted to have children, she wanted to make sure they had an apartment abroad. so they had the option of leaving China in the future.
However, you can see your own long term go by. Before the pandemic, I used to travel abroad for meetings or trainings, however, today, COVID-zero measures, combined with the development of political nervousness about contact with foreigners, have made this impossible. More and more internet sites have been censored in recent years, making it incredibly complicated for her to conduct educational research. She is incredibly concerned that increased censorship could limit her studies, especially after her Weibo account was blocked when she retweeted a clinical article about the rationality of living with the COVID-19 virus.
The preference to leave China grew as borders closed. The Chinese government is not happy with this trend; in Baidu’s search index, knowledge of the keyword “immigration” is not provided. Netizens have come up with a new term “runism,” which means the goal of leaving China and living somewhere else. of April, when Shanghai went into lockdown, and peaked on May 12, when the video “We are the last generation, thank you” went viral. Immigration applications have also increased, especially since February.
In many ways, this generation of young Chinese is more nationalistic, thanks to compulsory patriotic schooling and increased censorship. But lately, this generation has begun to realize that many of the benefits they take for granted, such as the convenience of buying groceries online and delivering food, as well as freedom abroad, can be eliminated through the government at any time.
A veteran journalist running for a state-affiliated media outlet in China told Foreign Policy that reports about the severity of Western countries seemed to be getting less and less attention. According to her, the strategy — employing how horrible Western countries are to redirect the attention of netizens — has worked well in recent years, but has stopped working because “everyone is busy solving their own lives and practicing. “When Chinese government officials published articles about anti-American content on Weibo the Shanghai shutdown, for a time many netizens used the hashtag “call me by your name” to mock those officials and ask them to focus more on China’s problems; This hashtag was subsequently censored.
It is highly unlikely that politics will be avoided. “I feel bad about living in this kind of political environment,” said a Shanghai writer who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. As a writer, I was more interested in history and literature than in literature. in politics. ” I’m not interested in politics and I don’t even watch the news about it, but I still see tragedies all around me. “It was classified as “sensitive issues,” and this genuinization made her feel powerless.
Sometimes anger erupts, such as the October 13 protest against Xi and his anti-COVID-19 policies in Beijing. But for the most part, young Chinese are frustrated and angry about the isolation of their own apartments due to COVID-19.
Tracy Wen Liu is an investigative journalist, author, and translator who focuses on U. S. -China relations.
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