The Great Opt-Out: Understanding China’s Youth Disillusionment & What the World Misunderstands
- Felicity Tisdall
- Jan 2
- 7 min read
Across China, a growing number of young people are quietly stepping back from the traditional expectations that once defined adulthood, from chasing “996” productivity and stable work to marriage and parenthood. Similar youth withdrawals defined by hyper-competition, plateauing fertility rates and economic stagnation have long been observed in South Korea and Japan, and are now emerging in cities such as Sydney, Paris, Toronto, Johannesburg, San Francisco and New York.
Therefore, this retreat is not apathy, nor uniquely Chinese, but a universal warning sign; a rational response to the unsustainable and untenable structural pressures increasingly constraining young adults across the world.
Saturday, 1st December:
A 24-year-old graduate sits alone on Shanghai’s metro at 22:45 after a 65h work week, typing her resignation letter into her Notes app. She is one of millions of young Chinese expressing tǎng píng, “lying flat”; not as apathy, but as a quiet judgement and resistance to an unfulfilling system she believes has stopped valuing her.
She is not alone in this social reality. China’s cities are the epicentre of a global youth burnout crisis, shaped by hyper-competition, inequality and urban unaffordability. This generational disillusionment has brought with it crashing birth rates and offers critical lessons. The rise of 躺平tǎng píng which calls “for a life free from societal pressures”, and the more extreme 摆烂 bǎi lán, “letting rot”, is not an instance of cultural decay. Instead, their widespread adoption reflects a rational protest against an unsustainable systems of insurmountable pressure.
When young people narrate their withdrawal as a collective judgement on failed systems, rather than simply personal exhaustion, the global implications extend globally. Such consequences reverberate beyond China. Mirroring countries facing unaffordable housing and hyper-competitive labour markets, who may not be far behind include Canada, Australia, France, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
1: The Weight of Expectation: Carried since Confucianism
For millions of young Chinese, the pressures of falling short and disillusionment precede adulthood itself. This draws from a long intellectual lineage of Confucian traditions prize filial piety, educational attainment, and intergenerational obligation. Yet to attribute today’s disillusionment to culture alone risks flattening history into a generalising caricature. What matters is how these patriarchal ideals collide with the demographic, economic and political architecture of modern China. The results include, but are not limited to, extreme education and family pressures.
Confucianism’s filial piety originally rested on shared labour and multigenerational households. However, for the one-child generation and its enduring legacy, with birth rates falling for the third consecutive year, that ratio has inverted: one young adult now supports two parents and often four grandparents. A demographic pyramid has turned on its head.
With the “4:2:1 problem”, Confucian morality has been both intensified and compressed. The expectation to “repay” one’s family remains, but resources are rapidly diminishing. Namely, earning educational achievement, securing stable employment, accessing affordable housing, and a sustainable environment to raise future children are becoming far less readily attainable.
Internal disagreements should also be considered crucial. Voices from across the country are rejecting Confucian norms outright, denouncing them as incompatible with the contemporary economy. Others feel trapped between honouring family expectations and economic realities. Far from a niche, elite phenomenon, the inherited duty and moral weight is ancient; reality’s socioeconomic terrain is not.
Chinese scholar Yujie Kou affirms that this phenomenon is ‘an unavoidable product of the modernisation process of countries all over the world’. Developing this notion, multiple Chinese studies have situated tǎng píng within a broader pattern of involution; namely, increasing competition without proportional reward. Cultural roots deliver the extreme pressure while the system delivers the lack of incentives.
The pillars of education, work and housing have become economically and socially non-functional. Demographic decline is therefore a predictable outcome.
Education sits at the centre of this tension. The compulsory 高考 gāo kǎo university entrance exam once served as a golden mechanism of opportunity. Today, it functions as a bottleneck. Across generations, involution defines schooling from early childhood. For countless families, their child is the “only hope” of mobility, amplifying pressure across all stages of schooling. Magnified to the extreme for the gāo kǎo, the prestige-based university hierarchy filters millions through a narrowing gateway. Only 2% of the approximate 10 million students will gain entrance to China’s top 39 universities each year. This stokes burnout long before employment and the hunt for it even begins.
Geography, too, is determining opportunity. Across China, geography and socio-economic circumstances differ greatly. Despite the meritocratic ideal, rural and inland students are more disadvantaged. For instance, the Henan province’s top-university entry rate is >1%, as top universities prioritise local quotas. Chinese scholarship notes that this unequal, regional stratification has limited meaningful upward mobility, thereby producing a sense of structural futility over meritocratic opportunity.
The labour market offers little relief. In October 2025, urban youth unemployment stood at 17.3%. Education studies highlight many young people’s perception of the schooling-employment pipeline as 失衡, imbalanced; where effort no longer predicts security. Despite its illegalisation, the ongoing expectation of the debilitating “996” corporate culture, working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week, the rise of gig-based precarity, as well as declining trust in the private sector, have pushed young people toward stable, public-sector jobs. China is undergoing a modern resurgence of the “iron rice bowl”.
Yet competition is extreme, with record-high applications for the civil service and police force, for instance. The security they promise can be illusory, but the rewards of extended socio-economic security are too tantalising. This mass pivot reflects more than career preference; it reveals a deeper search for institutional protection within a hybrid system of state-capitalist governance that produces both prosperity and dramatic inequality.
Housing and finance constitute an additional breaking point. In the wake of an ongoing property bubble, China’s urban property markets, long used as vehicles of state-directed growth and middle-class wealth storage, have detached from wage trajectories. For the millions of young adults, home ownership - a common prerequisite for marriage - is simply unattainable. The cost-of-living crisis is not merely personal; it is embedded in the structure of urbanisation and local-government finance.
Layered across this is the 户口 hù kǒu system, which binds mobility and opportunity to birthplace. Rural youth face different calculations: even when they succeed academically, urban residency barriers, wage gaps and astronomical rent limit their futures. This inequality in life chances deepens the sense that the system offers little return on extraordinary effort.
When viewed through this structural lens, the emergence of tǎng píng and bǎi lán appears as both a withdrawal from the relentless urban race and a verdict on the conditions it has created.
3: The Demographic Shock: What Withdrawal Exposes
Some may argue that this phenomenon is overstated because online youth cultures amplify disillusionment. Yet, structural indicators predate these behavioural shifts. Youth withdrawal is accelerating China’s demographic crisis, but did not cause it. Rather, it exposes deeper systemic cavities.
For instance, China has now entered a second consecutive year of population decline; the fertility rate is approximately 0.9-1.0, below replacement levels of 2.0. The ageing curve is steepening; according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), by 2040, 28% of the population will be over 60. This leaves profound implications for labour supply, public finance and social stability.
Imbalanced gendered pressures magnify the problem. Young women describe a landscape in which marriage and childbirth impose disproportionate economic and personal costs. Unequal childcare expectations, workplace discrimination, the gender pay gap, and socially entrenched housing demands restrict autonomy greatly.
Government responses remain focused on individual behaviour instead of structural transformation, therefore limiting their ability to meaningfully reverse demographic decline. This includes the 2021 shift to a three-child policy, subsequent childcare subsidies, housing incentives and propaganda campaigns urging marriage and “self-sacrifice”.
International parallels highlight the regional/global significance: despite decades of incentives, South Korea’s fertility has fallen to the world’s lowest; the “N-po generation” says they have given up on dating and family due to impossible living costs. Another regional cousin is Japan’s “satori no sedai” generation, the “resignation generation,” following Japan’s economic downturn of the “Lost Decade” starting in 1990. Furthermore, in an earlier stage, Vancouver, Dublin, Sydney, San Francisco and New York exhibit similar patterns of unaffordable housing, precarious work and delayed family formation.
Therefore, far from an anomalous Chinese phenomenon, decades of evidence from South Korea and Japan underline that reversing systemic failures and the ageing population’s momentum cannot occur through incentives alone. Without education and labour-market reform, gender equality and affordable housing, even generous state programs falter.
4: Youth Agency, Not Apathy
Far from passive and ambitionless withdrawal, young people articulate their decisions as active, adaptive and resilient across interviews, public essays, and public discourse. Their choices constitute a strategy of self-preservation, critique, and reimagining adulthood with autonomy and humour.
Anonymised interviews with young people from Beijing, Kunming and a countryside region of Henan reveal a variety of positions. For some, tǎng píng is a quiet form of resistance: a refusal to participate in an extractive game, whose rules no longer produce fair outcomes. For others, alongside tǎng píng, the more extreme bǎi lán, “letting rot,” offers humour and emotional release in a high-stress environment.
Among more mobile youth, 润 rùn “running”, namely emigrating, emerges as an exit strategy. Meanwhile, others pursue entrepreneurial work, side-hustles or freelance projects as forms of autonomy. These narratives demonstrate not laziness, but agency. They show young people actively judging the institutions around them and recalibrating their ambitions accordingly in structures such as the education system, labour market, and property regime. Young people are redefining what adulthood, and success constitutes.
This opinion is backed up by social-psychological findings identifying this “social resistance strategy” as preventing a complete disengagement from society. Therefore, tǎng píng can be interpreted beyond a fatalist lens; this warning’s burden can be alleviated through mental health planning, collective humour and structural reform.
Conclusion
Tǎng píng and bǎi lán’s proliferation forces us to reconsider what we value as “success,” what states owe their young, and what responsibilities cannot be outsourced to personal, selfish ambition. This widespread disillusionment has only been accelerated by housing unaffordability, extreme job insecurity, and rising care burdens in an ageing society. In the wake of escalating geopolitical tensions with the United States, warranting a need for a healthy workforce and economy, China needs its youth to embrace tǎng píng’s antithesis for them to be rejuvenated and hopeful.
Therefore, recognising youth withdrawal as a structural warning to be treated empathically and robustly instead of a cultural anomaly or generational flaw may be the first step in addressing long-term demographic and economic decline across the globe. It mirrors established patterns in South Korea, Japan, and emerging patterns across Vancouver, Dublin, Sydney, San Francisco and New York. All face hyper-competition and economic stagnation as a result of the growing shadow of an ageing population.
China’s youth are not passive victims of demographic or socioeconomic forces. They are interpreters. Instead of slogans or individualistic incentives, their collective redefinition and interpretation of adulthood’s trajectory shape China’s future.
Written by Felicity Tisdall
Edited by Alexander Xia
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