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August 20, 2014

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Real-life skills wither as disaffected youth without jobs take refuge in the virtual world

By Wan Lixin | August 20, 2014, Wednesday | Print Edition

FOR senior college students, August should have been a hectic month of transition and fresh beginnings. After years of study, they are now ready to enter the job market.

Two decades ago, this used to be a nearly seamless transition. You pack up, bid farewell, and resume the journey. There is a sense of uncertainty and anxiety in the air, but these are more than balanced by the excitement to see the bigger world, the eagerness to prove useful, and the satisfaction of living up to expectations.

So lately I have been anxious to hear from a 23-year-old nephew of mine in Shenzhen, who graduated this year. Upon my inquiry, I was told the nephew would chuangye, or start his own business, by opening a cafe. His girlfriend, who also graduated this July, is also not looking for a job but preparing for an MA program next year in a rented flat.

Though have I heard much about how fabulous fortunes have been made on successful startups, I am still a bit uneasy about by my nephew’s unconventional move into a sector in which he has zero experience and expertise.

Is the cafe merely an excuse to stay out of formal employment, and a ruse to silence parental kvetching? Either way, a cafe is simply not the proper place to start for a young man. There is an obvious lack of ambition, or motivation to move on. It’s like when that long-awaited day hangs ripe in the heavens, you no longer have any volition to move on.

Am I witnessing a paradigm shift?

I am not sure this is already a trend, but I do find something revealing from a report about Japanese youth. A recent survey conducted among Japanese people aged 13 to 29 found only 46 percent of those surveyed are satisfied with themselves, and only 62 percent cherish any fond hope for the future.

A Japanese government report finds 696,000 young people seldom venture outside their homes, many of them victims of the otaku subculture. Increasingly traditional lifelong employment is being replaced by skirmishes and temporary engagement.

According to a 2012 survey in Japan, only 64 percent of college graduates were formally employed, while 1.8 million people aged 15-34 were in a sort of limbo, neither studying nor being employed. This accounted for 6.6 percent of the total population within that age bracket. Many of these people have fallen prey to the virtual world as defined by the Internet, manga, anime, videogames, and Skype. If this is true of Japan, I cannot see why this should not apply to China, too. Look any way any time, you see people crouched over their e-gadgets, watching videos, updating Wechat accounts, quite oblivious to the real life unfolding around them.

Vital guanxi

Tesla founder Elon Musk warned recently that the impending rise of artificial intelligence could “potentially be more dangerous than nukes.”

In my opinion, more dangerous because nukes are merely physically destructive, while the Internet can supply spiritual addiction that is for many well-nigh impossible to kick.

It is also where all the money is being made, startups or otherwise.

Unlike drug traffickers who tend to be stigmatized, these suppliers of spiritual dope are glorified, admired, viewed as icons, and rewarded with immense fortunes. With literacy no longer a prerequisite for working the LED panel, we are ushering in the age of zhaitong, or indoors kids, who would panic and grow restless when divorced from their LED panels. In the past, a suggestion of “let’s go outside” would be greeted with enthusiasm. Today you need all kinds of inducements to draw them out.

The small park opposite my home is monopolized by veteran citizens, grandparents and their grandchildren whose limbs are yet too feeble to hold the tabloids.

There are other explanations for the young people’s hesitation to enter the job market. Joe Wong, a talk show artist, quipped once that in America, people are born equal. But after their birth, their life will be subject to their education and medical coverage, which are dictated by their parents’ income.

Education used to afford a level playing field for aspiring Chinese, but today it is increasingly an investment, and it is very difficult for youth of humble beginnings to rise above their circumstances.

So much hinges on guanxi, your parents, or your uncles.

It’s easy to understand that this state of things instills in our youths a great deal of negativity, and naturally it’s unfair to place all the blame on them.

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