A 2025 survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Finance found that 78.3 percent of people born in the 1990s carry debt, with average liabilities of 121,000 yuan. For many young workers in Shenzhen, China’s technology capital, the monthly ritual is unchanged: wages arrive, credit card bills and installment payments go out first, rent follows, and what remains barely covers groceries. The joke circulating on social media is that the two biggest “fathers” in a young person’s life are their landlord and Huabei, Alipay’s buy-now-pay-later service.
Shenzhen has a saying: earn your money here, spend it here, and don’t expect to take any home. Yet a countercurrent has emerged in the city’s offices and apartment blocks. A growing cohort of young workers has adopted zero debt as a personal creed: some having never borrowed in the first place, others having clawed their way back from serious financial trouble, and still others still paying down balances while treating the goal as a fixed point on the horizon.
How debt creeps in
The easiest trap, as several Shenzhen residents describe it, is the installment plan that feels like nothing at all.
Old Wang — a common pseudonym for sources who asked not to be named — graduated and started work in Nanshan district on a monthly salary of 4,000 yuan. To keep pace with colleagues who seemed to live well, he bought the latest iPhone on a 24-month interest-free payment plan. “At the time I thought, it’s only two or three hundred a month — skip one dinner out and it’s covered,” he said.
Once that door opened, it stayed open. Photography pulled him in next: a Sony mirrorless camera, lenses, a gimbal stabiliser. Each purchase came with its own installment plan. By the time he noticed, his monthly repayments had climbed from a few hundred yuan to several thousand. Electronic payments and installment plans together dulled the pain of spending, letting him believe he had purchasing power far beyond his actual income.
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The reckoning arrived fast. The combined debt — tens of thousands of yuan — pinned him down. His salary went straight to repayment apps before it had time to settle. He could not afford to get sick. He could not afford to quit. Splitting a dinner bill with friends meant a quiet calculation he could not let anyone see. “It was like running on a treadmill,” he said. “You can’t stop. Stop and you fall.”
Business debt cuts deeper. Ah Liang, 30, borrowed several hundred thousand yuan with a partner to open a craft beer bar in Longhua a few years ago. The bar eventually failed and closed, but the monthly loan statements kept arriving. Watching the repayment deadline approach with no means to meet it, he lay awake night after night under the particular dread of becoming a credit blacklist case, a designation in China’s social credit system that restricts travel and other basic rights.
Then there is the mortgage, the most visible long-term liability of all. Youzi and her husband bought a flat in Changsha in 2018 for a commercial loan of 760,000 yuan over 30 years, then moved to Shenzhen to earn money and service the debt from afar. Early repayments ran above 4,000 yuan a month; after the loan prime rate fell, they dropped to around 3,400.
Last year she sat down and ran the numbers. After seven years of payments, she had repaid only 100,000 yuan of principal. She had paid more than 200,000 yuan in interest. More than 660,000 yuan of principal remained. “Before, when my income was growing, I didn’t think about it,” she said. “Now it feels like a terrible deal.” In the current economic climate, she said, ordinary savers cannot earn enough from fixed deposits or low-risk wealth management products to outpace mortgage interest costs.
The moment of zero
Old Wang’s turning point was an engagement. Still juggling installment payments and robbing one account to cover another, he finally told his fiancée the full picture. They fought badly. Shaken into clarity, he swallowed his pride and called his parents. A man nearly 30, about to start a family, confessing to his parents that consumer vanity had left him with debts he could not clear alone. The silence on the other end of the line, he said, was harder to endure than any collection call. He used the money they sent to settle every outstanding balance in a single transaction.
“There was no elation,” he recalled. “Just the hollow feeling you get after a long illness, and a deep shame, and a kind of fear about how close I’d come to ruining things.” He quietly resolved never to use installment plans again. It took him another two and a half years of careful saving and weekend work to repay his parents. The day he owed no one anything, not the bank, not his family, came much later than the app going to zero, but that, he said, was the moment he actually felt at rest.
Ah Liang’s path was harder. His parents’ retirement savings did not cover the full bank debt, so he borrowed from friends to fill the gap. The debt did not disappear; it changed form, and in some ways became more oppressive. Bank collectors create anxiety; owing friends creates something closer to slow psychological damage. For a long time he avoided contact with the people who had helped him, finding it painful to watch them buy homes and have children while he could barely respond to a social media post without feeling fraudulent.
He found stable salaried work in Futian and cut his living costs hard, declining invitations to dinners and trips, agonizing for weeks before buying a second-hand electric scooter. Most of what he owed friends and family is now repaid. “A little longer and I’ll be clear,” he said. “I won’t have to feel guilty every time I see them.” His view of borrowing has hardened into something close to reverence for the risk involved: “For an ordinary person without real financial buffers, taking on leverage is gambling with your whole family’s future.”
Youzi and her husband have not cleared their mortgage, but they have found satisfaction in the partial journey. Between November last year and March this year, they made three lump-sum early repayments totaling 300,000 yuan. That single push cut the remaining loan term from 23 years to 10 and will save them roughly 230,000 yuan in interest. “Watching the principal drop, I feel safe,” she said. “Each payment feels like one step closer to being free.” She describes herself as having woken up too late, having missed the optimal early-repayment window in the first five to eight years of the loan.
Staying at zero
Old Wang discovered that clearing debt and staying clear are different problems entirely.
In the six months after his accounts hit zero, he came close to relapsing several times. A phone he had been waiting for launched. He read the reviews, watched the videos, and opened the purchase page. His thumb was moving toward the 24-month option when the memory of that phone call to his parents stopped him cold. He deleted the shopping apps. He turned off the e-commerce notifications. His discipline, he admits, comes from fear, not virtue.
Youzi’s restraint has a different character: arithmetical. Once she understood exactly how much interest she was paying, the calculation made many ordinary pleasures seem straightforwardly not worth it. Weekend shopping trips and restaurant meals gave way to free parks. Milk tea and café coffee disappeared. She cooks and brings food to work. She intends to clear the remaining mortgage entirely within the next year and considers every day of remaining debt another day working for the bank without compensation.
A smaller group has avoided debt from the start. Ah Jie has spent seven years as a software engineer in Nanshan. His phone contains no lending apps. His Huabei credit limit is manually set to zero.This was a learned disposition: growing up in a family of modest means, he watched his parents borrow from relatives to pay for his schooling and rehearse explanations for why repayment would need to wait another year. That particular kind of social diminishment stayed with him.
Since starting work he has held to a single rule: pay for everything outright, and only buy what he genuinely needs. His position on property is the same. “If I buy a flat someday, I’ll buy it outright. If I can never do that, it’s fine — renting suits me well enough.” Colleagues and some relatives read this as excessive caution, or even as failure: in Shenzhen, no car and no flat after seven years of work reads to certain audiences as a life not going well. Ah Jie is indifferent. Real savings in his account, he says, give him the confidence to say no at work and in life.
A generation repricing risk
Income growth has slowed, asset values feel uncertain, and the cost of a single financial misstep, whether a failed business, a job loss, or a medical bill, can take years to undo.
Zero debt carries its own costs. It means forgoing the compounding benefits that well-managed credit can provide. It means living below your apparent means in a city that generates constant pressure to do otherwise. It means accepting, in some cases, that a flat or a car may never be within reach on a cash-only basis.
Old Wang’s restraint comes from having felt what the alternative looks like from the inside. Ah Liang’s caution is shaped by years of social anxiety and sleepless nights. Youzi ran a spreadsheet last year showing that seven years of payments had reduced her principal by barely 100,000 yuan while interest consumed more than twice that amount. She has not stopped thinking about it since.
