China’s next generation

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘China’s next generation’

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Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about the rise of China and the country’s future. My guest is Keyu Jin, associate professor of economics at the London School of Economics and author of a just-published book, The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism. This podcast is a co-production with Intelligence Squared, who’ll be running a slightly longer version of our conversation. At a time when some are talking about Peak China and arguing that the glory days of the Chinese economy are over, Keyu has a more optimistic take. She believes that a new generation is coming of age who will profoundly change our country for the better. So what social, economic and political changes lie ahead for China?

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The 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist party took place in Beijing last October. For China’s leader, Xi Jinping, the Congress marked the latest stage of what he calls the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people. For many ordinary Chinese an arguably much more significant landmark took place late last year when a mass rebellion by young people persuaded the government to abandon its zero-Covid policy and the repeated lockdowns that have entailed.

News clip
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Journalist
This is the sound of Chinese people chanting for the ruling Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, to stand down. These are momentous events. Whatever this unrest leads to, it is already hugely significant.

Gideon Rachman
With China out of lockdown, the country’s economy has come roaring back. There are some analysts, however, who point to deep structural problems that China is facing, such as a shrinking and ageing population, an increasingly hostile United States, and a large pool of unemployed and dissatisfied graduates. On the other hand, it’s also important to remember how far China’s come over the last 40 years, a period that’s seen hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty, the rise of entire new cities and of an affluent middle class. Keyu Jin was brought up in China before moving to the US for her secondary school education. During the course of her life, she’s witnessed the astonishing transformation of the Chinese economy and society. So we started our conversation by recalling the China of her childhood.

Keyu Jin
In the 1980s, we lived on rationed food and cooked from communal kitchens, and even 11 square metre apartments were considered a luxury. And I remember reading poems with my father under candlelight, three nights of blackouts every week in Beijing. And fast forward now, my classmates have houses and computers and cars, and they’ve seen everything. It’s a big transformation. But for me personally, to have come to the west when I was a teenager, the first thing they asked me was just about, you know, the political issues around China. But then a few years later in college, people were learning Chinese, they were going to China — American students, by the way, to seek jobs, seek opportunities. All of that within 10, 15 years; an enormous, amazing transformation.

Gideon Rachman
And particularly it must be incredible contrast with the experience of your parents’ generation because your father was caught up in the Cultural Revolution, like so many of that generation did, like Xi Jinping sent out to the countryside. Is it difficult for your generation to understand the experiences of the Cultural Revolution generation?

Keyu Jin
Well, one of the big themes in my book is about this change in generation. And we have to understand that China going forward is going to be shaped and determined by a completely different generation from the generation of my parents. More prosperous, confident — the new generation has a knack for lifestyle consumption and borrows. My parents generation save for a rainy day, and that has become the defining feature of the Chinese economy. But all of that is about to change with the arrival of a new generation. Data have shown that they’re more open-minded than the previous generation on a range of issues, including diversity. Even they care about social issues like the environment and animal wildlife, which is all progress. So we’re about to see a new playbook powered by a new generation with a different outlook, and I would say with values that converge with the younger generation around the world. So they are a positive force for China, but they also have pressing challenges themselves.

Gideon Rachman
Mmm. And there’s a fascinating chapter in your book about them being also the generation marked by the one-child policy, and which I think comes in more or less at the same time as Deng Xiaoping opens up the economy. And I think you said in your book that in your school class, everybody was a single child.

Keyu Jin
There was one exception. A Uyghur classmate of mine had a sibling.

Gideon Rachman
But other than that, 40 kids, all single. I guess, because everyone’s like that, it’s hard to assess what the psychological impact of that is. But although you talk about it a bit and it seems to me a combination of intense pressure and also perhaps a sense of entitlement.

Keyu Jin
I think that people underestimate or don’t fully understand the profound social and economic consequences the one-child policy has played on China and frankly, the rest of the world. This generation is highly educated but also grew up in super competition, overburdened, very lonely. I mean, don’t forget that this generation’s are the inventors of the only singles day in the world, a day in which they splurge and borrow and Alibaba gets to process half a million orders per second. At the same time, they have obligations to their parents who now only have one child. So they have a unique set of problems. And of course now with rising housing prices, can they afford to have a bigger family? And they have shown the statistic that they don’t want to get married anymore and they don’t want to have as many children. All of these are social consequences somewhat related to the one-child policy.

Gideon Rachman
And of course, the government has now reversed the one-child policy. But from what you’re saying, there may be an irreversible social change already in train.

Keyu Jin
I think the government is desperately trying, through a variety of factors, even coming up with very creative ways to encourage single women to have children, something that is radical considering such a traditional culture and society and including reining in the real estate sector. But the fact is 25 per cent of college students last year didn’t get a job. The high youth unemployment rate of 20 per cent above, a big gap between expectations and reality of not fulfilling their dreams are all a present challenge for the Chinese government.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, that’s a stunning statistic because, you know, if I just think about it from first principles, here you’ve got this economy that’s been growing at incredible pace for the last 40 years, a very small rise in generation because it’s a one-child generation. And yet you say 20 per cent of graduates are unemployed. How can that be?

Keyu Jin
It’s interesting that there are 30mn manufacturing jobs that need to be filled and that can’t be filled by 2025. And in high-tech sectors like semiconductors, there are 300,000 vacancies this year. This shows you that the present problem is not that there are not enough jobs, but that there’s a big gap in terms of education and skill. Now, these Chinese students — very smart and very well-educated and impressive — however, they don’t have internships. Many of them have been overburdened by a competitive test-taking, rote-memorisation kind of education system, so they’re not that appealing to the private businesses that demand passion, interests, ethics and some experience.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, but there’s an interesting, again, anecdote in the book where you say that there was a cigarette-making plant where the people assembling the cigarettes were all graduates, and some of them postgraduates, on that line.

Keyu Jin
Top masters and college students in cigarette factories, nannies that have master degrees from Columbia — these are all things that have caused social uproar. You’ve got to ask, you know, the Chinese families, what is it all about? Their hope, right? It’s all about the next generation. For a long period of time, the bottom rung of society was happy and content because they knew that their children could have a better future. That was the bedrock to social stability.

Gideon Rachman
What about the kind of social, political implications of that? Because you cite in the book a few kind of world values surveys, which suggest that, perhaps surprisingly to many in the west, Chinese people are basically among the more contented in the world. I don’t know, you know, what the methodology of these things are, but let’s take them at face value. But if you now have a rising generation who have disappointed expectations, that must be a concern. Well, it’s a concern to any government, but to a one-party state, which relies on its performance legitimacy as a phrase the Chinese have often quoted at me. Are they concerned about that?

Keyu Jin
There are currently now very focused on the new generation. Let’s not forget that the young generation were a critical part of ending the pandemic controls. And so their legitimacy rests on the trust of this new generation. So there are a variety of things that the Chinese government is doing. For instance, expanding the capacity and quality of vocational schools, because China is primarily still a manufacturing-based economy. So they wanna educate and equip these students, the new generation, with the right skill set. They are expanding the service sector, where many of these highly educated people can be absorbed more than manufacturing sectors. And even, you know, the common prosperity policies, which includes, you know, trying to crack down on technology and education sectors, of course, it was unfortunately implemented and had severe consequences on the economy. But by design and intention, they were trying to make the society more harmonious, less competitive.

Gideon Rachman
This is where they said, almost overnight, private tutoring, illegal. Why was that done? Because they felt too much money and too much pressure on people.

Keyu Jin
Too much pressure on the kids overburdened by tutorials. It’s a race to the bottom because everybody spends to have more tutorials and that doesn’t get you anywhere.

Gideon Rachman
Just give me a picture of the kind of social life that involves for the children involved. What was going on?

Keyu Jin
They have the busiest schedule: Saturdays and Sundays packed with five classes a day and tutorials even after classes during the weekday. Even people from the working class are sending their kids to tutorials, you know, really spending a lot of money. But to what effect? In the end, it’s all the same. It’s all just test-taking.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And so overnight the government said, OK, this is gonna stop.

Keyu Jin
There were also exploitative motivations of these private tutorial companies. So I think the intention is not a wrong one, but we basically killed a part of the industry overnight. And these kind of dramatic moves we often find so radical in the Chinese government, sometimes they’re, first of all, meant to make a big point and then they’re gradually rolled back. So it’s a process of constant recalibration and fine-tuning, and the pendulum often swings, but it’s often very dramatic in the beginning.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, but it also tells you something about how dramatically the Chinese government’s way of operation differs from, say, a standard western government. I can’t imagine the UK government saying overnight, OK, no more private tutoring, that’s it. Couldn’t be done, really.

Keyu Jin
The western governments have argued for a long time about regulating big tech, regulating AI, and little is done. China, for all what you disagree with their implementation procedures, can move quickly once they’ve made up their mind. So there’s pros and cons of both.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. Just on this ageing thing, I mean, one of the great things that you hear all the time is this phrase that China will get owned before it gets rich, that inadvertently Deng Xiaoping kind of put a landmine under the Chinese economy because dependency ratios are gonna go wild out of whack. You’ll have a shrinking population, an ageing population, and that this is what in the end will slow the Chinese economy down, cause it big problems. What’s your take on that?

Keyu Jin
I don’t agree with the view that ageing is what’s gonna cause the Chinese economic slowdown. I tend to believe that technologies and demographics interact with each other, that there will be more adoption of labour-saving technologies, just as is the case in Japan, and we’re now talking about artificial intelligence displacing many jobs. The question is can you get the right kind of education to deal with a modern economy? Can you get the people who are present, who are educated, to do fulfilling jobs? And here I think the government can play a big role. Countries like Japan and other places, which have had ageing issues, there were other really, really pressing macroeconomic factors that were more dominant as a driving force.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, well, I mean, you mentioned the deflation of the Japan bubble, and obviously those parallels are in everyone’s mind. And I think, well, maybe, you know, China will be a bit like Japan, have this incredible surge and then suddenly slow. And one thing that did strike me as a parallel is property. There was a big property bubble in Japan and there does seem to be one in China as well. You make the point that people on salaries that are like maybe a quarter of an American middle-class salary are paying similar prices for flats in Shanghai that they would be paying for in Boston.

Keyu Jin
The Japanese lost decade was in large part due to the collapse of the big asset bubble. We have not seen the collapse of a big asset bubble in China, at least not yet. Even with the reining in the property sector, we’ve seen investment slow down, negative investment growth, but the prices have not fallen dramatically. There’s still a huge pent-up demand for urban properties. If you think about the Chinese rural population, by the way, 600mn of which have not even reached middle income by international standards, they all want an apartment in urban areas. Property has been an obsession for Chinese, and part of the reason is that if you look at the financial system, what can you invest in if you have some money? Stack it under your mattress is one. Putting in banks and earning a zero real rate of return is another or putting into the rollercoaster stock market, which haven’t really paid off. So there are not a lot of choices. So even as an investment, property has been very popular for Chinese households.

Gideon Rachman
But just give us a sense again of what it feels like socially having these very high prices. Again, there’s an incredible anecdote in the book where you talk about the difficulty of getting an apartment in Shanghai, which somehow led a young person to get their parents to divorce so that they could buy a property. Just explain to me why that would be necessary.

Keyu Jin
Now, in places like Shanghai, the demand is so high that you have these kind of very creative ways. And by the way, not surprising at all to circumvent these restrictions.

Gideon Rachman
The restrictions being what?

Keyu Jin
Being that you’re not eligible to purchase a second house unless you meet certain criteria. So divorce was one of the possibilities. But there are also all kinds of rules that I can’t keep track of. But we have to understand there’s a big heterogeneity within China. The first-tier cities show evidence of a property bubble, whereas for the rest of the country there is no evidence of property bubble because the growth of property prices has been roughly in line with household income growth. And so for many third-, fourth-tier cities, the price can still keep on going up.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah, but in Shanghai and Beijing, etc, the prices are at least by western standards, kind of out of whack with income. You’ve talked about how the younger generation have certain parallels with the issues that young people in the west have. Is there the same sense amongst the Chinese young that the system isn’t working for them anymore? Or rather that if you remember the elite, if you’ve already got money or you’ve got connections, you’ll be OK. But if you’re not, you’re kind of looking from the outside in. I mean, I remember when I was in Beijing at one point talking to a student at Tsinghua. He made it, you know. But he was from a small city and he said, you know, there’s so many kids in my class from a few schools in Beijing; from my city, maybe one person got to this university. And it reminded me of the kind of laments you get here in Britain about, oh, well, you know, the rich still dominate universities, all Harvard legacy students. Do you see a parallel?

Keyu Jin
Meritocracy has always been in the bedrock of Chinese society, especially in the last 40 years. There’s an argument to be made that there is somewhat of an erosion of meritocracy, which I find to be a big challenge to China. But still, until very recently, if you look at the surveys, the expectations of the young is still pretty rosy. It was only during the pandemic where many of the university students felt extremely frustrated. I think that some of that sentiment has changed and yes, there is a greater frustration with their circumstances. But these young people look at what’s happening outside of China. They look and they are not inspired. They don’t think that there’s an alternative of a better model. And that shows in the surveys. In surveys, they asked the younger generation whether China would be suited for a different and alternative model. And the majority of them do not believe so even though they admit that there are huge challenges for the Chinese citizen.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I was actually kind of had an open question about those figures you cite because you say that, you know, 38 per cent of young Chinese say that a western political model would not be suitable for China. But that leaves open the possibility that the other two-thirds might think it was suitable.

Keyu Jin
The sentiment towards the west changed in 2017, so I’d say that before 2017, many of them were quite attracted by different forms of political systems, at least as a possibility for China and looking at the west.

Gideon Rachman
What happened then?

Keyu Jin
Trump (both laugh) as an example, and of course, with the rising tensions of US-China.

Gideon Rachman
But of course, 2017 is also the year that Xi amends the constitution and extends his period in power. So that could also cause a few question marks, yeah?

Keyu Jin
But that’s the time when the western perceptions shifted for the negative. We just have to understand that there’s superficial globalisation, you know, the fact that we like Hollywood and MBA etc, etc, that . . . 

Gideon Rachman
Carry the same phones.

Keyu Jin
 . . . is very appealing for the young Chinese, but their cultural roots are overwhelmingly local. As I show in my book the statistics, 80 per cent of the students from 2013 have returned to China not only because it’s close to home — because they have good Chinese food; of course, that’s important — but also because of the opportunities that are afforded them. And the fact that they’re creating their homegrown kind of cosmopolitan culture — so vibrant in the second-tier cities. So they are fostering a different environment there.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. I mean, how has the pandemic and the handling of the pandemic affected the relationship between people and the government? What do you make of that episode? A lot more than an episode, a couple of years.

Keyu Jin
I was reassured that when there was concerted pressure from the younger generation, but also from the people, potentially even the local governments, that such a steadfast policy was broken. It shows that there are mechanisms embedded in the systems, whether it’s from the people and social media or the competitive mechanism within the Chinese government that makes it so that preferences are still revealed and potentially shape the outcomes of political and economic decisions. Now, of course, that is the ongoing challenge, as the Chinese government has to manage a much more complex society going forward. Not like the time when I was born and everybody was content with having a growing income.

Gideon Rachman
But you said that preferences revealed. I mean, they were revealed by people demonstrating on the streets. It wasn’t a particularly sophisticated polling exercise.

Keyu Jin
Absolutely. But it’s a two-way monitoring system. And social media creates that kind of platform, not only for the Chinese government to watch what was happening on the ground, but other way as well. And I think that the complexity of the society is a big challenge for the Chinese government. And they do listen. They do listen. Now, I still think the challenge is how do you have the political mechanism to include the much more important participants of the economy, like the entrepreneur, in that system? If they don’t do it and they don’t adapt, the system is not gonna enable the Chinese dreams that it has laid out.

Gideon Rachman
And you use the phrase “the Chinese dream”. It’s one that Xi Jinping uses and he talks about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people. But some economists worry that Xi is so statist, as they see it, that he’s in danger of killing that entrepreneurial spirit. And they point particularly to the fate of Jack Ma, who was the icon of Chinese business, appeared to say something or do something that government didn’t like and is now, as far as we know, sort of teaching students in Tokyo.

Keyu Jin
He’s called back now.

Gideon Rachman
(Laughs) Oh, really? Is he? Well, tell me first, what you made of that episode, but also more broadly, what it said about the government’s relationship with the most dynamic business elements in society.

Keyu Jin
Well, the first thing to note is that no policy is permanent and they’re constantly being fine-tuned. So the pretext of this is under the umbrella of common prosperity under President Xi, how to achieve equitable growth. But I think in Xi’s view, China doesn’t wanna be like the US — a great economy, but highly inequitable and politics sing to the tunes of corporates. China wants an olive-shaped income distribution — narrow on the ends and fat in the middle. It wants the corporates to sing to the tunes of politics. And so this initial sweeping regulatory clampdowns on technology companies that had consequences for personalities and private businessmen such as Jack Ma, was of course, a devastating blow to the economy because of the confidence issue.

Gideon Rachman
Didn’t it wipe $1tn off the stock exchange?

Keyu Jin
Yes, it did. And that’s all very understandable. Now, that’s a painful lesson for the Chinese government, understanding that whatever they say, their intentions, their ambitions have real economic and immediate capital markets consequences. That was not the case in the old playbook, which was economy built on industrialisation. In the new playbook around innovation and encouragement of entrepreneurs, they have to have credibility and commitment. However, in the recent last few months, the state has rolled back some of these heavy blows, invited Jack Ma to come back, and there’s a lot of luring private businessmen and trying to restore that confidence, because guess what? Today’s China’s economy, the private sector is firmly in the driver’s seat and they do the heavy lifting. So even if the west believes that there’s a statist approach of President Xi in control, the reality is that pretty much everything about the economy is driven by the private sector, and the government is keenly aware of that.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. And obviously now both the development of the economy but also this emerging struggle between the US and China that we started on, technology is absolutely key to it. And there’s a debate. Some in the US say, you know, China, because it’s not as open a society as us is not gonna be able to advance as rapidly technologically. Others say, well, look at mobile payments, for example, where China was way ahead and that China will in fact surprise, if you like, for liberal theorists and prove that you can have rapid technological advance in a one-party state. What do you think’s happening? I mean, just on the ground, as you observe these various sort of groundbreaking technologies, if there is a race between China and America, who’s ahead?

Keyu Jin
I think that we ought to be a little bit more nuanced when you talk about technology, which is a very broad concept. China’s very strong on innovations around business models and applications and frankly, coming up with practical solutions to real problems.

Gideon Rachman
Give me a couple of practical examples.

Keyu Jin
For instance, solar panels or, you know, the renewables is a very good example. EVs will be a very prominent example. Remember that controversial technology, forced technology transfers, if you will, didn’t make China leap ahead in traditional automotives, but it’s often in greenfield technologies . . . 

Gideon Rachman
Electric vehicles.

Keyu Jin
 . . . where China has spearheaded. EVs is one of such examples. But even that . . . 

Gideon Rachman
But in fact, I read in the Financial Times, no less, that next year China will become the world’s largest exporter of cars.

Keyu Jin
China became the largest consumer and producer of EVs within a decade, not least thanks to the government rolling out 4mn chargers around the country, as opposed to 140,000 in the US, and the state co-ordinating supply chains around these EV companies. So that comes back to the point about technology, right? Yes, the US is putting out a bunch of aggressive policies to try to hobble China’s technological growth. But we have to remember, China has an innovation ecosystem within the country. There’s close proximity between the downstream players like EVs and artificial intelligence companies with chip companies. Their close proximity means that their demand will drive these innovation efforts. And we have to remember that there are a lot of unexpected consequences of American policies because that just gives a huge boost to the domestic industries.

Gideon Rachman
And I mean, one thing that everybody’s been waiting for is the moment at which China becomes the world’s largest economy, I think in purchasing power. It happened actually in 2014. But even when that happens, it will still, on a per capita basis be much poorer than the United States or western Europe. And you write quite a lot in the book about can they make this leap from a $10,000 per person economy to a $30,000 per person economy and that will be very difficult. I mean, are you confident that will happen?

Keyu Jin
Well, that’s the hard part. The catching-up growth is much easier than becoming a rich country. And to become the $30,000 income per capita nation, you need innovation because productivity growth is the only sustainable source of economic growth and lots need to change. For instance, institutions needs to be better. The financial system, which supports innovative companies, needs to totally reform. They are the last old dinosaur in the Chinese economy. Why? Because the Chinese state likes control. They wanna protect retail investors. But the longer they protect, the longer it will take for them to learn. And you can never get a dynamic, vibrant financial system. Of course, with all the problems in the US I would still argue that is one of the key critical contributors to US’s innovation system. And then, of course, how do you get a wider set of preferences from businessmen to students to people to be reflected on the top? It’s easier to copy goods, but it’s very difficult to copy good institutions.

Gideon Rachman
Talking of which, Xi is now entering his third term and as some Chinese liberal put it to me, it’s not the third term that worries me, it’s the fourth, it’s the fifth. Do you think that Chinese institutions have this flexibility that you think they need?

Keyu Jin
Political reforms have lagged economic reforms. I think it is a big challenge. I think the system has always been able to adapt to the evolution of society and the economy, even in the last 40 years. More competition, more checks and balances. Of course, it’s taken a few steps back in the recent years, and I do think it’s a big challenge. But today, I mean, at least for the short term, let’s just hope that the fact that Xi’s inner circle are loyalists means that there’s gonna be more trust and that there will be more delegation, at least in terms of practical issues like the economy, to the experts and to the technocrats.

Gideon Rachman
Yeah. There has just been a reshuffle. A lot of these names won’t be familiar to people in the west, but who are the key people in the inner circle who’ll be driving things like economic reform?

Keyu Jin
Well, I would say that Li Qiang, the premier, is the most important figure. And we have to remember all these standing committee members, politburo members have all been beneficiaries of reform and opening up. And they’re not gonna forget that. That’s what changed their personal lives. And Li Qiang’s background is also very interesting because he rose to the top by helping private businessmen succeed. And he had made famous speeches even when he was on lowly municipal levels of, if you guys have great ideas, come to me, we’re all gonna support them. And he thoroughly understands the deep frustrations and challenges that face private businessmen. So he has made it clear that he wants to support them. And by the way, when he was Shanghai mayor, that’s when Tesla also moved their factories there. And he was very encouraging of these foreign businesses. So I think we have an eminently practical and sensible person in charge of the economy.

Gideon Rachman
OK. We’ve talked a lot about the things that made China’s growth and this economic miracle, I think you can say, take place over the last 40 years. And you mentioned things that were crucial: innovation, the private sector and so on. But I guess one thing that was really crucial was peace. China hasn’t been at war since 1979, but now I think certainly in Washington, it’s quite striking and alarming how many people openly talk about the possibility of a war with China. I haven’t been to Beijing since the pandemic, but people tell me the mood is quite nationalistic there. You know, as somebody who knows both societies very well, are you concerned about this prospect of war and of a sort of mirroring nationalism? Because people say that the rising generation of Chinese, as you said, they’re more confident, but some say they’re also pretty nationalistic and that’s reflected at the top levels of government and there’s a potential for a clash.

Keyu Jin
I think the whole world is becoming more nationalistic, including in the US, and that is deeply worrying. You mentioned something that’s absolutely correct, that’s deep in the Chinese people’s heart, even today, and especially leaders. And it is peace. The cost of war is still very fresh in the memory. China has not fought a war for decades, as you mentioned. So even on this critical issue of today of Taiwan, we can’t forget that well, they haven’t had the experience of these military confrontations. And so peace is still very much at the core of the leadership’s top agenda. They understand that for China to reach the aspirations, including President Xi’s aspirations, which is most important, making the Chinese economy the biggest in the world requires peace. And nobody is going to forget that. However, I think that errors in judgment, miscalculations are increasingly more likely on both sides, and one cannot tell where the escalation is coming from. But what we do see is that when the temperature has been too hot for both sides, the presidents have respectfully tried to cool it down. I think maybe there’s a view in China that left to the parties across the Taiwan Strait there’s more possibility of working out a peaceful solution. But the military conflict is really the very last resort that China would wanna see.

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Gideon Rachman
That was Keyu Jin of the LSE ending this edition of the Rachman Review, which was co-produced with Intelligence Squared. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.

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