Liang Xiaosheng: 20 million educated youth, 85% of whom are now low consumption groups

Wen/Liang Xiaosheng

On the whole, educated youth belong to the low consumption group in today's cities.

Because most of them are working class. The working class, whether "state-owned" or "collective", is under tremendous negative pressure from China's "reform". If you don't bear the pressure directly, you can't fully understand what the "pain" of the times is.

When people see some celebrities and cadres among the educated youth, they mistakenly believe that the educated youth generation is "promising". Many people draw even more wrong conclusions based on this, as if educated youth monopolized China's superior industries for a whole generation.

In fact, the so-called celebrities among the educated youth refer to only a few writers, a "small group" of literary and art practitioners, two or three more successful businessmen in the new era, and all the people who have become section chiefs, directors and even directors;

Add in all those who have received higher education, studied abroad, and returned home to seek personal career development with success, the total number will certainly be less than 15%.

These people are often endowed with the representativeness of educated youth by the society or talk about how "we educated youth generation" should be. For example, I used to like the ridiculous and unrealistic feeling of self promotion.

However, 15% is higher than 85%, which is not qualified for "generation". Eighty five percent of the returned educated youth are now lucky, which determines that they can only be the low consumption group in the city.

At present, they are a considerable part of the "laid-off" unemployed. Among the people who are about to be "laid off" and unemployed, it is doomed to have more of them. Fortunately, they have not been laid off. Seventy eight out of ten of them are the lowest wage earners in Chinese cities.

Compared with the previous generation, the small welfare promised by the old system is gradually disappearing from them, making them look forward and backward.

Compared with the next generation, due to the inherent weakness of their own knowledge capital and skill capital, they are unable to meet the competition opportunities brought by the "reform" and are often quickly eliminated.

As parents, money is more important for them than ever before, even for educated youth. Faced with all kinds of advertisements that stimulate consumption, they cannot help counting money.

Even if their current performance is several times better, they are not likely to become a group that blindly "catches up" with high consumption, but will still be a very rational consumer group.

This is because most of them grew up with their parents' rags. Later, he experienced almost the same hard life.

Their material requirements are too easy to achieve psychological satisfaction. They have already become people who reject high consumption from their conscious instinct and become "simple people" from their conscious instinct.

What would a contemporary youth do if he won a million lottery tickets?

Presumably, I will buy a car first. Then, the house was luxuriously decorated. Then, use several famous brand clothes to completely change your social image

Some of the returned educated youth may look down at the millions of lottery tickets and think:

Should I really buy a car when I have one million yuan?

Do I really need to decorate my home like a three-star hotel room?

I must be more attractive to people who don't know me and more intimate to people who know me than I am now dressed in ordinary clothes

This difference in consumption consciousness is one of the "generation gaps". The "generation gap" between the educated youth generation and the next generation is more obvious in many aspects than that between them and the previous generation.

In terms of consumption awareness, the "gene" characteristics of the previous generation of people are particularly obvious, such as self cherishing, accommodating and making do.

No matter how encouraged and enticed by advertisements, most of them do not dare to consume on credit in advance, as if they regard such consumption as a trap for deceiving others to commit suicide.

They are the helpless consumer groups in the city that make businesses shake their heads. Businesses have a thousand good ideas, and they have their own set rules.

Of course, among the 15%, there are also many people who have a very noble sense of consumption. But we will find their former selves according to their consumption consciousness, and we will realize that their living standard was relatively noble or close to quasi noble when they were young.

Their aristocratic consumption today actually reflects another "gene" feature. Their or their going to the countryside in those years only meant that they were in distress.

There were few similarities with most educated youth in the past, and today's contrast is naturally greater.