China’s young people have tried a number of ways to deal with high unemployment in their country’s tottering economy, from valorizing joblessness as a form of political protest to “working” as valets for their aging parents.
The latest craze is “pretending to go to work,” which essentially involves Chinese young people posting social media videos of themselves “working” at imaginary jobs.
The videos, which are rapidly accumulating under a hashtag called #IPretendedToGoToWorkToday on the video-sharing site Douyin, show their creators pretending to be tour guides, fussing around in libraries, or even “working” at filling out dozens of job applications.
Many of the pretenders live with their parents, so they have enough money to hire “study rooms” where they can have a little privacy while they make videos of themselves pretending to work at non-existent jobs. Others use video editing tools to disguise their identities because they do not want their families to discover they are merely pretending to go to work.
Renting out desks for pretend work has become so popular in some cities that the supply of desks for rent is drying up. Those who cannot afford to rent phony workspaces sometimes make videos of themselves hiding in stairwells or on rooftops, hoping their parents do not notice they remain unemployed.
Some of the video creators seemed to be trying to comfort themselves by going through the motions of jobs they do not think they will ever have, while others were making a political protest, trying to convince the Chinese Communist government that nourishing jobs for young people should be a higher priority.
“This phenomenon of relying on one’s parents is ultimately an employment or job security issue. The key is to provide employment, and better quality jobs,” one YouTube commentator argued.
Many posting under the pretending-to-work hashtag said they were coping with feelings of shame for not being employed, and fake employment at least made them feel useful. Others said they were just killing time until their situation improved.
A surprisingly common tactic for the chronically unemployed is playing the lottery and hoping to strike it rich. Pretending to work keeps them from feeling lazy while they wait for their lottery tickets to pay off.
A frequent complaint among young people who resort to living with their parents is that farmland in many rural communities has been seized for industrialization, so the time-honored practice of working on family farms is no longer possible.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping has acknowledged that unemployment among 16-to-24 year olds, currently standing at 17.6 percent, is a serious problem, but so far he has done little more than pay lip service to creating “full, high-quality employment.”
Some critics doubt Xi can do much to alleviate the problem because too much of China’s employment-generating capital is locked up in moribund state enterprises. The situation will only get worse if China becomes embroiled in another trade war with the U.S. under the second Trump administration.
“How can he say stuff like ‘promoting high quality, full employment’? It’s hilarious. Dude, the guy should do stand-up,” a Chinese social media influencer in German sneered at Xi, taking his criticism much further than anyone living in China would dare to.
As with “lying flat,” another craze among unemployed Chinese youth, the notion of “pretending to work” comes from a Chinese idiom called mo yu that was originally an insult directed at slackers.
“Lying flat” is supposed to mean being lazy, but rebellious young people turned the concept into an act of rebellion against a system that no longer serves their interests. The full term for pretending to work, hun shui mo yu, began as a derogatory reference to fishermen who would stir up mud in the water so their supervisors could not tell if they were really trying to catch fish or not.
Mo yu later became a term for office workers who performed useless, but easy, tasks on their computers to make themselves look busy, and now it has been inverted to mean young people who are only pretending to work because the Chinese system is not supplying them with enough real jobs.
“Pretending to work” is not even the strangest craze to sweep unemployed Chinese youth this year. That award would have to go to the “pretending to be birds” craze over the summer, in which people were putting on oversized shirts and flapping the sleeves like wings while they perched on benches and railings. The bird act was meant as a metaphor for seeking freedom, like carefree birds swooping across the sky.
Xiang Biao, an expert on Chinese society at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, saw the deeply weird bird craze as a cry of despair from youngsters who felt left behind in the fading Chinese economy — and, like “lying flat” or the new “pretending to work” videos, it worked as a safe act of metaphorical rebellion in a society where explicit criticism of the system is harshly punished.
“They had very high expectations about themselves, about China, and about the world in general. And then when they graduated from college and when they became adults, they became victims of the slowdown. They started asking: ‘Why did I study so hard? What for? I sacrificed so much joy and happiness when I was young,’” Xiang said.
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