by Mei Fong
They also experienced China’s expansion of higher education, which resulted in floods of graduates hitting the job market and high rates of unemployment. At the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1977, there were just 270,000 college spots available. Now 7 million college graduates flood the market yearly.
A typical kubi lament on Baidu, China’s Google, goes thus: “When we were elementary school students we had missed the free college education at that time. We became college students eventually with the expensive tuitions, increasing enrollment, and worse teaching. We were not ensured a decent job after graduation because of the frequent education and social reform during our student days.” While the one-child generation have it better than any other previous generation, they are competing in a fierce market economy. Yet their expectations have been fostered by their parents, who came from a background in which lifelong employment was a guarantee. It is this clash of expectations, I suspect, that is at the root of this malaise.
Another reason is growing restrictions on social mobility. When I first started writing about China in the late 1990s, there was a Horatio Alger–like sense that anybody could rise, provided they worked hard and were smart enough. People could look to examples like consumer electronics billionaire Huang Guangyu, who had risen from a peasant to become China’s richest man.
Ten years later the landscape had changed radically. Huang is now serving a fourteen-year sentence for bribery and insider trading, as are a handful of other newly minted billionaires lacking the right political backers. Gaps between rich and poor grew so wide, China for years stopped publishing its Gini coefficient, a measure of income disparity. (In 2013, China started publishing it again, but many dispute the official figures.) In just a decade, that sense of limitless opportunity appears to have been vastly diminished.
The members of the one-child generation who feel this most are those not fortunate enough to be born in China’s major cities. After graduation, they are drawn to these places in search of work, but lacking parental homes and big-city connections, they camp out in cramped lodgings with few amenities like running water or heat. In 2009, Peking University sociologist Lian Si coined the term ant tribe to describe these overworked and underpaid graduates.
Yet on the other end of the spectrum, employers also complain that Little Emperors have been raised with such high expectations, they make poor hires. In job ads, some employers expressly state a preference for candidates with siblings. China Railway Construction Group, the country’s second-largest state-owned construction enterprise, put out a want ad stating, “Non-only children college grads from rural areas have priority.”
A human resources manager quoted in Nanjing’s Jinling Evening News said, “We don’t hire two kinds of persons, the wealthy ones and single children.” An employee at a geological survey company in Henan said hires who were single children were quick to complain the job was too tough and quit. Also, parents of single children were quicker to object to the travel requirements of the job.
Another name associated with the Little Emperor generation—specifically male members of the tribe—is diaosi, a term for male genitalia that is slang for “loser.” The term is used by low-paid office drones who “take an ironic pride in their lack of prospects,” notes Wall Street Journal writer Josh Chin. Diaosi has become mainstream so quickly that Internet portal Sohu broadcasts an online comedy show called Diaosi Man. Since its 2012 debut the show’s episodes have been streamed over 1.5 billion times. The increasing popularity of this term—and all it represents—has alarmed the Communist Party, which, in a recent editorial in the flagship People’s Daily, called for an end to its usage. Entitled “Self Deprecation—It’s Time to Stop,” the essay said, “The danger it represents to the spirit of our youth cannot be ignored.”
I never ended up writing Liu’s story for the Wall Street Journal. Gentle forbearance did not make dramatic front-page material, and other news cropped up. In 2008, however, I bumped into Liu again at the Bird’s Nest Stadium on Olympics opening night. He was wearing his National Moral Hero medallion and snapping pictures. “Sister Fong! How nice to see you.” He beamed. We took a picture together. Of all the nation-building symbols and emblems present that night, Liu was probably one of the most representative, I mused.
“You should be out there on the field,” I joked.
He giggled. “I don’t think the country is ready.”
IV
One year after the Olympics, I left Beijing and moved to California. While there, I met game developer Jenova Chen, a baby-faced thirty-something who is a cult figure in the gaming world.
Chen made his name creating thoughtful, lushly designed products that are worlds away from typical gaming shoot-’em-up fare. His games are more like movies, meant to evoke complex emotions like nostalgia and awe instead of pure adrenaline surges. Chen has often been compared to Japanese cartoonist Hayao Miyazaki, one of his games is on permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, and MIT Technology Review named him one of the world’s top young innovators.
Despite this early success, Chen, product of the one-child generation, describes a state of constant pressure trying to live up to parental expectations. In traditional Chinese families, each sibling had a role to play, he said. “Being the single child meant I had to do all of them. I can’t fail because that’s all my family is counting on.”
Chen Senior was a civil servant, someone who’d grown up poor but managed by dint of hard work to make it to Peking University (Beida), the pinnacle of Chinese academic achievement. On his child’s first trip to Beijing, they skipped typical tourist sights like the Great Wall. Instead, the younger Chen was taken to Beida and Tsinghua, a move akin to taking an American child to visit Harvard and MIT. “That’s the only two places we went,” he recalled.
When Chen was fourteen, his father, sensing the coming Internet revolution, bought a personal computer for the teenager’s use. For mid-1990s China, this was a huge investment, like buying a Stradivarius for a kid just starting violin lessons. “Nobody had a computer at the time,” said Chen. His parents hoped to encourage Chen’s interest in computer programming, but all the teenage Chen wanted to do was to play computer games.
For Chen, playing computer games was a welcome escape from academic life, which he made sound like a bruising scholastic version of the Hunger Games. At the time, he was not only enrolled in one of Shanghai’s top high schools, he was in a special class for gifted students. “Every champion and medalist” in the city was in that class, he said. Each semester, the lowest-scoring students were cut and sent to the normal, nongifted class. They were deemed “losers.” Chen spent every semester’s end figuring out what his classmates’ scores were, calculating how safe he was from elimination. He made few friends.
His parents wanted to steer him to a safe, prosperous career working for a prestigious company like Microsoft. Chen, however, longed to create games like Legend of Sword and Fairy, the first game that ever made him cry. “Nobody expected video games to make you care, to talk about sacrifice and love,” he said. But telling his parents he wanted to be a game designer would be “like telling them I want to be a pornography director.”
After graduation, Chen went to USC for graduate studies, one of the school’s first batch of students to major in game design. For a student competition, he designed a game, Cloud, where players could simulate a sick child in the hospital—the asthmatic Chen had passed many such days—looking out of the window, fantasizing what it would be like to fly. So many people downloaded the game, it crashed USC’s servers and made local news.
“Most games are about primal feelings like violence, competition,” he said. He enjoyed those games growing up because they gave him a sense of power at a time when parental and academic pressures made him feel helpless. “But now I’m older, I want something more intellectual and relevant.”
Chen eventually founded a small studio in Santa Monica and secured a three-game deal with Sony. Chen spent years deve
loping Journey, a game depicting a nameless being’s lonely pilgrimage across a barren landscape. Sony executives had expected the game to be done in a year. Chen, a perfectionist, took three. In the process, his company ran out of money. Chen was forced to lay off a substantial portion of his staff while the rest were forced to take 50 percent pay cuts. Journey eventually went on to critical and commercial success, winning the D.I.C.E. Awards, the gaming industry’s equivalent of the Oscars, and becoming one of Sony PlayStation’s top sellers.
Even so, Chen feels his non-mainstream choices trouble his parents. He hasn’t, unlike some of his peers, made a killing on China’s burgeoning Internet market. He is in the precarious world of entertainment.
“There are only three jobs for Asian kids: lawyers, doctors, and engineers,” mocked Chen, ticking them off with his fingers. Such a narrow viewpoint is understandable in China, though. There, “your retirement plan is your child. When you’re the only child, your parents want to make sure their investment is well vested,” he said.
Several years later Chen’s mother had glaucoma surgery in Shanghai. The procedure was not a success, so Chen brought her to the United States for a corrective procedure. Chen’s mother’s insurance didn’t cover medical treatment outside China, so the operation ended up costing half of Chen’s savings.
In late 2014, he married. His bride, born in China but raised in Hawaii, is also an only child. Despite their reservations about the burdens imposed on an only child, the Chens will likely be a second-generation only-child family. “I don’t feel like I dare to have more than one child. I feel I can barely take care of my parents,” he said.
At the time I first met Chen, I was teaching a class at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School that prepped graduate students for summer jobs in Asia. Although it was titled “Global Journalism,” half the class consisted of students vying for a master’s in public relations.
Before the class started, I would get everyone to do an introductory spiel about their career goals: “In five years, I hope to be doing . . .” My students from China, who were mostly female, and mostly PR students, invariably said the same thing: in five years’ time, they hoped to be working in in-house PR. I was mystified by these near-uniform replies. Why in-house PR? Why not agency work? Why not running their own business? I was accustomed to the soaring confidence of people in their mid-twenties, who had not yet begun to realize their limits, whose shiny new edges hadn’t yet been worn down by nasty bosses, impossible deadlines, and crushing mortgages.
They told me: Well, in five years’ time, they would likely be married, with families. In-house PR, with its more predictable hours and routine, was easier.
Such answers made me wonder if there was some truth to the Little Emperor stereotypes. I didn’t believe that China’s one-child generation were significantly more spoiled than other generations. I did, however, suspect that they struggled with a weight of heavy expectations, not only because many were single children, but also because China’s rapid transformation and societal structure had shaped them to narrow their horizons early on, precisely at the time when they should be open to trying new things. Some of the problems stereotypically associated with only children appear true of this generation, not simply because they are only children, but because they are only children interacting with expectations and institutions unique to China.
Start first with the gaokao, the most searing, soul-destroying experience of any Chinese teen. In 1977, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, China reinstated the National College Entrance Exams, continuing a long tradition of test taking that began in the Song or Tang dynasty, with the world’s first civil service exams. While a civil service exam is not the same as a college entrance exam, this long tradition of test taking has fed the Chinese belief that this is the only meritocratic way to advance.
Exam taking became so ingrained in Chinese culture that in Yunnan Province, a local dish called Crossing Bridge Noodles was said to have been developed specifically for cramming scholars. As the story goes, a wife used to walk across a bridge to deliver a nocturnal noodle snack to her husband, who was up late studying. The noodles, however, cooled before she crossed the bridge. So she devised a way of keeping the dish hot with an insulating layer of oil. True or not, the story says a lot about national obsessions. Consider, by comparison, the English, whose contribution to the culinary world—the sandwich—came about through a desire to gamble unimpeded.
With success in examinations, a well-established form of social mobility, the gaokao became a be-all and end-all examination for every Chinese school-going person, starting in their early teens.
When I lived in China, I always knew when gaokao season arrived. Colleagues would take a couple of weeks, sometimes even a month, off work in order to help their kids through this crucial time. Traffic would be lighter. Heavy construction around test areas halted. Beijing’s smoggy skies would magically turn blue. I’d heard of parents who put their daughters on the Pill during gaokao so their focus wouldn’t be diminished by menstrual cramps. Parents would put toothpaste on their child’s toothbrush, just to save them those precious seconds to study.
In the year or two leading up to the gaokao, my Chinese students had twelve-hour school days and cram school on weekends, and they slept on average only four to six hours each night. The only children of China may not have had to compete with siblings, but they faced even fiercer competition with their peers.
While suicide rates in China among the young and college-going lag behind those of Japan, the United States, and Russia, test-taking pressure does take its toll. A 2014 Chinese government report looking at seventy-nine cases of suicide among students concluded that over 90 percent were caused by the pressures of China’s test-oriented educational system. Sixty-three percent of the suicides occurred between February and July, when the gaokao and other important exams are held.
My students who said they wanted to work in in-house PR weren’t necessarily lazy or unambitious. But the window for experimentation for a young person in China is much smaller than it is for Americans of a comparable age.
Dating, for example. With gaokao being a huge burden during the teenage years, they are all discouraged from distractions like the opposite sex—which isn’t to say, of course, that there’s no flirting or heartbreak. In 2007, a school in southern China even went so far as to ban hand-holding between male and female students. The top high school in Yizhou, a small town in southern China, issued rules stating boys and girls “should only talk together in well-lit places such as the classroom or hallway,” and “exclusive talk between one boy and one girl is prohibited.”
In China, the legal age for marriage for women is twenty (twenty-two for men). Women then have a window of about five to seven years before being considered officially too old for marriage, according to actual guidelines put out by the All-China Women’s Federation, the organization established by the Communist Party to protect women’s rights. After that, they’re on the shelf, a condition charmingly termed shengnu, or “leftovers.” With such a narrow window to make a life-changing decision, it’s no wonder one in five Chinese marriages ends in divorce now, double the rate a decade ago.
Popular blogger Han Han, the Holden Caulfield of his generation, describes it thus: “Most parents won’t allow their school-age children to date, and many are even opposed to their children dating when in college, but as soon as the kid graduates, the parents pray that all of a sudden, someone perfect in every respect—and if possible with an apartment of their own to boot—will drop out of heaven, and their child must marry them right away. Now, that’s well thought out, isn’t it?”
V
In 2012, Chen Hanbin sold the Beijing apartment his parents gave him, used the proceeds to buy two RVs, and embarked on a road trip around the world. Three years later he was still on the road, a modern-day Jack Kerouac chronicling his journey through short films and blogs.
Among his adventures: kickboxing in Thai
land, scuba diving in Australia, picking watermelons in Iraq, and cuddling cobras in India. His group, called No Turning Back, have lost their passports in Cuba and narrowly escaped an avalanche in Norway and an earthquake in Chile. Original members have drifted away and been gradually replaced by new dreamers.
When Hanbin announced his intentions on Chinese social media, China’s online community reacted predictably with encouragement, longing, and envy. But many commenters also voiced disapproval for his “unfilial” conduct and his abdication of parental responsibilities. One online user said, “If you have money to take care of your parents and use the leftover money to pursue your dream, then that’s fine and I’m all for it. But if you selfishly sell the family home and hurt your parents’ feelings, then that’s another matter.” I couldn’t imagine this kind of reaction if an American thirty-something had decided to do something similar.
I met Hanbin in Los Angeles just after he had completed a cross-country leg that started in Miami. He’d managed to persuade his parents—who’d been lukewarm about his journey from the start—to spend a month on the road, a decision that had ended with his father breaking down in the parking lot at Universal Studios. His father started crying, begging him to come home, said Hanbin. “He said, ‘Your life is too dangerous. Can you please not go on?’”
Hanbin couldn’t do it. Referencing Tennessee Williams’s “A Prayer for the Wild at Heart Kept in Cages,” he said, “Everyone has cages but China in particular is a cage. Everyone follows one path, everyone measuring how expensive your apartment is, what school you went to, living up to your parental expectations. . . . I want to define my own life.”
Was Hanbin selfish, or were his parents overly invested in their only child?
In 2012 Renmin University academic Du Benfeng coined the term one-child family risk. Wrote Du, “The one-child family has serious structural defects: injury and accident suffered by anyone in a family means disaster and even breakdown of this family, and the family is extraordinarily fragile.” (Du’s definition of fragile family structure contrasts with Western studies, where family fragility is mainly viewed through the lens of single-parent or unmarried households. These familial variations are relatively rare in China, in part because of the one-child policy’s effects.)