Beijing confronts a generation of slackers that prefers ‘lying flat’ to menial labor

(Originally published July 27 in “What in the World“) The Wall Street Journal has come late to the party with a feature on youth unemployment in China, making President Xi Jinping’s point that, hey, there are plenty of jobs, just not the kind of cushy jobs China’s college graduates want.

As in many countries around the world, China now faces the politically combustive problem of a generation of people that may not live as well as its parents. This is one of the most painful outcomes of growing income inequality and of stagnating real wages. Sound familiar? It should. It’s precisely the problem plaguing the United States and helping to polarize the American electorate. China’s youth aren’t yet rioting in the streets or storming the capital. Instead, they’re just disaffected and apathetic—“lying flat.”

Xi’s policies prior to the pandemic seemed aimed at mitigating this problem by cracking down on the unbridled growth of tech giants like Alibaba and reversing some free-market reforms—to the alarm of foreign investors. But as China’s economy continues to stumble and youth unemployment continues to rise, he appears to have decided to reverse course somewhat. His latest economic plan champions entrepreneurs, SMEs, and technology, while promising to open up new sectors of the economy to private investment.

Washington continues to make matters worse by prosecuting what constitutes economic warfare against Beijing. In the latest salvo, the U.S. Senate has sent a bill to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives that would ban Chinese businesses from buying U.S. farmland and require any U.S. companies within two weeks of making any investments in Chinese semiconductors, hypersonics or artificial intelligence to report it to U.S. authorities.

The White House is already planning an executive order that would further restrict U.S. investments into sensitive technologies in China and tighten supervision of U.S. investment into the country. That’s on top of the ban it has proposed on the export of advanced semiconductors to China and on the equipment for making them. Last year, the Biden Administration imposed a rule requiring a license from the Commerce Dept. for any such exports. It’s also considering blocking China from using cloud-based services from U.S. companies like Amazon, Google or Microsoft.

Worried that it’s getting rose-tinted economic reports from the provinces, China’s National Bureau of Statistics has a 13-day series of statistical inspections to crack down on data fraud.