There is something remarkably revealing about hundreds of young people queuing to take a photograph with an anthropologist.
He is not a singer, an actor or a sports star. He does not sell ten-step formulas for becoming rich, nor does he promise instant happiness.
His name is Biao Xiang.
Born in Wenzhou, educated at Peking University and later at Oxford, Xiang is now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. For decades his work has examined migration, labour, mobility and the effects of profound social change on ordinary lives.
An impressive academic career.
But the interesting story begins when the auditorium fills.
Young Chinese people turn up in their hundreds to hear him speak. They wait afterwards to meet him. His ideas circulate widely online.
The obvious story would be about a professor becoming a celebrity.
That would miss the point.
The story is not Xiang. The story is the queue.
What are these young people looking for?
Over a few extraordinary decades, China experienced an economic and social transformation of almost unimaginable scale. Cities expanded, universities multiplied, industries developed, infrastructure changed the geography of the country and millions of families acquired opportunities their parents could scarcely have imagined.
Alongside that transformation came a familiar formula:
Study hard.
Get into a good university.
Find a stable job.
Buy a home.
Marry.
Build a family.
Move upwards.
China did not invent that promise. Parents from Milan to Manchester, Tokyo to Buenos Aires have told their children versions of the same story.
The difficulty begins when people follow the instructions and discover that the reward has become less certain.
China remains an industrial, technological and commercial powerhouse. Recognising anxiety among part of its younger population does not erase that reality.
Both things can be true.
A country can build high-speed trains while a young graduate wonders where his own life is going.
It can export sophisticated technology while another graduate worries about finding secure employment.
It can become increasingly influential abroad while families at home reconsider assumptions about property, careers and social advancement.
There is no statistical contradiction there.
There is a human one.
Xiang has found words for it.
One is the idea of “suspension”: people moving constantly, studying, working and competing not necessarily to advance, but sometimes simply to avoid falling behind.
Like a hummingbird beating its wings furiously just to remain in the air.
The exhausting part may not be flying.
It may be the feeling that one cannot stop.
Another of Xiang’s most interesting ideas concerns “the nearby”.
Modern technology has given us an extraordinary ability to know what is happening thousands of miles away. Before breakfast we can follow an election in America, a war in Europe, markets in Asia and an argument involving strangers on the other side of the planet.
The world has never been so close.
And yet what is physically close to us can sometimes seem strangely distant.
We may know what a president said yesterday while not knowing the name of the person living two doors away.
Between the individual and the enormous world displayed on a screen lies another territory: neighbours, colleagues, streets, shops, families, communities and everyday relationships.
Xiang asks us to look again at that territory.
It is hardly surprising that such ideas resonate.
Anxiety becomes particularly corrosive when people interpret a structural change exclusively as a personal failure.
Everyone else appears to be moving forward.
Why am I not?
Everyone else seems successful.
What did I do wrong?
If one person asks that question, perhaps the mirror is the obvious place to look.
If millions begin asking variations of it, opening the window might also be worthwhile.
None of this abolishes individual responsibility. Nor does it mean governments or societies can guarantee every person success.
It simply recognises something rather obvious that the language of personal achievement sometimes forgets: nobody builds a life in a vacuum.
Education, housing, employment, technology, family expectations and economic cycles all enter the room.
Sometimes without knocking.
This is why Xiang’s popularity matters.
He is not offering a new map to guaranteed success.
He cannot promise that jobs will become plentiful, homes affordable or uncertainty disappear.
He is doing something much simpler.
He is giving names to questions people already have.
And once a private anxiety acquires a public vocabulary, something changes.
Instead of asking only:
“What is wrong with me?”
people can also ask:
“What is changing around me?”
The first question leads to the mirror.
The second opens a window.
And that window does not look only onto China.
Young Europeans face housing costs and insecure employment. British graduates may begin working life carrying substantial student debt. Young Italians may accumulate qualifications while struggling to obtain stable positions. Argentines confront another form of economic uncertainty altogether.
The countries are different.
Their political systems are different.
Their economies and histories are different.
Simple comparisons would be foolish.
Yet one question travels remarkably well:
What happens when you follow all the rules and discover that the finish line has moved?
Perhaps that explains why an anthropologist can fill an auditorium.
Not because he possesses all the answers.
But because he takes the questions seriously.
A generation does not always announce profound change with demonstrations or manifestos.
Sometimes the first indication is quieter.
It begins by inventing new words to describe an old discomfort in a new world.
“Involution.”
“Lying flat.”
“Suspension.”
“The nearby.”
Language rarely appears without a reason.
New expressions emerge when the old vocabulary no longer adequately describes everyday life.
So the story of Biao Xiang is ultimately not only about Biao Xiang.
Nor is it exclusively about Chinese youth.
It concerns an increasingly universal question:
When the world changes faster than our ability to understand it, where do we find our place within it?
Perhaps the answer is not always somewhere far away.
Perhaps we should begin by looking again at something we have almost forgotten how to see:
what is nearby.
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Sources consulted: BBC; National Bureau of Statistics of China; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.