WE HAD TWO covers again this week: one on what ails Germany, and the other looking at China’s disenchanted youth. Each inspired questions about how images must navigate the tricky line between evocative national symbols and tedious visual stereotypes.
A dark cloud hangs over Chinese people born in the 1990s and 2000s. Since Xi Jinping secured power in 2012 the government has grown more repressive and society less vibrant. Censors have turned the internet into a drearier place, while letting nationalist trolls drum in the state’s talking-points. At university, students must grapple with Mr Xi’s forbidding personal ideology. Worst of all, China’s economy is stagnating and the unemployment rate in cities is over 21%—a number so disheartening that earlier this month the government stopped publishing the data.
In one candidate for the cover, we showed the ladder to a better life being lifted away. Plenty of young people still have faith in the party and support Mr Xi’s calls to make China strong. But many are suffering a deep sense of angst. Graduates are finding that the skills they spent years learning are not the ones employers want. Scarce jobs and punishing property prices have dashed their hopes of buying a home and starting a family.
In another image, a worker leaves her place at the assembly line, representing the response of many young people: leaving the rat race behind. We scraped social media and found that the mood is growing darker. Disillusioned youth talk of tangping (lying flat) and bailan (letting it rot), synonyms for giving up.
One of these images was too simple, the other too complex. So we tried the empty monotony of a hamster wheel instead.
Nobody can rule out the possibility of dissatisfaction leading to political unrest. But our reporting suggests that China’s young are hardly bursting with revolutionary fervour. Reared on propaganda about the Communist Party’s accomplishments, many continue to support it wholeheartedly. The real challenge the party faces is more prosaic: not the threat of revolution, but a quiet rejection of the government’s ambitions. “Endure hardships” and “eat bitterness”, Mr Xi tells the young. Many cannot see why they should.
Yet we thought that the hamster wheel was not Chinese enough. China is hardly the only country where young people are gloomy, and we wanted to convey the idea that something unique is happening in the world’s second biggest economy.
We alighted on a simpler version of the assembly line, with a young woman walking out on her colleagues. Some of our Chinese colleagues thought that this, too, was unsatisfactory. This time the stereotype was Western ideas of independent-minded young women. In real-life China, a female hipster would never belong to the country’s regimented ranks of hard-hatted engineers.
However, we stuck with our design. The path that connects obscurity to novelty and familiarity to cliché is hard to navigate.
Leader: Why are China’s young people so disillusioned?
Briefing: China’s defeated youth
Nearly 25 years ago The Economist called Germany the sick man of the euro. Today, after a golden age as the European Union’s powerhouse, it has once again started to fall behind. Germany has just experienced its third quarter of economic contraction or stagnation, and may end up as the only big economy to shrink in 2023. The IMF reckons that it will grow more slowly than America, Britain, France and Spain over the next five years, too. Germans grumble that their country is not working as well as it should. Four out of five tell pollsters that it is not a fair place to live. Defying out-of-date stereotypes, German trains run so serially behind the clock that Switzerland has barred late ones from its network. After being stranded abroad for the second time this summer as her ageing official plane malfunctioned, Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister, aborted a trip to Australia.
Our first thought was to focus on the idea of sickness. In one illustration, an unfortunate chap squeezes on his lederhosen over his bandages. We later decided to simplify this image. The hospital bed was replaced by a crutch; his arm and leg were no longer in traction. However, some of us worried that lederhosen are Bavarian or Austrian rather than belonging to all of Germany. Others thought we were straying from humour into cliché—though our German colleagues assured us that their compatriots would take it all in good spirit.
The alternative was to revisit the Ampelmann—the characteristic figure from pedestrian lights in Berlin and other German cities whom we had featured on the cover five years ago, when Germany still had its mojo. We depicted him on a drip instead.
Yet this design provoked the opposite worry: that the Ampelmann is too obscure and that those who are unfamiliar with him would be baffled by a short, hat-wearing, apparently fit man striding ahead with a drip attached to his arm.
In the choice between familiarity and freshness, we sided with novelty. For years Germany’s outperformance in old industries papered over its lack of investment in new ones. Two decades ago, Germany pulled off a remarkable transformation to extraordinary effect. It is time for another visit to the health farm.
Leader: Is Germany once again the sick man of Europe?
Finance & economics: The German economy has gone from European leader to laggard
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