The Transformation of Young People's Perceptions of FIRE During China's Economic Slowdown

Abstract

In recent years, terms such as FIRE, lying flat, low-desire living, and early-retirement orientation have spread in China as vocabularies through which young and younger middle-aged people describe their life choices. This article examines how perceptions of FIRE have changed during China's economic slowdown. It uses response notes collected by the author over approximately one year in small communities on the Soul app as the main qualitative material, and reads them alongside the 2024 Hurun Wealth Report and statistical data on retail consumption, employment, and population dynamics in China. The article argues that FIRE as narrated in these online communities differs from the wealth-accumulation model popularized in the West. Rather than a success story of earning a high income, accumulating investment principal, and retiring early on investment returns, FIRE is increasingly imagined as a defensive life strategy: reducing expenditure, avoiding urban housing costs, weakening dependence on the labor market, and keeping life from collapsing even without continuous employment income. By juxtaposing three layers - elite wealth thresholds, macroeconomic constraints, and everyday life narratives - the article shows that young people's sense of freedom is shifting from an upward-oriented freedom to consume and upgrade one's life toward a defensive freedom not to be drawn further into housing, employment, marriage, childrearing, and urban-cost pressures. The transformation of FIRE consciousness therefore reflects not merely a youth subculture but a broader reconfiguration of life design under a slowing growth model.