China’s young consumers have driven their market to diversify, but it’s left them with little to no savings and few seem to care, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Due to its turbulent economic history, many older Chinese are quite used to spending little and saving much of their earnings, but the over 330 million people being born in China between 1990 and 2009 are spending much more freely on entertainment, travel and technology.
The Journal notes that many young Chinese are opting for short-term loans, one of the most popular methods being Huabei, a revolving credit line in the country’s Alipay mobile payments network. Since launching in 2015, Huabei has extended more than 1 trillion yuan in loans. Short-term lending in general has skyrocketed since 2004, reaching almost 50 trillion yuan in 2018.
25-year-old Liu Biting, who works in marketing in Shanghai, told the Journal that about one third of her 10,000 yuan, or $1,400, monthly paycheck goes to rent and the rest is spent on food, hobbies, music, going out and other products.
“For my parents’ generation, for them to get a decent job, a stable job, is good enough — and what they do is they save money, they buy houses and they raise kids,” she said. “We see money as a thing to be spent.”
She added that her parents frequently ask her how much she has saved after working for three years.
“I say, ‘I’m sorry, probably nothing.’ All my friends are like this. We have no savings and we don’t really care about it.”
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