Meet the typical Chinese millennial, who makes $22,000 a year but has no student debt, grew up in an economic boom, and has learned how to out-hustle everyone else

Chen Hai Ying has been a waiter, a handyman, a barista, and a mechanic. He's the definition of the Chinese Dream, having paid his way through community college after his family's savings were wiped out in the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis.

All he wants now is to live a quiet life with his wife and 8-year-old daughter.

Meanwhile, 900 miles away in Shanghai lives Cassi Xia. She loves a good night out, but her $3,000 monthly salary — which nets her around $2,000 a month after paying rent — limits her to online shopping sprees. Her mother would love for her to settle down within the next two years — she just turned 26 and is one year away from being called a "leftover woman" — but she's resisted those overtures for years.

China has a population of 1.3 billion people living in its 22 provinces. At least 400 million of them are millennials. For comparison, the US is home 72 million millennials.

Insider spoke to six millennials in China, as well as financial and generational experts, to better understand the generation. Importantly, the Chinese millennial is not part of a monolith, and our findings speak to the typical millennial in China, not every millennial.

China's millennials were among the first to taste the fruit of China's booming economy.

Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, which makes the oldest millennials 40 this year. But while millennials in the US are known for enduring financial crises, their counterparts in China grew up during a period of economic reform.

Their parents belong to a generation renowned for its ability to "eat bitter" or endure hardship, people who lived through uncertain times such as the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Millennials, on the other hand, started working while China's GDP per capita soared more than ten-fold.

"Our parents could only worry about putting food on the table, now we can worry about owning assets and houses. Our generation can work hard and reap the rewards, our parents had to try and survive," said Chen, the entrepreneur.

The pressure to succeed, though, can be soul-crushing. Millennials in China are expected to own an apartment, get a high-paying job, and find a spouse by the time they hit 30. The country's big tech companies celebrate working six days a week, 12 hours a day, as part of its "hustle culture."

Around 70% of Chinese millennials own a home, compared to 40% of millennials worldwide, according to a 2017 HSBC report. And for the Chinese millennials who don't yet own a home, nine out of ten of them plan to get one, said the report.

Many of them get help from their parents. At least 40% of China's millennial homeowners received money from their families to help pay for their houses, per the HSBC report.

The pressure to grab property in China is high because it practically makes or breaks your chances of getting married. Chinese men are expected to purchase homes before they can tie the knot, said Allison Malmsten, marketing director at Daxue Consulting.

"Owning a home means a lot to Chinese families, so they are willing to put themselves in deep debt in order to purchase a home," she told Insider. "To make the down payment, a whole family will chip in, oftentimes borrowing money from extended family and friends before going to the bank."

Fan Qing, a single 35-year-old social worker, rents an apartment with several friends in the city of Nanjing. She wants to get married in the future, and for her, that will require finding a man who's already purchased a home or has the financial means to buy one.

"In China, when you have kids, you need to register them to a school according to their home address. If I don't own a home in the city where I work and live, my home address would be all the way back in my hometown in another province," she told Insider.

The typical Chinese millennial doesn't take student loans, even though nearly a quarter of them — 100 million people — have bachelor's degrees.

In fact, student debt is virtually non-existent in China because college education is so cheap, said Malmsten from Daxue Consulting. University in China typically costs between $1,700 and $3,500 a year, according to Times Higher Education. In the US, for comparison, students spend between $12,900 a year for public school education and $49,800 a year on private universities.

Most Chinese millennials also get their education paid for by their parents.

Fan's parents were farmers in a rural part of Fujian, a province in southern China. But they saved enough money to pay for her college education, which cost about $550 a semester.

"Most people I know don't go to university because they didn't study hard enough, not because they couldn't afford it," she told Insider.

More Chinese millennials are looking to international institutions to further their education than ever before. Around 544,000 Chinese students studied abroad in 2016, more than triple the 179,800 who did so in 2008. The top destinations include the US, UK, and Australia.

But millennials like Fan feel that students who travel abroad are either top-scoring students or the children of wealthy parents — what Chinese people call "fu er dai," or the rich second generation.

The job market in China is inundated by the high volume of graduates every year, making it difficult for millennials to find jobs.

China's total unemployment rate fell to 5% in May, but reports say that while there is an abundance of manufacturing jobs in China, there aren't always enough high-level jobs.

For example, this year, nearly a third of the workers at a tobacco manufacturing plant were graduates from some of China's top-ranking universities, reported the South China Morning Post.

"The pressure on us is very great. Most people in my parents' generation went to high school. Now everyone is going to a university. China has so many people, and so many people are fighting for good jobs," said Zhang Xun, a 33-year-old who lives in the city of Qingdao.

Zhang is one of those who tried to escape the rat race by starting his own business. He left his job as a HR executive and cofounded a machinery testing company with his university professor in 2017. His new job pays him around $1,500 a month.

"It's much more relaxed, I get to spend more time with my wife and children," he told Insider.

The average salary of a millennial in China is around $1,817 a month, or $21,804 annually, according to a KPMG report. This means millennials earn about $1,200 less a year than their older counterparts, per the report.

Millennials in China are savers: Even those who make less than average tend to save more than half of each paycheck. A 2020 survey by Danke revealed that Chinese millennials spend where needed and save where possible.

Hai Rong, a 30-year-old accountant, is able to save 70% of her $1,500 monthly salary because her husband, who works in another city, sends about $1,200 a month to support her and her 2-year-old son in the city of Guangdong. She spends most of her money on food and daily living expenses.

Like many millennials in China, the couple is in debt, paying off a housing loan of about $46,000 for their 1,200-square-foot apartment. Chinese millennials, on average, owe more than $20,000 to lending and credit-issuing institutions, according to Tencent News.

Most of this debt comes from loans taken to purchase big-ticket items like homes or cars, said Malmsten, the marketing director from Daxue Consulting. A basic apartment in major "tier 1" cities like Beijing can cost as much as $1 million.

For Zhang, being the sole breadwinner for his family of four while paying off a housing loan means he can barely afford to save.

"There are definitely times when I am worried about the future. It's not that I don't want to save, it's that I can't," he said.

For the typical Chinese millennial, the definition of success is best summed up in one word: 孨. Pronounced "zhuan," this was a term coined in 2012 to refer to three essential pillars of success — at least for the Chinese man — house (房子), car (车子), and wife (妻子).

"The concept of having a family, house, and car in order to be viewed as successful might seem archaic, but it's still what my friends and I worry about," Gu Guoli, 34, told Insider.

Gu, who works in a tech startup, told Insider that it was "not easy" to check off the items on the list. He said it took him almost 15 years to save for a deposit on his home in Beijing.

"I have a wife, and a house, but not a car. Even though we live close enough to the middle of Beijing city and don't necessarily need a vehicle, to some extent, there's still a worry that we haven't quite achieved our full potential," Gu said.

The typical Chinese millennial is well-connected: It's estimated that more than 90% of millennials in China own a smartphone. And life behind the Great Firewall is far from uninteresting.

Chinese tech giants like Tencent, Alibaba Group, JD, Baidu, and Meituan have generated an online ecosystem of their own, completely separate from the Western world. You can share the highlights of your life in WeChat Moments (their version of Facebook) and surf Weibo (China's version of Twitter). The social media app TikTok (called Douyin there) has around 600 million monthly active users in China. Its rival, the video app Kuaishou, hit the one billion monthly active user mark in June this year.

Shopping on Taobao has practically become a national pastime in China too, with 77% of Chinese respondents in a 2017 KPMG survey picking it as their favorite leisure activity. This is boosted even further by influencers like China's lipstick king, Austin Li, and the rise of fast beauty brands like Flower Knows and Florasis.

"Many things on Taobao are fairly inexpensive," Xia said. "For $50, you can buy around 10 to 15 fairly well-made items. It's enough for most people to satisfy any retail therapy cravings. And if you're super bored, watching online shopping live streams is a kind of entertainment in itself, too."

A report released by Boston Consulting Group and Tencent in September 2018 observed that Chinese customers will by 2024 account for 40% of the global luxury goods sold worldwide and a good portion of them (58%) will be millennials.

Chinese millennials' love for shopping follows in the country's broader tradition. During this year's "618" shopping season (which is known as China's Black Friday) one shopping platform, JD.com, hauled in over $53.2 billion in sales, with luxury brands like Ferragamo, TOD's, and BALLY coming out on top.

Daxue Consulting said millennial moms were among its core consumer group, picking up items for new parents.

However, Chinese millennials speaking to Insider said they rarely spent money on luxury goods, saying the practice is only common among the wealthy.

Chen, the 3D printing company owner and entrepreneur, said he bought his wife an expensive coat for their wedding and sometimes gifts her branded bags, but said these splurges are the exception.

Hai, the accountant, said she rarely buys luxury goods but values them tremendously.

"I grew up poor," she continued. "My father worked as a miner and my family was always struggling for money. I learned to save money because of that, but I also wish I could spend money on things like Louis Vuitton bags. It would be a sign that my life is better now."

The typical Chinese millennial might be on dating sites like TanTan (the country's version of Tinder), but they're likely getting married at a later age than their parents did.

The average marriage age of a Shanghai resident has been inching up since 2010. In 2019, the average age of marriage was 30 for men and 28 for women. Notably, there's a stigma attached to women over 27 who haven't already gotten engaged or married, and who are tagged with the derogatory label of "sheng nv," or "leftover woman."

Nationwide figures also show millennial women are putting off marriage until at least their mid-20s. In 2016, the average age at first marriage for a Chinese woman was 25. For men, it was 27.

This is in stark contrast to their parent's generation. In 1982, the nation's population census showed half of China's women were married before they hit 22. The men were younger, too: The average Chinese man married at 23.

The Chinese government is worried that some Chinese millennials aren't getting married at all. In the six-year timeframe from 2013 to 2019, the number of Chinese people who got married plummeted 41% from 23.8 million to just 13.9 million, per data from the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics.

In 2020, China hit two demographic landmarks in one year, said May Yee Chen, an expert at marketing research firm Wunderman Thompson: a historically low birth rate and the lowest marriage rate in two decades.

"This is part of a longer-term trend where more and more women are financially independent and their changing life expectations have made the tradition of marriage less appealing," said Chen. "It's not that Chinese millennials don't want to get married, it's that their bar is higher."

Chen added that women in particular have become less willing to settle.

"In consumer trends, you see this in things like the rise of the pet economy, where singles spend on pets what they are not spending on children; the increase in solo women travelers; and of course, the growth in Alibaba's annual Singles Day Shopping Festival, now the world's biggest annual shopping spree," Chen said.

Speaking to Insider in June, Zhang Zhiyuan, 27, who is unemployed, said he was an ardent follower of the "lying flat movement" (or 躺平主义).

"8 a.m. means it's time to lie down," Zhang told Insider. "Though I don't have a job to go to, so I can lie down anytime. It's great."

Zhang is not the only Chinese millennial who is choosing to lie flat. It is a rebellion against "neijuan" (or involution), a term often used to describe the hyper-competitive lifestyle that millennials in China face.

"Neijuan" goes hand in hand with China's "hustle" culture, where people work 12 hours a day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. The 9-9-6 lifestyle was strongly championed by Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, who once in 2019 called the 72-hour workweek a "blessing."

"Since I made a permanent move to Shanghai four years ago, I've sent out more than 2,000 job applications and been to hundreds of interviews," Zhang told Insider. "I got a job at an accounting firm after my second year of job-hunting, but I resigned after four months. That lifestyle just wasn't for me."

Xia, the marketing consultant, told Insider that many Chinese millennials like herself know that they have to work hard if they want a better life.

"If you put in your 100%, someone will put in 110%. So if you want to earn more money, live in a nicer house, and have a good life for yourself and your family, you only have one option — work hard," she said. "The alternative is to be content with being a loser."

Gu, the tech startup employee, told Insider that Chinese millennials like himself weren't out to "change the world" or "be the generation that changes China." Echoing Xia's sentiments, he said that while some people may be content with "lying flat," there's a general consensus that the possibilities — if one works hard — are endless.

"I think that the next generation after us may have more room to be creative and pursue alternative careers. But even for younger people, the idea of giving up your corporate job to become a musician and earn a quarter of your current salary would be ridiculous to your peers, not to mention incredibly disappointing to your parents," Gu said.

In comparison to the American millennial, the Chinese millennial might be better off financially. Insider's Hilary Hoffower wrote that the average American millennial is delaying life goals because of student loan debt. Chinese millennials earn much less than their American counterparts, but they are not saddled with massive student loan debt.

And while Chinese millennials face familial, societal, and even governmental pressure to get married and have more kids, this doesn't make the generation a regional outlier. South Korea and Japan, too, are reporting dismal birth rates.

But even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and a fraught international landscape for China, Chen Hai Ying, the millennial who launched his own company, believes Chinese millennials can build a life that's better than their parents'.

He thinks his countrymen are "good at quietly enduring adversity to find a breakthrough in solving difficulties."

"Most Chinese millennials have high academic qualifications or personal skills," Chen said. "And as long as they are guided by wise mentors, I think Chinese millennials will be better than their predecessors."