In Their Hands

  • Share
  • Read Later
Photograph by Sim Chi Yin for TIME

A bug's life Members of Beijing's low-paid or unemployed "ant tribe" kill time in their shared tenement

(3 of 3)

They Have a Dream
What ties together both ends of the youth spectrum, more than anything else, is a quest for self-definition. For one spoiled princeling, identity may come from a private yacht. For another recent arrival to the big city, individuality may be expressed in a designer bag that costs months of salary. If that sounds facile, remember that the parents of today's youth had every lifestyle decision dictated by the Communist Party, from where to live to when to procreate. It's no accident that their progeny revel in wearable bling or joining peer groups with a high price of admission, whether it's a photography club, a polo team or a weekend romp with other golden-retriever fans. One of the most popular phenomena among young Chinese today is to take a so-called gap year — not between high school and college as in Britain, but at any point when the rat race gets too frenzied. The World Tourism Organization estimates that 100 million Chinese will travel overseas by 2020. If they can't find themselves at home, maybe their true selves will materialize abroad.

The young are far choosier when it comes to their careers. The high rate of unemployment among educated youth is due in part to the rapid expansion of higher education, which has flooded the market with too many graduates. (Last year, there were 6.6 million college graduates, compared with just 830,000 in 1998.) But the persistent joblessness and constant job hopping among educated youth also have to do with a reluctance to accept positions considered beneath them. After all, their parents scrimped to pay their university tuition. How can they accept a job with poor pay? Surely life is about more than work for work's sake?

A decade ago, laborers were still flooding Chinese factories to provide for their families back home, who lived from one remittance to the next. Today's young workers, whether university graduates or line workers, face much less pressure to support relatives in the provinces. The style of family finances is shifting closer to a Western model. That explains why the ant-tribe dorms in Beijing, while outwardly shabby, are often crowded with expensive equipment like laptops and scanners. For these newly arrived youth, particularly those born after 1990, life in the big cities tends to be about personal satisfaction, not familial obligation. "I sent money home a few times when I first got here," says Yin. "My father doesn't mind. He said, 'After you're 18, you do what you want. It's your life.'"

In fact, many young people are counting on their parents to support them — not the other way around, as was the case for generations. Often parents are expected to buy their adult children apartments, which for young men are a prerequisite for luring a future mate. For others, it's about more than just real estate. Many of China's young rich are not self-made but inheritors of their parents' wealth. Beijing Sports Car Club founder Zhang stresses that his money is his own. But he acknowledges that around 70% of the club's members are spending family cash. Spanish supercar maker Tramontana says all the cars it sold in China two years ago were snapped up by young drivers; the oldest buyer of a car that can cost around $4 million was 28 years old. It doesn't help the image of such scions of privilege that there have been a series of high-profile traffic accidents in which young fuerdai and guanerdai have plowed into pedestrians — often with fatal consequences — and expected to drive away with impunity.

The reality may be that an increasing number of young Chinese will be left in the dust. But that doesn't mean they've given up hope — yet. A 2011 Gallup poll found that 80% of Chinese believed the economic conditions in their own communities were getting better, while only 5% felt they were declining. (By contrast, 48% of Americans said their local economic conditions were improving, while 43% said they were worsening.)

Xu Bo, a 24-year-old member of the ant tribe, lives in a cramped and dimly lit room he shares with seven other young men. At night, some of them snore under mosquito nets, while others play games on a shared laptop or read about Warren Buffett's path to riches. Beijing is the fourth city Xu has lived in since graduating from medical college. But the baby-faced nursing graduate is confident he'll find something in "technology or health or computers or whatever." An ant-tribe existence is not an end point for Xu but a way station to a better life he is sure will soon be his. "I want to stay in the big city so that I can have my own fuerdai one day," he says. "If I gave up and went home, then I'd have no hope of realizing that dream. My future children are depending on me."

With Reporting By Chengcheng Jiang And Jessie Jiang / Beijing

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. Next Page