View of China From Within

Big changes coming after Xi likely. Perhaps the US-China relationship might become less confrontational?

In today’s China, the world of the 1950s generation, to paraphrase Marx, weighs like a nightmare on the lives of the young. The need to pay lavish pensions overhangs the state and large swathes of the economy, the politics of a previous era still dominate, and of course, the all-encompassing zero-COVID policy was explained in part as essential to protect the elderly, many of whom eschewed vaccination. Family values — China’s folk religion — are part of the imagery on government billboards advertising the “China Dream,” which is a bit jarring, since many elders being cared for today were once the youths who tore down the old society during the Cultural Revolution. The explosive tumult of China’s revolution has ossified, leaving the same old hierarchies untouched.

Both in big cities and villages, grandparents occupy a key role in childcare largely unknown in the West.

what will happen when this generation takes power in the “high-income society” of the near future, which Xi Jinping has suggested will arrive by 2035?

Young people are better educated, richer, more individual, more alienated and fewer. They don’t feel the history of their elders as their own. L

This generational clash defines China’s politics. The elders have power and the youth are expected to propel the economy forward, innovating but “never forgetting the struggle.” In truth, the younger generations were born into a society profoundly more individualistic than their elders’. Their truth is different than their parents’, even if both are valid. This manifests as a political problem due to China’s “birth strike” — fewer children are being born, which will make China feel older and less energetic, and transform the raw material of economic growth: humanity itself.

If Chinese planners have their way, it seems increasingly likely that the country’s next generation of industrial workers will be robots.

Even as the overall working population decreases, the absolute number of urban working-age people is likely to continue rising as the countryside empties out.

Demographic reality gets heavier every year.

To make sense of China, it’s better not to think of it as a single nation. More like three. “China One” is made up of the globalized, urban middle classes, with extremely low birth rates. “China Two” is the working classes, perhaps 30% of China’s population, who live in factory towns and third-tier cities. And “China Three” are the rural people whose population is shrinking the fastest not because their birth rates are lower, but because everybody moves to the cities.

The Chinese economy is fundamentally a story of China Two moving into China One, with the cheap workers of China Three serving as the raw material for growth. That labor pool is diminishing and Chinese industry is becoming ever more automated, ever more reliant on big data. Busy ports such as Tianjin and Yangshan are now less hubs of working-class life and more like games of Tetris played by white-collar engineers. Even coal mining is being automated, with Huawei engineering new robots that can do the job more productively and safely.

As time passes and more and more young people live life on their own terms, absorbed in social media and globalized brands rather than the collective lifeways of the past, the whole of China could become like Hubei Industrial University: crazy elders flailing around, exhorting this or that, recounting their memories, while the young filter it out and politely go about their business.

6 Likes