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Every morning, you encounter them: the man in the black jacket, who always boards through the same door; the young woman carrying a thermos cup who dyes the tips of her hair a different color every six weeks, this time a faded green-blue. It is a peculiar form of familiarity. For a few minutes, we share the same space and travel the same route. No words are exchanged. In this way, people become part of everyday life without becoming part of one’s life.
What initially appears to be a casual observation points to a broader structural condition. The loneliness experienced by many young people is the product of a social model that demands flexibility, mobility and constant availability. In Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, millions of people live and work far from their hometowns. They reside in high-rise apartment complexes, often sharing flats with strangers they rarely see and speak to even less. Daily life is tightly scheduled around long commutes and office hours. During lunch breaks, food is ordered through an app while the next work message on WeChat is already being answered.
Yet the people young professionals encounter throughout the day rarely become part of meaningful social relationships.
The Fragmentation of Social Life
None of that means young people today are less social. If anything, the opposite is true. Rarely have people communicated and interacted as much as they do today. Messages are answered almost instantly. Photos of meals are shared and commented on with suitable emojis. In the workplace, this often means remaining reachable on WeChat long after the working day has ended. Dating too, rarely begins with a face-to-face introduction anymore, but increasingly through algorithms. The boom of games such as Love and Deepspace, in which virtual partners are available around the clock, points to a growing desire for emotional reliability.
The concept of emotional value refers to a relationship’s ability to provide attention, care and emotional stability – resources that are becoming increasingly scarce in the everyday lives of young urban residents.
In Chinese online debates, this is often discussed under the term emotional value. The concept refers to a relationship’s ability to provide attention, care and emotional stability – resources that are becoming increasingly scarce in the everyday lives of young urban residents.
At the same time, another concept has gained prominence in China: the “disappearance of the nearby”. The anthropologist Xiang Biao uses the term to describe the gradual loss of social rootedness in one’s immediate surroundings. The everyday forms of closeness that once emerged though neighborhoods and local communities, he argues, are slowly disappearing.
This development is particularly visible in China’s major cities. Work, mobility and digital platforms now structure everyday life so thoroughly that relationships themselves are expected to be flexible, efficient and permanently available.
This development becomes particularly striking when viewed against the backdrop of recent Chinese history. For decades, social relationships in the People’s Republic were closely tied to the work unit, the danwei. The danwei was far more that a workplace. It organized housing, childcare, healthcare, leisure activities and social welfare. Colleagues were often also neighbors; children attended the same kindergartens and schools and many everyday interactions emerged not through individual choice but through participation in the same workplace structures.
At the same time, the danwei was by no means an idyllic form of community life. It often functioned in paternalistic manner limiting individual freedoms while exercising social control. This gave rise to rigid hierarchies, local power structures and forms of clientelism that frequently hindered broader social change.
With the reforms introduced in the 1980s this model underwent a fundamental transformation. The economic dynamism of the reform era created new opportunities for education, employment and upward mobility for millions of people. At the same time, many of the social functions that had previously been organized through the danwei were gradually outsourced, marketized, or privatized. Employment became more flexible and mobility emerges as a key prerequisite for professional success. Hundreds of millions of people left their hometowns and moved to the rapidly expanding metropolises of China’s eastern coast.
The loneliness experienced by many young urban residents is an expression of a historical transition: from a society in which social relationships were embedded in collective institutions to one in which belonging increasingly has to be created, maintained and organized by individuals themselves.
It is precisely this historical transformation, that makes Xiang Biao’s diagnosis of the “disappearance of the nearby” so compelling. It highlights the extent to which the places and institutions through which people experience belonging have fundamentally changed in contemporary China. Many of the institutions that once fostered everyday encounters, long-term relationships and local communities – such as danwei – have lost much of their significance. In the place have emerged labor markets, digital platforms and online networks that connect people in ways that are often more temporary, functional and spatially flexible.
The loneliness experienced by many young urban residents therefore cannot be understood solely as a psychological phenomenon. It is also the expression of a historical transition: from a society in which social relationships were embedded in collective institutions to one in which belonging increasingly has to be created, maintained and organized by individuals themselves.
From Personal Experience to Political Question
What becomes socially visible, however, is primarily the loneliness of a particular social group. Platforms such as TikTok and Xiaohongshu count hundreds of millions of users, yet only a small proportion actively produces content. Those who possess the time, cultural capital and digital literacy required to do so tend to belong overwhelmingly to China’s urban, well-educated middle classes.
Yet a metropolis consists of more than office workers, content creators and academics. While Xiaohongshu is filled with discussions about burnout, dating and emotional availability, the infrastructure of urban life depends on millions of delivery drivers, cleaners, security guards and service workers. They, too, often live far from their hometowns and work under immense pressure, but they enjoy significantly less social security, and far less visibility.
The loneliness of urban professionals and the invisibility of service workers are two sides of the same coin. The modern metropolis draws people into ever deeper forms of economic interdependence without necessarily generating social relationships. Society increasingly appears as little more than a network of services and functions. Delivery drivers, cleaners and security guards become part of the everyday lives of young professionals without ever becoming part of a shared social world.
Social relationships do not only provide emotional support. They create trust, solidarity and a sese of shared experience. When these relationships become fragmented, personal difficulties are less and less likely to be understood as social problems. And those who experience social problems individually tend to look for individual rather than collective solutions. Burnout is thus reframed as a matter of self-care, while loneliness becomes a problem of self-optimization. In short, structural problems are increasingly recast as individual responsibilities.
Instead of leading to solidarity, loneliness can easily turn into resentment: against women, against minorities, or against other groups blamed for one’s personal problems. Such dynamics can also be observed in China. The enormous popularity of nationalist discourses online, recurring debates about “proper” masculinity and sharp gender conflicts between young men and women all point to a society in which many traditional forms of social belonging have come under pressure.
In the Chinese context, this development contains yet another dimension. Since the beginning of the Reform and Opening Up period, the People’s Republic has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, experienced the largest urbanization movement in history and enabled enormous social mobility. At the same time, many of the institutions through which belonging war once produced – work units, neighborhoods, hometown communities or extended families – have changed profoundly. In the process, many of the social structures that collectively organized belonging were lost.
For many young Chinese people today, mobility has become a professional necessity. Often, their parents’ generation had already moved from a village to a country town; their children then left for a provincial capital to attend university, before eventually relocating to Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen for work. Within a single generation, China has dismantled many of the social structures that once organized community life. What then, will take their place?
Under what conditions can people experience themselves as part of a society rather than merely as individuals living, working and competing alongside one another?
The question of loneliness therefore touches upon more than individual choices. It also raises fundamental questions about the relationship between the individual and the collective. After all, the People’s Republic continues to define itself as a socialist project in which social cohesion, collective development and social harmony remain important political reference points. This makes the popularity of debates about loneliness, emotional exhaustion and the disappearance of social closeness among young people all the more striking. These discussions point to a fundamental tension between the demands of a highly mobile and competitive everyday life and the desire for belonging and community.
The question, ultimately, is not only how people cope with loneliness, but also what kinds of social spaces still exist in which solidarity, trust and collective experiences can emerge. In this sense, the debate on loneliness touches upon a classic socialist question: under what conditions can people experience themselves as part of a society rather than merely as individuals living, working and competing alongside one another? The growing popularity of concepts such as the “disappearance of the nearby” suggests that this question is rapidly gaining significance for many young Chinese people.
