Alice Han

James, let's get right into this.

I was alerted to this through a couple of friends in China.

So it's a kind of comic macabre element to what I think is a real problem in China, which is the loneliness problem and the aging problem.

Yeah, I have noticed this in the last five, six years that I've been traveling to China.

The way in which everyday young people...

live, I think, is quite isolating.

A lot of them tend to be more plugged into the digital matrix than in everyday life.

And a lot of them are only children as well.

My cousins are all only children.

And as a result, unsurprisingly, you've got this dimension of the tangping, which is to lie flat and have this kind of nihilistic worldview.

You know, what is the point of working or striving or struggling or doing well in your

I think this is all part and parcel of the fact that in China, young people don't really feel like there's a sense of economic momentum and growth, and they don't have siblings.

And at some point, 20 years down the line,

They're going to have to be responsible for their aging grandparents as the single caregiver, really.

And then you add to this the other dimension, which we also discussed, declining marriage rates.

So the number of unmarried people in China between the ages of 20 and 49 reached 134 million in 2020.

That's bigger than the entire Japanese population.

And over the last decade, marriage registrations have been cut about 50%, so in half, effectively.

This is, again, I think, feeding into...

this single, lonely state of a lot of Chinese youths.