China’s Reform Generation Adapts to Life in the Middle Class

Even when they participated in city activities, their rural roots were often visible. In June of 2021, Linda and Huang Dong’s son took the gaokao, the multiday national college-entrance exam. On the first morning, I met the family at the entrance to the testing site in Fuling. In Chinese cities, it’s become a tradition for exam-day mothers to dress up in fancy qipao outfits, and Linda dutifully wore red silk, with her long hair neatly braided. When I complimented her on the dress, she said proudly that she weighed the same as she had in college.

Over the years, the gaokao has become increasingly stressful, but nobody in Linda’s family was visibly nervous. “Be confident,” Linda told her son, before he walked through the gate. The moment the boy was out of sight, his parents began to speak dismissively of his chances.

“He hasn’t prepared very well,” Linda said. When I asked what her son hoped to do in the future, she shook her head: “He doesn’t have any goals.”

“He just needs to find some kind of stable job,” Huang Dong said. “His mind isn’t nimble enough for business. If you’re not completely focussed on everything these days, you’ll lose money. He shouldn’t be a teacher, either. It’s too demanding.”

They continued in this vein for a while. The previous year, I had accompanied North when he dropped off his boy at the exam, and North’s remarks had been similar. This was another pattern that I associated with rural Chinese, who sometimes attempt to ward off bad luck through negativity. And it reminded me of the letters I had received two decades earlier, when my students were embarking on their marriages. He is not very handsome. There are many black points on her face. The month after the gaokao, Linda wrote that her son had tested into a good university, and that was exactly what had happened with North’s boy, a year earlier.

Sometimes North regretted his decision to leave his position at the hot-pickled-mustard-tuber company. In 1997, when I visited him at his first job, I was skeptical of his prospects, but he rose in product sales. Eventually, he was made chairman of a subsidiary in Guizhou Province, and he represented the company on business trips to Malaysia. He bought five apartments, including one in Fuling’s most luxurious new development. I sensed that one reason he left the hot-pickled job was that he admired the independence of his former roommates, Anry and Youngsea.

But North worried that he had started too late. Nowadays, Chinese often speak of neijuan, a word that’s usually translated as “involution”: a kind of self-defeating competition. When North started his elevator business, there were only a few competitors, but by 2020 there were more than a dozen. The margins were falling fast, and every time I visited North there was a neijuan quality to the surveillance-camera feeds on his phone: all these little boxes, all over town, all of them potential sites of conflict and negotiation. North said that the hardest part was dealing with people who resided on lower floors. They paid nothing for a new elevator, but even when they agreed to a project they tended to change their minds as construction proceeded. They couldn’t bear the idea of upstairs neighbors getting benefits: after an elevator was installed, upper-floor property values increased dramatically, whereas those of the lower floors changed relatively little.

One afternoon in July, 2020, I accompanied North to a mostly finished site. Some lower-floor residents had sabotaged the project’s electricity, in order to delay progress, and there had been confrontations with upstairs neighbors. When we arrived, a man in his forties took out a tape measure and started complaining about the size of the elevator’s entrance. Then he claimed that everybody would get stuck with high electricity bills after the elevator started to run. “And what about the maintenance?” he said.

“Neither has anything to do with you,” North said. “If you use the elevator, you pay. If you don’t use it, you pay nothing.”

The man swore in dialect: “The Devil’s own uncle knows! We are talking about those people upstairs—what if they sell their apartments, or if the elevator has to be fixed?”

“Since you aren’t using the elevator, none of those things concern you,” North said. He calmly produced a document with a state seal: “Building Project Permit.” But a woman in her thirties wearing a pink T-shirt began to shout. “You have made your mistakes!” she said. “A prime minister’s belly should be broad enough for a boat!” The phrase basically means: Be magnanimous. North spoke gently and pointed to the permit; after a while, the man took out the tape measure again. For most of an hour, the argument continued, with each side flourishing its prop: the permit, the tape measure.

Later, North told me that it was all a performance intended to prepare for further negotiations. He would have to go door to door on the upper floors, figuring out how much people would be willing to pay off their downstairs neighbors in exchange for allowing the project to continue. “But they won’t push it too far,” he said. “That woman is a government official.”

She hadn’t mentioned her job, but North had figured out earlier that she worked for a local government bureau. This status emboldened her, but it also reduced her appetite for serious conflict. Ever since 2012, when Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, initiated a series of strict anticorruption campaigns, local officials had become more careful in their interactions with civilians. I was still in touch with a few former students who had become officials, but they never said much about their jobs, and they didn’t answer my questionnaires. One former student told me that the Party had instructed many officials not to attend school reunions, which might present opportunities for old classmates to ask for favors.

Increasingly, Chinese officials have become a class apart. In 2017, I asked on a survey if respondents frequently had contact with government officials, and twenty-six out of thirty said no. But to the next question—would you want your child to pursue a career in government service?—twenty-one responded in the affirmative. “I don’t like government men, but I like the job,” one man said. “I hope my kid could get a job as an official. The job is not hard and rewarding.”

That year, I also asked respondents if they believed that China should become a multiparty democracy, and only about a quarter said yes. A number of them said that China’s system has been successful. For others, though, the reasons were more cynical. “We already have one corrupt party,” one man said. “It will be much worse if we have more.” A woman responded, “We have seen America with multiparty, but you have elected the worst president in human’s history.” When I asked if they expected a significant change in China’s political system during the next decade, more than ninety per cent said no.

My former students are often scathing about the state-mandated material that they have to teach. “China’s education is like junk food,” one woman responded, in 2016. Another wrote, “I think China’s education is rubbish. No creativity, too much work, pressure, and most of what the students are learning at school is useless in the future.” Part of the problem is that textbooks reflect a repressive political climate—the Party still educates people as if it preferred them to become assembly-line workers rather than creative, independent thinkers. In 2017, when I asked my former students to identify China’s biggest success in the previous decade, nobody mentioned education. The most common answers were all related to development: transport, infrastructure, urbanization.

But it’s remarkable how many of them remain in education. From surveys and from my conversations with North and others, I estimate that more than ninety per cent of my former students still work as teachers. This year, I asked how many jobs they’ve had since graduation, and the average for teachers was 2.1. More than a quarter had held the same position for nearly twenty-five years. In education, such stability probably serves to humanize what could otherwise become a relentlessly competitive and restrictive system. In China, there’s a long cultural tradition of respecting teachers, and the state seems to have increased salaries at a suitable rate. Despite all the teachers’ complaints about materials, when I asked them to rate their job satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10, the average response was 7.9.

In China, generations are not usually named. There’s no equivalent of boomers, or Gen X, or millennials: the Chinese media tends to identify a cohort simply by its decade of birth. But I think of my Fuling students as part of a group that could be called the reform generation, because their lives paralleled the changes initiated by Deng Xiaoping. For them, so many fundamental experiences—leaving the countryside, being limited to one child, entering a wide-open business climate—occupied relatively brief historical windows that have now closed. The rapid expansion of the primary-and-secondary-school system has also ended, because of aging demographics. In July, I visited a former student who teaches at a secondary school in the Yangtze city of Wushan, and he said that his department recently had ninety applicants for a job opening. Other teachers report similar applicant numbers at their schools. At the teachers’ college in Fuling, a dean told me that only about fifteen per cent of graduates go into education, because there are so few job openings.

In rural areas, the schools and villages that remain often feel as if they are dying. In July, I accompanied Grant, my former student, to his home settlement, west of Fuling. Traditionally, residents produced corn, soybeans, and vegetables, but now most of the fields appeared to be fallow. Grant’s three-story home, like a number of neighboring houses, was empty. His family had rebuilt the structure in 2000, thinking that at least one of the three children would continue living there. Now Grant and his siblings return only once a year, for the Spring Festival holiday. We walked through the silent house, where certain objects—a thermos sitting on a table, a pair of pants draped over a bed—gave the impression that residents had departed just yesterday.

Outside, Grant pointed to a large white-fig tree that he had planted as a teen-ager, in 1991. Ten years ago, a developer offered Grant more than a hundred dollars for the tree, in order to replant it in one of the new suburbs of Fuling, but Grant declined, for sentimental reasons. He said that developers often scouted these areas for healthy trees to uproot. In China, the scale of movement was almost Biblical, and perhaps this was the final stage of the exodus: in the beginning, the people migrated to the cities, and then the trees followed.

We visited Grant’s old primary school, where he said that student numbers were about a third of what they had been when he was a child. As we drove back to Fuling, he told a story about a former classmate. The boy came from one of the village’s poorest families, and he attended class dressed in rags. He dropped out before middle school and headed off to Shanxi Province, in the north. The boy found a position as a laborer in a rock quarry, and then continued to mining jobs. “Eventually, he started opening his own mines,” Grant said. “That was during a time when there was a lot of illegal mining. They were doing things that you can’t do anymore. He made a lot of money, and he came back here and started a construction company.”

The company is now involved in a road-building project worth more than fifteen million dollars, and Grant had invested in it. He received a significant dividend each month. “We’re still good friends,” he said. “Sometimes we get together and play mah-jongg.” He noted that his classmate’s two children had both tested into highly ranked universities.

Grant fell silent, and I thought the story was finished. But then he spoke again. “His younger brother died in one of those mines,” he said. “That was early in his time there, before he became a boss. There was an accident.”