I'M LIKE A BIRD: Chinese people pretend to be birds to escape hardships

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As Nelly Furtado once famously crooned: “I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away.”

Some Chinese youngsters are pulling T-shirts over their arms and torso, hiding their legs, sticking their hands out like claws and using the sleeves to act like wings. In the age of social media, they’re taking selfies and posting the pictures online along with a caption.

For these imaginative youth in China, pretending to be a bird is a way of escaping the real world where the pressures of work, studying and finding employment stresses them out. They want a break from being a human being as they question their futures.

“Birds can fly free and aimlessly in the sky,” 20-year-old Wang Weihan told the New York Times. The finance student from Shanghai said he pretends to be a bird in his dorm room, noting the social media trend showcases “the innate desire within every person for freedom.”

Unlike humans, the winged and feathered animals aren’t burdened by China’s slow economy, high living costs and even higher rate of youth unemployment — nearly 12 million students graduated last year, a number that has quadrupled since 2004.

The Times noted birds also don’t need to deal with the fear that the country’s boom years — which improved the lives of each generation — might be a thing of the past.

Another student, Zhao Weixiang, 22, from Shanxi, posted an image of himself as a bird perched on top of a telephone pole, with the caption: “No more studying. No more studying. Be a bird.”

The third-year biology student said he was feeling the pressure of forthcoming exams, which would determine whether he could get into a biology graduate program and start a career in a competitive field.

Zhao said he “envied” the freedom of birds after watching them through a classroom window one day. He said he decided to copy them.

While humans posing as birds has received more than 100,000 likes on social media, it’s a relatively small trend by Chinese standards. Not all the posts are about work or studying. Other subjects depicted revolved around love.

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Xiang Bio, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, told the Times that many Chinese youth are becoming disillusioned with life because they’re told at a young age that working and studying hard would result in a bright future. This outlook is more bleak as the country’s economy slows down.

“They had very high expectations about themselves, about China, and about the world in general,” said Xiang, who’s considered an expert on Chinese society. “And then when they graduated from college and when they became adults, they became victims of the slowdown.

“They started asking: ‘Why did I study so hard? What for? I sacrificed so much joy and happiness when I was young.'”

Xiang said the bird trend is another manifestation of disillusionment and enables young people to “have a moment of being light-hearted” without checking out of real life.

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