«不在沉默中灭亡，就在沉默中爆发»
Young Chinese people don’t blockade anything. They cancel the contract.
On September 8, 2026, the OECD published the PISA 2025 results. Chinese students crush the global rankings: 612 points in mathematics, 597 in science, far ahead of everyone else. 55.5% of them are “top performers” in at least one domain. Three weeks later, 400 French high schools were under blockade, bins piled up in front of the gates, and the Prime Minister announced that classes would be suspended until the end of the week in response to the school blockades.
The reflex wrote itself: look at these Chinese students, the best in the world, who work without breaking anything. The model and the counter-model. The silent ones and the noisy ones.
Exactly one hundred years ago, Lu Xun, the greatest Chinese writer of the last century, wrote about a generation of students: “不在沉默中爆发，就在沉默中灭亡”: if we do not explode in silence, we perish in silence. A century later, I turn his sentence around, because Chinese youth has invented a third way that Lu Xun did not foresee: it has not perished, and it has not exploded outwardly. It explodes within the silence itself. No slogans, no marches, no burning bins. Through tens of millions of individual decisions, silent and convergent, that are redrawing China’s consumer society.
The silence of the top students
Let us first acknowledge what is true in the admiration. China’s PISA result is real. It rewards a system of unmatched rigor: standardized, centrally steered curricula, teachers who prepare their lessons collectively, families who offer unfailing support whatever their income. One figure says better than any other what this machine achieves: only 1.8% of the Chinese students tested are low performers in all three domains at once, compared with an OECD average of 19.7%. The Chinese school leaves almost no one at the back of the class. This is precisely where the French school fails, and it is why French high school students are in the streets: teachers not replaced, overcrowded classes, a lack of resources that an entire neighborhood endures together. In China, none of this is lacking. The resources are there, the teachers are there, the evening study hall stays open until 10 p.m. No one shouts.
Honesty requires a point that the headlines omit: China’s PISA sample covers only four territories, Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the best-endowed core of the education system. This is not “China”; it is its territorial elite. But let us not linger on disputing the thermometer: even broadened, the sample would likely remain at the top. The real problem lies elsewhere, and MadameChina readers know my obsession with partial interpretations: PISA measures students’ ability. It measures neither the competitive regime that produces it nor its cost.
Yet the same survey documents that cost. Chinese students already reported some of the longest study hours in the world, and one of the lowest life satisfaction scores of all participating countries: 6.64 out of 10 (PISA 2018; France: 7.2 out of 10). The Blue Book of Mental Health from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences measures a risk of depression among 14.8% to 24.6% of adolescents, depending on the edition and the scale used. Chinese high school students sleep about 7.2 hours a night, below the official 8-hour standard, and the curve is declining. First in the world in mathematics, among the last in sleep and life satisfaction.
So why the silence? Not out of serenity. The French high school student suffers from a collective, vertical deprivation: their whole school lacks the same teachers, their whole neighborhood suffers the same neglect. This shared experience creates an “us,” and an “us” creates slogans. The Chinese high school student, by contrast, is caught in a horizontal competition: their direct competitor for scarce places is the classmate sitting next to them. When your progress mechanically means a classmate’s decline, suffering does not bind; it isolates. There is no possible slogan against your own deskmate. Chinese silence is therefore individual.
The royal road: a generation mistook its luck for a law
For all of this rests on a contract, the oldest and most powerful of Chinese contracts: 读书改变命运 (dúshū gǎibiàn mìngyùn), “study changes destiny.” Work hard, rank high, and the system will pay you in social mobility. To understand why this contract hardened to the point of becoming unbearable in the 2000s, we need to look at who the parents of today’s young people are.
They were born in the 1960s and 1970s. The good students of that generation collected what the Chinese language calls 时代红利 (shídài hónglì), the “dividend of the era”: graduating at the exact moment the economy was taking off at 10% a year, hired when skilled jobs were multiplying faster than graduates, homeowners when a Shanghai apartment was still worth a few years of salary, before it came to be worth decades. For them, the correlation between grades and success was perfect.
Their mistake was not lying to their children. In their inner narrative, they succeeded because they had worked hard; the hidden variable, having been twenty-five during the most formidable economic expansion in modern history, appears nowhere. And when you are certain you hold the recipe, you pass it on without measuring the dose. Hence the escalation of the 2000s and 2010s: tutoring turned into an industry, weekends sacrificed. Not because these parents are cruel, but because they are certain.
The academic competition they fuel is strictly zero-sum. Some 13.4 million candidates sit the gaokao (高考, the national university entrance exam); around 2% will reach the 985 universities (China’s Ivy Leagues), the top of the system. Even before high school, the zhongkao (中考, the end-of-middle-school exam) steers roughly one student in two away from the general academic track.
The crack: the payout window closes
A contract holds as long as the other party pays. And the other party, the economy, stopped paying at the very moment the most educated cohorts in Chinese history arrived at the window: more than 12 million new university graduates every year. Meanwhile, urban youth unemployment has settled durably at record levels, even after the calculation method was revised. That left the state as a refuge. It is shrinking in proportion: the national civil service exam, the 国考 (guókǎo), attracts more than three million applications for a few tens of thousands of posts; the queue grows longer in front of a door that does not widen.
That is the crack: a generation that paid for fifteen years of competition, with its sleep and its adolescence, discovers that the promise can no longer be cashed in. Social media found the words before economists did: the meme 孔乙己文学 (Kǒng Yǐjǐ wénxué) borrows from Lu Xun, once again, his downwardly mobile scholar who can neither make his scholar’s gown pay off nor bring himself to take it off. The diploma as a garment one can neither wear nor shed.
The silent explosion
This is where the silence changes in nature. Silent academic suffering does not disappear; it converts. Lacking the street, it discharges into individual decisions, made without a sound. And when tens of millions of silent decisions converge, they become macroeconomic curves.
This generation has given itself a name: 觉醒的一代 (juéxǐng de yīdài), “the awakened generation.”
First, the gestures of cancellation.
- 躺平 (tǎng píng), “lying flat,” and its darker variant 摆烂 (bǎi làn), “letting it rot”: cancelling limitless effort.
- Marriage, whose numbers have roughly halved since the 2013 peak, and the birth rate, which fell below 8 million births in 2025 (in a population of 1.4 billion): cancelling the transmission of the contract to a next generation.
- Record precautionary savings among young households, which social media calls 报复性存钱 (“revenge saving”): cancelling the future bought on credit.
- And even the 全职儿女 (quánzhí érnǚ), “full-time children,” graduates paid by their parents to keep house: the family contract running in reverse.
Then the gestures of reallocation, and this is where brands should look, because every cancelled clause frees up a budget that gets redeployed elsewhere. The money that no longer goes to a property down payment, to marriage, to preparing for the future, does not disappear: it changes destination, and each destination has become a market phenomenon.
- Young Chinese have sent lottery sales soaring, driven by the under-35s: a few yuan to buy not a win, but a moment of possibility.
- They have filled the temples: social media summed up the era in a sentence that has become a proverb, 在上班和上进之间，选择了上香: “between working and getting ahead, they chose to burn incense.”
- They have turned Pop Mart and its Labubu into a global giant of collectible toys, whose revenue more than tripled in one year: the 69-yuan (~€9) figurine as a unit of comfort, bought blind for the thrill of unboxing.
- They have invented the 谷子 economy (gǔzi, anime and video game merchandise), 特种兵 trips (tèzhǒngbīng, “commando-style”): ten cities in three days, maximum experience for minimum money; the 穷鬼套餐 (qióngguǐ tàocān, “broke-person meals”) turned into a marketing pitch by major chains; the 平替 (píngtì, the equivalent substitute): the dupe embraced as a mark of lucidity, not as an admission of poverty.
- Even social ties have been reorganized around lower commitment: the 搭子 (dāzi), a partner for a single activity, a lunch buddy, a badminton companion, the à-la-carte relationship when marriage is deemed beyond one’s emotional budget.
Put end to end, these phenomena, which the Western press treats as viral curiosities, form one and the same structure: the massive shift of budget from delayed gratification to immediate gratification. A generation taught for fifteen years that every pleasure must be postponed until after the exam, after the degree, after buying the apartment, and that has watched the final reward never arrive, is reversing the rule: it now buys only what pays off right away. Comfort, luck, play, a moment, a symbol. This is the exact ground on which the frugality economy and emotional consumption (情绪价值, qíngxù jiàzhí, “emotional value”) described in my previous notes are growing.
What business leaders can take away
1. Do not read 躺平 as a drop in demand, but as a shift in criteria. This generation still spends, sometimes impulsively. But it now buys only immediate, verifiable value, emotional or functional. Propositions based on deferred aspiration, status to be built, self-investment with a ten-year horizon, have lost their buyer.
2. The dividing line in the shopping basket is no longer price. The same person buys the broke-person meal at lunch and the collectible figurine in the evening. Ask yourself where your offer sits: in the “future” budget, in structural contraction, or in the “present” budget, in expansion. Many Western brands in China are positioned, without knowing it, on the wrong side of that line.
3. In China, yesterday’s HR levers are losing their grip. Sacrifice in exchange for a career promise, the 996 culture, worked on a generation that believed in the contract. The next one, that of 00后整顿职场 (“the post-2000 generation is setting the workplace straight”), demands immediate compensation: balance, meaning, cash.
4. The upward-mobility contract is a leading indicator. Today’s academic silence is the birth rate and consumption curve of ten years from now. Anyone who wants to forecast the Chinese consumer of 2035 should not look at the shopping malls of 2026; they should look at the evening study halls, lit until 10 p.m., in silence.