Zhihu users｜Answer: Will 2023 be a difficult and hard year?

Original question: The industries of my friends, from IT and medicine to traditional industries, have heard too many layoff news recently. In addition, in Shanghai, the number of storefronts being closed and transferred is significantly more than in previous years. In the clothing industry where I work, factories, especially small factories that are unable to take first-hand orders, are severely short of orders and struggling to survive. The foreign economy is not good, and foreign trade exports are stagnant. Friends in Shenzhen said that the permanent population of Shenzhen has dropped from 25 million to over 17 million. I don’t know if the numbers are accurate. Am I being too pessimistic? Which industries will be more prosperous in 2023? I want to hear the opinions of Zhihu users.

The answer is as follows:

I found that even the smartest people don’t shed tears until they see the coffin.

In 2020, I saw news interviews of Wuhan lifting the lockdown, and some Wuhan people cried while shopping.

I thought at the time, is that all there is to it?

In the same year, I saw news in the United States about the sadness of Amazon employees being laid off in large numbers, protesting and crying in the streets about unemployment.

I just casually swiped past it at the time.

Until this year, I went to People’s Square and Nanjing Road.

I started to be afraid, a real, bone-chilling cold.

Shanghai is not just Shanghai, but one of the best geographical locations in China, and it also carries a highly developed inland waterway system of the Yangtze River. It is not a simple coastal city; it is the bear’s paw, the camel’s hump, the gorilla’s lips, the sturgeon’s caviar…

But today, looking at the data with my childhood friend, I found that the morning and evening peak subway ridership in Shanghai dropped directly by 10% in the second half of the year. Even my dad complained a while ago that even the rent of subway entrances has decreased.

I don’t know what to say. I always thought I was someone who had experienced the cold.

My parents are the last generation of workers in Shanghai.

When I was a child, I saw some people who didn’t become flight attendants, didn’t go to sea to become bosses, and didn’t even invest successfully.

Some people set up a stall next to a flower bed to repair bicycles and patch tires. At that time, there were three bicycle repair stalls on one street.

Some people set up a stall in the community to make keys for others.

Some people also sold steamed buns at the school gate. I remember very clearly, six for one yuan, the size of a thumb, with glutinous rice flavored with meat juice wrapped in small wonton wrappers. Because the teacher always told us not to eat street food. So I was very hesitant when I bought the steamed buns, and I stupidly asked if this was hygienic, and the aunt hurriedly opened the aluminum steamer and showed me the boiling water below, saying that it was safe, and that everything I had was high-temperature sterilized.

When I was in junior high school, there was a girl whose family didn’t have a father, and her mother was laid off. A boy complained to me that he went to her house to play, and her mother was very enthusiastic and made two dishes, one was a package of pickled vegetables, and the other was ham sausage cut into very thin slices and arranged on a plate. Later, she made the wrong friends, and a group of hooligans defiled her, and she took a year off from school for this. Why do I know this? Our homeroom teacher told us secretly.

Actually, I can’t even be considered to know her. She was in the next class, and I only heard many people say that she was stupid and very honest.

Many years later, I felt very uncomfortable. I learned about the two most tragic things in a girl’s life from the casual conversations of two bystanders.

There was always a group of hooligans active in my junior high school, and my junior high school was also called a hooligan school. One night, a female hooligan entered our class and smashed the savings jar where we kept the class fees. The homeroom teacher also held up the broken KFC house for us to see, meaning that the hooligans would steal even this little money, and their character was so base.

Many years later, I thought, why is it that among so many schools nearby, only our junior high school is a hooligan middle school?

Because that area was all old worker new villages.

Those hooligans always had similar but different backgrounds, nothing more than divorced, disabled, seriously ill, struggling to make ends meet, and parents who let their children run wild. And the faces of these parents when they came to school were always haggard, full of tears, with screams and insults, and their faces were always black.

Looking back now, that seems to be the face of the unemployed.

Because when I was in high school, my father was also laid off in a big way, and his face also started to turn black.

At that time, he pretended to go to work for three months, and one morning he specially took me to eat my favorite chicken porridge and fried dough sticks, and then smiled and told my mother and me the truth.

Actually, our family’s transitional days weren’t that long. Later, when I watched ‘The Piano,’ I thought, if this group of great workers were Shanghai workers, it would be much easier to find work in Shanghai. In that era, those who were laid off and went to drive taxis later made money.

But later, probably a few years ago, around 2018, I was pregnant that year, and I remember eating small wontons on Fuzhou Road. I saw an old Shanghai woman with white hair arguing with a young waiter over a five-cent coin. The mistake was actually the old woman’s fault, and I also thought she was inexplicable. But when I was about to leave, I saw her crying out loud on the narrow and busy road, saying that she used to be an excellent worker, survived the layoff, and had so little retirement pay, and her life was so hard.

She was not dressed well, and she said that she hadn’t retired for many years, but she looked older than my grandmother, and my grandmother was almost 90 then.

I still remember her messy white acrylic-like hair, bloodshot eyes, a cry like bitter gourd, wrinkled skin and a skinny frame, which immediately brought me back to that black time.

I realized that there are always many people who haven’t climbed out and are frozen in that sad time.

Of course, it’s not necessarily that it’s so hard. After all, it’s Shanghai, and at least there are Shanghai houses, low-income allowances, and retirement pensions. Many elderly people in third-tier and lower-tier cities who don’t have retirement pensions, many in their seventies, dare not get sick and are still struggling to eat. Recently, the temperature has dropped so much that they may be scolded by their children and spouses if they turn on the air conditioner.

The two words ‘income’ are very likely the dignity that many people will never get back in their lives, and it is also the beginning of many children being ruined.

Of course, I have also seen remarkable single mothers who raised their children with polio to become the top students in our junior high school class, but the reason why the top students can be used as role models is that they are rare, and many people ultimately did not become that rare person.

These memories are intertwined and make up my fear of the recession.

Actually, the recession didn’t appear so late. It started four or five years ago in Sichuan North Road, where entire rows of shops were bricked up.

No more customers, no more attracting, only fallen leaves blowing in the wind on the road.

I remember Han Han also expressed his indignation online about these things. During the layoff wave, it was clearly to call on residents to break open the bottom houses to do business to save themselves. Now that others rely on this to make a living, it has become commonplace, and they are sealed again.

I’m fine, just a faint sadness. In my understanding, it’s a man-made cut of prosperity. Maybe a certain important brain nerve is connected, and the business will come again when the shop opens.

Until I recently went shopping online on Bilibili.

First, the underground square closed, and the comments said that those were low-end consumption and should have been eliminated.

Later, Tianzifang closed, and the comments said that those were deceiving foreigners and tourists, and there was nothing to feel sorry for.

Until the shops in Qipu Road also closed one after another, and in the huge wholesale market, there were more bosses than customers, and the expressions of the customers looked like wolves eating meat. The comments said that it was because of the rise of e-commerce that they were eliminated.

Finally, Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street, where even a pile of dog shit could be sold, from specialty stores to groups of closures, the comments said that the Land Plaza had nothing to buy a long time ago and should have been eliminated, it’s just the tears of the times.

Actually, if you take each one apart, I think they are all right. Tongling Road and Xiangyang Road were also the dandruff that fell on the ground in the metabolism, but the decline of the old is always accompanied by the birth of the new. In the past, many old things didn’t have time to decline, and the new ones had already grown conspicuously and brightly, but now I only see decline and don’t see the new ones growing.

I just feel that this is an inevitable recession, it’s just that Shanghai has become cold first, and the rest of the places haven’t been transmitted.

Maybe saying this will offend some people. Some people are frozen in the time of the big layoffs, and naturally, some people are frozen in the glorious and decent time of the workers’ era. Especially in many non-coastal provinces, and they don’t farm or do business.

Hey, maybe I care more about face. I’ve actually written a lot, but I’ve deleted it.

In short, it’s really what I feel after combining the exchanges of the upper, middle, and lower classes of old, middle-aged, and young men and women from that place.

In many areas of China, they are actually still frozen in the workers’ era, although some big cities in this area are also in the top 10, but luxury goods and CBDs are more like the supporting facilities of the entire city’s supply and marketing cooperatives, and the class of most people is frozen, and they worship the upper and despise the lower. Especially those in state-owned enterprises and extended enterprises like the third-tier positioning, the flow of classes is all in the internal factions, so they are extremely sensitive to political news. They care about the top, but they have no sympathy for the bottom.

They are sensitive to interpersonal relationships and politics, but they are slow and even indifferent to business and people’s livelihood. They don’t know what the people at the bottom rely on to maintain their dignity, and how they get through the day. Maybe they know, but they don’t care at all.

If you talk about the enterprises in Shanghai, although they are also products of white gloves and approvals, the business jungle is wide enough, the food chain is long enough, and there are many small animals, neutral animals, and omnivorous animals between the tiger and the ant. Although it is difficult to climb a little higher on the food chain, the probability is indeed higher, and they are always full.

I began to understand why the girls from these areas I met, even though their backgrounds were not bad, still wanted to stay here and settle down. It’s really because the oxygen in the jungle is much more concentrated than in the Gobi Desert.

But my fear is also because of the jungle.

The long-term recession, the subway ridership reported on Weibo, and the large number of shutter doors that closed and could never be opened again, all remind me of the trees that fell in large numbers in ‘Princess Mononoke’ and the little elves that fell from the trees.

The burning of the trees means that many small animals who came to survive will lose their homes and face a survival crisis.

Did anyone die?

No, they didn’t die, right, they didn’t die.

Go home and farm.

I can only say, have you all really farmed?

I have a classmate from Jiangxi who is most afraid of summer vacation every year. His family is too poor, and he has to help cut rice when he goes home. Every September when school starts, he will lie in the dormitory and sigh, finally school starts, he is free.

Moreover, do many people still have land?

I remember the most heartbreaking sentence in Wang Zengqi’s ‘Butter Pancakes’.

People who starve to death don’t starve to death all at once, but little by little.

First, the face turns yellow, then fatigue, and finally swelling, and a pit is pressed on the foot. On a bad day, the person is gone.

People don’t die of poverty all at once either.

First, the living conditions are poor, from a single room to a bed, and then they learn from the three-and-a-half gods and sleep in internet cafes.

I still remember when I was in high school and studying all night at McDonald’s, I saw a mother with a quilt coming to sleep. The child was still very young, only about three years old. They didn’t order anything all night. What does face matter? Face can keep the child from the wind.

And in the summer in Shanghai, at eight o’clock in the morning, you can see the Shanghai Bookstore gate filled with out-of-towners sleeping on the ground, looking like overnight fried dough sticks piled on a marble cake from a distance. I can only guess that maybe that place is more comfortable than the bridge hole.

Then, the food slowly gets worse. You can’t eat ribs anymore, and you start eating braised eggplant.

Many young couples who work bring their own leftovers or steamed buns and order a dish to eat.

Later, the dishes were also saved, and they brought very salty pickles and swallowed cheap steamed buns with a lot of effort.

Finally, there are fewer and fewer jobs, and they are getting worse and worse.

From a long-term worker to a casual worker, then to a temporary worker, and finally, they can’t even get a job, and they will be deceived by strange people.

These things don’t all happen at the bottom. Many college students will get a ‘position’ in an insurance company, and after their performance drains their interpersonal relationships, they will be fired.

The end of the road is often borrowing, and after they can’t pay it back, they go down the path of moral degradation, or it evolves into blood pay.

Like the Tenpo ronin, on a ‘bad day’, a person may be gone.