This Lunar New Year holiday season, China’s leaders are worried the kids aren’t all right.
The ruling Communist Party already has its hands full with young Chinese who prefer to “lie flat” in the face of a slumping economy, “let it rot” rather than join the job-seeking rat race or “run” abroad to escape eroding personal freedoms.
Now, the passive resistance of millennials and Gen Z has spread to the annual tradition of celebrating the Lunar New Year with family. Many young Chinese are choosing to “duanqin” — literally meaning to “cut off relatives,” or shun interactions with one’s extended family — rather than go home for the week-long holiday that runs through this weekend.
Bella is one of those who chose not to go home for the holidays, often the only time Chinese workers get enough time off to make the trek back to their hometowns for days of feasting and familial duty. This year, an estimated record 9 billion trips — involving millions of people on planes, trains and cars — have taken place over the Lunar New Year period.
The 26-year-old jazz band manager and art therapy consultant was not one of them. Bella, who spoke on the condition that only her English first name be used to talk about sensitive relationships, decided she no longer felt guilty about skipping the long journey from the green hills of Zhejiang province in southeast China — where she lives in a community for digital nomads — to her freezing hometown on the border with Russia.
“I could feel the third-degree of traditional morality,” she said about the pressure in past years to go back. But after one too many “toxic” exchanges with her parents, Bella didn’t even bother with an excuse this year.
Instead, she welcomed in the Year of the Dragon by feasting and painting dragons at a gathering organized by a friend, whose (much more easygoing) parents were visiting. The next few days were bliss: a hike through bamboo forests, meditating by a river, dancing in her underwear on a hillside, chilling in a cafe playing her drum.
“Here in the community, I have enough freedom. If I want to be with everyone, then I can. If I want to spend time alone, then I can. But at home, that freedom disappears,” she said.
Bella is not alone in thinking the annual pilgrimage home is more trouble than it’s worth. A growing number of recent graduates, already stressed by the pressure of finding a job and building a career, are choosing to skip out entirely on family reunions and focus on travel and having fun with friends.
Many are fed up with outmoded holiday traditions and crushing family expectations. They chafe at the excess of grand banquets and lavish gift-giving and loathe the intense pressure to settle down and have children.
If all home has to offer is endless clashes with relatives over money, marriage and lifestyle, they ask, then why bother?
Heated conversations with pushy relatives are hardly unique to China, but the country’s powerful leader, Xi Jinping, has made traditional notions of family and childbirth a political priority as he seeks to avoid a looming demographic crisis.
Today, faced with a rapidly shrinking population worsened by decades of limiting most families to one child, the Communist Party leadership has been promoting patriarchal gender roles in hopes of a baby boom — hopes heightened this year by zodiac beliefs about dragon babies being extra auspicious.
Many young people in the country fear internal family strife is especially intense because the jarring speed of economic development created a massive generation gap.
“China used 30 years to go through a process of economic development that took 200 years in the West, but Chinese people’s spiritual world hasn’t developed that quickly,” said Comyn Wu, a 21-year-old college student studying advertising in Changsha, Hunan province. “I feel like my ideas and those of my parents are separated by a dynasty.”
Wu doesn’t expect he will change his mind and return in future years to his small hometown on the banks of the Xiang River, even though it is only an hour’s drive south of where he is studying, because for him the holiday is, at its core, meaningless “feudal rubbish.”
If it wasn’t for the economic slowdown, he reckons more friends would follow his example, but some can’t find jobs, so they rely on their parents for income. “When the economic situation permits, a lot more people will want to spend the holiday alone or with friends who provide emotional support,” he said.
Urbanization, unpleasant interactions with relatives and a generation of people glued to smartphones have all contributed to fraying family bonds becoming an “objective fact,” said Hu Xiaowu, a sociologist at Nanjing University.
Young professionals trying to support themselves are often stressed and kept busy by “involution,” Hu said, using a popular term for putting in huge effort without seeing any real results. “Involution means less free time,” he said. “Without free time, it’s hard to keep up relations.”
State media has responded to the rising popularity of self-estrangement with some sympathy and a lot of cajoling, telling Gen Z to suck it up and stop being scrooges.
“It can’t hurt to be more understanding of young people,” the state-run Fujian Daily newspaper wrote beneath a cartoon of a young woman running away from a barrage of questions as she attempts to destroy a megaphone.
“As for the youngsters,” the article says, “instead of shirking reality by ‘cutting off relatives,’ it would be better to actively communicate and mend the generational estrangement to maintain family ties.”
In a sign of official unease, a video game called “Epic Showdown: New Year Reunion” was taken offline days after it proved a surprise hit. It used an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to mimic exchanges with aunts and uncles that often escalated into intense probing about dating and offspring.
The developers blamed “technical problems” but hinted at dissatisfaction from authorities. “We won’t forget our original aspirations to bring everyone warm and high-quality visits over the New Year,” the company said in a statement that used a Communist Party slogan.
Official propaganda has used the festivities as a chance to underscore Confucian beliefs about an orderly family being the bedrock of a stable and prosperous society.
The importance of being a dedicated husband, son, wife and daughter was front and center in this year’s Spring Festival Gala, a variety show put on by the state broadcaster and used as a kind of celebratory wallpaper in most Chinese households over the holidays.
This year, it included schmaltzy comedy skits extolling the virtues of putting in work to maintain a happy nuclear family. In one sketch, an emotionally stilted dad couldn’t work out how to openly praise his teenage son, despite being secretly very proud of him. Every time he tried, the attempt at kindness turns into admonishment.
At the last minute, when the son is about to leave, he has a breakthrough. “Son,” the actor intones, “you really are Mom and Dad’s pride.”
To tear-jerking music, he gives his kid a thumbs-up.
But a made-for-television happy ending isn’t so easy for everyone. For Lily Zhang, family criticism of her “rebellious” lifestyle became too much last year. Her parents — who don’t know she is gay — responded to her failed graduate school application by pressuring her to see a matchmaker and get married. When she refused, they stopped supporting her financially.
She decided to block all of her relatives and is spending the holiday with her girlfriend in the countryside of southwest Yunnan province. It’s not easy to pay back student loans as a freelance writer, but the couple’s rented village home is cheap and they save money by growing their own vegetables.
“I thought I could do everything: make money at work, be on good terms with my parents and grandparents, make us into a normal family, but I realized I wasn’t taking care of myself,” she said. “I think cutting off bad relationships is necessary to survive.”