This year, the microphone was handed over to the younger generation, leaving aside the “imagination” of the older generation towards the next generation in the latter film and presenting 955 junior high school students’ essays with the title “I don’t want to be like this”. Two junior high school students will give their answers.
However, unlike the B station, which was praised for giving the “right to speak” to young people, Tencent’s PR director Zhang Jun’s remarks touched on the contradiction between generations and classes, and was attacked by netizens.
At 9:33 a.m. early on May 4, Zhang Jun, director of public relations for Tencent, wrote on Weibo, “While we are busy doing all kinds of planning to pay tribute to the youth, the youth are sleeping.” The post received more than a million likes and 40,000 retweets by 3 p.m. on May 5, but the 20,000-plus comments were mostly critical. The top comments read, “The weasel is paying homage to the chicken, and the chicken is not up yet. Every day thinking about cheating clicks to earn traffic, one day no hype will die, one day no plagiarism will die.” It is not difficult to find out from the comments why Zhang Jun’s remarks have attracted so much criticism, and it can be said that they precisely It can be said that Zhang Jun’s remarks have attracted so much criticism, and it can be said that he has precisely stepped on the sensitive points of class and generation issues in the public opinion field of mainland China in recent years.
In 2019, Jack Ma’s “996 is a blessing” (996 means going to work at 9 a.m. and leaving at 9 p.m., working 6 days a week) sparked huge public criticism, to which he explained that it was because of his “love for work and finding something I love to do, otherwise every minute of work is torture. “But the netizens do not buy, not only large enterprises engineers overworked, many young people also joined this kind of labor exploitation of large enterprises to denounce.
Even though many young people still aspire to enter large enterprises such as Alibaba, Tencent, etc., but the high pressure and high working hours environment has led to many criticisms. In addition, the younger generation does not buy the saying “work hard to improve your life” and “get paid for your love of work”, and “how much money you get for how much you do” has become an epiphany instead. The Japanese drama “I want to get off work on time” became popular in 2019, reflecting the contemporary view of work and the reluctance of people to allow companies to wrap up the reality of being squeezed by labor with “responsibility” or “love”.
Such criticism of big business has not eased but intensified in 2021. The case of the sudden death of a Pindo employee is another peak. The 22-year-old employee worked overtime until after 1:00 a.m., but suddenly fainted and collapsed on his way home, and was later confirmed to have passed away causing high social concern, and the official response further fermented the matter. The official account of Pindo mentioned in the response of Zhihu, “You look at the bottom of the people, which one is not life for money, I have not thought it is the problem of capital, but the problem of this society,” the account mentioned that “this is a time to fight with life, you can choose the days of comfort, but you have to choose the consequences of comfort. You can choose to be comfortable, but you have to choose the consequences of comfort.” Also under siege by public opinion, “sweatshops are still justified” has led to widespread criticism.
The anxiety of the young people who point to the capital
Starting from the saying that 996 is a blessing, it is not difficult to observe the voices of the young generation on various social issues in mainland China in the past two years to see the attack on the so-called “capital” and “class solidification”. As long as they stand on the opposite side of “capital”, they almost always stand on the high ground of public opinion first, and often applaud the punishment of big enterprises, while showing more concern for the grassroots.
From the discussion of May 4 last year, we can see not only a variety of young people, but also their criticism of the “class solidification” in real life. For example, they criticized that the youth activities presented in the “Later Wave” film were not costly, and the comments mentioned that “the former wave took up all the good resources, and the later wave only died on the beach”, and “the life of Brahmins was made into a video to represent the Vaishya and Shudra. to represent the life of Vaishya and Shudra? Human confusion” and “The latter wave is actually not wrong, the sea is so big, only the upper layer has waves.” This is in contrast to the current situation of difficult class mobility in the past.
Zhang Jun’s remarks not only caused dissatisfaction because of the mention of “youth sleeping”, but also because of his identity as a senior executive of Tencent who produces youth programs but does not understand the problem of youth anxiety. The netizens mentioned, “Are various tribute to youth planning is not done by the youth,” Zhang Jun responded, “Maybe it is encouraged by the old people to do.” Whether intentional or not, people feel the oppression of generation and class as a sore point of contemporary young people, so public opinion will ferment like this.
And such a situation has emerged even earlier in Taiwan. In the past, the previous generation in Taiwan liked to encourage young people with stories such as Wang Yongqing’s fortune, but such success stories are no longer very popular. In recent years, there have been statements criticizing young people for their small fortunes, their failure to save money and their love of going abroad to have fun, but ignoring the reasons why young people are addicted to small fortunes and the reality of not being able to save big money and the problem of class entrenchment in the past, such statements are often met with public backlash.
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