The BBC has reported on a growing trend in several Chinese cities where unemployed young adults – many of them recent graduates – are paying to spend their days in mock offices. For between 30 and 50 yuan (£3–£5) a day, they can sit at desks, using Wi-Fi, and sharing the company of others in spaces designed to look and feel like real workplaces. Some participants say it helps them avoid family pressure or meet graduation requirements that include internship experience. Proprietors describe it as “selling the dignity of not being a useless person.” With China’s official youth unemployment rate above 14 per cent, and unofficial estimates far higher, these “pretend offices” have become both a coping mechanism and a social phenomenon – part camouflage, part community.

Among my colleagues at the Libertarian Alliance, there is a fond and growing belief that, because public life in England has been degraded into a blend of gross ignorance and ideological self-abasement, the Far East must be a functioning counter-example – a land of meritocratic rigour and ancient self-confidence. This view is not original. Since the late Middle Ages, European images of China have been shaped by the reports attributed to Marco Polo, whose account of the Yuan court – whatever its precise factual content – offered Europeans an image of a well-governed, wealthy, and almost magical realm.

In the eighteenth century, this romanticised China was adopted by several of the philosophes. Voltaire lauded it as a model of rational, secular government, contrasting its scholar-bureaucrats with the corrupt hereditary aristocracies of Europe. François Quesnay, founder of the Physiocrats, held up the Chinese system of land taxation as an ideal for a just and productive economy. These were not ethnographic studies; they were political weapons. China was constructed in their minds as a reproach to the ancien régime – a living example, they thought, of enlightened absolutism where talent, not birth, determined advancement.

That this vision was selective and often misleading did not stop it from influencing policy debates. Voltaire’s praise of a meritocratic civil service fed into French reformers’ arguments for competitive examinations. The Physiocrats’ admiration for Chinese land management coloured discussions on agricultural reform. Even in England, where Sinophilia was less fervent, this imagined China was used in parliamentary debates about corruption and public administration. The “Middle Kingdom” of Enlightenment salons was less a real place than a rhetorical mirror in which Europeans saw what they wished for themselves.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the pendulum had swung. The humiliations of the Opium Wars, the spectacle of the Taiping Rebellion, and the Qing court’s resistance to industrial modernisation transformed the Enlightenment’s “rational empire” into the “sick man of Asia” in Western eyes. China, once praised as the exemplar of reason and merit, was now held up as a warning against stagnation and insularity.

Japan’s trajectory in Western perception was almost the reverse. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it was viewed, if at all, as a closed and feudal society, peripheral to global affairs. Yet after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan’s rapid industrialisation, constitutional reforms, and military victories – first over China in 1895, then over Russia in 1905 – made it the new Eastern exemplar in European and American discourse. Western commentators who had once gushed over China’s mandarinate were now admiring Japan’s modern army, efficient bureaucracy, and selective adoption of Western science. In the space of two generations, China and Japan had swapped symbolic roles in the Western imagination: one became the model of adaptation, the other the cautionary tale. This contrast should remind us that such grand civilisational narratives are highly contingent, driven as much by Western needs for examples and warnings as by the realities on the ground.

The habit of treating China as an idealised counterpoint to Western failure has revived, even as the idealisation of Japan has faded. Today’s belief, among some Western critics of liberal democracy, that China must be inherently more efficient, more meritocratic, and more socially cohesive, is the descendant of those earlier projections. The BBC’s account of young Chinese paying to “pretend to work” is a reminder of how reality confounds the caricature.

China’s long inheritance of Confucian order has virtues the West should envy: a serious regard for learning, a sense of continuity, a distrust of the cult of disruption. But harmony and hierarchy carry their own coercion. One can live under the Party’s system without once feeling the weight of its law, and still find oneself hemmed in by the sideways glance of relatives, the question at the family meal, the shared assumption that to be without a post is to be without worth. It is a form of policing as real as our own battery of statutory offences and speech codes – perhaps more effective, because it is internalised.

The education system shows both the strength and the defect. The gaokao and the STEM-heavy syllabus do produce technical competence on a scale unknown in the West. They are a safeguard against the academic frivolity that passes in too many British universities for intellectual life. But there is a difference between feeding facts and cultivating understanding. The “learning factory” approach produces people who can execute brilliantly, but who have had little space to test ideas against experience. It is better to be force-fed mathematics than force-marched through “decolonising the curriculum”, but an education that never encourages creative dissent is no less narrowing in its way than ours.

The figures behind the “pretend work” story are stark. As said, youth unemployment for the 16–24 age group runs officially above 14 per cent, was higher still in 2024, and is almost certainly understated. Twelve million new graduates entered the market this summer into an economy still carrying the weight of the property slowdown and the pandemic years. Many of these young people have done everything the system asked of them, and still find no place. The cost is not only material. China’s health authorities have been frank in recent years about the prevalence of depression and anxiety, and even of suicide among the young – much of it tied to educational pressure and the abrupt anticlimax that follows.

Into this comes the small, odd industry the BBC describes: for a modest daily fee you can rent a desk in a room dressed as an office, with Wi-Fi, colleagues of convenience, and just enough of the corporate atmosphere to reassure your parents, or your university, that you are occupied. Proprietors speak of selling “the dignity of not being a useless person”. For some, it is camouflage; for others, a way to impose routine on themselves. The pose is not always empty. Forty per cent of “pretend” interns are using the time to build real skills or look for actual work. Conversations over lunch turn into job leads. In a society that expects to see you in harness, the illusion of harness can be turned to private advantage.

It is easy to read this only as confirmation of the diagnosis: a brittle, exam-driven culture that pushes its young to the edge and then leaves them to improvise. There is truth in that. But it is also, in a small way, a sign of resourcefulness. No ministry has ordered these spaces into being. No party committee has drawn up the scheme. They are bottom-up contrivances, paid for by their users, shaped to their needs. In a country where state and family both demand conformity, that is no small assertion of agency.

We should not over-idealise. England does not need “pretend offices” imported wholesale, and our own under-employed graduates would probably use them more as places for self-pity and general resentment than as boot camps for self-advancement. But the principle – that young adults in difficulty might pool resources and create their own transitional structures, without recourse to Whitehall budgets or NGO patronage – is sound. It is how civil society used to operate here before every social problem was declared the business of the state.

If there is a lesson from the long arc of Western views of China, it is that our commentary on other civilisations often tells us more about ourselves than about them. The Enlightenment’s ideal China, the Victorian “sick man of Asia”, and today’s fascination with China’s efficiency are all versions of the same reflex: to cast the foreign power as either a mirror for our aspirations or a foil for our failings. The “pretend office” story shows how risky such simplifications are. If we wished to praise China’s efficiency, we would have to reckon with the fact that some of its most educated young citizens are improvising daily routines to preserve dignity in the face of joblessness. If we wished to condemn its system outright, we would have to acknowledge the ingenuity and mutual support that flourish even within its confines. The reality, as ever, is harder, subtler, and more interesting than the role we want China to play in our own debates.

The Far East is not the West’s saviour, and the West is not yet beyond saving. We can take what is best from other traditions without flattering ourselves that we have found an alternative civilisation without blemish. From this small Chinese fashion we might take one useful lesson: that dignity, routine, and mutual help need not be conferred from above. They can be made, quietly, from below – even if the making looks, to the casual observer, like an elaborate pretence.

Bibliography

• Marco Polo, The Travels, ed. and trans. Ronald Latham, Penguin Classics, 1958.
• Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations, ed. René Pomeau, Garnier, 1963.
• François Quesnay, Despotisme de la Chine, 1767.
• Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, 3rd ed., W. W. Norton, 2013.
• Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China, Picador, 2011.
• Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, Harvard University Press, 2000.
• BBC News, “The young Chinese paying to pretend to work,” BBC Online, 11 August 2025.