Chinese youths trade ambition for simple pleasures

(Edited and refined by Vianne Chia, with the assistance of AI translation.)

During China’s National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival holidays this year, one of the most popular attractions in Beijing was, unexpectedly, a caterpillar-catching competition.

At the Beijing Wildlife Park, visitors armed with gloves, chopsticks and disposable food containers caught about 70,600 larvae of the invasive fall webworm in just two days. Each day, top catchers won prizes including admission tickets and commemorative badges. The competition proved so popular that it was extended, and other parks, including Longtan Park and Lianhuachi Park, also organised similar activities.

The road less travelled

Elsewhere, young people were heading off the usual tourist trail to county towns. 

Data from travel agency Tongcheng Travel showed that interest in bookings for county-level travel products rose 42% year-on-year during the holiday period. In these unfamiliar towns, young travellers were not rushing from one attraction to another to complete their bucket lists. Instead, they browsed wet markets, ate local snacks and watched the world go by.

Even getting there, it seems, need not be rushed.

During this year’s summer holidays, bookings for slow train journeys and train tour packages rose more than 45% year-on-year. Users aged 18 to 30 made up more than 40% of these bookings. 

It is travel without the pressure to see everything, and fun without the pressure to spend much. Visitors to county towns spent about an average of 58 RMB (US$8.67) per transaction, while slow train tickets cost only about a third as much as high-speed rail tickets.

The same reluctance to spend big also shows up in national figures. Reuters, citing government data, calculated that although the number of travellers rose during last year’s Golden Week, average spending per trip per capita fell to 911 RMB, the lowest in three years. 

Choosing not to deal with difficult topics

“Just getting on with life” (纯过日子) — i.e. having more ways to have fun yet spending less money — is the lifestyle many Chinese people now embrace.

On 14 August, the topic “the whole nation has entered the era of just getting on with life” went viral on Weibo, with large numbers of netizens identifying as followers of this trend. The topic became popular again at the end of the month and accumulated 43.4 million views.

Traditionally, “knowing how to live” (会过日子) meant being thrifty and adept at managing everyday life. But the current notion of “just getting on with life” goes further. It comes with a list of things people are choosing not to do: no more dissecting childhood trauma, asking about the meaning of life, obsessing over one’s sense of agency, or chasing major achievements.

Those who simply get on with life describe themselves as the world’s “most grounded people”.

Consumer spending drops

The numbers tell a similar story. In the first half of 2026, per capita disposable income among Chinese residents was 22,981 RMB, up 4.2% year-on-year after adjusting for inflation. Per capita consumer spending during the same period was 14,836 RMB, representing real growth of 2.7%.

Total retail sales of consumer goods rose 1.1% year-on-year in the first eight months of 2026. But the picture becomes more revealing when broken down by category. Convenience store sales rose 5.5% and supermarket sales grew by 3.8%. Meanwhile, department store sales fell by 3% and sales at branded speciality stores dropped by 10%.

At the same time, the sales of cars, furniture and home appliances decreased by 13.9%, 4.9% and 5.6% respectively, while that of food, cosmetics and telecommunications equipment rose by 6.8%, 6.1% and 16.3% respectively.

In other words, people are still spending on basic necessities and some things that offer an immediate lift. But the bigger purchases associated with long-term household spending like cars, furniture, home appliances and home renovations are clearly under pressure.

Loans also less popular

People are borrowing less too. Outstanding short-term personal consumption loans fell from about 9.49 trillion RMB at the end of 2025 to 8.79 trillion RMB at the end of May this year. In just five months, the total shrank by 703.1 billion RMB, or 7.41%.

Outstanding credit card loans at China’s major state-owned banks also shrank for the first time last year and the contraction continued in the first half of this year.

A survey of urban depositors by China’s central bank in the second quarter of 2025 found that 62.2% preferred to save more, while only 23.8% preferred to spend more.

Food blogger “Jingchi” (京吃), who has 1.4 million followers, said people had finally come to their senses and no longer living beyond their means. After all, they are only staying in rented houses and their performance targets are determined by others, but their health are their own responsibility. What matters now is not who lives more respectably, but who has less mortgage debt, goes to bed earlier, and has the time and energy to prepare dinner.

Financial blogger “Cao Duoyu” was more direct. The polite way to describe the “whole nation entering the era of just getting on with life” notion was that people were consuming rationally and voluntarily cutting back. Put bluntly, it was about reducing debts to balance the book.

The core problem, Cao Duoyu said, was that the vast majority of ordinary people could no longer bear additional debt.

Finding respite in consuming feel-good content

But the retreat is not happening only in people’s wallets. It is happening at the psychological level too.

Chinese news magazine Sanlian Lifeweek noted that the people who have embraced this way of life were once anything but passive. Before becoming people who simply got on with life, they traded stocks, suffered heartbreaks and wrote long film reviews on Douban.

Now they cook for themselves, watch microdramas on streaming platform Hongguo and probably even caught the cult favourite animated film Niu Lai (《牛来》) in cinemas.

The Sanlian report carried an interview with Tutu, a young woman who had moved to Beijing and once styled herself as an “artsy middle-class” type. She wore clothes from Lululemon, Ralph Lauren and Arc’teryx; scrambled for tickets to niche films; and went to Aranya, a seaside cultural resort, for arts discussions on weekends.

Now she calls herself a “Hongguo-type personality”. After work, she opens Hongguo and watches AI-generated videos of kittens and over-the-top melodramas. She finds this relaxing rather than mentally draining.

“I used to care about the world. Now my only concern is whether new episodes of my short drama will be released tomorrow.”

The report described this as a state of “no longer waiting for life to take a turn, or suffering over the gap between ideals and reality”.

Success stories were once a reliable source of social media traffic. But a 2025 survey by iiMedia Research found that lifestyle content, including food, travel and exercise, came out on top and was preferred by 36.54% of viewers. Entertainment and music content also ranked highly. By comparison, only 25.62% of respondents liked educational content.

From ‘lying flat’ to ‘just getting on with life’

Since the Covid-19 pandemic, China has seen a steady stream of buzzwords describing the state of its young people.

“Lying flat”, which became popular in 2021, carried perhaps the strongest sense of resistance. It emerged as a stance of withdrawing from competition and soon drew intense criticism from official media.

In December that year, Guangming Daily ran a front-page article entitled “Lying flat is not advisable”, arguing that young people who spoke of lying flat might say they did not care, but were actually unwilling to accept their situation.

“It is less an abandonment of goals than a fear of hardship and laziness,” it said. 

After the 2024 Lunar New Year came the “taking-things-lightly” philosophy (淡学 danxue).

Young people jokingly “diagnosed” themselves as danren (淡人）, or exhibiting “mildness syndrome”, adopting a way of life in which they took everything lightly. Mainstream opinion found this philosophy better than lying flat.

People’s Forum (《人民论坛》) republished an article by Shen Yi, a professor at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University, who argued that “taking things lightly” should not be equated with “lying flat”, because it still involved a degree of sustained engagement and even striving.

“Just getting on with life” is another philosophy that is, perhaps, even more palatable. It has evolved from the walk-away attitude of “lying flat” and the disengagement of “taking things lightly” into something quieter: expecting little, but still living well though simply.

Mainstream commentary is more forgiving towards this way of life. Lying flat was criticised. Taking things lightly was understood, though still deemed to require guidance. Just getting on with life, meanwhile, has been affirmed for its pragmatic side.

Zhejiang’s Tide News said, “The most touching moments are often found in ordinary days; living life earnestly is itself a remarkable thing.”

However, the Zhejiang Publicity WeChat account of the Zhejiang Chinese Communist Party provincial committee cautioned that “just getting on with life” does not mean merely muddling through and that people should retain their ambition and creativity for the future.

In the traditional sense, “knowing how to live” often comes with a goal: saving money to buy a home, striving for promotion or ensuring that the next generation has a better life. But “just getting on with life” is different. It means living for the present, without such distant goals.

Compared with the defiance associated with “lying flat”, “just getting on with life” is gentler. It may reflect a lucid understanding of life, or a temporary retreat under pressure. Or it may simply be a phrase people use to make peace with an ordinary life.

Whatever it is, it captures something real about the current mood in Chinese society.

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “下午察：从躺平到纯过日子”.

Related: ‘Brainless’ but satisfying: How Chinese micro-dramas are taking over our screens | [Vox pop] Cash is king: The practical shift in Chinese spending habits