Economy
China’s jobless fake work routines to keep families calm
A photo of a home-cooked lunch almost exposed Coco Li’s secret.
The 32-year-old, a former employee of a Chinese state-owned property firm, had been about to share it in her family group chat before catching herself. Her mother might ask why she wasn’t at work.
Li is one of many unemployed Chinese hiding their joblessness from relatives, wary of the concern and pressure that often follow in a labor market where finding work has become increasingly difficult.
“She would fall into an endless cycle of anxiety and eventually pass that anxiety on to me,” said Li, who quit more than six months ago, citing high workload and little recognition. Her mother’s concern “couldn’t really solve my problem,” she added.
Pretending to be employed may ease social tensions
The scale of online engagement suggests pretending to have a job is widespread.
Posts advising where to spend the day, how to dodge relatives’ questions about work, and chronicling the experiences of pretend-workers have drawn more than 70 million views on the Instagram-like RedNote app and 610 million views on Douyin, China’s TikTok. On X-like Weibo, related hashtags have drawn up to 320 million views.
Analysts say the phenomenon is a stark reflection of a weakening job market in an economy increasingly reliant on roaring exports. As Monday’s third quarter data showed, manufacturers are battling fierce competition by slashing prices and payrolls while piling heavier workloads onto remaining staff.
A prolonged property market crisis and tight local government finances have also hurt jobs and incomes, along with automation and rapid AI adoption.
Diana Fu, an associate professor of Chinese politics at Cornell University, says pretending to go to work allows people to save face and potentially defuse collective discontent.
This helps preserve social stability as Beijing pushes ahead with automation and its tech race against the U.S., she said.
“Pretend-workers are helping the Chinese government to stave off the hard choice between leaping ahead in automation and protecting job security, which is so essential to the social contract,” she said.
Parks, malls, libraries
Most social media posts share tips on how to spend the day away from home, drifting through parks, libraries, cafes and shopping malls, in scenes reminiscent of salarymen who hid their joblessness in South Korea and Japan during the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s.
Li follows similar routines when her parents visit.
“I never would have believed the library would be completely full on a weekday,” said Zhang, 36, a visual effects producer who lost her job in AI-driven redundancies in August. She gave only her surname.
In other posts, users wonder if the people around them are in a similar predicament, or – echoing Li – explain why they hide and how it makes them feel.
Some posts are daily journals. In one titled “Day 30 of unemployment: a month pretending to work,” a user recounts 80 failed job applications.
Susan Sun, 28, has concealed her layoff from an internet company since late last year. The balancing act became more complicated in May when her mother and stepfather moved in with her in the megacity of Chongqing from their smaller hometown to look for work.
This forces her to leave home before 9 a.m. and return after 6 p.m.
Sun lives on 1,864 yuan ($278) per month in unemployment benefits and what remains of her severance package. She says she is happy living on little and not working. Her only pressure comes from her parents.
“They pass their anxiety on to me, through subtle, insistent expressions and tone of voice,” she said, especially when they advise her to save money because “the economy is bad.”
Yige Dong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, says China’s relatively thin social safety net, compared with those in Japan and South Korea during the 1990s, could eventually make it harder for the unemployed to keep up the pretence.
At some point, “individuals would probably be more concerned with pooling resources from all available sources, including borrowing from family members and relatives,” Dong said.
The tractors entering Gela, a town on Europe’s southernmost edge, fly the Sicilian flag, decorated with Medusa, three bent legs and ears of wheat – a symbol of the island’s long-standing role as a breadbasket dating back to Roman times.
But the farmers are not bringing in a harvest. They are protesting.
As soaring fuel prices squeeze household budgets and businesses across Europe, cost-of-living pressures are driving unrest and giving fresh momentum to far-right parties ahead of elections next year in countries including France, Italy and Poland.
Parties once considered fringe had already been gaining ground, with voters from motorists in rural France to young men in Germany’s former Communist east looking for alternatives.
The U.S.-Iran war, which erupted in February and sent energy prices sharply higher, has compounded the challenge for governments already struggling to contain inflation, support growth and rein in spending.
The discontent has spilled onto the streets.
In France, demonstrations that began over deteriorating school facilities in Paris’ northern suburbs have morphed into some of the country’s worst unrest in decades, with shops looted, buildings torched and a 19th-century town hall in Limoges set on fire.
“Why am I here? Well, quite simply, I find the current cost of living truly terrifying,” said Quentin Leviloux, a 21-year-old protester in Nantes.
“Just think of people who earn barely the minimum wage, when you look at the cost of food, fuel, and everything else. It’s terrifying how incredibly expensive things have become.”
The European Commission estimates the Iran conflict has cost Europe roughly 100 billion euros ($112 billion) through disrupted trade and energy markets. Gas prices have jumped about 140% and diesel prices have doubled.
In a weekend address, French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the “legitimate demands” of protesters angered by rising living and fuel costs, while condemning those responsible for violence and looting.
“We must never confuse them with those who destroyed, vandalized and looted,” he said.
Protests erupt across Europe
Violence has also erupted elsewhere. In the wealthy northern Italian city of Milan, police clashed on Sunday with protesters hurling stones and looting stores during demonstrations over poor public services and rising living costs.
In Gela, on Sicily’s southern coast, farmers say fuel costs have made operating machinery prohibitively expensive. “We cultivate the land, we harvest debts,” said one banner.
“We are completely at a standstill,” said Arcangelo Gambino, a farmers’ representative in Caltanissetta province. “The (fuel) cost has more than doubled.”
Roadblocks by truckers, farmers and steelworkers have disrupted transport across parts of southern Italy, contributing to local fuel shortages and concerns over supermarket supplies.
Tens of thousands marched through Lisbon on Saturday over low wages, housing costs and the rising cost of living, increasing pressure on Portugal’s centre-right government.
In Spain, the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her home sparked nationwide demonstrations over housing shortages and soaring rents, helping trigger a snap election next month.
Belgium has also seen demonstrations, while large rallies in Albania have been driven by anger over perceived government corruption, a lack of jobs and poor education standards.
The protests reflect broader economic anxieties that are increasingly shaping politics across the continent.
Concerns about purchasing power have become “a major driver of populist politics” across Europe, said Gilles Ivaldi, a political scientist at Sciences Po.
Politicians on both the hard right and hard left have increasingly argued that restoring energy ties with Russia would help lower costs, challenging Europe’s mainstream consensus on support for Ukraine.
Le Pen makes fuel prices campaign issue
The latest energy shock comes after years of economic strain following the COVID-19 pandemic and the fallout from Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
In France, rising energy costs have provided an explosive backdrop to next April’s presidential election. Macron’s government is struggling with a ballooning budget deficit and pressure from bond markets.
Frontrunner Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally (RN) and hard-left veteran Jean-Luc Melenchon, have both made fuel prices central planks in their campaigns.
“Rising fuel prices are clearly an issue that boosts Marine Le Pen,” said Ivaldi. “I think this is an issue she has owned for quite some time.”
Since the Iran war began, Le Pen’s ratings have improved while Macron’s have slipped, according to polling by Elabe.
Le Pen’s proposal to sharply cut value-added tax on fuel has attracted broad public support. Analysts say the issue resonates strongly with her core voters in rural and semi-rural areas where car travel is often essential.
Calls to restore Russia ties
In neighboring Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is leading national opinion polls after strong gains in local elections. The cost of living topped Germans’ concerns for a fifth straight year in a survey published this month.
German inflation spiked to nearly a three-year high in September, with energy price inflation rising to 14.9%, handing ammunition to the AfD to attack Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The AfD is pushing to restore energy ties with Russia, arguing that Berlin’s support for Ukraine is needlessly self-sabotaging at a time when Europe’s largest economy and many of its energy-hungry companies are struggling.
Past experience indicates a link between high energy prices and voter turnout for the AfD, said Jan Steckel, professor for the political economy of climate change at the Technical University of Munich.
“Populist parties often frame energy costs as avoidable and attribute them to government policy choices … rather than to the underlying geopolitical shocks that drive them,” he said.
“These geopolitical shocks are … much more difficult to explain. And I think this is why incumbent parties often struggle.”
The argument is gaining traction elsewhere.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni faces growing competition from National Future, a new far-right party led by former army Gen. Roberto Vannacci that advocates restoring gas links with Russia.
In Poland, one of Ukraine’s staunchest supporters, concern over energy bills is helping boost support for the far-right Confederation of the Polish Crown. Its leader, Grzegorz Braun, has called for a return to buying Russian oil and gas, making the case alongside AfD politicians in Lubmin, where the damaged Nord Stream pipelines land in Germany.
“I love the smell of Russian gas in the morning,” he said.
The U.S. government on Monday instructed its civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and third-party services using the Chinese AI model from their IT systems, drawing opposition from Beijing, which said Washington “overstretched” the concept of national security.
China and the United States are locked in a race for dominance in the fast-moving artificial intelligence sector, trading accusations of stealing AI technologies and jeopardizing security in recent months.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Monday banned products developed by DeepSeek – and tools created using DeepSeek by third parties – saying they risked sharing sensitive data with China.
Beijing’s Foreign Ministry opposed the ban on Tuesday, vowing to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese businesses.
“China has consistently opposed the overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicisation of issues related to science, technology, and trade,” ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a news conference.
The Department of Homeland Security can issue directions to civilian agencies, but not the military or intelligence services.
Its statement on Monday said that “DeepSeek’s models present multiple threat vectors” and must be removed from IT devices.
Use of DeepSeek AI tools “may result in the transfer of sensitive data to (China) if used by U.S. government employees or vendors,” the department warned.
Its servers are located in China, where the legal system permits the government “extensive authority” to access private company infrastructure, it claimed.
DeepSeek, one of China’s top AI labs, shook up the industry in January 2025 with a low-cost, high-performance chatbot, challenging assumptions of U.S. dominance.
The firm released a long-awaited new model, V4, in April and this month updated a faster, more lightweight version of V4.
The United States has accused DeepSeek and other top Chinese AI firms of systematically stealing the capabilities of cutting-edge models developed by American rivals.
Despite their fierce competition in the field, China and the United States in September agreed to set up a “communication channel” for AI incidents.
The topic is expected to arise again when the countries’ leaders meet next month at a summit in the Chinese city of Shenzhen.
Indonesian stocks climbed on Tuesday, recuperating slightly as authorities in Jakarta introduced measures, including to restrict selling after a record two-day $82 billion rout sparked by index provider MSCI’s warning of possible removal from its global indexes.
Jakarta’s benchmark index rose 4% on Tuesday, after hitting a six-year low in the previous session as the world’s worst-performing stock market this year dropped 14.8% over Friday and Monday. Still, the index is down about 40% this year.
MSCI on Friday said it was considering shifting Indonesia to “standalone” instead of “emerging markets” status, a more-severe-than-expected downgrade that shocked investors and officials and fueled fears of a sell-off by passive funds that track global indexes.
The index provider’s latest warning stemmed from concerns that Indonesia had yet to improve ownership transparency or clamp down on coordinated trading and was much worse than the January threat of a downgrade to “frontier” market status.
Relegation to “standalone” would be a devastating blow to Indonesia as Southeast Asia’s biggest economy grapples with eroding investor confidence over its fiscal health and central bank independence under President Prabowo Subianto.
After an online meeting with MSCI on Monday, the Indonesia Stock Exchange said it would exclude from its benchmark index any stocks with a high concentration of ownership by any person or entity.
“We are doing what is best for our market,” IDX President Director Jeffrey Hendrik said, adding the exclusion would provide a more accurate picture of the index’s movements. He said the affected stocks account for roughly 18% of the total index weight.
Gary Tan, portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, said excluding tightly held stocks should help address some investability concerns, but implementation would be key, given the potential for domestic pushback.
“From here, we think the bigger incremental risk to flows is likely to come from active rather than passive funds,” he said.
Jakarta aims to calm nerves with market measures
To slow the heavy selling on the market, the stock exchange this week halved the daily down limit on stock prices to 7% from 15%, while setting a 1 rupiah down limit on shares priced at 14 rupiah or less.
Also on Monday, Prabowo held talks with finance chiefs, including the head of the Financial Services Authority (OJK), the finance minister and the Bank Indonesia (BI) governor.
After the meeting, OJK chief Friderica Widyasari Dewi said the regulator would continue to advance Indonesia’s capital market reforms, particularly regarding transparency, liquidity, and law enforcement against various forms of violations.
“A particularly important special message is how we must continuously enforce regulations against those who have committed violations related to coordinated trading and other similar practices,” Friderica said.
Market watchers said the stock exchange had taken a constructive step in eliminating stocks with highly concentrated ownership from the benchmark index, but that would not automatically eliminate investors’ exposure to those companies either directly or through products such as mutual funds.
“We must ensure that even if a stock is delisted from the Jakarta Composite Index, concentration risk does not continue to accumulate within products purchased by the public,” said Liza Camelia Suryanata, head of research at stockbroker Kiwoom Sekuritas Indonesia.
Eyes on central bank
MSCI’s warning has weighed on the rupiah, which strengthened slightly to 18,000 per U.S. dollar on Tuesday but remained close to the record low of 18,190 hit in June ahead of a policy decision from Indonesia’s central bank.
BI is expected to hold rates steady on Wednesday, although some economists have raised the prospect of a rate hike to defend the currency, which is down 7% this year, making it the worst-performing currency in the region.
George Xu, a director in Fitch Ratings’ sovereigns team, said the latest concerns and substantial market sell-off reinforced the risks the rating agency identified when it revised the outlook on Indonesia to negative in March.
“From sovereign rating perspective, we do not anticipate the consultation announcement itself to have material immediate credit implications,” he said, but added that external pressure could raise the government’s borrowing costs and erode external buffers.
Saudi Arabia has decided to move the hosting of its flagship investment conference to next year, organizers confirmed on Monday, following recent deadly attacks by Houthis on the kingdom, as the Middle East conflict widens, posing fresh challenges for businesses in the region.
The Future Investment Initiative (FII) was planned for Oct. 26 to 29, but will now take place in 2027, with a new date to be announced “very soon,” the organizers said.
Reuters reported earlier Monday that the in-person event had been scrapped and organizers were weighing postponing the event.
The conference, set for its 10th edition, has become a must-attend event for some of the world’s top financiers.
Informally dubbed “Davos in the Desert,” in a nod to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Switzerland, the state-backed annual event has showcased the kingdom’s ambitious investment plans in a bid to attract billions of dollars needed to fund its economic transformation away from hydrocarbons towards tourism, sports and technology.
Expected speakers for this year’s event included Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman David Solomon, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters and Citi’s CEO Jane Fraser, according to a draft program.
The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran this year has disrupted the Gulf’s busy calendar of events, with several conferences canceled, postponed, or retooled in the UAE and Qatar in the first part of the year, when the countries bore the brunt of the attacks while Saudi Arabia suffered fewer hits.
The kingdom in recent weeks has faced an escalating war with Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis, which have struck military, energy and civilian infrastructure across the country, including the state oil company Aramco’s headquarters and Riyadh’s international airport, where strikes killed at least 18 people and hundreds were wounded this month.
FII said it wanted to ensure the event delivered “the full scale, extraordinary quality, and unforgettable impact that our community has come to expect.”
Reuters reported last week that the FII organizers considered a hybrid format, allowing executives to tune in remotely.
Semafor reported on Monday that big banks and private-equity firms have privately relayed safety concerns about attending the event to Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, adding that CEOs feel pressure to attend the four-day event.
Türkiye expects the Development Road, a planned trade corridor linking the Persian Gulf to Europe through Iraq, to add about $55 billion to its economy over 10 years once completed, a senior official said Monday.
The project should also create jobs for roughly 70,000 people a year, Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu said.
Uraloğlu was speaking in Ankara at a conference on changing global transport geopolitics and the Development Road project.
Cargo leaving Iraq’s Faw Port, on the Gulf coast in Iraq’s far south, would travel about 1,200 kilometers (745.65 miles) by rail to Ovaköy, a crossing on the Türkiye-Iraq border in southeastern Türkiye. From there, it would continue across Türkiye toward Europe. The initiative was unveiled in May 2023 and is estimated to cost $20 billion.
Jobs from logistics, production hubs
Uraloğlu said the jobs would come from production and logistics centers built along the route.
The project also includes energy transmission lines and fiber optic infrastructure alongside the rail and road links, and officials hope it will further deepen economic ties between Türkiye and Iraq.
He also said transit from the Gulf to Europe along the route would fall to about 25 days.
That compares with 45 days around the Cape of Good Hope, off Africa’s southwestern coast, and 35 days via the Southern Corridor.
Lower logistics costs, Uraloğlu added, would make Turkish exporters more competitive and strengthen Türkiye’s position in global trade.
Officials have repeatedly tied the project to instability around the Strait of Hormuz.
The strait is the narrow waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf through which much of the world’s oil was shipped before the Iran war started.
Uraloğlu had said that had the Development Road been completed, the world’s energy supply would have been far less affected, and that the project would be started quickly after the war ends.
Transit push
The Development Road forms part of Türkiye’s wider push to become a transit hub between Asia and Europe. It complements the Middle Corridor, the route across Central Asia and the Caucasus, and Ankara has described both as central to Türkiye’s strategy.
Earlier this month, Türkiye opened the Çerkezköy-Kapıkule section, the longest part of the Halkalı-Kapıkule high-speed rail line, extending the network to the Bulgarian border.
The line is 229 kilometers long. It begins on Istanbul’s western edge and ends at Türkiye’s main rail and road border crossing with Bulgaria, at Kapıkule near the northwestern city of Edirne.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the line is a key component of the 2,094-kilometer Turkish section of the Development Road. The line extends the European end of the same network.
Türkiye’s top economic officials on Monday discussed, among others, the winding down of investment funds caught up in last month’s turmoil.
A statement after the meeting of the Economic Coordination Board (EKK) said payments to investors in the funds should start soon after Parliament passes a liquidation bill, which is due to be debated this week.
The board, chaired by Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz, also reviewed education and labor-market policy and revisions to balance of payments statistics.
The Fund Coordination Board said Sunday that authorities have settled about half of the funds ordered to be wound down. All 66 funds run by A1 Capital, Bulls and Pardus have been settled, covering more than 45,000 people and TL 40.8 billion ($823.37 million) in cash and in kind.
The goal this week, the board said, is to pay the largest number of participants, primarily those in money market funds. The remaining funds belong to Tera, Pusula, Hedef and Atlas.
The bill governing liquidation of the troubled funds has been submitted to Parliament and approved by its Planning and Budget Committee, the EKK said. Interim payments are expected to begin as soon as possible once it enters into force.
The crisis erupted last month after several funds said they could not meet investors’ redemption requests during a market sell-off, prompting a wide investigation into suspected price manipulation in thinly traded stocks.
The Capital Markets Board (SPK) suspended trading in 131 funds run by seven asset management companies, affecting nearly half a million investors.
Prosecutors have issued asset freezes and travel bans and have arrested more than 80 people, including the top executives of the asset management companies.
Economic outlook
The EKK said Türkiye’s strong macroeconomic fundamentals and firmly applied policies should keep the impact of recent developments on the financial system and the real economy limited. The measures taken are meant to make capital markets more reliable and efficient, it said.
The statement described the global economy as passing through a period of multiple shocks, with uncertainty and risk at historically high levels. Supply shocks and supply chain disruptions driven by the Iran war are weighing on the global outlook, it said, making economic resilience and stability more important.
Türkiye’s economic program has made growth more balanced, lowered unemployment and inflation, strengthened financial stability and established fiscal discipline, according to the statement. The government’s aim now is to protect those gains while raising production capacity, productivity and competitiveness.
Education, jobs
The board named raising the quantity and quality of education, and linking education more closely to employment, as priorities, noting that education has had the largest share of the budget for years.
It said green, digital and demographic change are reshaping labor-market needs, so education and employment policies must keep pace with technology and sector needs.
The government wants to increase the supply of skilled workers where they are needed, support productivity and encourage groups that struggle to enter the labor force, especially young people and women, to find work.
Balance of payments
The board also assessed how revisions to balance of payments statistics affect the “net errors and omissions” line, which captures transactions the statistics do not record.
The EKK includes the ministers of finance, trade, labor, energy, industry and agriculture, along with senior officials from other key economic institutions, including the central bank.
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