Today: What happened to the Chinese Dream? Yi-Ling Liu on declining opportunities, increasing malaise, and a waning of ambition in the People’s Republic.

+ Are sanctions against Iran working? Narges Bajoghli’s, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani’s, Ali Vaez’s, and Vali Nasr’s new book, How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare. … What we’re tracking for this week’s member’s despatch. & New music from Gelli Haha x Sean Guerin …

Requiem for a slogan

Schools and universities across the country created “dream walls,” encouraging students to write down their goals. They organized dream-speaking competitions. Students’ ambitions ranged, but many aspired to the same things: a stable job, a reliable income, and the chance to make a better life than their parents’.

Their aspirations would fuel the nation’s. Xi said the Chinese Dream was “realizing a prosperous and strong country, the rejuvenation of the nation and the well-being of the people.” All this would happen, he said, by the middle of the century.

Instead, the dream has become a chimera. Opportunities for China’s youth have stagnated, and China’s middle class is disappearing. Household incomes have flatlined. Youth unemployment hit a record high of 21.3 percent in 2023.

The same year, more than 70 percent of unemployed young people in cities had a degree. They call themselves “rat people” and “rotten-tail kids”—college grads in low-wage work or living with their parents. There are more and more of them. The malaise has spawned the “lying flat” movement—a rebellion against punishing hours and eternal struggle with few rewards.

What went wrong?

Yi-Ling Liu is a journalist in residence at the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism and the author of a forthcoming book on the Chinese internet. She says the energy that once defined China’s economic rise—the tech boom, the surging middle class, the expansive sense of possibility—has ebbed. The economy has stalled. Innovation has stalled. Real estate is in crisis. Where relentless striving was once the norm, young people are now opting out.

Ambitious goals on dream boards have given way to disillusioned posts online. The Chinese internet, Liu says, once felt like a frontier—a space of possibility, creativity, and connection. Now, like everything else, it feels increasingly closed off. But in a country where public protest is rare, it’s still a crucial outlet—and the source of a new language of apathy. During the pandemic, a phrase capturing the national mood went viral on the Chinese internet: “We are the last generation.”

• “The term involution—内卷 (nèijuǎn) in Chinese—literally means “spiraling inward”—this sense of being in a rat race. Your whole life, you’ve been told, If you study hard, get good grades, get a good job, buy a house, start a family, your life will keep getting better. A lot of young Chinese people feel this is a lie. They’re in a rat race with no purpose and no end in sight.”
• “The disillusionment cuts across all classes. The elite feel constrained, too. Jack Ma founded Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce firm. In 2020, his holding company, Ant Group, was set for an IPO. But regulators suddenly canceled it. Then the government enacted a slate of regulations to rein in the tech sector. They enacted a whole bunch of antitrust laws. They canceled lots more IPOs. Everyone in tech got hit. The industry’s CEOs were told, Here’s the red line. You can’t cross it. And the red line was very close to their feet.”
• “The romance of the Chinese internet overlaps with the romance of the Chinese Dream. As China opened up, people thought it would only become wealthier, more powerful, more open. They had the same kind of feeling when the internet came online in the ’90s—that the technology would help push liberalization. And as people’s attitudes toward the Chinese Dream have soured, their attitudes toward the internet has, too. It used to be less censored—a Wild West, an electronic frontier, with boundless opportunity and exploration. But the state and the big tech corporations have smothered that sense of freedom.”

This edition, produced in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation, features conversations—with Ben Freeman, Miranda Patrucić, Justin Callais, and Josh Rudolph—on how authoritarian states build political influence in the U.S., why dictators keep disrupting so many other countries, why autocratic corruption is such a problem for democratic life, and what democracies can do about it.

Now, after two weeks of intense fighting, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi says, “Iran has in recent days received messages indicating that the U.S. may be ready to return to negotiations.” U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff says the two countries were discussing the resumption of talks. U.S. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, says, “They had a war, they fought, now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”

But for the moment, it’s sanctions redux: The U.S. maintains Trump’s “maximum pressure” strategy from his first term, sanctioning much of Iran’s economy in the hope that Tehran will make a deal.

Has this ever worked?

• Israeli fighter jets have bombed Damascus, destroying part of the Syrian defense ministry, as a warning about the country’s poor treatment of its Druze minority.
• The ultra-Orthodox party Shas, a key coalition partner with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, has quit over a military-draft–exemptions dispute, leaving the Israeli government with a minority in parliament.
• A Turkish court sentenced Ekrem İmamoğlu—the mayor of Istanbul and a key rival of Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—to 20 months in prison for allegedly insulting and threatening Istanbul’s chief prosecutor.
• France’s Prime Minister Francois Bayrou has proposed scrapping two national holidays to help close its “mortal danger” of a budget deficit, as the Republic’s debt continues increasing—by €5,000 a second.
• A volcanic eruption in southwestern Iceland has forced the evacuation of 100 people from Grindavik, along with tourists at the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, following intense seismic activity on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

See you Saturday …

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