“the CCP has recently adopted policies intended to encourage the young generation to have more children. However it’s proving much more difficult to achieve this than it was to bully people to have less. A measure of Xi’s desperation is his de facto order last May that China’s 2 million military personnel must take part. The rest of the population are unimpressed by the various material incentives to increased fertility.
Like it or not, following Xi’s prolonged, ineffective Zero Covid lockdown the young people of China are increasingly inclined to passive resistance to the Party’s transactional interference in their private lives. Since the pandemic hit, Chinese social media have been full of nihilistic, disaffected exchanges between young people about the gap behind Xi’s fabricated ‘China Dream’ and their own hopeless existence. No amount of state censorship has stifled this.
The realities are stark. Last year, 11.6 bn Chinese graduates tried to enter the workforce. One in five is likely to remain unemployed. Others who did find work are victims to an obsolete ethic of unrewarded hard work and sacrifice. They prefer to do the bare minimum and abandon vain hopes of career advancement, an approach known as “lying flat”. Xi has singled this idea out for strong criticism but has nothing to offer in return. Worse still, in one speech he told the young five times to toughen up and learn to “eat bitterness”. They are not the least impressed by his exhortation to ‘seek self-inflicted hardships’ in the new economic normal.
Increasingly, Chinese people realise that their leaders have abandoned all pretence of a reliable social contract in justification for single-party rule. Neither they, nor the free citizens of Taiwan, have the least faith in talk of China’s “glorious rejuvenation”.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-population-time-bomb-explode-080000262.html