Youth Malaise: Fact or Fiction?
Hysteria regarding the plight of Western Youth obscures the fact that the situation in the East is much worse, at least economically.
Though historically politically unimportant, the plight of youth workers in the US has received more attention in the past year or two than historically. Whether approached from the angle of declining prime age labor force participation rates, increased automation, or a disintegrating social fabric (especially in the context of an unprecedented turn to fascism and communism among the terminally online American youth), it’s been hard to not hear something about the youth lately.
Separating fact from fiction is difficult, however: studies such as those conducted by the American political economist Nicholas Eberstadt suggest that a large portion of the decline in prime age labor force participation rates among young American men is due to increased incarceration, rather than a widespread and difficult to pin down social malaise turning otherwise competent men into voluntary NEETs. Similarly, the turn to political extremism is not necessarily a phenomenon driven by the youth: the shocking success of the Communist Party of Germany in recent Salzburg elections was, for example, driven by changes in voting behaviors across age cohorts, rather than solely by young voters.
Overall, it is probably better to speak of the “Stevenage Woman” as the driving force in contemporary western politics than a youthful “Stevenage Girl”. If Tony Blair’s popular success was owed to his appeal to the “Mondeo Man”, essentially a financially successful blue-collar worker, then the most important demographic for contemporary Western political campaigners is a disillusioned 40 something woman, whose wages have failed to keep up with inflation and the “cost-of-living” crisis. For now, the situation of the youth is merely concerning, not a life or death question of political economy.
If you look to the East the story is considerably different. There is a genuine crisis in both the living standards and economic opportunities of young Chinese workers, and, unlike their neurotic Western counterparts, young Chinese workers have much more to complain about on the economic front. Whereas American youth unemployment today stands at approximately 7.5%, youth unemployment in mainland China now approaches an extremely troubling 20%, per reliable sources.
Not only is this far outside a tolerable range, but the jobs that are accessible to modern Chinese zoomers have working conditions far below American standards. The infamous “996” schedule, or working 9am-9pm 6 days a week, is widespread, and competition for well paying jobs is increasingly confined to graduates of the most prestigious universities and the family members of well known and powerful party functionaries. Competition in education has reached an unsustainable zenith, and many lower class Chinese doubt whether their children can obtain social mobility through schooling.
These conditions threaten to result in open rebellion, and in fact one of the only things likely keeping the unsteady Middle Kingdom together is the legacy of the youthful Red Guard- a mass, student-led paramilitary social movement organized by Mao Zedong and unleashed on the public during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In an August 1967 editorial in the Red Flag magazine (an important source of propaganda during the Cultural Revolution), the Red Guard were encouraged to “pull out the handful of counterrevolutionaries within the army”. This editorial was read as a tacit encouragement of the Red Guard to attack military armories and seize weapons from the People’s Liberation Army, and inflamed local civil wars waged by Red Guard factions. Spurred on by these edicts and a desire for revenge against the bourgeoisie classes of 20th century China, the Red Guard spiraled completely out of control.
Professors, capitalists, and suspected enemies of the revolution were brought by the Red Guards on show trials before being summarily executed, and the entire People’s Republic of China nearly disintegrated into ecstatic violence and purges, led by the vulgar proletariat. The ensuing orgy of violence was only halted by the deployment of regular PLA military divisions, who brutally suppressed the Red Guards in 1967 and killed an unknown tens of thousands of students in the process.
If China doesn’t address the widespread inequality and youth unemployment affecting its youth, and soon, it risks engendering a modern Red Guard- one whose enemies would be many, from the relatively wealthy coastal elite to the aforementioned familial elite that has sprung up around Zhongnanhai and occupies the majority of important CCP administrative functions in a pseudo-hereditary fashion.
For all the popularly discussed political disfunction in the USA, this situation is much more desperate, and the loss of the Middle Kingdom to infighting or a modern “Heavenly Kingdom”/Taiping Rebellion would be a tragedy on a global scale unseen since the Holocaust. One can only hope that Beijing is able to address this crisis before it reaches a boiling point.