Young Chinese Are 'Cutting Off Kin' — and Experts Are Calling It Normal

Under this year's Mid-Autumn Festival travel chatter, a blunter conversation is running on Weibo: young Chinese are "cutting off kin" (断亲). The term describes a decision, or more often a slow drift, to stop keeping up with aunts, uncles and cousins — skipping the Lunar New Year round of visits, leaving group chats quiet, treating relatives not as obligations but as acquaintances one may simply not have. This week the phrase returned to the trending boards, and sociologists quoted in the posts delivered a verdict that would have been unthinkable a generation ago: this is a normal phenomenon, not a moral failure (a widely shared explainer on why the practice spread has been liked more than 200,000 times).

The reasons the posts give are mostly unsentimental. One much-liked comment traces the shift to what relatives are for (断亲现象为何如此流行): "Relatives used to be a safety net — when one family was in trouble, everyone helped. Now they're for comparison — when one family is in trouble, everyone piles on. Relationships founded on benefit scatter when the benefit runs out." Another renders the same complaint as a proverb-quote: "When you're poor, no one asks about you in a busy street; when you're rich, distant relatives climb over mountains to find you." A third keeps it even shorter, in a four-beat rhythm that has become the hashtag's refrain: kin who "resent you when you're poor, fear you when you're rich."

The circumstances behind the drift are structural. China's urbanization moved several hundred million people away from the villages where extended families lived within shouting distance; the one-child policy thinned the very category of cousins; and the generation now in its twenties and thirties grew up as the sole focus of two parents and four grandparents, with relatives already peripheral. Add the memory many young people carry of New Year visits as interrogation — salaries, marriage, children, all in front of an audience — and the calculus changes. A demographic echo is audible too: as one commenter put it, "the older generation has largely gone, and those below them keep in touch even less." The tie that held the lattice together is being removed at both ends.

What makes the trending debate more than a gripe is who is defending it. When the state broadcaster's opinion segments and sociologists in these posts call kin-dropping normal, they are conceding that the family horizon has permanently narrowed — that for a mobile, urban, largely single-child generation, intimacy is chosen rather than inherited. The dissenting posts show the counter-argument is alive: one popular commenter mocked the whole trend as hypocrisy, joking that if he taped a QR code to his living-room wall paying visitors 500 yuan a scan, the same relatives-swervers would beat a path to his door.

The practice is already reshaping the rituals around it. Betrothal customs are being simplified — young couples increasingly hand each other gold bars instead of the traditional three-piece jewellery set, as we covered earlier this summer — and the great freshman send-off, once a whole clan's expedition, now often involves two parents and a suitcase (a scene we followed here). The relatives are not being feuded with. They are being declined.