China's jobless turn to car boot sales as COVID-hit economy stalls

Liu, 30, used to make a living teaching Beijing kids how to solve the Rubik's Cube, but after in person learning was shuttered due to COVID-19, she became "penniless".

No wonder Chinese students have nostalgia for the "iron rice bowl" and actual socialism.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/12/ten-student-activists-detained-in-china-for-supporting-workers-rights

Not the "CCP"'s crony guided hypercapitalism.

Chinese young people "involuted" and "laying flat"

https://radii.co/article/laying-flat-involution

For young people struggling under the weight of both extreme competition and its would-be reward, the empty promise of consumerism, it can seem that there is no escape from exploitation. And in a society where more open forms of protest, such as labor activism, are quickly suppressed, they have found release, if not relief, in online expression. The “lying flat” movement, whose forums have drawn upwards of 200,000 members, is one example of this, and a slew of popular online terms have emerged to describe the sense of hopelessness. These include “leek people” and “harvesting leeks,” phrases that liken those caught in the struggle of work and consumption to leeks that are constantly harvested under the blade. “Lying flat-ism,” one Chinese journalist wrote on the Weibo platform, “is a non-violent movement of non-cooperation by the leek people, and the most silent and helpless of actions.” When one opts out of the cycle, or so the reasoning goes, it is no longer possible to be cut down, as the illustration below, appearing on Chinese social media in May, expresses. A harvest knife slashes vainly in the air as the plants below fold themselves down toward the earth. “Leeks that lie down cannot be harvested so easily,” the caption reads. 

“Lying flat-ism” is seen by some as the only possible form of resistance to this cycle of exploitation. One of the dominant slogans of the “lying flat” movement has been, “Don’t buy property; don’t buy a car; don’t get married; don’t have children; and don’t consume.” For this reason, calls to “lie flat” have doubly concerned China’s leadership, as they threaten both to sap the country of the ambition to innovate and to knock down the second leg of the country’s long-term development strategy—the drive to consume.

https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/the-lying-flat-movement-standing-in-the-way-of-chinas-innovation-drive/