Name: Human birds.
Age: SQUAWK!
What? I’m asking about age, why are you squawking? TWIT TWOO!
I get it, you’re being a bird. CHIRRUP CHIRRUP! And to answer the age question, this is a new thing.
Why are you pretending to be – make that parroting – a bird? To escape the pressures of everyday life, study, work and an uncertain economic future.
That’s a thing? It is on social media in China.
And how does one pretend to be a bird? You wear a big T-shirt, pull your arms out of the sleeves, stick your hands out of the bottom and grab hold of something so that they look like claws on a perch. Finally, take a selfie and post it with a message.
And that helps relieve the pressure of life in China in 2024? “Birds can fly free and aimlessly in the sky,” says Wang Weihan, a 20-year-old finance student in Shanghai, appearing to roost on his dorm room bed.
Yeah but Wang can’t actually fly, can he? Where are his wings, eh? It’s about the feeling. The trend, he says, is about expressing “the innate desire within every person for freedom”.
I guess our feathered friends aren’t so fussed about a slowdown in China’s economic growth, the high cost of living, soaring (sorry!) youth unemployment. Or exams, it seems. “No more studying, be a bird,” posted Zhao Weixiang, a biology student in Shanxi province, along with a picture of himself perched on top of a telegraph pole.
Sounds dangerous. The shot is digitally altered; he’s not actually up there. Stressed about upcoming exams, he looked out of the window at the birds in the sky. “I envied their freedom and decided to copy them.”
Why does this rejection of the high-stress, fast-paced life in China in favour of something freer and simpler sound familiar? You’re probably thinking of tangping – lying flat – a countercultural youth movement previously featured in this column.
Pretending to be a bird is the new tangping? It’s not as big – yet. But similar. Prof Xiang Biao, an expert in Chinese society, told the New York Times that many young people in China are disillusioned. “They had very high expectations about themselves, about China and about the world in general. And then when they graduated from college … they became victims of the slowdown. They started asking: ‘Why did I study so hard? What for? I sacrificed so much joy and happiness when I was young.’”
And the answer is take to the sky? Go on, up you go.
Do say: “SCREECH, SCREECH! I’m an eagle!”
Don’t say: “Honk, honk! I’m a dodo.”
