"China’s brightest students are increasingly choosing police academies, government-funded teaching programs, and other paths to permanent state employment," according to hedge fund manager Ken Cao this weekend, "even when their scores qualify them for elite universities."
Japan-based Cao, who also publishes The China Crash Chronicle online, added that "Instead of building the next Alibaba, top graduates are memorizing exam questions for government jobs with thousands of applicants per opening."
I don't know how to say "It's the economy, stupid" in Chinese — but that's exactly what it is.
Business Insider reported earlier this year that while economic growth was strong in 2025 "on paper," under the surface of official government statistics, "things were not as anodyne."
"Many young Chinese millennials and Gen Zers, who are trading down on everything from fashion to career ambition, are gripped in a deep sense of morass," BI reported. "The stepping stones to a solid, middle-class life seem to be sinking away, and the promise of long-term financial stability is crumbling as the housing market does the same."
It's all part of the "lying flat" trend among young Chinese adults that eschews competition, overwork, and high expectations in favor of a low-effort, low-expectation lifestyle. Here, we used to call them slackers. "Lying flat" first came to prominence in the West five years ago, when the CCP media apparatus went to war against it, calling lying flat "shameful" and deleting favorable social media posts.
Things really heated up this spring, when Beijing decided the whole thing must be some nasty foreign plot against the Party's benevolent rule.
When the Wall Street Journal report crossed my desk back in April, I didn't think much of it. "The youth represent the future of the nation and are the primary targets for ideological infiltration by foreign anti-China hostile forces," the Ministry of State Security, the WSJ reported at the time. The MSS said "certain overseas organizations" funded "anti-China media outlets, think tanks and influencers," as the Journal put it, "and have carried out a systemic 'lying-flat brainwashing' campaign."
When a Communist government says that "foreign forces" are "brainwashing" the country's young people, well, that's the kind of bat-guano stuff Communists always say to deflect from their own failures.
But there's something else interesting going on here, one of those cases where history might not repeat, but it certainly does rhyme.
By the start of the Brezhnev era — and the resulting stagnation — a younger generation of so-called "careerists" (карьеристы) began swelling the Communist Party ranks. These weren't the "Old Bolshevik" true believers, or the "Please Don't Shoot Me, Comrade" generation from the Stalin era. For them, the CPSU wasn't about revolutionary zeal, but about securing a decent career, a better apartment, maybe even a personal car.
The Party evolved into little more than a vast patronage network, where "promotions and privileges were awarded based on loyalty rather than merit," thus "creating an entrenched elite resistant to change," as Tutor Chase put it.
The reason Soviet history merely rhymes with today's China is that China does have a functional private sector. While it's in most ways subservient to the CCP, Chinese entrepreneurs built a global powerhouse in almost nothing flat — starting from virtually nothing.
If recent news is true about young Chinese "lying flat" or jockeying for hard-to-get government positions instead of entering the private sector...
...well, let's call that what it really is: a vote of No Confidence in China's private sector under Comrade Xi.
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