It's Chinese youth basically giving up on the prospect of the careers they were planning for , sometimes just staying with their parents and giving up on the job search. I think it comes from caving to too much family/societal pressure and instead adopting a "fuck this" attitude. The Chinese term is Bai lan (摆烂)

See also "tang ping" (lying flat, 躺平)

The media environment in China is murky at best so I'm honestly not sure how much of it is a real phenomenon and how much is propaganda of some sort.

*edited a typo

[–] Candelestine@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I only know about it from bits and pieces here and there, but it's a large soft-style protest where they refuse to participate in the economy as much as possible. When they get a job, they do it as poorly as possible without getting in trouble. If they can not have a job somehow, then they don't get one.

According to google, the Chinese words are pronounced Bai Lan in English.

[–] PenguinJuice@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh wow! So the same inequality is likely gripping China is what I'm gleaning from this.

[–] Candelestine@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I believe the youth in many places of the world are turning against the paradigms of their elders. Just wanna have a nice place to live, man. Don't care about Taiwan or Chinese Pride or trillions of dollars or mighty armies or covid lockdowns, just want a house, job and maybe family, and be able to think that's a safe thing to try and do. Some people are making that harder than it needs to be though, not in just any one place, but lots of places. And it's clearly because they're following old patterns that no longer work as well as they used to.

So take a page from Ghandi. Sit there and wait. They can't vote or anything in any way that matters, they can't rebel against a massively powerful authoritarian state, they'd just die or be tortured into re-education. This soft protest is a viable strategy though, similar things have worked before in history.

We at least can vote and bitch and moan about our leadership without being abducted in the middle of the night, taken away and "re-educated". But even with that democratic alternative, we had our own "Great Resignation", or so we called it.