The Labubu moral panic

From ‘little emperors’ to full-time children, a look at what’s fuelling China’s generational crack-up

Until a week ago, I had no idea what a ‘Labubu’ was.

Kinda cute, a little ugly, right? But ultimately just a fluffy toy. It’s mainly sold as a keychain.

So you might also be shocked, like I was, to learn about the craze of Labubu. This is China’s new hottest cultural export (if you can call it ‘culture’). As I write in my latest Times column:

Labubus are not expensive, retailing from 69 yuan each (the equivalent of £7, though in the UK they start from £13.50). But limited stocks and the fact they are sold in “blind boxes” — you don’t know which Labubu you’ll get until after purchase — has driven hype and a febrile second-hand market.

Earlier this month, a human-sized Labubu sculpture sold for more than one million yuan (£110,000) at a Beijing auction. Shares in Pop Mart, the Hong Kong-listed company behind it, have more than quintupled since the beginning of last year and its stores are the scenes of long queues and occasional fights.

If you want to find out more on the monster and the company behind it, I can recommend Amber Zhang’s Baiguan Substack.

But what interested me about the phenomenon wasn’t the runaway business success of Pop Mart; more what it says about the unseriousness of some Chinese young people today.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, ever since I noticed Nanjing being overrun with cosplayers on my latest visit. In a local shopping centre, swanky, relatively newly opened, all of the floors were pretty much empty except for the top two floors, buzzing with young people. They were dedicated to the so-called ‘2D industry’ - merchandise and spin-off tat from two-dimensional worlds, i.e. stuff from manga, anime, films and TVs, including cosplay outfits. I couldn’t believe how much energy and money my peers (and Gen Z) were spending on this.

Labubu has triggered China’s older generation into something of a moral panic. They worry that the blind boxes are basically gambling, and are baffled by how something so cheaply made (45 per cent polyester; 55 per cent PVC) could drive such hype – and prices.

I have to say I agree. I know that I was probably an unusual teenager to be watching Question Time (a British political panel show) when my friends were watching make-up tutorials (I don’t say this to brag; I honestly think I missed out on an important life skill). But the tiger mum in me simply can’t get behind the chasing of pop stars, the spaffing of months of pocket money on one ‘rare’ card set, or indeed buying box after box until you get the Labubu of your dreams. Even worse when it’s adults in their 20s or even 30s doing this, rather than teenagers.

So my latest column is about the unbearable lightness of some Chinese young (I emphasise ‘some’ – of course it is not all), and sketch out a picture of the anxiety from older generations that their kids are just not serious. I link it to the CCP’s paternal policies from recent years – from the video gaming restrictions to the campaign against ‘sissy men’.

But as I wrote, I started to wonder about things from the kids’ perspectives. If they are lying flat and looking for escapism, what are the causes of that? It’s easy enough for me to judge, sitting here in the UK having grown up with an utterly different teen-hood. It occurred to me that, actually, there were good reasons for this frivolity. Parents, and the Party, needed to take some responsibility:

If millennials and Gen Z are spoiled, who spoiled them? The one-child policy focused all of an ambitious parent’s attention and investment on a single target, who was meant to gain academic and then professional success.

When I was at school in China, my peers and I were actively discouraged from doing chores so that we could study more. It’s such a recognised problem that a Nanjing university lecturer went viral recently for teaching a “Guide to Adult Life” course, which included how to fry an egg and how to get healthcare.

And yet today’s struggling economy means that many young people can’t find good jobs: 15 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds are unemployed. They sometimes go for jobs that they’re overqualified for — in 2021, one Henan tobacco plant made headlines for employing graduates with master’s degrees on its factory floor. Or they could study for another degree to buy some time. Or they could just be full-time children. You can see lying flat as mere laziness or you can see it as a cry for help from a cohort under unbearable pressure.

The most underappreciated factor of all, I think, is that the Chinese political system semi-deliberately breeds apathy. After all, youth is the time to have strong opinions, become intellectually engaged, to be idealistic. It’s when people become vegans or climate change activists or accuse relatives of being racist. The views may be naive but thinking about them trains curiosity, conviction and intellectual muscle.

But what can the average Chinese teen do? They’re not encouraged to debate with their elders and they are certainly not meant to have views. Those who do and get even a little organised, like the online feminists or the student Marxists, are censored, disbanded or even arrested.

So given all this, is it any wonder that so many Gen Z and millennials are looking for escapism? The fantasy worlds are so much safer and more comforting than their own.