The kids are not alright

Nuanced account details how China's blessed generation has been replaced by one consumed by fear and hopelessness.

- ANNA FIFIELD

Some Chinese university students last year marked their graduations not by posing with their degree certificates but by lying face down, zombie-style, on college steps and lawns. The phenomenon, posted across Chinese social media, embodied the idea of "lying flat", used by the generation born after 2000 to express the widespread feeling that they won't be able to get ahead so why even try?

How did China change, in a generation, from a country where kids born in the boondocks could grow up to be big-city slickers to one where 20-somethings feel so dejected about their prospects they are literally lying down?

Fortunately for us, esteemed New Yorker journalist Peter Hessler has a new book to tackle that question. And with it, he poses a bigger and even more perplexing question: how can China have gone through such enormous economic and social change but remained politically stagnant? Or worse: regressed?

OTHER RIVERS: A Chinese Education

by Peter Hessler

(Allen & Unwin, $39.99)

Hessler moved to Fuling, a town in southwestern China where the Wu and Yangtze rivers meet, in 1996 to teach at a teachers' college. In his first memoir, River Town, he describes how most students were the first from their extended families to attend university and in many cases their parents were illiterate.

In 2019, he returned to China as a teacher, this time to Sichuan University in Chengdu, also in the southwest and also on the banks of a river, the Fu. There, he taught a nonfiction class, with texts including George Orwell's Animal Farm, which the increasingly dystopian system didn't seem to mind.