For all the frustrations young Chinese face in the workplace and at home, many would still answer in the affirmative, says Peter Hessler, the well-known author of “River Town” and “Oracle Bones.” Hessler, who has spent most of the past three decades chronicling the changing lives of Chinese across the world, still sees the younger generation as fundamentally optimistic about the future.
But for Xiang Biao, a popular anthropologist and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, whose analyses of societal phenomena like “involution” and “lying flat” have been read by millions, the answer is less revealing than the thought process: He sees young Chinese as increasingly self-reflecting and willing to interrogate what words like “better” mean in the context of their lives.
