With youth unemployment at a record, the Communist Party is trying to reset expectations about social mobility by talking up the virtue of hardship.

This article looks like a goldmine, but I don't have time to read it all and won't be interested in doing that once I have the time. Here's my favorite paragraph of the part I read:

Today the party’s propaganda machine is spinning stories about young people making a decent living by delivering meals, recycling garbage, setting up food stalls, and fishing and farming. It’s a form of official gaslighting, trying to deflect accountability from the government for its economy-crushing policies like cracking down on the private sector, imposing unnecessarily harsh Covid restrictions and isolating China’s trading partners.

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  • IceWallowCum [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    spinning stories about young people making a decent living by delivering meals

    Wait, fake stories about people making a living in service work? 🤔

    making a decent living by (...) fishing and farming

    Oh no!

      • Gucci_Minh [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        The 5000 year old question in China has always been how the fuck do we feed all these people with this little arable land. Every single dynasty rises and falls with how well they organize and manage this issue. With so little land to farm on, modern China relies heavily on imports, mechanization, and clever ideas like terrace farms, greenhouses etc. to get by.

        So to answer your question, no, because there's not enough land and the trend is the other way around where rural farmers migrate to the city to find work. However I still see small 1 acre sized plots that are worked by one family being fairly common in the space between cities, but even those are getting less common.