India’s republic of uncles A cockroach meme rattles the country’s gerontocrats June 4th 2026 LET ME TELL you how to identify an Indian uncle. A dead giveaway is the phrase “let me tell you”. It is inevitably followed by a thesis on what really ails the country. Another hallmark is unsolicited advice, veering from career counselling (“only girls study literature”) to dietary prescriptions (“eat five soaked almonds to build immunity”). But the defining feature of the Indian uncle is his bottomless disdain for the youth of today: feckless phone-addled softies, the lot of them. They need discipline. The uncle reigns supreme across India’s divides of religion, caste and language. He earns his radioactive confidence through the simple act of reaching middle age, thereupon instantly gaining omniscience. But despite proselytising the Way of the Uncle on WhatsApp, his authority extends only
to his own circle. The uncles who run India, however, know no such boundaries. They inflict their fossilised notions upon the nation. India is a republic of the uncles, by the uncles, for the uncles. Thus does the country produce such infantilising policies as Gujarat’s plan to require parental sign-off before adult couples can legally marry. Or Goa’s mandatory uniforms for adult students at its public colleges. Or Delhi, where adults can vote at 18 and marry at 21 but cannot enjoy a beer until they are 25. Thus too are Indians subject to the pronouncements of learned higher-court judges, over 85% of whom are middle-aged men. The Calcutta High Court in 2023 advised young women to “control sexual urges” rather than “enjoy the sexual pleasure of hardly two minutes”. A judge in Karnataka observed that it would be “better for the nation” if social-media access was restricted until the age of 18—or even 21. And on May 15th the chief justice of the Supreme Court lamented that “There are youngsters like cockroaches, they don’t get any employment, they don’t have any place in profession”. Within a day of the chief uncle’s remarks, an Indian student in Boston had set up a joke political outfit, the Cockroach Janta Party. It swiftly drew over 22m followers on Instagram, more than twice as many as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and gave rise to an infestation of commentary on the pent-up frustration of the young. The chief justice clarified he just meant people with bogus law degrees but could not resist adding that the “youth have great regard and respect for me.” This is the delusion of every uncle. The Indian uncle’s toolkit for dealing with criticism is limited. At home it starts and ends with “Don’t talk back okay!” The response of the Republic of Uncles followed the same instinct, backed by the might of the state. Domestic intelligence raised “national-security concerns”. The government restricted the roaches’ X account as a threat to the sovereignty of India. One BJP leader called the meme a “cross-border influence operation”. It is inconceivable to the Indian uncle that young people might possess agency. It is inconceivable, too, that the uncles might not know all. Half the population is under 30. India produces 5m graduates every year, but just a
third find regular salaried jobs. Yet the uncles do not ask why job creation is so lacklustre. Easier to blame the youth. Some years ago Narayana Murthy, a septuagenarian billionaire, exhorted young people to work 70 hours a week, declaring that “India needs a stronger work ethic.” Not to be outdone, the chairman of another firm advocated a 90-hour week: “What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife?” Many youngsters already work such hours. They go to school or university. They attend extra coaching classes. And when they get home they study some more. In May more than 2m candidates sat a national exam for around 130,000 medical-college seats. Nine days later the testing agency invalidated their efforts because papers had leaked. The same month 1.8m pupils received the results of class 12 exams—the single most important test in Indian schooling. Those, too, were full of errors. A parliamentary committee is investigating both fiascos. The uncles will grade the uncles. It is a minor miracle that the youth, faced with parental pressure, overbearing states, systemic incompetence and poor job prospects, respond only with a silly meme. Their peers in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have been rather more heavy-handed with their own ageing leaders. Here is some unsolicited advice for the uncles of India: let the cockroaches have some fun on the internet. It is for your own good. And don’t forget your five soaked almonds. ■ Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//asia/2026/05/31/indias-republic-of-uncles
China’s high-tech rise is leaving much of the country behind Xi Jinping gives China’s crack scientists new jobs inside government Ma Ning will proudly represent China at the World Cup China’s delivery drivers are its most obvious underclass
China’s high-tech rise is leaving much of the country behind That could make a starkly unequal country even more so June 4th 2026 LIKE MANY cities in China’s hinterland, Tianshui, in the western province of Gansu, is full of dusty and disused factories. But over the past decade it has also become an unlikely high-tech hub. New industrial parks have sprouted, offering companies cheap energy, financing and land deals. The city has already built an exhibition hall to display the zippy products it hopes to make in the future, called “Tianshui Industry 2050”. All this will please officials in far-off Beijing. They want China’s rust belt to reinvent itself with technology. Just recently they released yet another plan for urban renewal, calling for the transformation of stagnant cities into “innovative” places that can offer their inhabitants a “high-quality life”.
Yet for all the fanfare, the people of Tianshui are not much better off. The new factories have failed to offset a broader slowdown in the city’s economy: ten years ago Tianshui’s GDP per person was 16% of Beijing’s; now it is 14%. In 2025 the city’s economy grew at a rate two percentage points slower than the national average. Nor, say locals, have the highly automated facilities created many jobs for them. Throngs of young people are leaving in search of better opportunities. Over the past decade, its population has shrunk by nearly half a million to 2.9m. At this rate, by 2050 there will be few workers left. The tale of Tianshui shows the limits of China’s big bet on advanced manufacturing. The Communist Party has decided the country’s economic future lies in making world-beating technology. So hundreds of cities across the country are, like Tianshui, trying hard to do so. But while the high-tech drive has helped some brainy, connected and wealthy cities become even richer, most of those in the hinterland lack the supply chains or talent to take advantage of it. After all, some 60% of China’s workforce—about 500m people—do not even have a high-school education. Many of them live in smaller and poorer cities. For centuries Tianshui was more a cultural than an economic hub. Legend has it that China’s first emperor, a serpent-bodied demi-god, was born there;
Buddhist grottoes have been cut out of the cliffs nearby. But in the 1960s Tianshui industrialised. It became an important cog in the state-planned economy; its factories made tractors, ball bearings and matches. Dormitories, schools and hospitals were built to cater to the swelling labour force. One of the workers was Ms Dong, now in her 80s, who enjoyed an ultra-stable “iron rice bowl” job at a printing press. She retired in her 40s with a good pension and a guarantee that her son could inherit her job. But most local factories were not competitive enough to survive China’s bumpy transition to a more market-driven economy in the 1980s and 1990s. In the past ten years a new generation of high-tech factories, making gizmos such as sensors and machine tools, has sprung up. But they have not brought many jobs with them. An exhibit at Tianshui’s museum displays snapshots of the city’s factory floors over the decades. Each shows fewer workers and more robots. Most of the factory positions that are available pay around 3,000 yuan ($440) a month, according to locals, half what they could get in a big city like Shanghai. “I’d like to stay here to settle down, but there’s just no good jobs for young people,” says Wen Jin, a 27-year-old Tianshui native who has moved to Jiangsu province, a wealthy eastern region. The city’s best days are firmly in the past, reckons Ma Xin, another local in his 20s who is hoping to get out. High-tech industries do create well-paid jobs as well, in research and development, for instance. But these positions are mainly clustered in big cities near China’s coast, like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which boast the best universities, brightest graduates and access to the densest supply chains. Tech-sector salaries in such places have shot up in recent years, some topping 1m yuan a year. But few parts of inland China have a chance of attracting such stellar jobs, explains Dan Wang of Eurasia Group, a consultancy. “The vast majority of Chinese cities are stuck with what they have.” Even as Tianshui is unable to gain from China’s new economic model, it struggles with the problems of the old one. China’s growth has slowed in recent years thanks, in large part, to a lingering property crisis that is gripping the country. House prices have fallen fastest in smaller cities like Tianshui. Unfinished concrete flats litter the city’s outskirts; investment in