Why are China’s youth pretending to be birds on social media?
By Yan Zhuang
To become a bird, pull an oversize T-shirt over your arms and torso. Hide your legs, let your hands stick out like claws and your empty sleeves flap like wings.
Now, use your claws to grip some kind of railing. Take a selfie and upload it to social media with a chirpy caption.
A young Chinese person pretends to be a bird on a TikTok video.Credit: TikTok/babelfish.asia
Some young people in China are pretending to be birds as a way of dealing with the pressures of working, studying or looking for jobs after graduation, among other familiar challenges. Sometimes, they just want a break from being human at a moment when their futures feel uncertain in the face of slowing economic growth.
“Birds can fly free and aimlessly in the sky,” said Wang Weihan, 20, a finance student in Shanghai who pretended to be a bird in his dorm room. He said the social media trend expressed “the innate desire within every person for freedom.”
Birds are unburdened by China’s sluggish economy, high cost of living and soaring rates of youth unemployment. They have no need to study hard or to find a job after graduation in a country where the number of graduates – nearly 12 million last year – has quadrupled since 2004.
Birds don’t need to grapple with the fear that China’s boom years, which improved the lives of successive generations, might be behind them.
Part of the caption in Wang’s bird video – “Blink, and it’s already week 11” – refers to the imminent end of the semester. With exams approaching, he said, he wanted to convey the stress and regret felt by students who had slacked off and now had to cram.
“You feel like you’re staring down imminent disaster,” he said. “You can’t escape it – there’s no way to avoid things like exams – and you feel a bit guilty and a bit remorseful, I think. So, at that moment, you want to be a carefree bird.”
Zhao Weixiang, 22, a biology student in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi, posted a digitally altered image of himself as a bird perched atop a telephone pole.
“No more studying, no more studying, be a bird,” the caption said.
The bird trend is another manifestation of a disillusionment with society.Credit: Han+7/Douyin 3
In his third year of college, he was feeling the pressure of upcoming exams that would determine whether he could get into his desired biology graduate program and the prospect of starting a career in a competitive field.
Many young people in China are becoming disillusioned because the story they were told from a young age – that they would have a bright future if they studied and worked hard – looks more doubtful as China’s economy slows, said Xiang Biao, director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, and an expert on Chinese society.
“They had very high expectations about themselves, about China and about the world in general. And then when they graduated from college and when they became adults, they became victims of the slowdown,” Xiang said.
Zhao Weixiang, 22, a biology student in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi, posted a digitally altered image of himself as a bird perched atop a telephone pole.Credit: TikTok
“They started asking: ‘Why did I study so hard? What for? I sacrificed so much joy and happiness when I was young.’”
To cope with this frustration, some people have adopted the mentality of “lying flat,” or favouring a restful life over one defined by constant striving and hustling. They protest in small ways, like wearing casual outfits to work instead of business attire. A handful have left Chinese megacities for Dali, a southwestern city known as an oasis for disaffected youth.
The bird trend is another manifestation of this disillusionment, and enables young people to “have a moment of being lighthearted” without opting out of the rat race, Xiang said.
Many young Chinese people are looking for an escape.Credit: TikTok/babelfish.asia
He said he saw the implicit message of the trend as this: “I don’t see any alternatives right now, but I can still imagine what a free life can be.”
So, do young people who pretend to be birds achieve a sense of freedom and lightheartedness?
Yes and no. One problem is that they can’t actually fly, of course.
Maybe because of the pressure of his exams, said Wang, the finance student, he felt more like a “pet parrot, one that’s kept in a cage and spends most of its time on the one perch its owner gave it”.
Zhao, the biology student, said he was also keenly aware of the limits of his avian form.
“I felt like a flightless bird that could only grip the railing and gaze into the distance,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.