this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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Young people in China are becoming more rebellious, questioning their nation’s traditional expectations of career and family

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[–] [email protected] 218 points 10 months ago (8 children)

So.. there'll be a lot of great Chinese punk music soon?

[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago (2 children)

There was an explosion of Chinese punk/alt bands late 90s/ early 2000s but they gave way to hip hop/pop. Still a decent scene in Beijing. One of my favorite bands from that era is called Wood pushing melon (木推瓜).
https://youtu.be/j_dq-tQuNrA?si=3tEzKqRpgVUlm2yn

The lead singer left that band and started an incredible tribal folk group called Dawanggang next
https://youtu.be/toaZqu_4hMw?si=1XQP0yKpz3rsGTD0

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[–] [email protected] 202 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (14 children)

It's interesting because people are people and it doesn't matter where you are born.

If you look at it from a birds eye view you will see a younger, smart generation trying to fight it's own governments.

It's not USA vs China vs Russia vs Europe etc. it is the younger generation vs the old generation. Currently each generation is fighting it's own government and slowly realising how poor they have done in the last decades.

Nobody wants war.

[–] [email protected] 129 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

t’s not USA vs China vs Russia vs Europe etc. it is the younger generation vs the old generation

No, it's owning class vs working class, anything else is a distraction in service of the owning class.

Workers of the world, unite! ✊

(edited in image. If you need image description - source)

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (11 children)

Even marxists don't simplify the classes as much as that diagram suggests. It's missing peasants, artisans and the petty bourgeois. It's also never been as simple as capitalist vs working class. Capitalists regularly fight amongst themselves as do the working class. This whole idea of class struggle being the only struggle is so oversimplified it's kinda silly.

I don't think it's honest to frame it in generational language either btw. Though that is a component of it.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (9 children)

I'm waiting for Gen Z to realize that they've grown up interconnected and have the ability to coordinate like no one ever could before and when they realize that I expect them to flip the monopoly board.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (15 children)

This is exactly why the billionaires are dismantling the current social media platforms. Organizing is the only threat they truly fear.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago

As phrased in a recent anti-union campaign by Amazon: Watch out, your co-workers might be "vulnerable to organizing".

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It's not true to say we've "grown up interconnected", by the 2010's, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn't a grand a unifying "american culture". At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90's could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we've all become atomized, there's a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that's not "the culture". There is less genuine engagement with a "the culture", and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.

You know, along those lines, there's also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can "coordinate", yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you're doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would've thought that tech literacy would've gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don't know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.

I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can't, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we're kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we've seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don't learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won't), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they've grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.

In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They're all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I've seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don't really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I'm wrong.

Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that's maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.

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[–] [email protected] 133 points 10 months ago (15 children)

Amazing arc, like watching the last 120 years in the US compressed down to a couple decades. From rural to industrial powerhouse to the kids going “fuck this shit”.

What’s next?

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's like watching a speedrun: Capitalism any%.

Next? Some of them have to be thinking "wait, this is a communist country, isn't it?"

[–] [email protected] 52 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I don't think anyone think of China as a communist/socialist country for a very long time. Maybe except older generations and tankies.

Ironically, I have met more tankies in six month on lemmy than my 18 years growing up in China. It is truly a wild culture shock that I didn't expect. LOL.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 10 months ago (7 children)

A "tankie" isn't a communist anymore than an American Republican wants individual freedom.

Anyone that supports China is going to say it's communist, and anyone from the right shitting on China is going to say they're communist.

But both groups are pretty much the same and no one should listen to either

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[–] [email protected] 105 points 10 months ago (3 children)

摆烂 bai3lan4

A slang term that means "stop striving", I'd say it's loosely akin to the phrase "quiet quitting" but a bit more general.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Fuck yeah China! (not the government)

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Pretty sure this is happening all over, not just in China.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Its just a generic filler article that gets posted about young people every year or two.

"Quiet Quitting" was the thing in 2022.

"Great Resignation" was the thing in 2021

You can find articles about this in 2019, 2016, omfg all over the place in the wake of 2008, "Jobless Recovery" from 2004 to 2006, in the 90s it was "Slackers" and in the 80s it was "Punks" and in the 70s and 60s it was "Hippies" and then back to Beatniks and Anarchists and of course, the old crowd favorite, Pinko Commies.

This is just a more recent mash up of the "China Bad" and "Nobody Wants To Work Anymore" meme

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Can say I've definitely "stopped striving", don't know if it's from Long Covid, living paycheck to paycheck cause my pay gets min/maxed for the business, personal infighting thanks to Fox News and Republican bullshit tearing apart and killing families over vaccinations, or maybe it's just the weather 🤷‍♂️ lol fuck

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 10 months ago (13 children)

This is not how I want to read an article.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (5 children)

I checked the comments before opening the article and wasn't sure what to expect based on yours.

Holy hell, we really are catering to the lowest common denominator here. It's not that I think we shouldn't, we absolutely should, but our society really should be working harder to keep lowest from being so damn low.

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 10 months ago (6 children)

The problem with The Rat race is, even if you win, you’re still a rat.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 10 months ago (10 children)

They have an interesting strategy where they workout expenses for the year if they lived minimal. It might be 9k. So they work for a few months and save up that money then quit their job and "lay flat" for the rest of the year.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago (6 children)

Honestly, that sounds amazing, and illustrates why, "can you explain this gap on your resume" is such a bull shit interview question.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 10 months ago (4 children)

One of the behavioralist psychologists, I think it was Pavlov, ran an experiment on dogs where he shocked them for both bad behavior good.

Eventually, the shocks had no effect.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago

Leaned hopelessness. Can't escape the effect regardless of your efforts so eventually you stop trying

[–] [email protected] 29 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It was Martin Seligman who did dog shock experiments and developed the theory of learned helplessness in 1967. While Seligman demonstrated that learned helplessness did occur, we still don't know why learned helplessness occurs (especially in humans).

Pavlov was much earlier (1897) and formed the theory of classical conditioning where a primary stimulus (food) was paired with a neutral stimulus (a bell) under the right conditions until the neutral stimulus would evoke a similar automatic response as the primary stimulus (e.g. drooling).

What you are describing also sounds a little like operant conditioning, where a learned behaviour is reinforced or punished with the application or removal of a stimulus. Or in this case, where the link between a behaviour and a stimulus is eroded to the point where the learned link goes extinct, and the subject becomes desensitized to the repeated stimulus.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago

GLOBAL GENERAL STRIKE, A BLOB CAN DREAM.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 10 months ago (6 children)

I really enjoyed this story format. It showed the strength of photographic journalism

[–] [email protected] 76 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

EDIT: i present to you: the duality of humanity.

the duality of humanity

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago

let it all rot

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Warms my heart to see the youth choosing to walk the Rebel Path.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Late stage capitalism is a blight of humanity, there's gotta have to be some sort of revolutionary changes to society at the rate this is all headed. The world is not healthy right now.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago

Fuck the rat race all over.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (7 children)

Funny, people in the USA have been doing that for 20+ years

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Can a Chinese speaker clarify something? "Let it rot" in other sources is 摆烂 (Bải làn) which translates as "showed away" When I translate "let it rot" I get either 让它腐烂 (simplified) or 讓它腐爛.

What's the difference? How does showed away become let it rot?

[–] [email protected] 105 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (8 children)

This is another case of a foreign word don't have a good translation in English (and vise versa). Both 摆烂 and 让它腐烂 don't have the same tone as "let it rot".

To me, "let it rot" means watching something collapse with a sense of enjoyment. I cannot recall a Chinese word with this exact sentiment of the top of my head. But I can try to explain both Chinese words.

"让它腐烂" is the literal translation of "let it rot", word for word. It don't have the cultural and sentimental meaning behind it, merely stating the fact. More like "let the leave rot in the compost pile".

"摆烂" is probably what the article is referring to. Its meaning is similar to civil disobedience, and 躺平 ("lay flat", another word that was popular couple years ago).

"摆" means put, "烂" means something poorly made, broken, etc. "摆烂", together as a word, means "displaying a broken (bad) attitude, no matter the outside influence". However, "烂" also means rot, which is probably where the translation "let it rot" came from.

The original usage is much more playful, like your cat would lay on the floor no matter what toy or treat you give it, then it is 摆烂. But with the recent increase in pressure for many young people in China. 摆烂 and 躺平 (lay flat) become more of a act of civil disobedience and refusal to participate in the broken system/economy.

So 摆烂 is not a exact translation for "let it rot", but they do share the meaning of "no action" and the sentiment of joy. And "let it rot" sounds much cooler and concise than my explanation.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hey I just wanted to say thank you for the breakdown. The intricacies of translation are interesting.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Ditto. Respect for anyone who not only knows two languages well enough to explain one in the other, but is willing to share that knowledge.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

They just like me fr

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Great phrase, much more impact than quiet quit. I have plenty of sympathy for them, though that dipped substantially when one of the people they profiled became a "certified life coach" oh my god.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago

Quiet quit was always the establishment's phrase anyway.

They made it up to spread a manufactured panic about people rationally refusing to do more than their contracts say for no more than their contract pay.

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