- China’s Gen Z is broke.
- And America’s Gen Z is in rough shape financially too, though not as bad as US millennials.
- They’re sharing photos of savings accounts on Weibo and paychecks on TikTok, respectively, to prove it.
TikTok and Weibo are currently both alight with some nitty gritty details that were, for years, considered too private to share: How much people make, and how much they save.
As my colleague Cheryl Teh reported today, there’s a massive trend on Weibo — the Twitter of China — right now that involves 26-year-olds sharing how empty their savings accounts are. As of press time, more than 300 million people had viewed a Weibo Forum thread called “My real savings at 26,” and thousands of people had contributed to it.
Many of those people shared screenshots of their bank accounts, and while we weren’t able to independently verify any of their posts, they showed life savings totals as low as the equivalents of $0.14, $21.29, and $67 apiece. All bank accounts showed sums in the Chinese yuan. The US conversions in this story are accurate as of May 19.
“Doesn’t everyone just live paycheck to paycheck and spend their entire salary?” a Weibo user in Jiangsu wrote.
Something similar is happening in the US, albeit in a slightly different form.
Rather than sharing screenshots of their bank accounts, TikTok users in the US are dishing on details of their weekly paychecks, including itemized breakdowns of where every dollar goes. The #paydayroutine hashtag has been used more than 50 million times. As The Wall Street Journal’s Oyin Adedoyin reported this week, people do this to try to control their spending and stop living paycheck to paycheck.
The problem is, for many of those sharing their stories online, their dollars just aren’t going far enough.
Adeoyin broke down the details of one #paydayroutine: A Miami-based safety manager who makes $105,000 a year and has ended up with as little as $80 left over after budgeting money for bills, rent, and savings.
Other popular accounts include an account manager who shows how she spends her $70,000 salary and a 24-year-old who makes $705 a week and has $25,000 in debt.
To be sure, both the Weibo and TikTok trends have their high-rolling or at least financially secure outliers, too.
One person in Shandong, China, shared a screenshot of a bank account with $14,400 and wrote on Weibo: “I’ve worked for 10 months. Managed to save six figures. Recording this!”
Another person from Guangdong shared a bank account screenshot with $5,700 in it and wrote, “I’m turning 26 in 10 days. I’ve scrimped on food and saved bit by bit. It’s not a lot, even though I don’t date and don’t go out. But if I can save, I save.”
And many of the people using the #paydayroutine hashtag on TikTok appear to have budgeted their money closely enough to cover monthly expenses and savings alike.
But the core sentiment remains: Young people in both countries are broke. American millennials are scarily behind, financially speaking. Gen Z is racking up credit card debt and falling behind on payments. And unemployment rates among China’s Gen Z are at a record high; the generation has been dubbed China’s “unluckiest generation.”
In 2021, I wrote that China’s middle class is starting to look a whole lot like America’s. In both countries, housing is increasingly unaffordable; household debt levels are rising, and the middle class faces the real possibility of not being able to live a better life than their parents did.
If this week’s social media trends in China and the US are any indication, it looks like the two countries’ generations share some of the same woes, too.
Cheryl Teh contributed reporting.
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