The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
October 25, 2026
Dali, Yunnan
video (2 minutes 31 seconds)
https://stories.smh.com.au/lisa-visentin-china-dalifornia-91421
With China’s economy slowing and youth unemployment rising, exhausted, disillusioned young people are seeking relief from the grinding pressures of modern life.
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Jenny Chan, an associate professor of sociology at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said that the persistence of themes of exhaustion and despondency for half a decade after the tang ping movement took off pointed to an entrenched malaise among younger generations.
“They are not just lazy or unmotivated,” she says, but rather the traditional formula of hard work “didn’t give them a clear pathway to get to the next step”.
