China’s “porcelain capital” Jingdezhen is attracting droves of young people drawn to the city of artisans in search of an escape from the urban rat race among its ceramics workshops.
The picturesque eastern city that is home to China’s best-known porcelain has seen an influx of young professionals seeking to learn an ancient art taught there for more than 1,000 years.
Times are tough for young people in China, with youth unemployment at record highs, sluggish economic growth and, for many, the opportunities their parents’ generation enjoyed are simply not attainable, but in Jingdezhen they find something different: low rent, a slower pace of life and a proximity to nature in a city of just 1.6 million inhabitants, very small by Chinese standards.
Photo: AFP
From her one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor, He Yun, a 28-year-old illustrator, enjoys a panoramic view of the surrounding green hills for just 500 yuan (US$69) a month.
She arrived in Jingdezhen in June after being laid off and found a place where she did not feel “any pressure.”
“I came because on social media everyone was saying that it was a great place for craft fans, like me, and that there was a scent of freedom,” she said. “When I lost my job, I stayed at home and got depressed, but once I arrived here, I found that it’s super easy to make friends.”
“No more need to set the alarm in the morning,” she smiled. “I have zero pressure now.”
A typical day for He starts with a laid-back breakfast, before heading to a workshop to make her ceramic candle holders and necklaces, which are then fired in one of the city’s many kilns.
“At the end of the afternoon, we go to the surrounding villages and swim in the streams to relax,” she said. “I put my work on Xiaohongshu [a Chinese app similar to Instagram] where people contact me to buy, but we mainly sell at the market.”
Between trendy cafes, boutiques and stands offer glasses, bowls, cups, teapots, plates, necklaces and earrings.
Chen Jia, 24 with dyed red hair, makes feminist pendants in the shape of sanitary napkins.
A music graduate who arrived in June, her first jobs as a piano teacher and in a milk tea shop and cafe were not to her liking.
“I am looking for meaning in my life,” Chen said. “Many young people today no longer want to clock in at work at a fixed time.”
China’s transformative economic rise was built on the backs of a growing middle class, who were promised they could enjoy the trappings of prosperity and give their children a better life if they worked hard enough, but the nation’s millennials and Generation Z have faced altogether different prospects — youth unemployment has reached a record level, exceeding 20 percent according to official figures, and pay is low.
It is in that context that the tangping counterculture has thrived.
Meaning “lying flat,” it has come to represent a general rejection of society’s expectations, giving up a great career and money to concentrate on a simple life and pleasures, and Jingdezhen has become a haven for those seeking just that.
At the Dashu pottery school, about 20 students work with clay on their pottery wheels or chat as they sip iced lattes. Training costs 4,500 yuan a month, a very affordable price.
“Many young people cannot find work” said the 39-year-old director who calls herself Anna. “They come here to reduce their anxiety.”
“Ceramics are very accessible. In two weeks, they can produce simple works and sell them at markets,” she said.
One of them, Guo Yiyang, 27, resigned in March from a well-paid job as a computer programmer. After working overtime for years, he said he wanted to “take a breather.”
“In big cities ... you just work. You don’t have your own life,” he said, adding that he “never again” sees himself working that way.
“The desire for another way of life” is also what motivated Xiao Fei, 27, a former interior designer who resigned and moved to Jingdezhen in June.
“I didn’t have time for myself,” she said. “I came home tired and I didn’t want to talk to others. I feel happier, more free and I meet people who have the same ideals.”
Chinese media say that 30,000 young urbanites lived in Jingdezhen last year. Few stay long term, but Xiao already knows that she does not want to go back.
“After tasting this new life, I don’t want to go back to an office job at all,” she said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS