Chinese youths are seeking more manual labour than white-collar mental knowledge-required jobs, ditching high income for a healthy lifestyle.

According to the New York Times report, young people living in China are ditching high-income career jobs for manual and social media jobs due to the notorious job culture in China and the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.

A former white-collar worker, Loretta Liu said she left her job as a visual designer for a Chinese company to work in a store for one-fifth of her previous salary.

She said her physical and mental ability was deteriorating because she was working overtime without being creative with her skills.

“I was tired of living like that. I didn’t feel like I was getting anything from the work. “So I thought, there’s no need anymore,” Ms Liu said.

Ms Liu admitted that she had saved $15,000 before leaving her white-collar job and reduced her expenses to fit into her new income.

She said she prefers the physical toiling in her new job to the mental draining and demands from her former job.

Ms Liu added, “Emotionally, everyone probably can’t bear it anymore, because during the pandemic we saw many unfair and strange things, like being locked up.”

Although many critics believe that young people are wasting their parents’ investment and abandoning the industriousness of Chinese people to focus on the social media trends of quitting their jobs and enjoying life.

While young people find manual jobs more attractive due to less competition for the jobs compared to white-collar jobs that demand university degrees and grades.

Another former white-collar worker, Eunice Wang, said she abandoned her consulting job in Beijing to return home to her family after the Covid-19 lockdown.

She said she fell into a vicious cycle and began to question her mental development which prompted her to work in a coffee shop in her hometown Shenyang, in northeastern China.

Ms Wang said that she is more satisfied with being praised or befriended by customers in the coffee shop than being homesick and alone in the city.

“Everyone thought that conquering a project or securing a client was such a great thing, and I wanted to force myself to believe the same,” she said

The 25-year-old said she is currently staying with her parents while earning extra money through online freelancing to support her salary.

She said the notorious job culture in China made her choose a job that pays one-fifth of her previous salary.

Ms Wang, who described her family as comfortably middle class, acknowledged that she was lucky she could afford such a choice. She would return to white-collar work if her parents one day needed financial support, she said. But until then, she valued the opportunity to challenge her long-held notions of success.

China’s state-owned media blamed young educated employers for the increased unemployment rate, accusing them of taking “blue-collar” jobs from uneducated workers.

A 24-year-old, Yolanda Jiang resigned from her architectural design job in Shenzhen, after being asked to work 30 days straight to work as a security guard in a university apartment.

Ms Jiang said she was embarrassed to inform her family and friends, but she appreciates her new job more because she is being paid a higher salary.

She said her new job came with free accommodation and her salary is $870 monthly, which is 20 per cent higher than her previous salary.

Ms Jiang noted that she will be returning to the office to take on more intellectual challenges in the future.  

“I’m not actually lying flat,” Ms. Jiang said. “I’m treating this as a time to rest, transition, learn, charge my batteries and think about the direction of my life.”