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GREGORY WARNER, HOST:

You're listening to ROUGH TRANSLATION from NPR.

Sometimes a teacher can tell you something, and you don't hear the sting behind their words until much later. When Aris was growing up in Hubei province in China, her teacher would single her out.

ARIS: My teacher, she would say, you see, Aris was not smart, but her grades were so good. This was because she was hardworking.

WARNER: This was supposed to be praise.

ARIS: She didn't mean to hurt me, but I felt those words really hurt me.

WARNER: The lesson that Aris drew from that was that failure was just one missed alarm clock away. And her mom had an expression.

ARIS: Early birds - early birds have something to eat.

WARNER: The phrase that I know is, the early bird catches the worm.

ARIS: Yeah. Yeah. It's similar.

WARNER: Years later, when Aris would grow up to become a high school teacher herself, she didn't want to shame her students into working hard, but she worried. Her students didn't seem to have that work ethic needed for the grueling high school exams that can decide your future career. Her students were only five years younger than her but already felt like a different generation.

ARIS: When I was a student, I was very obedient, maybe because we have fewer temptations, like mobile phones or video games. They have so much temptations, so they didn't work hard.

WARNER: So Aris gave herself homework. She would play video games...

ARIS: League of Legends - LOL.

WARNER: ...And read the sports pages.

ARIS: Oh, did you know that someone has win the champion?

WARNER: She wanted to motivate her students by connecting with them.

ARIS: So I am interested in everything my students are interested.

WARNER: And then one day, she remembers, the bell rang. The class was still noisy, and she'd asked one boy to sit down and resume studying. But he just looked at her, and he said no and smiled.

ARIS: So I asked to asked him, what was he doing? And then he said (non-English language spoken).

WARNER: And this phrase, he says...

ARIS: I will not study. I will become a boss, and I will not work for others.

WARNER: It's said in an unfamiliar accent.

ARIS: Is not the standard Mandarin.

WARNER: The students tell her, oh, it's a new joke online. And she thinks, OK, if this is something my students are connecting with, then I need to know about it. So that night she looks it up.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ZHOU LIQI: (Non-English language spoken).

WARNER: And what she finds is this video...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ZHOU: (Non-English language spoken).

WARNER: ...That she'd later learn was causing lots of people in China to rethink all those lessons about working hard that Aris heard as a kid.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ZHOU: (Non-English language spoken).

EMILY FENG, BYLINE: It's a video of this guy. He is handcuffed to the bars on the wall of a police station somewhere.

WARNER: We first heard this story from NPR's Beijing correspondent Emily Feng.

FENG: Judging by his accent, he's in southern China. His hair is kind of disheveled. His eyes are going all over the place. And it turns out he's jailed because he'd been caught stealing scooters.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ZHOU: (Non-English language spoken).

FENG: It seems to have been filmed on a local television station. And in this video interview, whoever is asking the questions says, why do you keep stealing scooters? Like, can't you get a real job?

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ZHOU: (Non-English language spoken).

FENG: And the guy in the video, the guy who's been arrested, says, working in this life is impossible for me. It's impossible for me to work.

WARNER: And this was the phrase...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ZHOU: (Non-English language spoken).

WARNER: ...That Aris first heard from her student.

ARIS: And I saw it, and I realized it was from a thief.

WARNER: A thief with apparently millions of followers across China.

FENG: He's not complaining about a specific job, but he's talking about work in general and the fact that he won't do it at all. He's not suited to it at all. And that was really what struck a chord with people.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

WARNER: This is ROUGH TRANSLATION. I'm Gregory Warner. That video would ricochet across Chinese worksites and offices. Today in the show, how a scooter thief became an icon for brewing discontent and why some guy saying he just didn't want to work anymore came to be seen by the state as such a threat.

FENG: And he says, my office is filled with police officers.

WARNER: In this story, the government uses surveillance and censorship to try to stamp out burnout. We'll see how that's working out for them - the scooter thief and what he unleashed among Chinese youth, from tech workers to high school students, even to a high school teacher.

ARIS: Oh, he was amazing. He was so brave. But I didn't want to go to prison, so I just work for you today.

WARNER: It's slackers at work after this break.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

WARNER: We are back with ROUGH TRANSLATION. I'm Gregory Warner.

FENG: Recorder is starting.

WARNER: Here with Emily Feng. Great. So, yeah - so where do you want to start, with a rock show?

FENG: Yeah.

WARNER: To understand why that video came to mean so much in China, we're going to start with a cultural phenomenon known as Sang.

FENG: I actually first noticed Sang because of a bubble tea shop chain. And they specialized in making drinks that had really long and elaborate names that all referenced some universal problem that was very Sang - for example, like, my-ex's-life-is-better-than-mine fruit tea or I've-achieved-absolutely-nothing black tea. And I was discussing it one day with my producer in Beijing, Aowen Cao. And she was like, oh, yeah, Sang. Actually, there's this guy I went to high school with. He started this band called Trip Fuel, and they're all about Sang.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A LOW ALTITUDE FLOW")

TRIP FUEL: (Singing) Low altitude flow.

WARNER: So you went to the show?

FENG: Yeah, we met them in this live house in Shenzhen.

(SOUNDBITE OF TRIP FUEL SONG, "A LOW ALTITUDE FLOW")

FENG: So there were probably about 200 people who showed up, which is a good crowd for a Thursday.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).

FENG: And one thing that really struck me is everyone was sitting down at the beginning of the show.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).

FENG: The live house had set up all these chairs lining the perimeter of the room. And people were just kind of plopped there, looking at their phones, sleeping.

WARNER: (Laughter) What?

FENG: A lot of people with their heads on other people's shoulders.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).

FENG: And so I started talking to some of these people - like, why would you come all the way to a rock show, a live house, and then just take a nap?

(Non-English language spoken).

And everyone was like, well, I'm tired.

(Non-English language spoken).

WARNER: It's like a party for exhausted people.

FENG: No, completely. Like, Shenzhen's kind of a special city because it's China's technology hub. It's basically China's Silicon Valley, and all these really hot new startups are there. There's something called 996 in China.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken).

FENG: It's working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. It's technically now illegal. In practice, most tech companies do this, and Shenzhen is notorious for 996.

WARNER: But it turns out that being exhausted, at least in this crowd, it's almost like a membership card in a club known as Sang.

FENG: Sang is an actual Chinese character, which can be combined in various phrases. It just means depressive or tragic - in general, sad. The fact that people feel that their work is pointless. They're simply going through the motions to just get through the day every day at their jobs.

(CHEERING)

FENG: The show slowly picks up. Trip Fuel is the last act to perform. And most of their fans are between the ages of, like, 20 to 30-somethings. A lot of them are working white-collar jobs, which might be prestigious but don't often pay that much in China. And even though labor laws are starting to get a little bit more strict, it's still really common to work overtime unpaid basically every night of the week.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A LOW ALTITUDE FLOW")

TRIP FUEL: (Singing) Let's go wild and watch your life wasted.

FENG: So they have no personal time of their own. They're often only children, so they've got financial burdens to make sure that they can take care of their older relatives. The band members feel this. You know, they're struggling with the same issues. But I think that's also what connects them to their fans. Their lyrics are about watching your life happen.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A LOW ALTITUDE FLOW")

TRIP FUEL: (Singing) Let's go wild and watch your life wasted.

FENG: Like being a passenger in your own life and watching your dreams slowly die.

(CHEERING)

FENG: So the lead singer of the band - his name is Manager Chen.

WARNER: That's his stage name and his actual job title.

FENG: He's a manager. He manages financial products and derivatives at a provincial bank. Towards the end of their act, he pauses in between two songs, and he says, thank you all for coming to his fans, thank you to the band members, but also thank you to my bank managers for letting me be here. And everyone kind of laughs and applauds because they - like, that's part of a shtick.

WARNER: So a bunch of tech workers nodding off at a math rock show may not seem like a big threat for the Chinese government to stress about. But when we were talking to Aris, the high school teacher, she said she would not go to one of these concerts. She doesn't like what Sang culture represents.

ARIS: Then you are spreading negative energy.

WARNER: Negative energy is something the government has been campaigning against for years. And Aris says there's something shameful about sharing how exhausted you are.

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The "Great Resignation" in China: A Thief Inspires the Overworked : Rough Translation - NPR