Everything's Ruined, Beijing Is Unlivable! The Post-80s Have Become the Biggest Obstacle, and So Far Everything Has Failed!? Qiqi Baba TALK Episode 994 20261009

This episode explores the grim current state of Chinese society, including the depression of the real economy, the mass closure and transfer of shops on commercial streets, and the plight of the vast number of workers facing endless overtime, excessively long working hours, and meager incomes. The program analyzes the widespread risks of layoffs and the phenomenon of exploitation by management in private enterprises, points out the hopeless mentality of young people and parents born in the 1980s regarding childbirth and the future, and emphasizes that due to the lack of substantive distribution reform and social security systems, all official policies to encourage childbirth and marriage have failed.

Video link:

Full text:

Hello everyone, welcome to Qiqi Baba, I am Qiqi. Let's look at this issue regarding having children. Actually, there is another very critical point. It's not just that the new generation isn't getting married; there is actually an even greater influencing condition.

I just saw a sentence that said the most serious social problem right now is not that those born after 2000 aren't getting married or those born after 1990 aren't having kids, but that the generation born in the 80s, who were the best at having and raising kids, suddenly said to their children at the dinner table one day: "It doesn't matter if you get married in the future, and it doesn't matter if you have kids. I don't even expect you to support me in my old age. I have no requirements; as long as you are happy and joyful yourself, that's enough."

What happened later? How did it get like this? I haven't been to the underground street for a while, why have they all closed down? Is business that hard to do this year?

Working in a factory is actually more bitter than farming. My mother was diagnosed with three or four chronic diseases, and my father doesn't even have the courage to go to the hospital for a check-up. But my grandparents are in good health now and can even farm one or two mu of land. Although farming is bitter, it won't make you work eleven hours a day for one or two months straight. Working in a factory can, and it won't even just let you work eleven hours. This article reprinted by state media tells us that if we work more than 55 hours a week for a long time, our risk of stroke will increase by 35 percent. But will the factory really only let us work 55 hours a week? This is why I am speaking up for the two-day weekend. I hope everyone will cheer me on.

Half the street is gone, it's terrifying! Forward this to your landlord and let them see. This is Shapingba, and it's gone. Anta has been open for more than ten years, right? It's closed too. This street is full of old men and old women. Back in the day, shops in Shapingba were hard to come by. We even had to beg people everywhere just to grab a shop. Some shops had transfer fees of hundreds of thousands. Holy shit, look at this whole row, they're all closed. How can you do business like this? This shop was our earliest 361 store, with a business area of only about 60 or 70 square meters. At its peak, the rent was 2.4 million. The upstairs is all empty, where is the business? If you don't make money, why are you doing it? Half the street is gone. We used to do special sales here, a 60-square-meter shop, one million a year. Now look, it's all gone. It's too depressed. This is Shapingba, the most awesome core business district in Chongqing, and now it has become a big community shop area. Everyone can't keep going, and the landlord won't lower the rent. The real economy is too hard, too hard.

Actually, these shops are already dead; they just won't admit it. The whole street, look, it's all for rent, for rent, look. Even if it's not for rent, there's no one. Many people have already collapsed now. These days, it's useless to shout through a loudspeaker, it's useless to shout until you die! No one, no one.

Nobody is coming, it's over, the sky has fallen. One shop transferred, two shops transferred, three, four, there are still two more upstairs, several of them are all being transferred. Over here is another row of four or five empty storefronts, all large areas of vacant rentals outside, one, two, three, four poles, they can't even be rented out directly. The storefront is good, there's outdoor seating, but it's largely empty.

With our population of 1.4 billion, incomes below 2,000 yuan account for 936 million people.

So many.

Right, with such low incomes, they can hardly talk about living; they are simply trying to survive! Indeed, and those experts and professors who claim the per capita income is 118,000, do you really understand the lives of ordinary people?

Exactly.

Sitting in your offices all day, blowing the air conditioning, sucking the blood and sweat of ordinary people.

Too outrageous.

Do you deserve the word "human"?

An unwritten rule of society is that truly high-value resources that can be implemented are never public, let alone circulated at the grassroots level. Most of the resources you can see and get in the public market are what others have chewed up and left behind, with not much real value. For example, the job openings you swipe through every day, the bidding advertisements you see, the policies and news you follow, are all meat others have chewed and soup they have drunk, not very valuable at all. And the truly valuable things are never brought to the table. Why is that? Because quality resources are always scarce, good things are just that many, and the fewer people who know, the more those who know can eat their fill. Take job hunting for instance: when you can see truly good positions and opportunities on recruitment websites, they have basically already been screened through several rounds. First, people with connections arrange things in a circle, then a circle is screened among company employees, then headhunters fish around for a circle, and only finally do they appear on recruitment websites and in front of you. At this point, if no one has filled the vacancy, the position either has very harsh requirements or has little appeal in itself. This is actually an unspoken rule that everyone knows but keeps quiet about.

Desperately pursuing economic growth while being unwilling to talk about distribution is today's reality. There are always people telling us to rely on hard work to get rich, but that is simply helping them make their wealth even more abundant. I want to ask, in today's material-first society, who can succeed by relying on their own hard work? That is not an economic problem at all, but a distribution problem. Failing to solve distribution is equivalent to constantly repeating a dead end. What do you think? Take the delivery industry we come into contact with every day: delivery workers brave wind and rain, delivering thousands of packages a month, and the wages they actually get, after deducting fines and fuel costs, are almost nothing. But what about the bosses of delivery platforms? They ring the bell for going public, their wealth grows by tens of billions, and this is called getting rich through hard work. It is clearly the delivery workers' hard work that paved the boss's path to wealth. Look at the financial circle again: ordinary tellers handle business and pull in deposits every day under immense performance pressure, yet their wages are mediocre. Meanwhile, those financial giants rely on capital operations, and a single project can make them money ordinary people could never earn in several lifetimes; this distribution is simply shoving the blood and sweat of ordinary people directly into the pockets of a few. Then there are the ride-hailing drivers, spending over ten hours a day immersed in their cars, while the platform's commission gets higher and higher, the drivers' incomes get thinner and thinner, and the platform's founders rank among the rich list. This is the economic growth we pursue, nothing more than turning the efforts of the majority into a feast for the minority.

Jobs with a four-day monthly rest are endless, and there are even jobs with a two-day monthly rest. The day before yesterday I posted a video saying that nowadays, when everyone looks for a job, they must find one with a two-day weekend. Then many friends left messages in the comments saying that nowadays they are facing a four-day monthly rest, and some even a two-day monthly rest. Let's do the math: take this four-day monthly rest as an example. First of all, we must distinguish that a four-day monthly rest is not a one-day weekend; it means a total of four days off in a whole month. Usually, each month has about four and a half weeks, so two months is exactly nine weeks, and nine weeks means a total of only eight days off. But what about a single-day weekend? That's nine weeks over two months, allowing a total of nine days off. The work intensity of this single-day weekend job is already self-evident, so one can imagine how terrifying the work intensity of a four-day monthly rest job is. However, this day off is not even fixed; if you want to rest on a certain day, you still need to greet your leader in advance and ask for permission, completely depending on their mood. The reason why enterprises are so outrageous and exploitative now is partly due to the poor employment environment, and partly because, frankly speaking, they've been spoiled rotten. When enterprises push out this kind of rest system, if you don't go, someone else always will. With more people going, over time, this system naturally forms itself. As a result, more and more companies are taking this oppressive or exploitative route. To those friends with a four-day or two-day monthly rest, I really find it hard to imagine how you survived. You completely have no life of your own anymore! This is not striving; this is overdrawing your own body. I still say what I have repeatedly emphasized: a leading, truly good employment environment is never about comparing who is more involved in involution, but about allowing employees to truly, uprightly live, living out their own dignity and splendor.

As long as you are not working within the system, any job is just gig work, no different from food delivery. The only difference is that some people do it for three months, some for three years, and others for ten years, but the result is the same. Once you reach a certain age, you will naturally lose your job. When did I realize this? It was six months ago. At that time, I was an e-commerce director at a listed company. My salary was very high, hundreds of thousands a year, and my position was quite important. I managed one of the five business departments, generating 300 million in revenue for the company annually, ranking first. Logically speaking, I was in a high-ranking and powerful position, stable enough, right? But I was still laid off. The reason for the layoff was ridiculous. It wasn't because I made a mistake or performed poorly; it was simply because the boss's nephew took a liking to my business and decided to take it over himself. Isn't that a bastard move? You didn't lead when we were opening up the market, you didn't lead when we were building the team, but as soon as I smoothed out the business and achieved results, you want to step in. The company suggested I go start a new business. Bullshit, of course I wouldn't. If I built that up too, who's to say some other little cousin or nephew wouldn't pop up to snatch it away? So I took the severance and left. From that day on, I realized that there is no future working for a private enterprise. If you do poorly, you'll be 'optimized'; if you do well, it doesn't mean you'll get a good result. It's strange—it's been hundreds of years since the Industrial Revolution, and the organizational form of the company evolves every ten or twenty years, yet here it has evolved into a landlord-tenant model. You rarely see a group of bosses elsewhere who show such little respect for talent. Being a 'beast of burden' (niu ma) under these circumstances doesn't just drain you physically; it's the anxiety of living hand-to-mouth that wears you down. You have no sense of security as a junior specialist; after three months of business testing, any slight change means you get laid off. It's the same for managers and directors: if the business doesn't take off, you're finished; if it does, your team becomes a resource to be divided among their own people, and you still get laid off. What's the point of doing this kind of work? So after quitting, I didn't look for another job. It's not that I couldn't find one, I was just tired. The environment is so poor, it's the same everywhere. Going anywhere else is just repeating this process—what's the point? So brothers, I advise you to take advantage of the time and energy you have left to consider your exit strategy. Never trust the quality or conscience of private enterprises. You cannot work in a private enterprise until retirement. If nothing else, let me ask you: have you ever seen a private enterprise employee over fifty? I haven't. The oldest one I've seen was forty-two. When I worked at a big tech firm, I had a friend, a senior programmer who had worked for ten years, and he was laid off at thirty-eight. Then he began his wandering journey. The companies he found kept getting smaller, and the work kept getting worse. The last time I contacted him, he had opened a water station to deliver water.

Just look at how desolate Wanda Golden Street is now, and you'll know.

Have you noticed a common phenomenon? A couple works hard for decades to run a small shop, and business has been quite good, earning some money. They regret not being bolder ten years ago and not expanding the scale; if they had, wouldn't they be rich now? Now that they are in their fifties, if they don't give it one last shot, they won't have another chance. So they take out all their savings, borrow some loans, and open a fancy local shop. When the business doesn't come, they hire a few employees, but after a few months, they are stunned—they are actually losing money. They grit their teeth day and night, and after a year or two, they go bankrupt, owing a lot of debt, back to square one overnight. Many companies are the same: decades of building from nothing, growing from small to large, only to end in bankruptcy.

I think the job market this year is a bit too outrageous, isn't it? Many people around me have been looking for months, or even half a year or a year, without finding a suitable job, so they choose to compromise and move downward—like setting up a stall, delivering food, or driving for ride-hailing apps, thinking that's an exit strategy. Actually, let me tell you, you've fallen into a red ocean that is even more crowded. For example, if you set up a stall, you aren't as thick-skinned as others; if you deliver orders, you aren't as fast on your feet as others. If you sell things, you aren't as glib as others. At the bottom, there is a huge crowd of people; the further down you go, the less advantage you have. You think that if you lose your job, you can lie flat on the floor to catch your breath, but guess what? The floor is covered in people, and everyone is more familiar with this ground than you are. You think moving downward is cutting your losses, but I tell you, you are throwing yourself into a war of attrition you are destined to lose. So when looking for a job, your direction was wrong from the start. Unemployment isn't about forcing you to look for an exit downward, but forcing you to look for a gap upward. It's not about fighting with people at the bottom for that bowl of rice, but about training yourself in a skill that others can't easily snatch away, and reaching for that ceiling that not everyone can touch. I tell you, the path upward looks slow and very difficult, but once you walk it, it is wide open. Never let the 'let's just stay stable for now' mindset trap the opportunities you could have used to go higher.

Ah, in the current macroeconomic environment, I'm telling you, it's better to have no job at all than to work a shitty job! Because having no job simply means you have no money; but a shitty job will genuinely grind you to pieces! Although many people feel very anxious about unemployment, the good thing is this: that kind of anxiety is visible! Because you know your current predicament is simply being unemployed, and your immediate goal is to quickly find a job and secure a stable income. This kind of suffering and anxiety is temporary; once you find a job, it disappears. But a shitty job is completely different! This kind of pain is pervasive. At first, you might not think much of it—just that it's tiring and annoying—but after a long time, you'll find your sleep getting worse and worse, your temper growing shorter and shorter, and your whole person becoming dull and dim, turning petty yet timid, losing interest in everything around you. Every day consists of nothing more than commuting to work and scrolling through your phone, with no energy left for anything else! Nothing can make you happy anymore, slowly draining away all your energy! This kind of mental consumption is much more painful than unemployment. With unemployment, you at least still have expectations and yearnings; but a shitty job not only squeezes out your physical health, it also grinds away your confidence and spirit! Therefore, if you don't have a job right now, it might not necessarily be a bad thing; it could just be a brand-new beginning.

I already feel a deep sense of powerlessness regarding the current employment environment. First of all, what is it? Why is everyone unwilling to go to work anymore? Why has everyone chosen lying flat? Because you pay a single salary, yet you make me do the work of three people, four people, five people, and after I serve as an ox or a horse for so many consecutive days, you give me two days of rest a month, or three days, or four days, completely failing to provide a two-day weekend, completely failing to achieve what was hoped for. And I don't know why, even when a company's corporate system is already very mature, it still demands overtime, overtime, and more overtime every day, working overtime every single day, and unpaid overtime at that. Isn't that sick? I don't understand why a company that has been open for so many years must still demand overtime? Some companies, if they have a tiny bit of conscience, might give you alternating one- and two-day weekends, but they still fail to provide a true two-day weekend, and on top of that, they still demand endless overtime. It's just so helpless, and they even require you to have that specific vertical work experience! Many influencers have talked about this issue: they are hiring someone who knows how to fry chicken drumsticks, and if you previously fried chicken wings, that won't do; they strictly require you to have fried chicken drumsticks, and they also demand relevant work experience! If you're a fresh graduate, they reject you because of it, and companies will demand work experience; but if you do have work experience, they complain that you're too old.

Do we really not deserve a two-day weekend? Do we only deserve twelve-hour shifts in a two-shift rotation? Do we not even deserve to have a single day of rest? I really don't understand! Clearly, a two-day weekend was already mandated back in 1995, so why has it never been implemented? Some enterprises and modern factories have always maintained twelve-hour shifts in a two-shift rotation, and they even have the audacity to talk to us about overtime pay. I'd like to ask these enterprises: do you actually follow the labor law? Ah, why is what we take home only a little over 5,000 yuan a month after working several hours of overtime? Compared to those other enterprises out there, why is the difference so huge?

Do you know that in 2025, 70% of us do not have a two-day weekend? There is something very absurd in society right now: the two-day weekend has become a luxury. I don't know when it started, but companies began listing the two-day weekend and the 'five insurances and one fund' as benefits, placing them in the most prominent positions in job postings. This is as absurd as someone on a blind date proudly telling you, 'My greatest strength is that I don't beat my wife and I don't do drugs.' When did the baseline become a favor? Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that in 2025, the average weekly working hours for employed persons nationwide were 48.6 hours. Over the past nine years, our per capita working hours have seen nine consecutive increases. In industries like accommodation, catering, transportation, and manufacturing, it has even exceeded 51 hours per week. There is also data suggesting that more than one-third of people work overtime almost every day, and nearly two-thirds work unpaid overtime. Only 6.5% of people actually receive statutory overtime pay. A 2025 report from Zhaopin mentioned that only 30% of people actually have a two-day weekend. But the question is, with so much overtime, has everyone really become wealthy? Have companies really become stronger? Not at all. There is a basic common sense in economics: economic growth does not rely on working hours and labor intensity. If overtime could make a country strong, then the strongest country in the world should be Mexico, where the average working hours are 15 hours. But reality is not like that. In Germany, France, and many Nordic countries, their working hours are much lower than ours, yet their per capita GDP, industrial competitiveness, and technological levels have long been at the forefront because they rely on high efficiency, high added value, and high technology, not on grinding away time. Therefore, we have never opposed hard work itself; what we oppose is that kind of meaningless, performative overtime. Everyone knows that when encountering projects, deadlines, or tasks that must be carried out, it's fine to grit your teeth and push through. But what has it become now? 'I won't leave if the boss doesn't leave,' showing off overtime on social media, and having to be online at all times during the weekend. Everyone clearly knows that much of this overtime is meaningless, but no one dares to be the first to stop. This kind of overtime doesn't just make people tired; it slowly destroys things that are more important: health deteriorates, moods worsen, marriages are affected, and birth rates decline. When you get home and your child shares a small thing with you, your first reaction isn't even happiness, but irritation—not because you don't love them anymore, but because you are just too tired. This exhaustion is not just an individual cost; it is the cost of the entire society. If you don't have time to rest, you don't have the energy to consume; if you don't have the energy to consume, domestic demand won't rise; without leisure and peace of mind, innovation will become increasingly weak. In the end, this is a play with no winners. So, truly powerful companies rely not on exploitation, but on systems. There is a great example domestically: Pang Dong Lai. Pang Dong Lai implements a seven-hour workday, plus 40 days of paid leave; they even have 10 extra days of paid 'unhappy' leave. Ordinary employees have nearly 150 days of vacation a year, and management has nearly 180 days. A few days ago, Pang Dong Lai distributed 2025 year-end bonuses to employees, and even the cleaning staff received 200,000 yuan each. Did Pang Dong Lai collapse by doing this? No. Economists may lie, but facts do not. In the year Pang Dong Lai distributed the most money, its revenue actually grew by 38.7%. The more you distribute, the more you earn. This is actually the efficiency wage theory: using wages above the market level to attract the best people in exchange for the highest loyalty and the lowest management costs. Ford verified this 120 years ago, and it was written into textbooks. 120 years later, Pang Dong Lai verified it again, and it actually became news. This shows that bosses understand the logic; they just pretend not to. So many bosses rush to learn from Pang Dong Lai, but what did they learn? How to arrange shelves? How to decorate? Pang Dong Lai's core management system, leave policy, and salary structure are all posted on the supermarket walls. The answer is right there, but no one copies it. Why? It's not that they can't see it; it's that they are unwilling. A truly good job shouldn't make people look forward to retirement every day; a truly powerful company shouldn't burn out its young people. What we need is not exhausted bodies or fake busyness, but clearer minds, more authentic creation, and a system that at least treats people like human beings. There is a piece of trivia: initially, the term 'nine-to-five' was used to describe how hard it was to work. There is a topic online asking: if the eight-hour workday were strictly enforced and there were two-day weekends, what would our lives be like? It would probably be like returning to childhood. On the way home from work, the sky would still be bright, and you could smell the cooking from your neighbor's house. After dinner, the sky would still be bright, and you could go for a walk with your parents. We don't oppose overtime, and we don't oppose hard work; we oppose overtime that has neither pay nor meaning, because a place that struggles to guarantee even normal rest really struggles to go far.

What makes the spine chill the most over the past two years is perhaps not that young people are refusing to marry or have children, but that more and more parents are starting to proactively tell their children: it is fine whether you get married in the future or not, and whether you have children or not. I do not even expect you to support me in my old age; I just hope you can live a little happier yourself. Why has it come to this? Look at the current state of work and life, and the answer may not be hard to understand. Some people can only rest four days a month, or even two; some work more than ten hours a day and just want to lie down when they get home; others work hard for more than a decade, only to be kicked out in the end by a single phrase of optimization. What is even more heartbreaking is that you might be laid off if you do poorly, or you might also be laid off just because the boss's relative wants to take over your business. So-called stability may have never existed in the eyes of many private enterprise employees. On the other side, commercial streets that were once packed with people now show large areas of closed stores, transfers, and empty storefronts. Prime shop locations that used to command hundreds of thousands in transfer fees that people fought over can now not even be rented out. Brick-and-mortar store owners have struggled for decades, only to find in the end that it is not because they did not try hard, but because foot traffic, consumption, and profits have all changed. What is even more ironic is that getting a two-day weekend and leaving work on time, along with basic social insurance and housing funds, are actually starting to be packaged as benefits. Even though everyone is already working this hard, they are still constantly asked to work overtime, and involution is online at all times. The question is, does working overtime really make everyone rich? Not necessarily. Truly competitive enterprises should compete on efficiency, technology, and creating value, rather than on who can grind down their employees longer. If a person is so exhausted every day that they have no time to accompany their family, no energy to consume, and no mood to live, what is lost in the end is not just health, but expectations for the future. Therefore, what everyone truly resents is never hard work, but meaningless involution and endless consumption with no end in sight. When more and more people start to feel that being jobless means no money, but a rotten job can truly drain a person completely, this is perhaps the most alarming signal we should be vigilant about. Thank you everyone for watching to this point. What are your views and feelings about the current economic and social situation in China? Welcome to leave your opinions in the comment section and chat with everyone.

Uh, currently it seems that whatever the Chinese Communist Party wants to do, the final outcome, uh, always seems to run counter to what they want. They want to encourage childbirth and marriage, and now all their policies are pushing things in the exact opposite direction of what they want. Ah, the more they push and the more policies they issue, the fewer people get married and the fewer children are born. Right now, in many villages and even county towns, funerals outnumber weddings; that is just the population structure. Because the actual policies they issue do not genuinely solve even a single minor problem within it, and they have never once started from the essence of the matter—they have not solved a single point from which problems arise—then of course there will never be any good outcome, because they only know how to coerce. But you can whip someone to force them to carry bricks for you, but when it comes to things like getting married and having children, just using policy tactics to suppress people probably will not work. Alright, that is all for this episode.