Young Chinese are getting paid to be 'full-time children' as jobs become harder to find | CNN Business
Young Chinese are getting paid to be 'full-time children' as jobs become harder to find | CNN Business
Exhausted by the pressure to succeed as a photographer, Litsky Li accepted a better offer: quit work to become one of China’s growing legions of children paid by their families to stay home.
A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.
Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn't make a country communist.
Their land use rules... that makes them communist-ish. But that's a small part of a far larger picture.
Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish
Wouldn't go that far...
It's hard to pretend China is in any way communist when they have rampant wealth inequality and the wealthiest run the government.
China is socialist. Socialism is serving as the stepping stone on the path from the previous system to full Communism. Socialism serves as an important developmental stage as antagonisms from within (counter-revolutionary forces) and without (imperialist powers) are resolved.
It’s hard to pretend China is in any way communist when they have rampant wealth inequality
First, China does have wealth inequality, but its middling in its severity.
(The key is on the linked Wikipedia page, but darker has higher income inequality).
China has a Gini index of 38.2% in 2019, putting them at 71 out of 168 in national rankings. The USA has a Gini index of 39.4% in 2020, putting them at 107 out of 168. (Lower Gini index, and lower ranking are better). The worst nation, South Africa, has a Gini index of 63.0% as of 2014; the best nation, the Faroe Islands, has a Gini index of 22.71% as of 2018^1.
Moreover, wealth inequality has been decreasing in China for about a decade^2, whereas our point of reference, the USA, has seen its inequality steadily increase over the same time span^3. Wealth inequality is also not unexpected in a rapidly developing economy such as China: initially, as the economy grows, certain people financially benefit more than others and wealth inequality increases; over time as the economic growth stabilizes, and with a concerted effort to combat it, wealth inequality levels out and then decreases, as we see happening. Income inequality is not automatically horrible: careful attention needs to be paid to the bottom of the income rankings; comparatively, high wealth inequality is less of a problem if the bottom is not in poverty than if they are. This ties in to my next point,
the wealthiest run the government.
This is not true at all. Wealth does not buy political power or influence within the CPC (or indeed in the Chinese government overall); nor does having power or influence in the CPC enable one to amass more wealth. Those who are wealthy work with the party, as members, to further the goals of the Party to improve everyone's lives, rather than working selfishly against the party to further their own personal goals. To paraphrase Boer[^4], "The private entrepreneurs have not become a class in itself with associated class consciousness, but many have become CPC members or non-party supporters. The social and cultural assumption is that those that have benefited from wider support must contribute to the well-being of others". That is, those who are wealthy do not get to exert outsized influence by way of being wealthy, and do not sit back and glorify their wealth, but instead work by giving back and improving the well-being of others.
The CPC is extremely developed and works for the people; large companies have branches of the party that help steer them. All enterprises (state-owned, private, or foreign) produce annual "socialist responsibility reports" which guarantee that their actions are not putting profit before the goals of the society as a whole: poverty alleviation, environmental improvement, education, and more.
Socialism (and indeed communism) is a structural form that dictates a government's (and economy's) purpose and its relation to society and its members. The goal of a socialist government is to improve the material and cultural lives of its people. To a Westerner, it seems foreign or fantastical that a country could genuinely operate with this goal in mind, and so people would rather say "it's not real socialism", or say that "because it has some problems, it's all bad", than to acknowledge that no system is perfect and as long as the system works to fix its issues and help its people, it is on the right track.
The OP has a non-nuanced and seemingly uninformed opinion on China as well,
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.
They are not capitalist. Infrastructure spending is also not what determines whether they are capitalist, socialist, or something else. Moreover, nobody is arguing that a strong central government determines whether they are communist or not. To say that China is capitalist is a category error and falls into the trap that dictates that using aspects of a market economy automatically negates socialism and makes a system capitalist. I've written a bit more in depth on it elsewhere, but plenty of sources dive in to why China is indeed socialist and why it is faulty to see them as capitalist. Chapter 5 ("China's Socialist Market Economy and Planned Economy") from Richard Boer's book I've cited above serves as a good overview of why it is a category error to call China capitalist.
[^4]: Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. Boer, Roland.
Good reply, thank you.
And I'll defer to your categorization and consider the reading recommendation.
I weighed calling them socialist, but it seemed... unhelpful when what i was trying to highlight that the unemployed youth are relying on family, and not the state.
The responses yesterday seemed to think China is just giving away money. They aren't.
Also: all developed nations are socialist. What people argue over is where lines are drawn.
I love how you can give a detailed explanation, and libs just freak out and downvote because it doesn't fit with their narrative.
Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107. It's fair to say both countries have "rampant income inequality" right now. Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally "capitalist" countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.
The CPC is extremely developed and works for the people; large companies have branches of the party that help steer them. All enterprises (state-owned, private, or foreign) produce annual “socialist responsibility reports” which guarantee that their actions are not putting profit before the goals of the society as a whole: poverty alleviation, environmental improvement, education, and more.
Forgive me as you've written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about "working for the people". Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they're fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.
To view a text only version of CNN pages, replace "www" with "lite". https://lite.cnn.com/2023/07/26/economy/china-youth-unemployment-intl-hnk/index.html is about 50 kB, whereas the original is about 2.7 MB.
"Excess infrastructure spending" I've spotted the republican.
It sounds strange, but it is something that the Chinese national government has made policy to rein in. This includes a national ban on new skyscrapers and subway lines. If the national government has to ban different types of infrastructure to be built, it can be a sign of excessive spending.
As far as I know, the ban on skyscrapers is due to safety concerns and a sense of identity which make sense, vertical urban planning is good but the best middle point is buildings that are neither too small (because you are not taking advantage of the vertical space) nor too tall. This is not much different from US zoning laws, which work to appease to the car industry lobbyists.
Regarding subway lines, I can't find any information about that, just that they banned drinking in such places.
Ad hoc and poison the well while being very wide of the mark, too.
Nicely done.
My politics align more with Sanders than anyone well known politician. Surplus is surplus and the left needs to retain the right to call a spade a spade.
Not all infrastructure spend is good. I'm both envious of what they have and stymied by articles documenting unused cities.
For ease of research, I recommend "China ghost cities." Maybe those cities will make sense and not every idea has to work, but that is surplus, ergo excess.
Most of the things that you mention as "ghost cities" and so on are simply they building in the long term, for the people, so that they can be in a later time be populated. Here's a good example of a YouTube channel who made a video about "ghost" metro station a few years ago, recently they did an update, and it is no longer a place without a purpose but actively being inhabited.
brb moving to China
You need to find Chinese parents first.
Or parents. Period.
Really weird phrasing by cnn, and strange that the Chinese youth take it upon themselves online, since they're performing work that is very common in China, being a nanny or a housekeeper, and getting paid in room and board. They aren't "professional children," they are professionals who happen to be the children of their employer.
Despite the youth working at home and being paid, the article keeps using the phrase" professional children" as if they're being paid to act like children.
Totally aside from that, what makes you think the land use laws in China make China more communist? The US has essentially the same rules, that if you don't name a beneficiary, your assets are often allocated to the state.
As far as I understand, as long as you name a beneficiary in China, the 70-year lease on your property/ real estate can be renewed indefinitely by any directly named beneficiary.
Is that correct as far as you understand real estate laws in China?
This is basically my understanding.
Got it. When you get down to the individual level, this is what real estate law is like concerning land ownership that I'm referring to.
"Each buyer registers his/her real estate title at the local registry and obtains a real estate certificate (or a land use right certificate and a building ownership certificate in transactions closed before 1 March 2015) in respect of the residential property he/she purchased. The buyer will enjoy ownership of the residential property for the remaining term of the 70-year land grant. Under PRC law, the buyer’s title will be automatically renewed at the end of the 70-year initial land grant (although the legal procedures for title renewal have not yet been legislated"
It looks like there is two different things happening.
First is that the one child policy is causing problems with several grandparents being supported by one grandchild. In this case, it seems like the grandparents are paying a salary to their grandkid to support them in elderly care. It may not be a lot of money, but it seems to be enough for the adult grandchildren to live for what is effectively a part time job.
Second is that the economy going through issues, and grandparents are acting as unemployment insurance.
Li, 21, now spends her days grocery shopping for her family in the central city of Luoyang and caring for her grandmother, who has dementia. Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.
That just sounds like a caregiver. Laura He and Candice Zhu can eat shit if they do not think that is a real job. Caring for someone with dementia is not a walk in the park.
That certainly sounds a lot better than the prospects young people living in US or Canada have. Also, why would you start with 16 years of age? I realize child labour has been noramlized in US, but in civilized countries 16 year olds go to school instead of having to work.
Finally, this seems pretty in line with Europe https://www.statista.com/statistics/613670/youth-unemployment-rates-in-europe/
So, basically this is a lazy propaganda story as can be expected from CNN when covering China.
Let’s not pretend how trust fund babies work in the US
Is everyone just a Capitalist deep down inside?
No, and to paint everything this way serves to delegitimize alternatives to capitalism. China is not capitalist, they are socialist. They have their own problems, because no system is perfect. But there are alternatives to capitalism, and not everything is "secretly capitalism in disguise".
Greed and envy (the roots of capitalism) are basic human drivers that we all have. It takes a lot of discipline, ethics, and an altruistic moral code or belief system to negate that. Some individuals are capable of that, but there is no societal system that has been able to overcome it.
We would never be able to completely move away from a capitalist system because it's in our nature to want more, to be rewarded for our efforts, and to be jealous of others. It's also why alternative systems never work as intended - the greed turns into corruption and ends up ruining the system.
The best outcome is to establish guardrails that limit the extent of the greed that is allowed in the system.There's no true Scotsman. China is both and neither. The US is both and neither. You need to talk about specific policies as one or the other.
Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.
So…they are unemployed?
It says right there there's a salary. She's nepotistically employed as a caregiver.
If you think that's not a "real job", that's basically a cultural judgement, which I guess you can make, but then there's dudes that think only steelworkers have a real job.
Why would you want for young people to work? Is your idea for a utopia to have 15 year olds working at a McDonalds for minimum wage?
If the youth can focus on studying and improving themselves that is what they should do. Maybe it is because of the strong US "work ethics" but where I live unless you are under extreme poverty you focus on studying until you are 25 at least. We have free healthcare and education, so we have it much easier than people in the US, though.