A photo of a home-cooked lunch almost exposed Coco Li's secret.
The 32-year-old, a former employee of a Chinese state-owned property firm, had been about to share it in her family group chat before catching herself. Her mother might ask why she wasn't at work.
Li is one of many unemployed Chinese hiding their joblessness from relatives, wary of the concern and pressure that often follow in a labor market where finding work has become increasingly difficult.
"She would fall into an endless cycle of anxiety and eventually pass that anxiety on to me," said Li, who quit more than six months ago, citing high workload and little recognition. Her mother's concern "couldn't really solve my problem," she added.
Pretending to be employed may ease social tensions
The scale of online engagement suggests pretending to have a job is widespread.
Posts advising where to spend the day, how to dodge relatives' questions about work, and chronicling the experiences of pretend-workers have drawn more than 70 million views on the Instagram-like RedNote app and 610 million views on Douyin, China's TikTok. On X-like Weibo, related hashtags have drawn up to 320 million views.
Analysts say the phenomenon is a stark reflection of a weakening job market in an economy increasingly reliant on roaring exports. As Monday's third quarter data showed, manufacturers are battling fierce competition by slashing prices and payrolls while piling heavier workloads onto remaining staff.
A prolonged property market crisis and tight local government finances have also hurt jobs and incomes, along with automation and rapid AI adoption.
Diana Fu, an associate professor of Chinese politics at Cornell University, says pretending to go to work allows people to save face and potentially defuse collective discontent.
This helps preserve social stability as Beijing pushes ahead with automation and its tech race against the U.S., she said.
"Pretend-workers are helping the Chinese government to stave off the hard choice between leaping ahead in automation and protecting job security, which is so essential to the social contract," she said.
Parks, malls, libraries
Most social media posts share tips on how to spend the day away from home, drifting through parks, libraries, cafes and shopping malls, in scenes reminiscent of salarymen who hid their joblessness in South Korea and Japan during the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s.
Li follows similar routines when her parents visit.
"I never would have believed the library would be completely full on a weekday," said Zhang, 36, a visual effects producer who lost her job in AI-driven redundancies in August. She gave only her surname.
In other posts, users wonder if the people around them are in a similar predicament, or – echoing Li – explain why they hide and how it makes them feel.
Some posts are daily journals. In one titled "Day 30 of unemployment: a month pretending to work," a user recounts 80 failed job applications.
Susan Sun, 28, has concealed her layoff from an internet company since late last year. The balancing act became more complicated in May when her mother and stepfather moved in with her in the megacity of Chongqing from their smaller hometown to look for work.
This forces her to leave home before 9 a.m. and return after 6 p.m.
Sun lives on 1,864 yuan ($278) per month in unemployment benefits and what remains of her severance package. She says she is happy living on little and not working. Her only pressure comes from her parents.
"They pass their anxiety on to me, through subtle, insistent expressions and tone of voice," she said, especially when they advise her to save money because "the economy is bad."
Yige Dong, an assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, says China's relatively thin social safety net, compared with those in Japan and South Korea during the 1990s, could eventually make it harder for the unemployed to keep up the pretence.
At some point, "individuals would probably be more concerned with pooling resources from all available sources, including borrowing from family members and relatives," Dong said.