Class Anxiety and the Erosion of Mobility in China

Once a symbol of unrelenting ascent, China’s model of social mobility is now showing cracks. For millions of young people, especially those from working-class families, the promise that education and diligence would lead to a better life is eroding. Increasingly, what matters is not how hard you work, but who your parents are. This is inequality, this is blocked aspiration.

For decades, China seemed to defy inequality. Since the 1980s, over 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty, forming the backbone of the country’s labor force and fueling its urban-industrial boom. Migrants left rural villages for booming cities, and college enrollment surged. The image of a young villager climbing into the middle class through grit and education became a central narrative of China’s rise.

In today’s high-tech, credential-driven economy, this mass of human capital is no longer valued equally. Many of those who once powered China’s growth, factory workers, rural migrants, even university graduates, are now seen as economically “excess” or structurally redundant. In other words, China no longer needs everyone to rise, only a highly curated few.

Mobility engine is sputtering in China. With the property market in crisis, youth unemployment hitting nearly 15%, and real wages stagnating, today’s China is no longer a land of promise, it is a land of status anxiety. While these frustrations are deeply rooted in China’s unique system of state capitalism and party control, the underlying dynamic of rising inequality and declining upward mobility would feel familiar to many in the United States, the U.K., Turkey, or South Korea.

In the U.S., for example, the idea of the American Dream has long rested on the belief that hard work and talent can transcend birth. Yet, over the last few decades, intergenerational income mobility has declined sharply, especially for those born into the bottom 20%. Elite universities are populated disproportionately by the children of the top 1%, a dynamic well-documented in the Chetty-Zipperer study on elite college access. The U.S. is meritocratic on paper, but increasingly aristocratic in practice.

This global shift toward “sticky” class positions is not just an economic issue, it is a political one. In both democratic and authoritarian regimes, a declining sense of fairness in opportunity breeds cynicism. In the U.S., it has fueled populist surges on both the left and right. In China, the consequences are subtler but no less significant: a growing sense that the system is rigged, and that loyalty and lineage matter more than effort.

Historically, societies with rigid class structures, whether feudal Europe or caste-bound India, tended toward stagnation and unrest. Modern capitalist societies once distinguished themselves by enabling dynamism through competition and mobility. If those pathways close, inequality stops being a temporary imbalance and becomes a permanent societal architecture.

China’s challenge today is not just to manage its slowing economy but to revive the dream of upward mobility. The deeper test, faced not only by Beijing but by governments worldwide, is whether they can deliver not just growth, but fairness. Without it, the next generation may not aspire upward but instead, drift into resignation or revolt. In such moments, culture plays a decisive role in shaping a society’s reaction.