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Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

bbc.com

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Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#241

Post by toephu2 »

teknopaul wrote: post #46

I went to China and everyone i met was doing 9-5 monday to friday. A school leaver with no qualifications in his chosen career finds his first job is crap is not really world news. Change jobs and hang in there kid. China's unemployment rate is lower than the uk where this article originates. You have labour laws. The worst expected unpaid overtime hours i ever worked or saw worked was in a bank in London. 885 was to…

Making an anecdotal statement as a rebuttal based off a single visit to China isn't very authoritative either.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#242

Post by toephu2 »

yakuza00000 wrote: post #17

Poor Chinese Millennials. They are frustrated their country turned dictatorship. They are constantly monitored by the big brother, social credit score, public cameras that have facial recognition. Their words censored by wechat, and the great firewall. If they say something wrong, they will be watched and put on no travel list. There's no moving up the ladder; they're stuck trying to buy a $500k house with a meager $…

Every country has positives and negatives, you just listed the negatives.

Have you ever been to China recently? The major cities there are 10 years ahead of the West. No one uses cash anymore in China. You use your mobile phone to pay for everything... even the street food vendor or mom and pop stores accept Alipay or WeChat Pay. Public transportation is clean and efficient; new stops (for subway) and new routes (high speed rail) are added monthly. The pace of innovation is amazing. The cities are super safe (cameras everywhere) and clean too (no homeless, no human feces, or needles on the streets like in SF).

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#243

Post by seanmcdirmid »

barry-cotter wrote: post #240
thaumasiotes wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly possible as a Chinese person in China to enjoy a solid middle-class lifestyle based only on your ability to speak English.

If you can actually speak English to a level high enough to communicate effectively with monoglot English speakers this is absolutely true. Unfortunately lots of degree programmes that aim for that level of fluency do not achieve it. I’ve worked in Shanghai for the past six years. This is definitely one of the cities with the highest fluency in English in China. Most educated professionals have some basic competency…

Living in Beijing, I was amazed in Shanghai when the taxi driver actually spoke to me in English. That would just never happen in Beijing.

English wasn't uncommon in the professional world, however.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#244

Post by zdragnar »

DmenshunlAnlsis wrote: post #225
thaumasiotes wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is true that English is a required subject in Chinese high schools. This no more means that all Chinese college students can speak English than US high school foreign language requirements mean that American college students can all speak Spanish.

You’re right about most of that, and if you look at Japan it’s a similar situation with a similar outcome. It is however also not true that Americans have to take Spanish, they could just as easily take Latin.

That depends heavily on where you go. My high school only offered German and Spanish. I think a few years after I graduated they added either Japanese or Chinese, though that's because our school district was growing significantly year over year.

If you're not in a large school district / large city, your options as a student in a public school (and most private ones) are quite limited indeed.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#245

Post by woolvalley »

onlywei wrote: post #143
aurailious wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Millennials are now killing the Chinese manufacturing industry!"

The word "millenials" as a classification is not used in China. Everyone gets classified instead as 80后，90后，00后， etc. (meaning born after 1980, born after 1990, born after 2000, etc.). Because of China's rapid economic growth, the difference in attitudes for someone born in the 80s versus someone born in the 90s is actually very pronounced.

It's like metric vs imperial measurements for generations.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#246

Post by wollw »

sho wrote: post #198
stcredzero wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what my Chinese wife says about all that. People go to a monthly meeting. You hear a "sermon" and sing some patriotic songs. Then people go on with their lives. Not everyone who goes to church necessarily really believes. Not everyone necessarily believed even in the 1800s. That said, the social/theocratic hegemony of western Christianity wasn't all good, but it also wasn't all bad. The same probably goes for…

That sounds like a meeting for party members, often people (or the families of people) angling for local government jobs. Of course there'll be some True Believers but the subtext is it's basically a networking event. So yes, definitely like Church ;)

I find something ironic about this, but of course it's unfortunately true. Until last year my "Church" experience was mostly on and off spending time at a Buddhist monastery which was more about taking part in an isolated community and retreating from the world. Wanting to find something similar I started going to the local Anglican Church and being the studious kind of person I am decided to read the Book of Common Prayer, which includes the Articles of Religion[1] and in particular Articles XIII and XIV: Of Works before Justification & Of Works of Supererogation respectively. My understanding of it is that doing more work than needed is basically a Sin. Funny that until the mid-1800s these Articles were required for University students in Britain (and before Sir Isaac Newton students were I believe required to Ordain into the Church before Graduation). Part of me wishes they would make a come back.

[1] http://anglicansonline.org/basics/thirty-nine_articles.html

  XIV. Of Works of Supererogation.
  Voluntary Works besides, over and above, God's Commandments, which they call Works of Supererogation,
  cannot be taught without arrogancy and impiety: for by them men do declare,
  that they do not only render unto God as much as they are bound to do,
  but that they do more for his sake, than of bounden duty is required:
  whereas Christ saith plainly When ye have done all that are commanded to you,
  say, We are unprofitable servants.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#247

Post by seanmcdirmid »

virtuabhi wrote: post #193
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful with generalizing. Southerners, and very especially Fujianese, are less patriotic than Chinese in other parts of China, especially the north.

Careful with generalizing. Esp. with southerners in one bin, and northerners in the other bin.

Sure. However, if South China and North China were actually different countries, you would notice a distinct differences in the trends between both.

And if Fujian somehow became a part of Taiwan, you might not notice much difference in CPC support between the province and the island.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#248

Post by joejev »

ben509 wrote: post #95

> Pilots or train conductors, for example, can work longer shifts than the eight hours stipulated under Chinese law. I can't think of anyone who I'd less want to be working excessive hours than pilots.

What about a 9 hour flight? Bring 2 sets of pilots?

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#249

Post by AmericanChopper »

vkou wrote: post #186
thaumasiotes wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly possible as a Chinese person in China to enjoy a solid middle-class lifestyle based only on your ability to speak English.

It seems that is no longer the case.

It never really was the case. It's pretty much just a meme that's often repeated about China, and to some extent the rest of Asia. If you don't have marketable skills, then learning a second language simply makes you unmarketable in two languages.

Re: Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

#250

Post by nostrademons »

emodendroket wrote: post #234
nostrademons wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is such a thing as enlightened self-interest, where you consider not just what's good for yourself in the here-and-now but also whether the likely consequences to you (both natural and social) are going to be good. Dumping waste in the river may be cheaper now, but won't be if you get hit by a fine, or have to deal with an angry mob at the factory gates, or end up polluting your own drinking water supply.

The problem is you end up having to do a bunch of hedging like this. What if I have a lifetime supply of safe drinking water for my home and I am absolutely positive nobody will find out I'm dumping waste into the water? Or I'm sure I can blame it on someone else? If self-interest is all that matters this is a completely logical course of action (and I hardly need to point out that this isn't just some theoretical th…

...which is why people spend a significant amount of time dreaming up both incentives and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that it's not in one's self-interest to be really shitty to your neighbors.

It's not a perfect system - in particular, it's reactionary, which means that enough people a.) need to be harmed and b.) need to complain effectively before the broken incentives are fixed. In practice, it seems to work a lot better than societies where people act for the nebulous "common good", which always seems to end up being defined in a way that suits the self-interests of the people doing the defining anyway.

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