@samuelszuchan: She made 700,000 yuan a year in Shanghai finance. Then she retired at 28 to a ghost city. Sasa Chen saved up two million yuan and moved to a place called Life in Venice, a deserted Evergrande development on China's eastern coast built to look like the Italian city. Less than one in five of its 46,000 units are occupied. Abandoned boats sit off the rundown pier. Her rent is 1,200 yuan a month. That's $168. She is part of a generation that has a word for what they're doing: “Bai lan,” or “Let it rot.” It started as basketball slang for losing on purpose. Now it describes a whole posture. You don't quit the game. You stay in it and visibly stop trying. Youth unemployment for 16 to 24 year olds in urban China hit 21.3% in June 2023. It got so bad the government stopped publishing the number entirely. And Sasa Chen isn't an outlier. In Hegang, a coal city where the mines closed, one-bedroom apartments sell for $3,000. A four-bedroom goes for $13,000. A realtor named Yang Xuewei has sold over 100 of them. Meanwhile, 3.7 million people applied for just 38,100 entry-level civil service jobs in the 2025 national exam. That's 98 candidates per slot. Others went a different direction. Litsky Li is 21. She quit her photography career and her parents now pay her 6,000 yuan a month to care for her grandmother. The hashtags FullTimeDaughter and FullTimeSon have millions of views. Parents paying adult children a salary to come home and do chores, because the labor market valued their education even less. Sasa Chen watches the sea from her balcony in a development built for a boom that ended. She's not off the grid. She's inside the grid, living in its ruins, on purpose. And she has a word for it that 700 million people understand.

Sam Szuchan

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Thursday 28 May 2026 19:02:08 GMT