Generation Frustrasia
A horizon scan about East Asian youth’s disillusionment and unconventional responses to the challenges of a rapidly changing world.
Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash
In September 2020 a photograph circulated on the Chinese internet of a Tsinghua student riding a bicycle with a laptop open in front of him, working as he pedalled. It drew over a billion views and a word: involution, 内卷, neijuan.
The term comes from anthropology. Alexander Goldenweiser coined it in 1937, and Clifford Geertz used it in 1963 to describe Javanese rice farming, where more and more labour went into the same land for steadily worse returns per person. Chinese students took it to mean competition that intensifies without anyone getting anywhere. Everybody runs harder. Nobody advances. It entered China's official buzzword list that year.
Involution is the condition. What followed is a decade of vocabulary for getting out of it.
The vocabulary of withdrawal
Lying flat, 躺平, tang ping. In April 2021 a former factory worker called Luo Huazhong posted an essay on Baidu Tieba titled "Lying Flat is Justice", describing how he had quit work in 2016, cycled thirteen hundred miles from Sichuan to Tibet, and now lived on around sixty dollars a month. He cited Diogenes. The post was deleted, a Douban group of ten thousand members was closed, merchandise was banned, and Xinhua called the idea shameful. In October 2021 Xi Jinping named it personally in Qiushi, calling for the avoidance of both involution and lying flat.
Letting it rot, 摆烂, bai lan, arrived around 2022. Lying flat is withdrawal. Letting it rot is active: allowing a bad situation to deteriorate on the grounds that improving it is pointless.
Runology, 润学, from April 2022 and the Shanghai lockdown. A pun in which the English word "run" reads as the Chinese rùn. It is the study of how to emigrate, and it was framed explicitly as the third option after involution and lying flat.
Full-time children, 全职儿女, from mid-2023. Graduates who cannot find work are paid a salary by their own parents, often four to eight thousand yuan a month, to keep house and be available. A wage, from family, for domestic labour, in place of a job.
Rat people, 鼠人, from early 2025 and now the most recent of these to travel. It describes a state more than a stance: no motivation, awake at night and tired by day, anxious about the future without acting on it. Scroll, eat, sleep, repeat. It has drawn around two billion views.
Read in sequence, the arc runs from ideology to pathology. Lying flat was a position you could argue for. Letting it rot was a refusal. Runology was an exit. Full-time children was an accommodation. Rat people is a diagnosis.
The same impulse, different grammar
Each society in the region has its own word, and the words are not equivalent.
South Korea counts losses. The sampo generation, named by the Kyunghyang Shinmun in 2011, gave up three things: dating, marriage and children. The opo generation gave up five, adding home ownership and friendships. The chilpo generation gave up seven, adding hope and a career. Then the count stopped being fixed and became the N-po generation: give up however many it takes.
Japan named a temperament. The satori generation, さとり世代, emerged around 2010 from 2channel, borrowing the Zen word for enlightenment to describe young people with little interest in money, promotion, cars, travel or brands. The irony is deliberate: the detachment reads as resignation and not transcendence. Japanese discussion has since moved on to freeters and hikikomori, which describe circumstances instead of attitudes.
Taiwan's term was an insult. The strawberry generation, 草莓族, was coined in 1993 by the author Weng Jing-yu and applied downwards by older generations: bruises easily, greenhouse-raised. A 2012 survey found it the most hated label among Taiwanese youth, who pointed out that it functions as an excuse for not fixing working conditions. The 2008 Wild Strawberries Movement reclaimed it deliberately. It belongs to a different era from lying flat, and it is worth keeping the distinction: one is a stance people adopt, the other a name applied to them.
What the numbers show
China. Youth unemployment reached 21,3% in June 2023. On 15 August 2023 the National Bureau of Statistics suspended publication, saying the measure needed improvement and specifically questioning whether job-seeking students should be counted. It resumed on 17 January 2024 on a new basis that excludes students entirely, and the first figure came in at 14,9%. The two series are not comparable and should never be charted together.
On the new measure the rate has run between roughly 14% and 19%, reaching a post-revision record of 18,9% in August 2025 and standing at 17,9% in July 2026. A record 12,7 million students will graduate from Chinese universities in 2026, up 480,000 on the year before.
The flight to safety is visible in the civil service exam, kaogong. Applicants per post have gone from 70 to 1 in 2023 to about 98 to 1 in 2026, with 2,83 million people sitting for roughly 38,100 central government positions and one post drawing 6.470 applicants. The age ceiling was raised from 35 to 38, an admission that the informal "curse of 35" is pushing older jobseekers back into the exam hall. Caixin has called it the new gaokao.
Fertility. Taiwan has now passed South Korea as the world's lowest, with a rate below 0,8 in 2025 and 107.812 births. Japan recorded 1,14 and 671.236 births, the fewest since 1899 and a tenth consecutive annual fall. Hong Kong recorded 31.100 births, a record low. Singapore fell to 0.87. China's births fell from 9.54 million in 2024 to 7,92 million in 2025, a 17% drop in a single year.
Ageing follows. China is projected to have close to a third of its population aged 65 or over by 2050, with Japan and South Korea higher still. South Korea crossed into super-aged status, meaning 65s and over above a fifth of the population, in December 2024, ahead of its own projections.
Three things that have changed
South Korea's fertility has risen two years running. After bottoming at 0,72 in 2023, the lowest figure ever recorded anywhere, it reached 0,75 in 2024 and 0,80 in 2025. Births rose 6,7% to 254,300. Marriages rose 14,8% and then 8,1%, three consecutive annual increases, and in a country with almost no childbearing outside marriage that is the mechanism.
It is worth being careful about what this means. Demographers attribute most of it to the large 1991 to 1995 cohort reaching peak childbearing age, and to pandemic weddings that were deferred rather than cancelled. Average maternal age is 33,2. The cohort tailwind reverses within a few years, and 0,8 remains around 38% of replacement. Hong Kong is the cautionary case: a HK$20,000 baby bonus produced two years of rising births that then erased themselves entirely in 2025.
The broader finding is that no country in the region has yet shown that pronatalist spending raises fertility. South Korea has spent over 360 trillion won, roughly 270 billion dollars, since 2006. China introduced its first universal child subsidy in 2025, 3,600 yuan per child per year with no marriage requirement, and births fell 17% in the subsidy's first year. Japan's spending coincided with a tenth straight annual decline.
Youth disillusionment changed Korean labour policy. In March 2023 the government proposed raising the overtime cap from 52 hours a week to as much as 69. The backlash from young workers was immediate, including from a newly formed union that had been read as sympathetic to the president, and within a fortnight the plan was under review. It was shelved.
Three years later the direction has reversed completely. Under Lee Jae-myung, elected in June 2025, South Korea is legislating towards a 4,5-day week with a stated destination of 32 hours, backed from January 2026 by direct subsidies to smaller employers of 200,000 to 800,000 won per worker and a move against the practice of bundling overtime into fixed salaries. Business opposition is substantial, and Korea still averages 1.874 working hours a year, 132 above the OECD average. But a government that tried to lengthen the working week was stopped by young people and is now shortening it.
The Chinese state adopted the diagnosis while banning the response. Having censored lying flat, Beijing has since taken up involution as the organising term of its industrial policy. The Politburo used it in July 2024, the Central Economic Work Conference in December 2024, Li Qiang in the Government Work Report in March 2025, and Xi at the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission in July 2025. The Fourth Plenum in October 2025 wrote the "comprehensive rectification of involutionary competition" into the fifteenth Five-Year Plan.
The word has been redefined in transit. In student usage neijuan described human competition with no exit. In policy usage it describes disorderly low-price competition between firms and excess industrial capacity. The condition young people named has become an economic management problem about corporate margins.
Japan breaks the pattern
Japan is the case that separates disillusionment from unemployment, and it is why the phenomenon is not simply about jobs.
Youth unemployment is around 3,9%. Wage settlements in the annual shunto rounds have exceeded 5% for three consecutive years, reaching 5,26% in 2026, the strongest run in three decades. More than half of firms report a shortage of regular staff.
Real wages have nonetheless fallen for a fourth straight year. Of that 5,26%, inflation absorbs around three points, higher social insurance premiums another half point, and a new child-support levy a further tenth, leaving take-home growth near 1,3%. And a survey in April 2026 recorded Japanese eighteen-year-olds at their lowest ever recorded hopes for themselves and for their country.
Near-full employment, the best pay rises in a generation, and record-low expectations. Whatever this is, it is not a labour market problem.
The gender fault line
South Korea has the region's sharpest gender divide, and it complicates the withdrawal story.
The gap between young men's and young women's support in the 2022 presidential election was 41 points among those aged 18 to 29, up from 19 points in 2020, in an election where the winning candidate campaigned on abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Carnegie's 2024 surveys found gaps of 28 points on women's political representation and 33 points on corporate leadership. A February 2025 survey found twenty-somethings with the widest ideological gender gap of any age group. Ipsos has ranked South Korea highest of 28 countries for reported tension between men and women.
The 4B movement, refusing dating, sex, marriage and childbirth with men, emerged from Korean radical feminist online spaces between 2017 and 2019. Its domestic reach is smaller than international coverage suggests, and it has declined in Korea. Its second life came abroad: searches rose sharply in the United States after the November 2024 election, and it spread into Chinese feminist spaces before being censored.
Set that alongside the fertility rebound and the picture stops being simple. Marriages rose 14,8% and then 8,1% during the same period in which political polarisation between young men and women widened. Both are happening.
Beyond the region
The ILO's Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026 puts global youth unemployment at 12,4% in 2025, 67 million people, and the global NEET rate at 20%, up from 19,7% in 2023. That is 257 million young people not in employment, education or training, an increase of nine million in two years, and the ILO singles it out as the most worrying figure in the report. Gallup's global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the lowest since 2020 and a second consecutive annual decline.
Quiet quitting was the Anglophone cousin of lying flat, and the label has already faded while the condition has not. In the United States underemployment among recent graduates has been reported at 41,5%, which suggests the shared condition across regions is a mismatch between qualification and available work rather than an absence of work.
The three states respond differently, and the comparison is instructive. China treats withdrawal as ideological deviance and censors it. Japan normalises and depoliticises it. South Korea acknowledges it and addresses it partially.
What we are watching next
Whether Korea's fertility rise survives the cohort. The 1991 to 1995 group ages out within a few years. What happens after that is the real test, and it will tell you whether any of the spending mattered.
Whether "anti-involution" reaches labour. So far it addresses corporate price wars. If Beijing extends it to working hours and hiring practices, the policy would start touching the condition young people originally named.
The Korean working week. A 4.5-day week enacted in a country with the OECD's longer hours would be the most significant labour signal in the region, and other governments would read it.
Japan's real wages. Three years of 5% settlements have not produced rising take-home pay. A fourth that does would test whether pay is what young Japanese are actually short of.
Whether any successor term to "rat people" appears. The vocabulary has been the leading indicator throughout, arriving before the statistics each time.
Whether the gender divide follows the export path that 4B did. Korea's political gender gap is the most extreme measured anywhere. If comparable gaps open in other high-pressure economies, this stops being an East Asian story.
Originally published in 2023. Revised September 2026.
Sources
ILO, Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026 (August 2026)
China National Bureau of Statistics, urban surveyed unemployment for ages 16 to 24, old and revised series
Statistics Korea, births and marriages, 2023 to 2025
Taiwan Ministry of the Interior and DGBAS; Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare; Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 2025 births
RAND, projections of population ageing in China (2026), drawing on UN World Population Prospects 2024
Runya Qiaoan, "Opting out of the system: Youth withdrawal and state response in East Asia", CEIAS (March 2026)
China Leadership Monitor, "Punching Down: Beijing's Playbook for Unwinding Involutionary Competition"
Mo and You, "The Fight Over Gender Equality in South Korea", Carnegie Endowment (April 2025)
OECD, Society at a Glance: Asia/Pacific 2025, spotlight on fertility trends
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026
