The quiet revolution: China’s millennial backlash

April 27, 2018 7:47 AM

Behind a stall in Beijing’s central business district, a barista offers drinks with names such as “Can’t-Afford-To-Buy-A-House Iced Lemon Tea”. Another stall of the same chain sells “My Ex-Girlfriend’s Marrying Someone With Rich Parents Fruit Juice”. This is the brand Sang Tea (sang meaning “dejected, dispirited”) — a business that began in Shanghai last year, initially meant to be a temporary pop-up stall to mock the brand “Lucky Tea”, but whose dark comedy and deadpan presentation resounded with millennials, and prompted franchises to open across the country.

Financial Times Beijing correspondent Yuan Yang (additional reporting by Xinning Liu):

She was hoping for the impossible: to convince her family she could be 30, single, and happy. When Lu had discussed her ideas about the future before, her parents said she had been “poisoned by foreigners” while studying abroad. But she was determined to carve out a different life for herself.

Across China, millennials like her are committing small acts of rebellion. Society puts pressure on young people in China to find a good job, buy an apartment, and get married — in that order, before the age of 30. But economic restructuring, soaring house prices and increasing numbers of students in higher education are making those goals harder for millennials than they were for their parents. At the same time, millennials have developed different visions of the “good life” to their parents. This generation wants something new from China, and in pursuing it they are changing China, too. A quiet revolution is under way.

Original article (SL Financial Times, behind paywall)

Yawen Chen and Tony Munroe (The Wire):

While China’s roughly 380 million millennials i.e. those aged about 18 – 35, have opportunities that earlier generations would have found unimaginable, they also have expectations that are becoming harder to meet.

The average starting salary for graduates dropped by 16% this year to 4,014 yuan ($608) per month amid intensifying competition for jobs, even as a record eight million graduate from Chinese universities – nearly ten times the number in 1997.

Even among the elite “sea turtles” – those who return after studying overseas, almost half of the 2017 graduates earned less than 6,000 yuan per month, with 70 percent of respondents saying their pay is “far below” expectations.

In contrast the median per person rent in Beijing, where most of the estimated eight million renters are millennials, has risen by 33% in the past five years to 2,748 yuan a month, equivalent to 58 percent of median income in the city, a survey by E-House China R&D Institute found. The spiralling costs mean that young Chinese workers have to live on the edges of cities, with long, stressful journeys to work.

Other teas at 丧茶 (English name: orz cha) include:
confessed, got rejected black tea
working extra hours every day slushie
ex-boyfriend is doing better than you latte
achieved absolutely nothing black tea
your whole life is a mistake macchiato
everyone is successful apart from you fruit tea with milk foam
no matter how cheap houses get, still can't afford (fruit tea)
wasting your life green tea
failed diet latte
bumming around waiting for death green milk tea

posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were (44 comments total)

this is brilliant
tag yourself i'm "your whole life is a mistake macchiato"
posted by halation at 7:52 AM on April 27, 2018 [18 favorites]

make mine a praying for the sweet release of death mocha
with whipped cream
posted by thelonius at 7:59 AM on April 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

Irony is a beverage best served hot.
posted by kozad at 8:10 AM on April 27, 2018 [17 favorites]

The success of Sang Tea rests on the growth of sang culture — the millennial self-mocking, semi-ironic embrace of giving up, which has launched viral internet picture-memes, videos and fiction. The 28-year-old writer Zhao Zengliang, who is often associated with sang culture through her dry-humoured internet presence, says of the phenomenon: “Sang culture is where you can take a breather [from the pressures of competition], and where everyone can honestly just admit, ‘I don’t feel I’m good enough.’ ”

Replace 'sang culture' with 'tumblr and twitter' and this is my everyday experience of the internet.
posted by perplexion at 8:13 AM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]

bumming around waiting for death green milk tea

I knew I had a spirit animal. I learned today that I have a spirit drink.
posted by RolandOfEld at 8:13 AM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

“The thoughts and ideas of young people will determine the future values of the Chinese people,” wrote The People’s Daily, “Smile, get up, be brave, refuse to drink Sang Tea”.

I want to go back to Beijing just to give Sang Tea all of my money. This is fantastic.

(I'm working extra hours every day slushie)
posted by Fig at 8:18 AM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

I was rooting for Ms. Lu to be the person who started Sang Tea, and that she was demonstrating to her family that she could be financially successful without a husband. Unfortunately the article does not state who started the company.
posted by vignettist at 8:18 AM on April 27, 2018

confessed, got rejected black tea

It's like they know me personally. When are these beverages coming to the US? I would try them all.
posted by Rob Rockets at 8:20 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

Every generation has to find a new niche to exploit, given that the previous generation has filled the previous one up. It's economic evolution in action!

feeling very attacked though. pls make mine a no matter how cheap houses get, still can't afford coal black coffee
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:21 AM on April 27, 2018

your whole life is a mistake macchiato
Just laughed out loud in a public place.
posted by q*ben at 8:23 AM on April 27, 2018 [13 favorites]

Is it still the case that low-level government workers' wages are tiny fractions of what these sad millennials get?
posted by Kirth Gerson at 8:24 AM on April 27, 2018

Is there a "Can't Risk Pursuing My Entrepreneurial Vision Because Only a Nightmarish Corporate Job Can Provide the Health Coverage For My Child That I Can't Give Up" something in there?

(This is sort of like sex isn't it? In that every generation seems to think they invented it. And now the Chinese too, apparently. Welcome aboard the train, guys.)
posted by Naberius at 8:35 AM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

Gee, I'll take the "I'll never complain about graduating during the early '00s recession again because, I mean, relatively speaking..." black coffee.

With room for a "We can all still hate the Boomers together, right?" That's one thing we've got?
posted by leotrotsky at 8:35 AM on April 27, 2018 [9 favorites]

Hello, and welcome to neoliberal capitalism! Have a drink! :-)
posted by clawsoon at 8:36 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

I will have one "my great-grandfather was uneducated and kept chickens and sold eggs to pay rent, my grandfather got a degree on a scholarship and was a middle-class, my father got a graduate degree and was professional-class, and now I have a graduate degree and keep chickens and sell eggs to pay rent" with a shot of almond syrup please
posted by Rust Moranis at 8:49 AM on April 27, 2018 [58 favorites]

your whole life is a mistake macchiato

And I don't even like macchiatos! :(
posted by davejay at 8:50 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

...every generation seems to think they invented it. And now the Chinese too, apparently. Welcome aboard the train, guys

A nice reminder of how alike all humans are, isn't it?
posted by davejay at 8:51 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

Agreed davejay, no recent news has made me feel more at one with another nationality.
It’s great how global capitalism brings us all together in caffeinated existential despair.
posted by q*ben at 8:59 AM on April 27, 2018 [20 favorites]

alright China, if this is your OK Soda moment, you've got about 25 years left before everything goes completely off the fucking rails
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:02 AM on April 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

everyone is successful apart from you fruit tea with milk foam

This is me.
posted by Samizdata at 9:05 AM on April 27, 2018

alright China, if this is your OK Soda moment, you've got about 25 years left before everything goes completely off the fucking rails

With modern gains in productivity I’m sure they can do it in five
posted by The Whelk at 9:07 AM on April 27, 2018 [23 favorites]

alright China, if this is your OK Soda moment, you've got about 25 years left before everything goes completely off the fucking rails

I was just thinking the description of sang culture sounds a lot like the slacker ironic Gen X culture of the early 90s, except without the ability to actually slack.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:12 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

Unfortunately the article does not state who started the company.
Apparently a guy called Xiang Huan Zhong, but I can't find much about him.

Their website says that apart from some places in China they want to branch out to Sydney in future yay. It's a bit of a hoon from mine but I'm a keen bean with a licence.

Their menus are quite scattered (and possibly they sell different teas at different stores) so I've been hunting them down, here's another one:
You don't possess nothing, you have a mental illness! oolong tea

I translated 你的人生就是个乌龙玛奇朵 as your whole life is a mistake macchiato, but I've only heard 乌龙 as a background speaker in contexts where 'mistake' feels accurate- so I googled it to check what the internet says about its slang usage (not much), and it told me pretty much unanimously that it meant Sinornithosaurus. Your whole life is a Sinornithosaurus.
(Native speakers please chip in!)
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 9:16 AM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

Your whole life is a Sinornithosaurus.

Man, that drink makes me feel like a forensic entomologist feels about discovering improbably geo-located silphidae!
posted by leotrotsky at 9:26 AM on April 27, 2018 [10 favorites]

so I googled it to check what the internet says about its slang usage (not much), and it told me pretty much unanimously that it meant Sinornithosaurus. Your whole life is a Sinornithosaurus.
(Native speakers please chip in!)

Not exactly a native speaker, though I do have some information. The link mentions that it is taken from Cantonese slang and based on an old folk tale where the people prayed for a green dragon to help, but the black dragon (乌龙) came instead and ruined everything. And there was also an HK journalist in the 1960s that used it in football, because its sounds similar to "own goal".

I don't speak Cantonese, but have been able to verify at least one Chinese speaking forum mention this too.

Oh, and 乌龙 is also "Oolong", the tea.
posted by FJT at 9:38 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

those are the characters for oolong (wulong) as in the type of tea, so it seems like it may be a terrible pun, depending on what the ingredients are. (i am not a native speaker, or really any kind of speaker at this point.)
posted by vogon_poet at 9:43 AM on April 27, 2018

Yes, I was rather wondering whether there were puns involved and was a bit disappointed that I couldn't make out the names in the photo. Good to hear that there may indeed be puns involved.
posted by inconstant at 9:47 AM on April 27, 2018

Your whole life is a Sinornithosaurus.

...based on an old folk tale where the people prayed for a green dragon to help, but the black dragon (乌龙) came instead and ruined everything.

honestly it just keeps on getting more accurate
as the kids say, i feel seen
posted by halation at 9:48 AM on April 27, 2018 [17 favorites]

those are the characters for oolong (wulong) as in the type of tea, so it seems like it may be a terrible pun, depending on what the ingredients are. (i am not a native speaker, or really any kind of speaker at this point.)

OH my lord, I just figured out why I was getting hits on dinosaurs, it's because I was using 乌 and 鸟 interchangeably oooops ahahah. I'm normally a trad Chinese reader so I didn't catch it at all.

For non-Chinese speakers, the one without the dot means black/dark, and the other means bird. They're pronounced pretty differently (oo and niao respectively).
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 9:57 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

every generation seems to think they invented it

As I have said before, my cohort (Generation X, graduated college 1989) had a couple of significant advantages, compared to the Snake People, although there was a nasty recession right after we hit the so-called Real World:

1) Cost of housing was much lower. (Student loan debt, while already a problem, was also of course lower).
2) The recession was pretty brief, and followed by a robust recovery....
3) ...which culminated in the IT boom - not just the dotcom era, but the whole thing - where there was such demand for programmers, sysadmins, DBAs, web designers, etc that no one really cared if you had any credentials, as long as you could do the job. Now the competition for those entry-level jobs is much worse.
posted by thelonius at 10:02 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is fascinating. Is the menu online? My Chinese is dictionary-assisted only at this point, but I'd love to see how these read. Thanks for posting!
posted by the sobsister at 10:32 AM on April 27, 2018

"achieved absolutely nothing black tea"
And here I thought I had been drinking Lipton's day and night for my entire adult life.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 10:55 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

I think 乌龙 in this context can be translated into 'bungle'.
posted by of strange foe at 11:27 AM on April 27, 2018

This reminds me of the subversively gleeful yet fatalistic anti-corporatism of Ms. Yeah's cooking videos.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 11:54 AM on April 27, 2018

I think 乌龙 in this context can be translated into 'bungle'.

Yeah, I would characterize it as "mistake, with some mildly farcial/humorous quality".
posted by btfreek at 1:07 PM on April 27, 2018

“Your whole life is an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm”?

Anyway it’s nice to be able to tell the truth and see things that are true.
posted by bleep at 1:10 PM on April 27, 2018

Your whole life is a Sinornithosaurus.
(Native speakers please chip in!)

your whole life is a mistake macchiato/你的人生就是个乌龙玛奇朵

(speaks Mandarin but not native speaker) I've seen a meme where they say "your whole life is just a [insert insignificant thing]".

If it's me translating it, it's "your entire life and all you've ever done amounts to nothing but this oolong macchiato", with perhaps some 乌龙 as disaster connotations intended as a second-order joke. There's a lot of pun and meme overlay since about 2013.

In the end, you've spent years learning Chinese and filing away hundreds of Mandarin memes in your head all so you can explain existential puns about a coffee shop to people on the other side of the planet who can't even buy this stuff. Why even bother?

brb ordering a
confessed, got rejected black tea
working extra hours every day slushie
ex-boyfriend is doing better than you latte
achieved absolutely nothing black tea
your whole life is a mistake macchiato
everyone is successful apart from you fruit tea with milk foam
no matter how cheap houses get, still can't afford (fruit tea)
wasting your life green tea
failed diet latte
bumming around waiting for death green milk tea

Since I'm in Beijing I'll have the chance to tell you how they taste, but you already know how they taste. They taste like tears.
posted by saysthis at 2:29 PM on April 27, 2018 [14 favorites]

Is the menu online?

It's weirdly hard to track down an official menu, but here are a few.
posted by womb of things to be and tomb of things that were at 4:00 PM on April 27, 2018

* nobody likes me, everybody hates me guess I'll go eat worms black tea
* customer service makes me want to die tea
* i'm really sick of hearing the same complaints every day from the same people tea
* everything's broken and nobody will fix anything tea
* stop being assholes tea
* i just want to hide in my apartment and drink tea
* i can't get a new job or a raise or anything tea
* i'm unemployed and gonna die tea
* i'm unemployed, gonna die and can't afford this tea so I stole it and now I'll go to jail but at least i'll have a home there tea
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:50 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

I’m having a complete generation X fantasy of these teas being served in a dank café with Demotivational posters on the walls (“some lives are lived as a warning to others”) and endless covers of Everybody Knows or maybe just the Pump Up the Volune soundtrack + Nirvana playing in the background...scratchy polyester couches....glass-topped coffee tables with collages of random dictators + pictures of the Challenger explosion...
posted by warriorqueen at 6:39 PM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]

"hey look at those new teas, they're pretty cool"
"dude are you being sarcastic?"
"i don't even know anymore"
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:43 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

I’d like an order of the why bother ice water
posted by GrammarMoses at 4:32 AM on April 28, 2018

Thanks, womb of things to be and tomb of things that were!
posted by the sobsister at 10:09 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

achieved absolutely nothing black tea

Honestly, I'm feeling so attacked right now.
posted by RhysPenbras at 11:03 AM on April 30, 2018 [1 favorite]