Chinese Gen Z finds unlikely idol in anthropologist tackling anxiety and disillusionment

In a Singapore auditorium earlier this year, five hundred people—mostly Chinese living abroad—lined up after a lecture to take photographs with a 54-year-old man in glasses. He was not a movie star or a tech entrepreneur. He was an anthropologist named Biao Xiang, and to the young people in that room, he was what one fan called "a star sent from the heavens."

Xiang has become an unlikely celebrity among China's Gen Z by doing something simple and, in the Chinese context, quietly radical: he talks openly about anxiety. Not as a self-help guru offering quick fixes, but as a scholar who names the structural forces crushing young people and gives them language to understand what they feel. He has been invited to speak at Peking University, where one talk drew so many people the auditorium filled and the event had to be live-streamed. Major Chinese media outlets have interviewed him. On social platforms, a saying has taken hold: "When in doubt, ask Biao Xiang."

The anxiety he addresses is real and widespread. A 23-year-old Chinese graduate, speaking on condition of anonymity because she feared it might hurt her job prospects, described the transition from school to work as a gauntlet of uncertainty. "People need an anchor in their life," she said. "And his words make us feel there is someone that gets me." Youth unemployment in China reached 21.3 percent before the government stopped publishing the figure in mid-2023. Those who do have jobs—civil servants, corporate workers, engineers—live in fear of losing them, anxious about the "curse of 35," an unofficial age cutoff after which employers stop hiring. Online, young people complain constantly about exhausting work hours, toxic office culture, and the sense that the old bargain—work hard, secure your future—no longer holds.

Xiang, who now directs the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, sees this anxiety as rooted in systemic change. He grew up in Wenzhou during China's transformation from Mao's rule into a market economy, watching ordinary people become entrepreneurs and small business owners. That generation prospered during decades of double-digit growth. But the economy slowed during Covid and has not recovered. The playbook their children inherited—get a degree, land a stable job, marry, buy a home—still circulates as gospel, yet the conditions that made it work have vanished. "When 1.4 billion people are all in the same race, that is involution," Xiang says, using a term that has trended in Chinese discourse for years to describe competition that generates little meaningful reward.

Two forces, he argues, have amplified this squeeze. The property market, fueled by local governments' dependence on land sales, has tied families' sense of security and self-worth to home values. Simultaneously, rapid expansion of university enrollment has raised the bar for achievement, intensifying competition across the board. The result is a generation searching for meaning while trapped in systems that measure worth through approval—exam scores, job titles, salary, property ownership. Xiang suggests a different path: seek meaning and understanding from others, use that to understand yourself better. It is not a quick fix. But in a country where public discontent is politically sensitive and heavily censored, it is rare to hear a prominent figure name what he calls the "pain point of the times."

When Xiang speaks, he uses concepts designed to make the invisible visible. "Floating" describes people working relentlessly just to survive, like a hummingbird perpetually flapping its wings to stay aloft. "The nearby" refers to the space between the self and the world—the immediate community, relationships, local life—which he argues people neglect while fixating on themselves and distant abstractions. This neglect, he says, leaves them feeling disconnected. On RedNote, a Chinese social platform, users have responded with intensity. One 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 praised him for refusing "empty, feel-good platitudes" and instead "crouching down to face real-life dilemmas alongside us."

Xiang's willingness to speak plainly about these things sets him apart. Zihan Han, one of his fans, put it this way: "Those who have said similar things aren't as kick-ass as Teacher Xiang, yet people who are as kick-ass as him haven't said such things." Some of his academic peers have warned him about "cherishing your feathers"—a Chinese expression for protecting one's reputation—and have criticized his methods as too public, too removed from the work of publishing research. But Xiang sees his popularity as validation of a different kind of influence. "If someone calls me an influencer I'll take it as a compliment," he told the BBC. "Because the real influence I can have is to make people think for themselves." In a society at what he calls a turning point, where rapid change has broken old certainties and young people are searching for new ones, that kind of thinking may be exactly what is needed.