What Internet Slang Tells Us About Youth Economic Prospects in China
Why are young people on Chinese social media talking about lying down, fishing in muddy water, looking for iron rice bowls, or wearing long robes? These are all Internet slang terms that reveal the bleak and cynical economic situations many young Chinese workers find themselves in. Despite record-high educational attainment and strong cultural expectations around hard work, many young people are struggling to navigate China’s modern economy, and they’re coining new vocabulary to describe their woes.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies work pressure in modern China better than the term “996.” It describes an intense working schedule—9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days a week—that leaves little room for a social life, hobbies, or anything other than sleep. Often expected of many office workers, it results in high rates of burnout and feelings of dehumanization. For the exhausted employees, they refer to themselves as “corporate cattle” (shechu), “wage slaves” (dagongren), or, for programmers specifically, “coding peasants” (manong).
Despite the hard work, the returns remain fleeting. Another viral term is “involution” (neijuan), which was borrowed from anthropology literature. It was originally used to describe the phenomena of agricultural societies whose farming practices became increasingly labour-intensive and complex, but did not result in better yields. More broadly, it describes an atmosphere of excessive economic competition, where individuals must continuously achieve more simply because other people are doing the same. Effort becomes self-defeating and is expended only to not fall behind, rather than to get ahead. A video of a Tsinghua University student working on his laptop while riding a bike went viral, becoming known as the “king of involution.”
Those who reject such pressure can choose to “lie flat” (tangping) or “let it rot” (bailan). These terms all describe a rejection of a culture of overwork through detachment: doing the bare minimum at work and accepting a life of little social mobility. With many traditional milestones of success, such as promotions, home ownership, or marriage, seen as perpetually out of reach, the lying flat movement embraces an indifference to professional development and an acceptance of a low-effort and low-desire lifestyle. At work, these people may be “fishing in muddy water” (moyu): pretending to be busy while actually slacking off.
But the employed are the lucky ones. The Chinese youth unemployment rate was 16 per cent in 2026, three points higher than the global average. In 2023, after the number hit a record 21.3 per cent, China’s National Bureau of Statistics suspended the publication of the statistic and later began publishing rates that separated job seekers who were and were not still in school. The current number, while a marginal improvement, is still startlingly high.
A whole host of new vocabulary has emerged to describe the struggle of being unable to find a job, a problem compounded by a mismatch between the millions of college graduates produced every year and the insufficient number of jobs available for them. The term “Kong Yiji’s long robe” (changshan) derives from a short story by the writer Lu Xun. In it, the titular character Kong Yiji is an educated scholar who fails to get a highly sought-after state official job. Nevertheless, he is too proud of his upper-class status to take off his scholarly robes and work in manual labour, resulting in his impoverishment. His plight has resonated with Internet users, who make self-deprecating references to their own high levels of education that have not resulted in a prestigious white-collar job, but have also rendered them overqualified and unwilling to perform blue-collar work.
Another pathway available for Chinese youth is to try for civil service jobs. Owing to their security and benefits such as subsidized housing, these jobs are known as “iron rice bowls” (tie fanwan) that can secure people for life, and have become especially attractive as private sector job growth stagnates. Rather than asking for a standard cover letter and resume, however, the path to China’s civil service requires a gruelling five-hour exam covering language, logic, culture, history, politics, and law. Last year, 2.83 million people registered to vie for one of 38,100 spots, with an applicant-to-position ratio of 98:1.
Taken together, these paint a cynical picture of what it’s like to be young in modern China. Since 1980, nearly 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty. From 1997 to 2020, the number of higher education institutions has doubled, and the number of people enrolled in college has increased ninefold. Many of them are the first in their families to go to college, often moving from rural areas to urban centres in pursuit of better jobs and higher earnings. Unfortunately, demand for high-skill labour has not grown enough to absorb the dramatic increase in supply, and the wage premium for college graduates has fallen by 19 per cent. Children who have grown up in a culture that places heavy emphasis on education have found themselves in a world that suddenly does not seem to care about said education. Sluggish economic growth, high social pressure, and fierce competition from 12.2 million other graduates have all contributed to the growing gap between young people’s economic expectations and their current realities. In this context, it would seem only natural that disillusionment would follow. The slang is only a byproduct.
In response, the Chinese government has pushed to encourage vocational education, having recently begun a campaign to increase the number of workers with practical training by 30 million by 2027 and revising laws that afford vocational programs the same status as academic ones. However, it is facing an uphill battle: cultural notions of the prestige and preferability of a university education are deeply rooted. It has also aimed to reduce intense working hours by outlawing the 996 schedule, although it remains unclear how these regulations are enforced. And it has attempted to curb involution through industrial policy, reducing price-cutting in industries such as electric vehicle manufacturing, though many of its policies rely on voluntary compliance from companies. Whether these efforts will meaningfully reduce overwork and excessive competition remains to be seen.
It would be remiss to claim that these pressures are anything but a more extreme version of the same phenomena that is going on globally. Around the world, young people are unemployed at disproportionate rates, facing the simultaneous challenges of stagnating economies, geopolitical uncertainty, and fears of displacement by artificial intelligence tools. These bleak circumstances do not inspire optimism around social mobility. In the developed world, a majority of people believe that children will be financially worse off than their parents.
Internet slang is mostly light-hearted, but masks a darker reality. The virality of these terms indicates that economic anxiety and disillusionment are widespread among young people, both in China and around the world. Youth discontent is not only a major economic challenge, but a social and political one as well. Eventually, these terms may evolve from mere coping mechanisms into something else entirely. How China, and the rest of the world, choose to deal with it will be the defining question.
Edited by Rafay Ahmed
Featured Image: “More people at work” by Maxime Guilbot is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
