'The better life is out of reach': The Chinese dream is slipping away

Since the 1980s, more than 800 million Chinese have risen out of poverty. China's middle class expanded from virtually no one to about 400 million. Villagers moved to cities. Tens of millions of people became the first in their families to attend college.

Today, China's economic growth has slowed. As wages stagnate and jobs disappear, the promise of upward social mobility is eroding, especially for those from modest backgrounds.

For people like Boris Gao, the Chinese Dream no longer feels achievable.

After Gao's parents were laid off from their jobs at state-owned factories, his father drove a taxi and his mother stayed home. The family struggled to make ends meet. To save money, his mother canceled a text message service from his school, causing him to miss notifications of homework and school activities.

But Gao was exceptionally driven. After graduating from college in 2016, he worked hard, saved aggressively and attended a graduate program in Hong Kong. Since 2024, his job hunt has been an ordeal. One company asked him to work with no pay during a trial period. He quit a job after not being paid for two months. Another company rejected him because he was educated outside mainland China, making him politically unreliable, he was told.

In one interview, he was asked about his parents' professions, which is not unusual in China. "Your family has low social status," Gao was told and did not get the job.

"To them, perseverance is a defect," he said. "If you have to struggle, it means you're not good enough."

Anxiety over inequality is growing in China. Children of privilege inherit not only wealth but also prestigious jobs and powerful connections. Children of laborers and farmers, no matter how driven or well educated, often struggle to break through.

It's a dynamic that would feel familiar to many in the United States and some other developed nations. But in China, the stakes are higher. The average standard of living is lower, and the social safety net is far more fragile.

The disillusionment is being captured sarcastically online. One buzzword is "Pindie," a biting term for nepotism that means "competing through one's father." Another is "county Brahmins," which lampoons small-town elites who gain status by monopolizing connections and jobs.

The discontent over privilege boiled over recently when a trainee doctor in the center of an extramarital affair with a doctor appeared to have questionable credentials. People noted that her father led a big state-owned enterprise and that her mother was a senior official at a university. After an investigation, her medical license was revoked.

The online debate fueled outrage that family ties, not merit, are what advance careers in China today.

"At a time when competition for quality education is fierce and jobs are hard to find after graduation, fairness is not just a moral imperative," wrote Hu Xijin, the retired editor of the official Global Times tabloid. "It is essential to maintaining social stability."

To understand this shift, I put out a call for Chinese people to write to me about their experiences in trying to move up from working-class backgrounds. All the responses I received were from men. I interviewed five of them, all between the ages of 25 and 49. They asked that I use only their family names or their English names because they feared government retribution.

The two oldest in the group did not go to college but rode China's wave of growth that took off at the start of the century. They are now worried they will slip back to where they started.

One of those two, who asked that I use only his surname, Zhao, dropped out of high school and became a coal miner. For three years, he worked eight-hour shifts in dark, freezing mine shafts. Then he moved to Beijing to pursue acting and worked briefly as a film extra.

In 2014, China's housing market was booming. Zhao started working in real estate. His $700 monthly pay matched what he had made as a miner, but, he said, "I could see the sun and live a normal life."

In 2017, he became a mortgage broker, and his pay increased several fold. One month in 2020, he earned $15,000. He married and bought a car.

Then the housing market collapsed. He has had no income for the past year. He has considered returning to the mines, but the thought of that dark world repelled him. Now Zhao, 38, and his wife live on her $500 monthly salary. Children are out of the question.

"I'm stuck in limbo," he said. "The better life is out of reach, and I can't fall low enough to start over. I have no idea what I should be doing."

The three younger men I interviewed, born in the 1990s, called themselves "small-town test-taking experts." That is slang used to describe strivers who believed education would lift them up, only to find they were shut out of elite networks and stuck in dead-end jobs.

The three men grew up in rural and working-class homes and rose above their parents' social class through hard work and by attending universities. But they all learned it would be hard to fully escape their socioeconomic backgrounds.

Two of them had to give up spots at leading foreign schools, one at Columbia University and the other at the London School of Economics, because of the cost.

All three recalled that, when they were growing up, their parents had paid little attention to their education.

Their experiences with education were the opposite of those of children in many of China's upper-middle-class families. Those parents pushed their children into math and computer classes, and piano lessons and English tutoring. They are driven by the fear of letting their children "lose at the starting line." These families may have more in common with their American peers than with China's working class.

For the three small-town strivers I interviewed, their educations opened their eyes to inequality.

One of them, Gary Liang, said most of the parents of classmates at his elementary school had worked at factories. When he was in high school, most parents were professionals. One student had a foreign English-language tutor.

The contrast was even more jarring when Liang entered a prestigious university in central China. The father of one of his roommates was a local-level Communist Party secretary; another roommate's father was a university dean.

While his roommates dined out, Liang got by on food from the university canteen and tutored high school students to earn some cash. At the time, he did not understand why his roommates spent so much time networking at school.

"It's very unfair," said Liang, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Japan. "You put in so much effort, and then you realize that some things are just a lot easier for other people, or not nearly as hard for them."

One sought-after path to move up in China runs through state-owned enterprises, which can offer elite, stable jobs. But landing one can require the right connections.

Josh Tang, a STEM graduate from a rural background, wanted to change his career from the grueling work culture of the tech industry. His father, a manual laborer who had once owned a small business, asked village relatives to help his son land a job at a bank. Tang submitted two applications but didn't get an interview.

When the economy was better, jobs at state-owned enterprises occasionally trickled down to people with his family background, said Tang, who went back to work in tech. But now, he added, "they're viewed as the safest bets, so they circulate within the same class."

"They're hoarded, not shared," he said.