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Some other people in China are agitating and shouting on social media to escape the culture of agitation. We can explain it.
By Yan Zhuang
For a bird, put an oversized 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 grab onto a kind of railing. Take a selfie and upload it to social media with a satisfaction caption.
Some young Chinese pretend to be birds to cope with the pressures of working, reading, or finding employment after graduation, among other family challenges. Sometimes they simply need to break with their human condition at a time when their long-term is doubtful in the face of the slowdown in economic growth.
“Birds can fly freely and aimlessly in the sky,” said Wang Weihan, 20, a finance student in Shanghai, who pretends to be a bird in his room. He said the social media trend expresses “each person’s innate preference for freedom. “
The birds face the burden of China’s stagnant economy, high cost of living and rising youth unemployment rate. They want to take a hard look at themselves or find a job after graduating in a country where the number of graduates (nearly 12 million last year) has quadrupled since 2004.
The birds don’t want to worry that China’s boom years, which improved the lives of successive generations, are them.
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