Education World

Live to work, or work for a life — Ding Shuai had to make a tough decision after six years living in the Chinese capital, home to nearly 20 million people.

A month ago, Ding, 24, packed all his belongings and moved to Xiamen, a coastal city of 2.52 million people in southeast China’s Fujian Province.

It was not Beijing’s notoriously high housing prices that made him leave, but the lifestyle.

“The rat race in the capital exhausted me,” Ding says.

He had struggled in Beijing, working as a model and TV program host with a monthly income of about 5,000 yuan (732.5 U.S. dollars) after graduating from a leading university in Beijing.

“Last November I suddenly lost my voice after days of round-the-clock work,” Ding said. “I still feel uncomfortable when singing high notes.”

The incident helped seal his decision to accept an offer to be a host on a local TV station in Xiamen.

He bought a 70-square-meter apartment in Xiamen.

“My parents can come to stay with me after I move this summer,” he says. “It’s a new beginning rather than a retreat from failure.”

An ongoing poll by China’s leading portal, Sina.com, shows many young Chinese feel the same way. From March 1 to Saturday, 75.3 percent of the total 8,729 participants said they planned to leave big cities, like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

Professor Xia Xueluan, a sociologist at Peking University, welcomes the trend.