For generations, the Chinese Communist Party has held on to power partly through an implicit bargain with its citizenry: Sacrifice your freedoms, and in exchange, we’ll guarantee ever-rising living standards.

That deal has not held up for today’s youths.

Until quite recently, China’s young people seemed poised to take on the world — and many of them appeared to believe they would. They’ve shown a streak of hyper-nationalism, stoked by the country’s leadership and reinforced by China’s growing economic and geopolitical strength.

China’s Gen Z came of age, after all, in the wake of the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization and amid a rapid rise in incomes.

President Xi Jinping has said young people must learn to “eat bitterness” (an idiom that roughly means to toughen up by enduring hardship). Today’s youths, leaders say, are not too good for manual labor or moving to the countryside — experiences Xi and his generation once had to endure.

China’s resilience after the financial crisis, particularly relative to the sluggish recovery across most of the West, suggested China and its citizens had nowhere to go but up. Political dysfunction in many of those same Western democracies, expertly exploited by Chinese propaganda, reinforced this perception.

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