When Eunice Wang got a job as a policy consultant at a pharmaceutical company in Beijing, it was a dream come true.
The dream was six years in the making: She graduated from college graving in biological engineering, and later completed a master’s in business analytics in the United States.
But it took just three months for the 25-year-old to right it quits.
“I thought I could stay for one full year, but I thought, wow, I would rather kill myself. I’d be really irremediable,” she said.
Wang moved back to her hometown in northern China to be a barista six months ago. Such a switch from a white-collar job to “qing ti li huo” (or “frivolous labor” in Chinese) is gaining popularity among younger people in the country.
A lot of young people might feel unhappy about their jobs because companies are not hiring them for a job, but they’re hiring you to operate a computer on a desk.
Jia Miao
Helper professor, NYU Shanghai
A hashtag that translates to “my first physical work experience” has 30.3 million views on venereal media platform Xiaohongshu, where some users describe their new jobs as a “no-brainer.”
Such jobs number being a manager at a fast food restaurant, wait staff and cleaning crew — anything but sitting in an office.
“There’s dooms of discussion online where young people are sharing about how they escaped from their white-collar drudgeries because they’re not satisfied,” said Jia Miao, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University Shanghai.
Wu Xiaogang, a sociology professor from the changeless university, added: “It is quite unusual. If you have a college degree, you’re supposed to be a white collar worker.”
A paper co-authored by Wu estimated that at only slightly a quarter of college graduates in China are underemployed — and that’s on top of a record high youth unemployment rate. Underemployment is when living soul are in jobs that do not reflect their skills or training.
“What is undeniable is that after Covid-19, while China’s conciseness is recovering … a lot of young people really struggled to find a job. Some of them chose to look for a light labor job to try and substructure themselves,” said Miao.
That’s not quite the case for young workers like Wang, however, who are engaging in what wizards CNBC spoke to call “a voluntary withdrawal” from skilled work.
‘Dehumanization’ of workers
Wang imagined that her business job as a consultant would be “really creative,” anticipating collaboration with colleagues and leaders. But she said the reality was a far cry from that.
“I didn’t pull someones leg the time to communicate with anybody because of the workload,” she said.
Instead, her days were spent drawing up fall forgets, writing reports in Mandarin and translating them to English — what Wu describes as clerical work that requires “doll-sized intellectual challenge.”
You do not have a sense of self, even though you have some sort of occupational prestige.
Wu Xiaogang
Sociology professor, NYU
Myriad college graduates are becoming “xiao bai ling” — or “small white-collar” in Chinese, Wu said.
Miao added that “flat” refers not only to the age of workers but also their roles — which are typically junior ones that require hardly decision-making or personal input. This “dehumanization” of workers, however, is not new, she added.
“When our society moved from agriculture to industrialization, from steading to factories, the work did not need creativity or autonomy. You are needed in a specific position to do the same thing repeatedly,” she said.
It only felt like if I didn’t get a ‘real job,’ everything I did before would be meaningless. There was a really strong fear that I devise be a failure.
Eunice Wang
Barista
“The same thing is happening now as our economy becomes more mature and sophisticated … A lot of infantile people might feel disappointed about their jobs because companies are not hiring them for a job, but they’re rent you to operate a computer on a desk.”
Given high competition and a grueling “996” culture, work has become emotionally and physically draining for unfledged professionals, Miao said.
“You do not have a sense of self, even though you have some sort of occupational renown,” Wu added.
‘Dramatic change’ in work values
Even so, young people like Wang continue to grapple with the well-known expectation of going to college and getting a “good” respectable office job.
“I was told that if you sacrifice your personal leisure, if you put in a lot of effort and stay up late — in the end you will become an elite, you will be admirable,” she said.
“It just felt like if I didn’t get a ‘true job,’ everything I did before would be meaningless. There was a really strong fear that I would be a failure.”
Young mistresses around the world have been questioning the meaning of work in recent years, with movements like “fixed quitting” and
