China’s Millennials don’t face a generation gap—it’s more like a chasm

The next time you think you are having a hard time getting through to your client the need to plan for their children’s future, you might want to consider the incredibly culture clash going on right now between China’s balinghou – youth born after 1980 – and their parents, who lived through the grim Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In many cases, the equivalent of China’s Millennials have parents who have zero understanding of the kind of economic, social and cultural priorities their kids have, and as a result, the balinghou are simultaneously on their own and pressured to support parents who often resent them. It all makes for an estate planning situation that today’s adviser would boggle at.