![]() ![]() Getting a job in the age of lowered expectationsīack in the States, youth isn’t faring all that much better. Facing the heat, Chinese officials have tried to encourage companies to hire more graduates, incentivize workers to take said jobs with ads about stable and meaningful service jobs, and send a hopeful message to new grads: Lower your expectations. Projected by Pew to be the most educated generation, Gen Z is leaving school only to meet an economy that doesn’t always have the jobs they expected and a government seeking to fill service and manufacturing roles. Chinese and American Gen Zers are both trying to reinvent work, emphasizing the importance of work-life balance and good pay, but the job market and economy aren’t meeting their needs. “I think of lying flat as a silent rebellion against a culture of overpressure,” Zak Dychtwald, CEO of consultancy Young China Group, told Fortune’s Grady McGregor. In China, it gained another phrase- involution, as many young workers reported a disengaging from hustle culture. Both countries experienced a widely spread reported burnout over the past couple of years. Something similar happened across the globe, as young employees in the U.S. The pendulum has swung the other way a bit, as “lying flat” gained traction as a term and practice in China, where employees put in just the work needed to get the job done, nothing more or less and certainly no 996. But during 2021, workers won a case that declared employees demanding such intense labor to be illegal. The old schedule in China’s tech sector used to be known as 996, or working from 9:00 a.m. As Samuel Beckett once said, “It’s awful.” It leaves these young adults in a Waiting for Godot situation, looking for jobs that simply aren’t coming while some lower their job or salary expectations still to be met with fierce competition. Experts told the Journal that a growing number of China’s Gen Zers are leaving school and looking for high-paying and high-skill jobs, and the country simply doesn’t have enough positions to meet the demand. Taking a closer look at the economic data, unemployment rates skyrocketed to a record 20.4% for young adults in China, while it stands at just 6.5% in America. But Gen Z has lived in a world where nearly everything says “Made in China.” Now, some Chinese Gen Zers seem to be saying it’s another country’s turn to make stuff. Older millennials and Gen Xers might look back to a time where most toys and consumer products had “Made in the U.S.A.” written on them in small font. It has even bigger ramifications for the world economy, since China became the “ factory of the world” when it entered the World Trade Organization in the late 1990s. ![]()
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