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The zeitgeist shift that first began about a decade ago in China now feels complete. Isolated grumblings from students and tech workers about impossible workloads have evolved into a widespread belief that in today’s China, hard work no longer pays off. A 2023 survey conducted by two American scholars of China, Scott Rozelle and Martin K. Whyte, found that for the first time since the survey started in 2004, respondents said that having connections and growing up in a rich family mattered more than personal ability when it came to getting wealthy in China.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this shift. Meritocracy was virtually a national religion during the decades of economic reform. The assumption that hard work paid just rewards was so intrinsic to the national psyche, so hammered in by parental instruction and patriotic fable, that it was rarely analyzed. Only as times began to change did the Chinese term for meritocracy, youji zhuyi, begin to circulate as people grappled with the loss of a condition that they had so long taken for granted.

The zeitgeist shift that first began about a decade ago in China now feels complete. Isolated grumblings from students and tech workers about impossible workloads have evolved into a widespread belief that in today’s China, hard work no longer pays off. A 2023 survey conducted by two American scholars of China, Scott Rozelle and Martin K. Whyte, found that for the first time since the survey started in 2004, respondents said that having connections and growing up in a rich family mattered more than personal ability when it came to getting wealthy in China.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this shift. Meritocracy was virtually a national religion during the decades of economic reform. The assumption that hard work paid just rewards was so intrinsic to the national psyche, so hammered in by parental instruction and patriotic fable, that it was rarely analyzed. Only as times began to change did the Chinese term for meritocracy, youji zhuyi, begin to circulate as people grappled with the loss of a condition that they had so long taken for granted.

This has often led people to a grim conclusion, the popular interpretation goes: Without the possibility of changing the rules of an unfair system, the only thing to do is give up—to “lie flat,” in Chinese parlance.

But this interpretation obscures another possibility: In a country that has raced through, in a decade or two, the social and economic changes that unfolded in other countries over half a century or more, a diminished collective appetite for conventional markers of success may well be the diversification of pursuits and values that happens organically in a maturing society.

Chinese often lamented that a herd mentality had dominated public thinking in the heyday of capitalist reform in the 1980s-2000s. Money and energy poured into one hot sector after another, creating bubbles in real estate, technology, and higher education that burst as the economy slowed. In their aftermath, many Chinese now find themselves confronted for the first time with a task more difficult than the rat race: figuring out what they actually want for themselves.

Part of that is deciding where to live. Gone are the........

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