Z-aspirations, Z-asperations
When I did my column last week (see “Gen Z fever,” 10/14/25) about the increasingly political Gen Z (people born, more or less, between 1997 and 2012), little did I realize that I would need to do a sequel so soon, as in today.
Gen Z seems to be a lot on the minds of earlier generations, in the form of anxieties that clash with older people’s aspirations for Gen Z and, increasingly, the next generation after Gen Z, labeled the Generation Alpha. These anxieties go back to the stereotypes of Gen Z that I described last week, of apolitical, if not apathetic and unfeeling, young people.
Yet, I did describe the surge of youthful activism and social movements in Asia and Africa, quite militant at that. The Gen Z activism has been powerful enough to topple governments in Nepal and, just last week, Madagascar, while sending tremors in other countries, including the Philippines.
But there is a paradox here, because Gen Z’s discontent has also been taking another form, first described in English as “planking,” meant more as a prank, with young people lying on the street doing nothing. More recently, it has become popular in China using the term tang ping.
But, unlike the Western planking, tang ping speaks of Gen Z’s alienation from society, a sense that life is not worth all the hard work, including having children and raising a family. Social media is full of posts from young Chinese practically throwing in the towel, expressing exasperation from having to work so hard and, it would seem, for so little.
Underlying tang ping is frustration and a clear “rebellion” of sorts against consumerism, almost disgust with the push to buy. After all, this is the China that gave rise to Shopee and Lazada (Lazada is actually Singaporean, but the market is hugely Chinese).
What’s so intriguing, too, is that the Chinese government has noted the new mood and is worried, warning young Chinese not to become “defeatist” and to be overcome by pessimism. The officials’ concern is very real: if young people move away from consumerism, the Chinese economy is going to slow down.
Young people’s reluctance to start families also spells problems for the economy. The Chinese word for “population” is ren kou, which literally means “people’s mouths,” i.e., the population of a place is given literally as the number of mouths. Up to the 1960s, the Chinese government worried about feeding all those mouths and imposed a draconian “one-child-per-family” limit and then realized population growth had slowed down too much. The government then relaxed the rules and spoke of two children per family, and just last month, it called for three children per family.
At one time, the pressure was extremely strong to have many children, a cultural imperative to carry on the family line, but despite all the incentives being offered to reproduce, Gen Z and their successors aren’t taking the bait. It’s simply become too expensive and intimidating to have children.
I’ve thought about where we’re headed in the Philippines. In at least three recent international meetings of educators, I’ve had colleagues asking me about our demographic (population) trends. I hear educators worrying about China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, with low birth rates, which means they don’t have enough students for their universities.
I tell them we still have a fairly high birth rate, but that’s dropping, too. Ten years ago, it was rare to find young students saying they wanted to limit their children to two, one, or none at all. They fret about the expenses of raising children, but here’s another catch—they worry about bringing children into a world in such bad shape: the climate crisis, natural disasters, and the people disasters of graft and corruption, and of widespread violence.
A few months ago, while waiting my turn at a government agency, a middle-aged man approached me and said he recognized me from his son’s graduation from the University of the Philippines a few years ago, during my term as chancellor, and he said he was worried because the son didn’t seem interested in getting married or working overseas.
I gently explained that young people have different aspirations now, and my parents were too worried about my “lack of ambition” after I graduated from college in 1977. Let them be, I advised him. But I could understand where this father was coming from, having worked overseas, hoping to put his children through college so they would seek greener pastures abroad, not necessarily leaving for the long term.
If I had run into him around this time, I would have told him he was lucky his son wasn’t leaving the Philippines and that I’d worry about him running into racism overseas, especially in the United States. I worry about my own children saying they want to study overseas, knowing what they may have to face in terms of discrimination.
What, indeed, are we passing on to our children and their children?
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michael.tan@inquirer.net
