This story is part of Sixth Tone’s 10-year anniversary series, Ten Years in Transition.

Before moving to Saudi Arabia, Liu Danru dreamed she was arrested there for testing cultural boundaries. In real life, the move seemed almost absurd. She spoke no Arabic, was not yet fluent in English, and knew the region mostly through news reports.

The next day, her visa came through. And soon after, she was on a plane.

After seven years as a journalist at leading Chinese business publications, Liu, now in her mid-30s, had grown tired of watching others build the life she wanted for herself. Then she interviewed a woman her own age who was already running a Chinese company’s operations in Egypt. “I had never met anyone my age who thought about the world that way,” she says.

When another interviewee offered her a public relations role in Saudi Arabia, she took it.

She arrived in 2023, as Chinese firms were pouring into the country in search of new opportunities after President Xi Jinping’s visit. “Everyone was rushing toward you,” she recalls. “In that environment, the momentum to get things done and grow was much stronger than usual.”

Liu belongs to a generation of young Chinese often described as turning inward — choosing stability over risk, government jobs over private ambition, caution over expansion. But that’s only part of the story. As the economy has grown less predictable and stable careers harder to depend on, many have begun to approach work more pragmatically: placing less faith in any single job, looking for ways to spread risk, and speaking more openly about money.

For some people, especially women, financial independence has also become a way to claim more control over their lives. On social media, that new pragmatism shows up in terms like gaoqian (making money), fuye (side hustles), and caiwu ziyou (financial freedom).

Liu, who grew up on the Xilingol grasslands of Inner Mongolia, chose to test that freedom far from home. In her first year in Saudi Arabia, she says she experienced more than a dozen incidents of sexual harassment — enough to make her buy a car so she could get around on her own terms.

Even sports brought her into conflict with local norms. Once, she says, women objected to her wearing shorts and told her to “respect their culture.”

“The first rule of entering an emerging market is to avoid arrogance,” she says. Instead, she points to younger people in the region whose attitudes toward women are changing, and to the trust she has built with female officials.

Living there, she says, has pulled her away from online debates about feminism and toward more practical questions: how power works inside institutions, teams, and daily negotiations, and how to build workplaces that recognize people’s value without exploiting them.

A year after arriving, she decided to raise the stakes. She quit her public relations job and began pitching herself directly to companies as someone who could launch and run a Saudi operation. “I didn’t want to look for a job anymore,” she says. “I wanted to create one.”

She was chasing the kind of role she had seen in the Egypt-based executive she once interviewed: running a market herself, building partnerships, and managing a team. “I wanted to be judged by results,” she says, “and by my own growth.”

In 2024, after pitching to companies one by one, Liu became the Saudi market lead for a Chinese digital marketing firm. Over the next two years, she expanded the firm’s business into the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and the broader Middle East.

The gamble paid off. The depression that marked her years in journalism lifted, and her earnings more than tripled. “More than finance, I’m after freedom,” she says. “But that kind of freedom has to be backed by capability. Even if I leave a company, as long as I can seize an opportunity, I can rebuild a system that earns for me.”

Managing more money, people, and decisions, she says, changed how she understood both negotiation and human nature. “That part is endlessly fascinating,” she says.

Her work now swings between exhaustion and exhilaration. Last year, one project ended with 900 drones rising over Saudi Arabia’s national stadium, a sight that moved her to tears.

That same year, she was diagnosed with a stress-related illness, got into a car accident, dealt with illness in her family, and broke up with her boyfriend. “While my career was moving upward, my life was a mess,” she says.

Then, in February, while she was in China, she watched a hotel in Dubai where she had once stayed go up in flames after Iran retaliated for U.S. and Israeli strikes.

One month into the conflict, Liu said her company’s business had actually grown in the first quarter. But she cautioned that the impact could lag, and that the real challenge for business would come in the second.

If it dragged on, she said, she would still have to weigh whether demand would hold, whether to scale back, and whether operations might need to move. By mid-April, she boarded a plane back to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, “ready to rally spirits.”

“I used to see ‘force majeure, including war’ in contracts and think it was almost redundant,” she says. “Now, for the first time, I see how it might apply to me.”

Closer to home, Cici, who asked to be identified by the name she uses for her side hustles, calls her pursuit of money a kind of “survival instinct.” Raised by a single mother in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, she grew up with her name on school lists for financial aid.

At times, she was asked to stand before the whole school and speak about “how to persevere through life’s setbacks.” In her first year of university, a campus broadcast summoned all aid applicants to gather. It was the last time she applied for financial aid.

“Why does everyone have to know about this?” she recalled.

Looking back, Cici, now in her mid-20s, describes her life a decade ago as a “blank page.” She grew up with her “calm and resilient” mother, who split her time between factory shifts and caring for her daughter, with what little free time she had left for TV dramas. During those years, Cici says, life was little more than going to class. There were no travels, no exhibitions, no “interesting” conversations around the dinner table.

At university, where she studied design in southern China, Cici began building that life piece by piece. Outside the classroom, she worked as a model, illustrator, social media editor, and an agent for influencers.

“Once I started earning money,” she says, “my life opened up completely.”

She bought luxury goods, took her mother traveling, and joined a philanthropic project. More than that, the constant hustles pulled her out of the “monotony” she associated with her hometown and into what felt like “a new life.”

Her first side gig was modeling for a social media account, which paid 1,000 yuan ($147). Sensing how precarious that work was, she soon took an editing job interviewing popular students on campuses across the country, some of whom would later become influencers.

Almost by accident, she found herself matching creators with sponsors — an early version of what would later be known in China as the multichannel network, or MCN, model. She also co-ran a Tarot studio, pairing diviners with clients.

“By my sophomore year, I was making enough each month to cover my living expenses,” she says. During our interview, she still remembered exactly what she had charged for each service and how much business she handled, tapping the numbers into her phone as she spoke.

After starting her first full-time job in the early 2020s, Cici read online posts celebrating humanities graduates at internet companies earning more than 200,000 yuan a year.

“I was always thinking about what I lacked,” she says, “a better school, overseas experience, a bigger platform, a higher salary.”

That habit of comparison eased gradually, as she became more focused on what she had rather than what she lacked. This year, she started a company connecting brands with creators, with early clients including a Chinese photography services company and a multinational hotel brand — both drawn from relationships she had built in earlier roles.

Looking back, Cici says she once placed great hopes in her first job at the ad agency. Over time, though, she came to see that large companies, with their rigid rules and fixed roles, left little room to develop her strengths or test her own ideas.

“If I’m a full, rounded shape,” she says, “these positions are all irregular forms.” Side projects, by contrast, offered space to realize her ideas and sense of value. A 2022 report found that more than half of Chinese workers born after 2000 had some form of side gig, underscoring how weak a single primary job now feels as a long-term anchor.

For now, Cici’s financial goal is modest and exact: a small apartment for her mother on the outskirts of Shanghai, and enough left over to live on the interest. “I’m still far from making it,” she says. “For now, I save 30% of my monthly income; the rest goes to living expenses, supporting my mother, and sponsoring a child’s education in Yunnan.”

She says she’s not ready for a period of aggressive wealth accumulation. That, she has decided, can wait until after 30. For now, she wants, as she puts it, to “be happy for a while,” rather than deny herself every small pleasure in pursuit of a distant target. “Do you think people driven by grand ambitions and constant dissatisfaction can enjoy the present?” she asks.

Many people her age in Shanghai, Cici says, rent apartments that feel ordinary compared with the homes they grew up in. “For me, it’s the opposite,” she says. “I live better in Shanghai than I do back home.”

Last year, she paid to renovate her mother’s apartment in Zhejiang. Just as important, she says, is the freedom to choose a different life from the one she once imagined around her: in the “gray” city she remembers, the ideal was a stable job — at the power grid, the tobacco bureau, as a teacher or a doctor — followed by marriage and children.

“I believe things will keep getting better,” she says. “That belief is what brought me to Shanghai, to build something on my own, instead of staying back home and living a scripted life. The economy may be slowing, but my life is still on the rise.”

That language of money — practical, public, and increasingly aspirational — has become a genre of its own online. Since 2023, Huang Huisheng has hosted “Money-Making Girls,” a podcast centered on side hustles, entrepreneurship, and financial independence.

Across more than 160 episodes, Huang — known on air as Hui — and his team ask guests, usually women, to explain in practical terms how they make money.

Some describe riding the DeepSeek boom into AI-generated content work; others explain how they built social media accounts from scratch, opened coffee shops, or started cross-border e-commerce businesses.

Just as often, they dwell on what pushed them there: frustration with traditional career paths, and the financial and psychological rewards of working for themselves. Each episode comes with detailed show notes and a list of takeaways, giving the show the feel of both a pep talk and a manual.

By this March, it had close to 2 million subscribers across platforms. On Xiaoyuzhou, one of China’s most popular podcast apps, 92% of listeners were women, approximately 60% were aged between 23 and 35, and they were split almost evenly between top-tier and smaller cities.

“When I first started podcasting, I had barely saved anything from my job at an internet company,” Hui, who is in his mid-30s, tells Sixth Tone. “By the next year, the show had brought me my first million through advertising, paid courses, and e-commerce.”

He moved into a downtown Shanghai apartment with room to film, started taking taxis instead of public transport, but still describes himself as a “Uniqlo guy.”

Hui grew up in eastern China’s Fujian province, the youngest son in a family with a clear plan for him: study hard, get into a good school, become a civil servant, and “bring honor to the family.” His father had once been a long-haul driver for a state-owned enterprise before going self-employed after the company dissolved; his mother stayed at home. For a while, Hui followed that script. Then he didn’t.

But by 32, he was hunting for what he called the “password to traffic.” And found it on Xiaohongshu, the lifestyle app known in English as RedNote, where one hashtag gaoqian nühai — “money-making girls” — consistently topped trending lists.

Hui, drawing on his marketing instincts, saw something “distinctive” and “clearly targeted” in the theme, as well as what he called an “aspirational image.” After trying a few episodes that channeled this ambition and seeing the idea catch on, he built a standalone podcast around it.

As a man hosting a podcast like Money-Making Girls, Hui says, some listeners questioned his sincerity, accusing him of cashing in on what some Chinese social media users call xingbie hongli — the traffic boost content about gender and women often receives. Others mocked his accent or his interviewing skills.

For a while, the comments got under his skin. He says he used to search for reviews of himself and the show every day, “liking” the praise and wincing at the criticism. He pays less attention now, which he sees as a form of growth. “That’s the cost of putting yourself out there online,” he says.

Hui describes the show as “electric Red Bull” — something meant to leave listeners energized, hopeful, and ready to act. He looks for guests with what he calls “high energy and strong execution,” and rejects the idea that he is selling some distant, grand ambition. “I encourage listeners to chase their first taste of ‘small money,’” he says.

Most often, that means a side hustle. Citing a 2023 survey, Hui says that 67% of young Chinese with side gigs earn less than 3,000 yuan a month from them. On his show, guests often talk about making a few thousand yuan extra through freelance work or small ventures.

Among the paid courses tied to the podcast, the most popular topics include building a Xiaohongshu account, running cross-border e-commerce, and making money with AI.

Liu Yijian, an entrepreneurship researcher who has studied startup communities in Shenzhen, has observed the rise of the “money-making girls” discourse among young, highly educated women. In her research, she describes it as a form of self-presentation centered on financial independence, entrepreneurial hustle, and pragmatic collaboration.

Hui sees that shift most clearly in those younger than him. Those born after 2000, he says, are more pragmatic than the generation before them, less attached to distant ideals and more focused on quick, tangible results. Campus bloggers, he adds, now start building their accounts as soon as they receive a college admission letter.

When Hui and his peers graduated, he says, the fantasy was to climb the ladder, get raises, and build a company that would “make a hundred million.”

“Now, people approach making money more pragmatically,” he says. “That’s why the side hustle has become the clearest expression of the spirit of our times.”

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image: Fu Xiaofan/Sixth Tone)