For decades, Chinese society was built around an almost unrelenting pursuit of success. Since the early days of the Reform and Opening up era, “time is money, efficiency is life” was not just a slogan but a guiding ethos. The economy delivered double-digit growth year after year, and success became both a promise and a requirement. To succeed meant to live with dignity; to fail meant to be cast out. Families spent fortunes on tutoring classes, students faced suffocating pressure (with suicides after exam setbacks becoming grimly familiar), and entrepreneurs spoke endlessly about their “success stories” while quietly burying the unseemly details of how their first fortunes were made. In a country obsessed with upward mobility, failure was unforgivable.
I was born in Hebei, one of the provinces once derisively referred to as part of China’s “Mountains-and-Rivers Four” – regions known for scarce educational resources and overwhelming populations. For generations, students there have endured the brutal gauntlet of the gaokao, the college entrance exam often described as “thousands of troops crossing a single-plank bridge.” More than a decade ago, I was one of the few who managed to cross it. The exam changed my life: I left the countryside, entered the city, studied abroad, and eventually became an urban resident. For years, my story was retold in my hometown as a model of success, a reminder to parents that education could still offer an escape from China’s entrenched urban-rural divide and the cruel “scissors gap” of opportunity.
Yet on my most recent trips back, I was struck by conversations that would have been unimaginable only a decade ago. Parents no longer speak obsessively about their children’s test scores. Instead, they share a grim realism: even in the cities, prospects are bleak. The coveted positions in state-owned monopolies are all captured by the children of officials and state-owned enterprise (SOE) executives. Private firms are synonymous with endless overtime and burnout. Low-end work – delivering food, driving ride-hailing cars, cleaning homes, or working as security guards – barely sustains a living and is seen as no more dignified than staying in the village, marrying early, and caring for aging parents.
Where once families poured every resource into forcing their children ahead in the race, today many adopt a posture of resignation, letting things take their course. The schools remain as grueling as ever, still pushing millions through rote memorization and suffocating competition, but the faith that education is the ladder out has quietly, and perhaps irreversibly, eroded.
A society once intoxicated by “success studies” now looks more like what some Chinese call a “loser’s nation.” According to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions’ most recent survey, over 84 million people work in new forms of employment such as ride-hailing, delivery, and courier services. That number nearly equals the Chinese Communist Party’s 99 million members. These jobs, once stigmatized as the preserve of society’s dropouts, have become part of the mainstream economy.
The disillusionment is not simply resignation to harsh reality but a recognition that personal success is inseparable from the failures of the system itself. Over the past decade, China’s leadership has lurched from one grandiose project to another – from the Belt and Road Initiative, which left Beijing bailing out indebted partners; to the Xiongan New Area, touted as a “city of the future” but already resembling a ghost town, to the zero-COVID policy that collapsed under its own contradictions after years of brutal lockdowns and inadequate vaccines. Each policy ended in costly retreat, yet those at the helm escaped accountability.
For ordinary citizens, the lesson is plain: if the state can preside over such visible, repeated failures without consequence, what meaning does individual effort hold? It is little wonder that many have come to see the entire system as a stage play – lavish in rhetoric, hollow in execution, and incapable of redemption.
This disillusionment is also closely tied to the economy’s slowdown. Official statistics report that GDP grew by around 5 percent in 2024, yet many economists suggest the real figure may have been closer to 3 percent. The credibility gap in China’s numbers is no longer a whispered suspicion but an open discussion.
Meanwhile, the job market paints a sharper picture of strain. In early 2025, the urban unemployment rate for 16-24-year-olds (excluding students) soared to 16.9 percent, the highest since the data was reintroduced – more than triple the national average. Yet even this understates the problem, because the government’s narrow definition of employment counts anyone who works just an hour a week as “employed.” Meanwhile, entire categories of underemployment or rural joblessness are absent from the data. Behind the façade of stability lies a far more precarious reality.
The effects are palpable in social choices. China’s young people are opting out of the success rat race. “Lying flat” has become a cultural expression of quiet resistance – not laziness but a recognition that the rewards no longer match the effort. The civil service exam has become a modern-day lottery to job security. In 2024, roughly 3 million candidates passed the qualification stage, facing a competition ratio of about 77:1, and in 2025, that number climbed to 3.4 million, pushing the ratio to 86:1. Some positions drew over 16,000 applicants for a single slot, and regions like Tibet saw competition nearing 150:1.
At the same time, the number of new graduates has continued to swell, reaching a record 12.2 million in 2025, intensifying competition in an already saturated market. Add to this the notorious “35-year-old crisis,” where workers are systematically pushed out of the job market before middle age, and the pursuit of stability over ambition becomes not just rational but inevitable.
The cultural trajectory is striking. A society that once idolized entrepreneurs and celebrated commercial risk-taking has turned back to the old logic of administrative power. In the 1990s and 2000s, the market was king, and wealth creation – however unscrupulous – conferred prestige. Now, as economic dynamism falters, China is reverting to a centuries-old tradition: reverence for the state and those who serve it. Young people no longer dream of starting companies or making fortunes; they dream of securing a government post, with its modest salary but ironclad stability.
This transformation is both a symptom of economic decline and a cultural regression. Success has lost its appeal because it seems structurally unattainable, while failure has lost its stigma because it has become universal. In today’s China, to be an overworked delivery driver or a jobless graduate is not a shameful exception but an increasingly common fate. The very idea of the “Chinese Dream,” once trumpeted as a collective vision of prosperity and renewal, now feels hollow. What remains is a nation reconciled with failure – not as a stage on the road to success, but as a semi-permanent condition.