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In most countries, a 54-year-old academic who studies social change would attract a polite but modest following. In China right now, Professor Biao Xiang draws crowds of hundreds, gets live-streamed from overflowing auditoriums at Peking University, and inspires the kind of devotion normally reserved for pop stars. The saying “when in doubt, ask Biao Xiang” has entered common usage, according to Chinese media. His fans call him an idol. One describes him as “a star sent from the heavens.”
What Xiang actually does is talk about anxiety. And in a country where public discontent is politically sensitive and heavily censored, that turns out to be an extraordinarily rare and powerful thing.
The Gap Between a Powerful Country and Its Exhausted Youth
China’s economic rise over the past four decades is one of the defining stories of the modern world. But the generation that grew up inside that story is not celebrating. Youth unemployment hit 21.3% before the government stopped publishing the data in mid-2023. Those who do hold “good jobs” as civil servants, engineers, or corporate employees live in fear of what is widely called the “curse of 35,” a reference to the informal cutoff age in job advertisements after which finding new employment becomes significantly harder. Online, young workers routinely complain about punishing hours and toxic workplace culture.
The old social contract, which promised that hard work would reliably produce a stable job and a comfortable life, has frayed. The economy slowed during the Covid years and has not fully recovered. Property values, which families had tied their sense of security and success to through a government-fuelled boom, have become a source of anxiety rather than confidence. A rapid expansion of university enrolment raised the bar for achievement without expanding the number of desirable jobs waiting at the end of it.
The result, as Xiang frames it, is that 1.4 billion people are running the same race: get a good degree, find a stable job, marry, buy a home. “When 1.4 billion people are all in the same race, that is involution,” he told the BBC over tea in Singapore. The term “involution” has become common shorthand in China for intense competition that generates little meaningful reward. Its counterpart, “lying flat,” describes opting out of the race entirely. Both terms have been trending for years, seeping into public discourse as proxies for a frustration that cannot always be expressed directly.
What Makes Xiang Different From Every Other Voice in the Room
Xiang is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, where he studies social change in China and across Asia. He grew up in Wenzhou during the period when China first opened to trade and private enterprise, watching a city of small business owners transform around him. That biographical grounding gives him a long view of what China has been through and what it is going through now. He believes the country is at a “turning point,” where people are searching for meaning while trying to make sense of rapid change, and where contradictions have become impossible to ignore: uncertain youth inside a powerful, assertive state; widespread disillusionment despite genuine advancement.
His contribution is not therapy or policy prescription. It is naming. He gives catchy, precise labels to feelings that people recognise but struggle to articulate. “Floating” describes the experience of working relentlessly just to stay afloat, like a hummingbird that never stops flapping its wings. “The nearby” is his term for the social space between the intensely personal and the abstractly global, a space he argues people have stopped inhabiting, leaving them feeling disconnected from community and from each other.
On a recent visit to Singapore, where he spoke to around 500 people, mostly Chinese diaspora, in a packed auditorium, Xiang addressed how young people in China have come to seek approval from systems rather than from relationships. Competitive exams, secure employment, measurable credentials: these become proxies for self-worth, which he described as exhausting and ultimately damaging. The alternative he suggests is finding meaning through genuine understanding of others, and using that understanding to know ourselves better. These are not quick fixes. But they are honest, and that honesty is precisely the point.
“Everyone knows where the issue is, but they are reluctant to look at it,” he told the BBC. “Sometimes it is too painful to look at, or they don’t have a way. But as an academic, it is not terrifying if you can describe it. That’s how you analyse and manage it.”
His fans respond to this with striking clarity. One user on RedNote wrote that Xiang “consistently views issues from the perspective of the vulnerable, attributes personal stress to macro-level causes, and encourages people to actively engage with life.” Another noted that “he never spouts empty, feel-good platitudes; instead, he crouches down to face real-life dilemmas alongside us.” A 23-year-old Chinese graduate who spoke to the BBC anonymously, worried that talking to foreign media could hurt her job prospects at home, put it simply: “People need an anchor in their life. And his words make us feel there is someone that gets me.”
The Risk and the Reward of Speaking Plainly
Xiang is aware that his approach is not universally admired within academia. Many of his peers, he acknowledges, prioritise publishing research and are “quite cold” to his public-facing methods. Some have warned him about “cherishing your feathers,” a Chinese expression for guarding one’s professional reputation. He dismisses the concern. Around three years ago, he noticed that a digital nomad camp where he had spoken raised its prices after his visit, and understood then that his reach had moved well beyond academic circles.
His position is also structurally unusual. Living and working in Germany gives him a degree of distance from the censorship pressures that constrain public intellectuals inside China. That distance does not make him a dissident. He is not calling for political change. He is doing something more subtle and, in its own way, more subversive: he is treating the anxiety of ordinary young Chinese people as a legitimate subject of serious intellectual attention, rather than a problem to be managed or dismissed.
China’s leader Xi Jinping has himself acknowledged the underlying tension, describing the country’s “principal contradiction” as the gap between “the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development.” Xiang is doing something similar but from the ground up, tracing how that macro-level contradiction lands in individual lives, in the body, in the daily grind, in the feeling of running hard and going nowhere.
His popularity is a signal worth taking seriously. It suggests that a generation shaped by extraordinary growth is now grappling with what comes after the promise of that growth fails to fully materialise. The fact that hundreds of young people in Singapore, far from home, will queue to take a photo with an anthropologist after a one-hour lecture in Mandarin says something about how deep that need runs. As Xiang put it: “If someone calls me an influencer I’ll take it as a compliment. Because the real influence I can have is to make people think for themselves.” In a media environment where thinking for yourself carries real risk, that is a more radical statement than it sounds.
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