FEATURE - Only Child Generation In China Challenges Traditional Family Life By 'Lying Flat'

MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 03rd June, 2021) Born in the city of Zhuzhou in central China's Hunan province in 1995, Nikki Luo grew up as an only child like most of the children in her generation due to the country's One Child Policy introduced in the late 1970s. Naturally, her parents poured all their attention on Luo and sent her to all kinds of after school classes in hope of securing her success in the future.

Luo and her parents' efforts paid off when she crushed the notoriously competitive National College Exams, known as Gaokao in China, and entered one of the top universities in Beijing in 2012. However, when she graduated from the Communication University of China in 2016, the job offers Luo received were far from her expectations.

"When I graduated in 2016, it was very popular to try to join the top internet companies. But when I sent my resumes to the top companies such as Tencent and Baidu, or even some other smaller online gaming companies, I did not even receive any response," Luo told Sputnik.

In the end, Luo landed a job at Qyer.com, a startup internet company that provides travel services. But she felt that she was being exploited because the salary was too low.

"In 2016, the salary offered to me was 5000 Yuan [about $782] a month. But the monthly rent in Beijing on average cost about 4000 yuan. After paying rent, I didn't even have money left for food. Luckily, my parents helped me from time to time," she said.

After struggling to make a living in Beijing with little hope of career advancement for more than two years, Luo quit her job in 2019 to pursue a Master's degree in a university in Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, her Master's degree from the Hong Kong Baptist University did not improve her employment prospects upon her graduation in 2020. Her job applications to state media such as the People's Daily and the Guangming Daily did not even land her a chance for an interview.

Deeply disappointed by the cruel reality she faced, Luo decided to join a growing number of young people in China to just "lie flat," or tangping in Chinese, which means to refuse being exploited by greedy companies and just try to enjoy life without trying to work too hard.

Today, Luo lives with her parents and spends less than 1000 yuan every month on her personal expenses as she doesn't have to pay rent and her parents make dinner for her. Luo has not held a stable job for almost a year and relies on freelance work to cover her basic expenses, which include spending almost 400 yuan a month on her favorite Japanese comics.

At the age of 26, Luo does not have plans to get married or have children in the near future.

As China's population began to age rapidly in recent years as a result of the One Child Policy, Chinese authorities started to relax the restrictions in recent years in hope of boosting the country's birth rate.

On Monday, the Politburo of the ruling Chinese Communist Party decided to ease the rules further by allowing Chinese couples to have a third child.

However, with more and more young people in China who grew up as an only child like Luo choosing to "lie flat" and reject the traditional pressure on a successful career, marriage and child birth, the new "third child policy" could face a daunting task in persuading young Chinese to have more children.

When Luo first started her career at Qyer.com in 2016, she bought into the spirit many startup technology companies advocated by urging young employees to make personal sacrifices by taking a low paycheck for the sake of the company's success in the future.

Luo took on additional projects at the company without any pay raise and often worked overtime for the company's key promotional events such as the marketing campaign for the annual Single's Day shopping frenzy in China.

Despite her efforts and dedication at work, Luo saw few chances of career advancement at her company and her monthly salary only grew from 5000 yuan to 6500 yuan.

A conversation with her uncle, who runs his own business in southern China's Shenzhen, struck her deeply.

"When he asked me how much I made, I said about 5000-6000 yuan a month. He said: 'you don't even make as much as my driver does.' I felt very sad," Luo recalled, holding back her tears.

The reason behind Luo's disappointment came from how much efforts she poured into her studies to be able to enter the Communications University in Beijing.

Due to the regional differences in university admissions, Luo had to beat 363,000 other high school graduates from her province when she took the National College Entrance Exams in 2012. She ranked among the top 500 students, or the top 1.3%, from her province, which gave her a chance to be admitted to the Communication University of China.

When Luo failed to even land an interview with Chinese state media after completing her Master's degree at the Hong Kong Baptist University, she began to question her self-esteem.

"Is it because I'm such a loser? What kind of talent do they need? I feel I've been doing pretty well myself. Is it because there are simply too many people in China?" she said.

As China's economic growth slowed in recent years, the job market for young college graduates became more and more competitive when the number of graduates reached a new record of 8.74 million in 2020.

When more graduates joined the foray for decent job opportunities, the fierce competition also reached new heights. The kind of excessive competition among young Chinese people is often being described as "neijuan", or involution.

One of the most common symptoms of the involution is that many Chinese high-tech companies began to ask their young employees to work a "996" schedule, which means nine am to nine pm every day for six days a week.

Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, went as far as calling the "996" schedule a "blessing" and viewed it as the foundation of the company's success.

Luo joined a growing number of young Chinese people to reject this kind of excessive competition by trying to "lie flat" and enjoy the simple happiness of a less stressful life.

"Please don't tell me about personal growth for young people or the sense of success of the company. I don't need any of that. If pay me the salary, I get the job done. It's a fair trade. Many companies try to sell you a 'value system' today. Those are all traps. You always urge us young people to 'work hard.' What's the purpose of our 'hard work'? To help our bosses to buy new cars and new houses?" she said.

Luo argued that the fruits of young people's efforts and hard work had been "stolen" by their bosses.

"If you don't offer me fair compensation, I'd rather 'lie flat.' I've proven that it's possible for young people to live on 1000 yuan per month. I can make this kind of salary from all kinds of jobs including washing dishes. Even if a job pays you more money, it's not worth it if you ended up in an ICU [intensive care unit] in the end," she said.

Luo said she had a friend who worked at Alibaba and reached the level of making more than one million yuan each year. But that friend was found to have cancer at a young age.

"I'm not saying people can't die. But I believe people shouldn't sacrifice their lives for a company," she said.

For the generation of young people growing up as an only child, they focus more on their individual value and needs today, Luo explained.

"Many young people like me today have become very self-centered, especially those who grew up as an only child. We're very much aware of our value as an individual. China has a large population, which diminishes an individual's value. It's almost like if you don't do this job, someone else will definitely take over. It's like your existence is not really very important. But to my family members and friends, I'm still very valuable," she said.

Luo enjoys a hobby as a comic artist and her drawings have brought her a sizable number of fans on social media. She said the sense of achievement from her comics was much more than what her job could offer her.

With more and more young people in China like Luo refusing to face the fierce competition that requires enormous personal sacrifices, many of them have also been putting both marriage and childbirth on hold.

Luo has been dating her boyfriend, who works in a company that is thousands of miles away in Beijing, for almost three years. As they live in different cities and Luo plans to pursue a PhD degree in the near future, the young lovers are not in a hurry to get married, not to mention having a child.

Megan Woo, a 24-year-old who does marketing for an internet company in southern China's Guangzhou, shares a similar sentiment as Luo on marriage and childbirth.

"The cost for marriage and childbirth is simply too high in first tier cities. I'm very happy that I'm single and I do not face any pressure in life," Woo told Sputnik.

After completing her Master's degree in a university in the United Kingdom about one year ago, Woo returned to her hometown to start a career. She said she was not in a hurry to start a family.

"I'm not thinking about getting married for now, because even if I meet a perfect partner, it's still 'let's date first.' My top priority is being happy and marriage has to happen naturally," she said.

On childbirth, in addition to concerns over possible impact on her career, Woo said she was just not very interested in raising a child.

"I'm just not interested in doing housework or taking care of a child. Plus, being a housewife is still looked down upon in China. There're all kinds of hidden and unmeasurable lack of respect [for those who choose to become housewives]," she said.

Growing up as an only child, Woo said she never really learned how to deal with children.

"Maybe I just don't like to play with children. It's just a personal preference as I'm not the kind of person who pays attention to retails or has patience. I helped take care of my younger cousin for a few days. When she cried, it brought me a lot of headaches. If it was my child, I'd have to deal with screaming, crying and waking up to feed the baby at night for a few years. In comparison, being single is much more comfortable. Maybe this is why the older generation calls us 'lack of a sense of responsibility,'" she said.

Facing brutal competitions in the job market, Luo from Zhuzhou expressed concerns that her children's generation could slide into a lower social class.

"I think the current policies caused most troubles for us so-called 'middle class." For us, we can never accept it if our children's social class would be lower than us. If my children would have to take a job as a migrant worker moving bricks, I'd rather not to give birth to them. If my children cannot enjoy their freedoms and do the things they like, I'd prefer for them not to be born," she said.

Luo pointed out that if conditions can improve, especially in the job market, she would also be willing to have children.

"For us young people, do we really hate children so much that we'd want to kill them all? Definitely not. We just sincerely hope that the government can provide a better environment for us to look for jobs and not allow young people to only find jobs that are worse than what their parents had," she said.

Wider access to affordable housing and improved protection for the rights of women, especially the young mothers, could also help boost confidence in young people on choosing to have children, she added.

Luo called on the government to pay attention to young people's individual needs instead of treating the population crisis as an issue with numbers.

"It's laughable that people were not allowed to have more children in the 1980s and 1990s. So the formula was one man plus one woman had to be one [child], then it had to be two [children], now it has to be three [children]? When such policies were implemented, did they just think of us citizens as numbers? Are we just a number in the 1.4 billion? Now facing a demographic crisis, you again treat us as a number and want to add 100 million to the figure?" she said.

Most young people in China today just want their spiritual needs to be addressed and be able to enjoy a sense of happiness, Luo stressed.