屌絲──中國社會幻滅的上班族
摘錄自：天下雜誌 經濟學人電子報 2014/5/9
2014-04-25 Web
only 作者：經濟學人
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| 圖片來源：天下雜誌（設計圖片） |
一般人越來越難在中國經濟中獲取成功；屌絲象徵著無力感，這個詞一直到最近在出現，吸引了中國各地的上班族，特別是IT產業。屌絲多為男性，通常是社交能力不佳、沉迷於線上遊戲的空想家。他們成為屌絲，大多不是出於自己的選擇，而是社會幫他們作出了選擇；幾項研究顯示，中國社會的收入持續增加，但社會流動性卻惡化了。
朱光表示，因為他是工廠工人的小孩，所以他是屌絲。他不是富二代或官二代，他和他的屌絲同事認為，要是有錢或有關係，他們可以念更好的大學、找更好的工作。
朱光的稅後年收入近8,000美元，輕易地超越了許多中國人；他是張江高科技園區的低薪族，但許多收入更高的人也覺得自己是屌絲。他們的薪資甚至高於上海的平均，但成功表象的成本實在太高；他們成不了高富帥，也不可能與白富美結婚。
這在快速發展的經濟中似乎相當尋常，但專家指出，屌絲這種相對貧乏感，是中國財富差距帶來的嚴重後果；他們覺得自己比過去更沒有機會向上流動。然而，他們確實是個行銷機會。雖然不易定義目標市場，但他們的人數確實比百萬富翁多出許多。
有的行銷人員並不認為上海和北京的IT員工是真正的屌絲，但研究顯示，他們真的相信自己是。去年，研究公司詢問了許多產業的上班族，問他們是否認為自己是屌絲；超過9成的程式設計師，以及約8成的食品業、服務業和行銷人員認為自己是屌絲。調查中最不認為自己是輸家的，則是替政府或共產黨工作的公務員。（黃維德編譯）
©The Economist
Newspaper Limited 2014
Disillusioned office workers
China’s losers
Amid spreading
prosperity, a generation of self-styled also-rans emerges
Apr 19th 2014 |
SHANGHAI | From the print edition
ZHU GUANG, a
25-year-old product tester, projects casual cool in his red Adidas jacket and
canvas shoes. He sports the shadowy wisps of a moustache and goatee, as if he
has the ambition to grow a beard but not the ability. On paper he is one of the
millions of up-and-coming winners of the Chinese economy: a university
graduate, the only child of factory workers in Shanghai, working for Lenovo,
one of China’s leading computer-makers.
But Mr Zhu
considers himself a loser, not a winner. He earns 4,000 yuan ($650) a month
after tax and says he feels like a faceless drone at work. He eats at the
office canteen and goes home at night to a rented, 20-square-metre
(215-square-foot) room in a shared flat, where he plays online games. He does
not have a girlfriend or any prospect of finding one. “Lack of confidence”, he
explains when asked why not. Like millions of others, he mockingly calls
himself, in evocative modern street slang, a diaosi, the term for a loser that
literally translates as “male pubic hair”. Figuratively it is a declaration of
powerlessness in an economy where it is getting harder for the regular guy to
succeed. Calling himself by this derisive nickname is a way of crying out,
“like Gandhi”, says Mr Zhu, only partly in jest. “It is a quiet form of
protest.”
Calling yourself a
diaosi has also become a proud statement of solidarity with the masses against
the perceived corruption of the wealthy. The word itself entered the language only
recently, appealing to office grunts across the country, especially in the IT
industry. A mostly male species, diaosi are often daydreamers with poor social
skills and an obsession with online gaming. They are slightly different from
Japan’s marriage-shunning “herbivore” young men in that fewer of them have
chosen their station in life. Society has chosen it for them, especially with
property prices climbing well beyond their reach. Several recent studies show
that, while incomes across Chinese society continue to rise, social mobility
has worsened. Yi Chen of Nanjing Audit University and Frank A. Cowell of the
London School of Economics found that, since 2000, people at the bottom of
society were more likely than in the 1990s to stay where they were. “China has
become more rigid,” they conclude.
An online video
sketch show, “Diaosi Man”, shown on Sohu.com, an internet portal, mercilessly
mocks the tribe. Since its debut in 2012, the show’s episodes have been
streamed more than 1.5 billion times. In one recent episode a man tries to
impress his beautiful dinner date with how busy he is at his job. He then
receives a phone call from work, apologetically takes his leave to go to the
office and finally pops up again as a waiter when his date asks for the bill.
In the same episode a frustrated new driver curses repeatedly at a Lamborghini
in the next lane and screams, “Are you bullying me because I don’t know any
traffic cops?” In the next scene he is in a neck brace and his nose is broken.
Mr Zhu says what
makes him a diaosi is that he is the son of factory workers. He is not fu er
dai—second-generation rich—or guan er dai—the son of powerful government
officials (it does not escape a diaosi’s notice that those two categories often
overlap). He and his diaosi colleagues feel that, with connections or cash,
they might have attended a better university and found a better job.
With after-tax
income of nearly $8,000 a year, Mr Zhu would look to many people in China
comfortably on his way to the middle class. He is among the lower wage-earners
at Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai, but even many higher earners call
themselves diaosi, or refer to themselves as “IT labourers”. Though their
salaries are above average even in Shanghai—which had China’s third-highest
annual urban disposable income per person in 2012 at 40,000 yuan—the cost of
appearing successful is stratospheric. A fancy flat and a cool car are well
beyond their reach. They are wage slaves who cannot hope to be gao fu
shuai—tall, rich and handsome—and marry a woman who is bai fu mei—fair-skinned,
rich and beautiful.
This might seem
quite normal for a rapidly developing economy. But Zhang Yi, a sociologist at
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank in Beijing,
says this diaosi feeling of relative deprivation is a troubling consequence of
China’s growing wealth gap. In an interview devoted to the subject for the
website of Phoenix Television, a Hong Kong satellite network, Mr Zhang
concluded that people at the bottom feel utterly alienated. They feel less
hopeful than they did before of ever moving up in life, he said.
In spite of this,
however, they do still represent a marketing opportunity. There are, after all,
many more of them than there are millionaires, even though it can be difficult
to define the target market. At Dianping, a website offering restaurant reviews
and consumer deals, Schubert You targets very low-wage workers in smaller
cities (earning about $150 to $450 a month) with coupons and group discounts.
Mr You does not consider the IT workers of Shanghai and Beijing to be true
diaosi.
But surveys show
they believe they are. Last year Analysys International, a research company in
Beijing, asked a broad cross-section of office workers if they saw themselves
as diaosi. More than 90% of programmers and journalists and about 80% of food
and service industry and marketing workers said they did. Those surveyed who
least identified with being losers were civil servants, working for the
government or the Communist Party.
From the print
edition: China
