Sun Eae Chun (Professor, Graduate School of International Studies, Chung Ang University)
This article compares how youth disillusionment has unfolded in China and South Korea between 2010 and 2025 and explains why coping patterns diverge across these contrasting political contexts. Drawing on stress- coping theory, social movement framing, and political opportunity structures, we conceptualize youth responses as adaptive repertoires that range from passive withdrawal to collective contention. Using existing literature and survey data, we show that shared drivers―slowing growth, precarious employment, entrenched inequality, and intensifying performance pressures―have strained many young people’s confidence in institutions and produced parallel vernaculars of malaise (e.g., tǎngpíng / “let it rot” and “Hell Joseon”). When opportunities for voice are perceived as limited, Chinese youth tend to adopt individualized, low-risk strategies such as quiet quitting, online irony, internal exits, punctuated only occasionally by brief episodes of public expression and met with a combination of narrative steering, selective accommodation, and efforts to preserve social order control. In South Korea’s more pluralistic public arena, similar grievances more readily translate into digitally enabled mobilization, issue-specific protests, and partial institutional uptake, even as polarization (notably along gender lines) and persistent “exit” aspirations endure. The findings illuminate how structure conditions agency and suggest several potential policy priorities: credible pathways to quality jobs and housing, inclusive participation channels, and depolarizing frames that restore a generational stake in the future.