Taiwan's Fifth to Ninth Grade Cohorts: The 'Strawberry' Insult Has Swapped Three Generations, While the Escalator Beneath Their Feet Has Slanted

30-Second Overview: Taiwanese people identify themselves by "grade" (cohort), taking the tens digit of the Republic of China (ROC) birth year: Fifth Grade refers to those born in ROC years 50–59 (1961–1970), extending all the way to Ninth Grade (2001–2010). The term "Strawberry Generation," criticized for thirty years, was first printed in 1993 targeting the then-twenty-something, now fifty-something Fifth Graders¹; it then passed down to Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Graders. The people being criticized have changed batches, but the label has not changed a single character. What has actually moved between these five generations is the "escalator" beneath their feet where "hard work pays off": it slowed down around 2002, when real wages decoupled from productivity²; its entrance was simultaneously raised by housing prices, with the Taipei housing price-to-income ratio rising from 6.4 times in 2004 to 15.41 times in 2025³; and then it split into two paths. The path relying solely on salaries has nearly stopped, while the path relying on parental down payments continues to move. This article aims to deconstruct this label.

In March 2025, an account appeared on Threads, posting: "No one seems to notice... it seems like it's about to shut down again." This was the server of youth for the Seventh Grade cohort, MySpace (WuMing XiaoZhan), which had already shut down in late 2013⁴. Beneath the 10,000 likes, comments were filled with "Give me back my account" and "But we all forgot our passwords."

This was an entire generation liking a piece of space that only they could enter, while others could not press in. Every generation has such a place: the candy shops for the Fifth and Sixth Grades, MySpace for the Seventh Grade, and TikTok for the Ninth Grade. The true boundary of generations is drawn there: not in values, but in the lack of a shared login screen.

Ironically, the word that caused the fiercest arguments among these five generations has changed its target over the thirty years, yet the word itself has not changed a single character.

One Word, Criticized for Thirty Years, Swapping Three Batches

In the early 1990s, workplace consultant Weng Jingyu wrote a book titled Office Stories, where the term "Strawberry Generation" was first printed. She was not criticizing today's young people, but rather the batch that had just entered the office, in their twenties at the time—those born in the 1960s, now in their fifties, who love reminiscing about Datong Babies and Yakult in Facebook groups¹.

Wikipedia's entry records this migration line clearly: "Strawberry Generation" originally referred to Taiwanese people born in the 1960s, commonly known as the Fifth Grade; subsequently, mainstream perception shifted downward, broadly referring to young people from the Seventh Grade onwards¹. A term originally used to criticize a specific batch of twenty-something young people has become, thirty years later, a general term for "the batch younger than me that I don't like." The label does not describe a specific generation; the label describes the act of being "young," and youth is a moving target.

The trajectory of this moving target can almost serve as an abridged history of Taiwan's generations. In 1993, it criticized the Fifth Grade; in the 2000s, mainstream usage stuck to the heads of the Seventh Grade; in 2008 during the "Wild Strawberry Movement," the criticized Seventh Grade students干脆 (simply) reclaimed the term as the name of the movement⁵; in 2012, Vision magazine, Yahoo, and MySpace co-hosted the "New Nine Tribes of Youth" survey, where 1,129 young people aged 20–35 voted for the "label they most wanted to be exonerated," with Strawberry Generation ranking first at 16.5%, followed by Neet (NEET) and Phubbers (Head-down Tribe)⁶; by the 2020s, this hat had moved down to the Z Generation, landing on the heads of the Ninth Grade.

Moreover, this term holds up legally. The Taiwan High Court ruled in a lawsuit that "Strawberry Generation" refers to "young, inexperienced people who cannot withstand setbacks," classifying it as a derogatory term¹. That is to say, this is a word recognized by the court as belittling, yet for thirty years, it has been used by the older generation as the most convenient tool to comment on the younger generation, passed down repeatedly.

Throw the ball back: Everyone who wants to say "Young people today are just strawberries" should remember that the word originally criticized, likely, was themselves.

No Shared Childhood: From Candy Shops to TikTok

If there is really a wall between generations, that wall is built from childhood. Laying out the childhoods of these five generations, you will notice a quiet thing: they almost have nothing in common to remember.

The childhoods of the Fifth and Sixth Grades were in candy shops. The Datong Baby, launched in 1969, was given as a gift for buying 10,000 yuan worth of appliances; that red-clad doll placed in the living room was proof of a family climbing from laborer to middle class⁷; Yakult set up a factory in Taiwan in 1964, costing two yuan a bottle, delivered door-to-door by "Yakult Moms" carrying cold boxes⁸; the way home from school featured Wangzi Noodles, Kexue Noodles, Wangzai Biscuits, and marbles. Turning on the TV, Huang Junxiong's puppet show Yunzhou Grand Confucian Hero aired on Taiwan Television in 1970, with Shi Yanwen fighting for 583 episodes, achieving a 97% viewership rate, so popular it was banned in 1974 on the grounds of "disturbing farmers' work schedules"⁹.

Five-pack Yakult, the iconic drink of Fifth and Sixth Grade candy shops and grocery stores. Photo: kxz Chen, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The youth of the Seventh Grade changed interfaces. Pagers (BB Call) peaked in 1999, with over 4 million households in Taiwan¹⁰; couples used numbers to convey affection, with 520 and 1314 flashing on small screens; after going online, the "ding-dong" of Yahoo Instant Messenger, the "deng-deng-deng" of MSN going online, and the blogs and photo albums of MySpace formed a whole set of codes only they knew⁴. The electronic chicken landed in 1997, sold out at a Kaohsiung department store with one resold for 1,500 yuan; students focused on feeding electronic pets in class, leading the then-Minister of Education to half-jokingly suggest setting up a "chicken farm" in schools to raise them together¹¹.

1990s Digital Pagers (BB Call), the communication tool used by Seventh Graders to send "520" and "1314". Photo: Solomon203, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

By the Eighth Grade, the stage was PTT and Facebook. In 2009's Happy Farm, everyone in Taiwan asked, "Did you steal vegetables today?" The Ninth Grade is entirely immersed in algorithms: IG, TikTok, Xiaohongshu, Dcard. What changed is not just the platform, but the viewing method itself: for the Fifth Grade, a whole street watched the same Yunzhou Grand Confucian Hero at night; for the Ninth Grade, one person scrolls a short video fed by an algorithm only to them.

📝 Curator's Note
We are accustomed to explaining generational gaps with "value differences": the older generation loves to strive, the younger generation loves to lie flat. But closer to the truth might be something more physical: they never watched the same screen together. Collective memory requires the premise of "collective," and over these forty years from candy shops to segmented algorithms, Taiwan's media has fragmented from "the whole village surrounding one TV" to "each person with a phone only for themselves." Ultimately, they did not grow up in the same room. Nostalgia is therefore each nostalgic for themselves: the server you like, others cannot enter.

This is why nostalgia is so marketable in Taiwan, yet so segmented. A 2018 nostalgia snack survey collected 1,523 questionnaires, with the highest participation from Seventh Graders at 38.2%; the top votes included tin-can fruit candy, Morinaga Milk Candy, Wangzi Noodles, Kexue Noodles, and Qiqi Milk Powder, each precisely corresponding to a specific generation's way home from school¹².

Every Generation is Someone Else's White Rat

If childhoods are lived separately, one thing is unavoidable for all five generations: every generation is treated as the first batch of white rats for a system reform.

The education system changes almost every decade. The Fifth and Sixth Grades took the Joint College Entrance Examination (Liankao), with High School Joint Admissions from 1958 to 2000, and University Joint College Entrance Exam until 2001, deciding life in one test. The Seventh Grade faced three consecutive education reforms: starting in 1996, primary schools implemented "Constructivist Math," requiring kids to relearn arithmetic through understanding; scholars later statistics showed this experiment made nearly 1.8 million primary school students white rats¹³; in 2001, the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum went into effect, Junior High Basic Tests replaced the Joint Exam, and textbooks changed from "One Syllabus, One Book" to "One Syllabus, Multiple Books." The Eighth Grade encountered the 2014 Twelve-Year National Education and Joint Examination, while the Ninth Grade faces the 108 Curriculum implemented in 2019. No generation used the same rules as the previous one.

Military service is also a moving line, and the direction of movement is counter-intuitive. Early conscripts served two to three years, then it shortened continuously; by late 2013, conscripts born after ROC year 83 (1994) only needed to serve 4 months of military training¹⁴. It looked like a downhill slope getting shorter, but then it flipped up. The Ministry of the Interior stipulates that conscripts born after January 1, 2005 (ROC year 94), will resume one year of active duty¹⁴. In other words, the batch born after 2005 in the Ninth Grade serves eight months more than the Eighth Grade seniors who served only four months of military training; this is the first "extension" of compulsory service in seventy years.

Stacking these system lines together reveals a sharper question: Every reform is theoretically designed to educate the next generation better and secure national defense more firmly. But from the perspective of those being reformed, it feels more like: the experiments designed by the older generation are borne by the results of the younger generation. And the designers of the experiments mostly do not have to be white rats themselves.

The Slowing Escalator

Up to this point, the accusation of "Strawberry Generation" actually hides an unspoken premise: young people cannot climb up because they are not hardworking enough. But if we shift the lens from "people" to "the escalator beneath their feet," we see a completely different thing.

First, look at salaries. Research from the Academia Sinica indicates that before 2002, Taiwan's real output per hour (productivity) and real wages climbed together step by step; after 2002, these two lines diverged, productivity continued to rise, but salaries froze. Economist Yang Tzu-ting explains: "The fact that producer prices are getting lower and consumer prices are getting higher is the main reason real wage growth lags behind real GDP growth"². During the same period, the share of labor compensation in GDP slid from about 51% in 1990 to around 43% in 2024². The cake got bigger, but the slice given to workers got thinner.

Second, look at housing. This is where the escalator truly steepens. The national mortgage burden rate rose from 21.7% in 2005 to 46.62% in 2024, meaning a family must dedicate nearly half its income to mortgage payments³. The housing price-to-income ratio is more direct: nationally it rose from 8.2 times in 2014 to 9.89 times in the first quarter of 2025, while Taipei soared from 6.4 times in 2004 to 15.41 times in the first quarter of 2025, higher than London or New York³. In plain language: in Taipei, a family must not eat or drink for fifteen years to afford a house.

Dense apartment clusters in Tamsui, New Taipei, a typical face of Taiwanese urban housing. Photo: HC Lin, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

資料來源：NCCU Real Estate Research Center (Compiled from MOI Real Estate Information Platform)

Thus, the same effort does not reach the same position. Data from the Academia Sinica Taiwan Social Change Basic Survey best illustrates this: the homeownership rate for the 31–40 age group was over 60% in 1996, dropping to only about 25% by 2021³. The age of first-time homebuyers also shifted back by five years, from early thirties to early forties. A Fifth Grader might already have their own house at thirty; an Eighth Grader at thirty is likely still calculating the down payment.

This is also the consensus in academia. Sociologists Chang Yi-chun and Lin Tsung-hung published research in the Taiwan Journal of Sociology in 2020 explicitly stating: "The baby boom generation born before 1972 enjoyed income advantages brought by economic growth, while the younger generations born after 1978 generally have lower incomes"¹⁵. In another interview, Lin Tsung-hung spoke more plainly: "Every economic depression in human history creates a traumatized generation... The generation most impacted is those born after 1975, who came of age around 2000"¹⁶, which corresponds exactly to the Seventh Grade.

💡 Did You Know?
Blaming young people entirely for "not being able to climb up" was debunked as early as 2005. A 2005 Taipei Times report cited experts pointing out that "Strawberry Generation is a myth," citing that Taiwanese workers have some of the longest working hours globally, yet salaries have not adjusted for years¹⁷. That is to say, the accusation of "young people are not tough" contradicts the fact of "Taiwanese workers work extremely long hours" from the beginning.

The Escalator Didn't Stop, It Split Into Two

However, saying "the escalator stopped, so young people can't buy houses" is also wrong; this is also a form of laziness. The truth is more nuanced and cruel: the escalator did not stop; it split into two.

Indeed, some Eighth Graders bought houses. But looking closely, those who could buy mostly relied on parents' down payments: down payments of several million were covered by elders, inheritance or gifts bridging the gap that salaries could not. In contrast, among all young people aged 20–30 in Taiwan, only 0.89% can afford a house relying on their own strength³. In other words, those who can board that still-moving escalator swipe their parents' cards.

This is why "generation" is a useful entry point but cannot be the endpoint. Lin Tsung-hung himself connects the generational issue back to class distribution: within the same generation, those who inherit capital and those with only a salary are on two completely different escalators; this gap within the generation may be larger than the gap between generations. How deep is the impact of family background on the next generation's wealth? A 2024 study published in Labour Economics estimates Taiwan's intergenerational wealth correlation coefficient is about 0.40 for sons and 0.30 for daughters, and the transmission effect strengthens non-linearly towards the top of wealth¹⁸.

The salary line is not entirely black. Nominal salaries have slowly recovered since 2017, and real total salaries in 2024 even increased by 2.16% year-on-year, a rare positive growth after years of stagnation². But this is at most a stop-loss, unable to make up for the fifteen years of loss from 2002 to 2017; it is like the escalator started moving again, but the floor is already much higher than before.

⚠️ Controversial Viewpoint
The framework of "Generational War" itself has received much skepticism. Chuck Collins, an inequality researcher from the US, said very directly: "We're not suffering through a generational war. We're continuing to live through a clash of economic classes."¹⁹ He means that opposing young people and the elderly obscures the true fault line: that line is drawn between those with capital and those without, having little to do with who was born in 1970 or 1990. Applying this sentence to Taiwan holds equally true: within the same grade, the gap may be larger than between grades.

From Martial Law Children to Sliding on TikTok Saying "I Don't Want to Be Unified"

Another real fault line between generations is the answer to the question "Who am I." And this fault line, scholars generally believe, is chiseled out by shared "events," having little to do with whether a specific generation is inherently so.

The National Chengchi University Election Research Center has long tracked Taiwanese identity: the percentage identifying as Taiwanese rose from 17.6% in 1992 to a high of 67% in 2020, and 61.7% in 2023; simultaneously, the percentage identifying as Chinese dropped to 2.4% in 2023²⁰. Pew Research Center's 2024 survey echoes this trend, specifically highlighting the younger end: "Adults in Taiwan under the age of 35 are especially likely to identify as solely Taiwanese (83%)"²¹.

This identity curve is often simplified into "Natural Independence Generation is inherently independent." But academic views are more cautious. Multiple researchers point out that the dominant factor here is what scholars call the "period effect," meaning democratization, the 2014 Sunflower Movement, and other shared "events" reshaped the identities of various generations. The answer is chiseled by the era, never in anyone's genes. Scholar Shen Wei-chieh, researching Natural Independence, stated clearly in her master's thesis: "Natural Independence is not natural, but formed post-natally; Natural Independence is also not traditional nationalist Taiwan independence, but rather anti-China"²².

March 30, 2014, the anti-ECFA march filled Taipei's Ketinghuang Avenue, the Sunflower Movement called the peak of the "Natural Independence Generation" taking to the streets. Photo: tenz1225, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

For the Ninth Grade, things present an interesting tension. This generation grew up sliding on TikTok, scrolling Xiaohongshu, using simplified characters, chasing mainland variety shows and internet slang, culturally closer to the mainland than ever before; but politically, they are native to a democratic system, the generation most intuitively repulsed by "being unified." Taiwan Doublethink Lab's 2025 observation points out that junior high students' TikTok usage rate reached 57.87%, and high school students 50.73%²³, but cultural proximity has not automatically translated into political shift.

📝 Curator's Note
The seemingly contradictory combination of "Culturally Pro-China, Politically Anti-China" is precisely where Taiwan.md should not draw conclusions for readers. A Ninth Grader loving mainland short videos while supporting maintaining the status quo may not seem contradictory to them at all, because cultural consumption and national identity are two different things. What can be done here is to honestly lay out the tensions seen by NCCU Election Research Center, Pew, Shen Wei-chieh, and Taiwan Doublethink Lab, letting readers see how complex this generation is, and putting aside the hats of "Pro-China" or "Anti-China." Labeling the next generation is exactly what this whole article aims to deconstruct.

Strawberries Didn't Get Softer, The Ground Got Slanted

Stacking five birth certificates together, you see a quiet thing. The Fifth Grade batch of 1963 had 427,212 classmates entering this world; the Ninth Grade batch of 2010 had only 166,886, less than 40% of the Fifth Grade peak, missing over 200,000 people²⁴.

Fewer people, the cake didn't get bigger, buildings got higher. On this terrain, later generations using the same effort cannot reach the positions the earlier generations reached. This is not because strawberries got softer, but because the ground beneath their feet got slanted, and slanted unevenly: some have a slope paved by parents beneath their feet, others have only a nearly vertical wall.

"Grade" as a coordinate is ultimately just an entry point. It is useful because it helps us see how the escalator gets steeper year by year; it should not be the endpoint because what determines whether a person can climb up is often whether the escalator beneath their feet connects to salary or inheritance, and this crack is drawn within every grade. Pew Research Center even announced in 2023 that it would use generational labels less in reporting, because many differences attributed to "generation" ultimately stem from demographic characteristics themselves²⁵. Even the institution that first popularized generational classification is starting to call a halt to this tool.

✦ So, before saying "Young people today are just strawberries" next time, think about one thing: the word originally criticized, likely, was you, in your twenties. And what truly changed over these thirty years is the escalator you stepped onto, which was still moving, then slowed, steepened, and finally split into two. The MySpace quote "No one seems to notice me" resonated with an entire generation because every generation has a piece of youth only they own, that others cannot enter, and the rent for that piece of youth gets more expensive with each generation.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan's Side-Hustle Generation — The survival math of Seventh and Eighth Graders splitting one salary into three incomes under a low-salary structure
• Taiwan Youth's Career Lost at Sea — Spending sixteen years in school, the most common question on graduation day is "I don't know what I want to do"
• Taiwan's Low Birth Rate Crisis — Birth numbers crashed from 420,000 to 160,000, how the cake gets smaller year by year
• Taiwan Unification-Independence Spectrum — The full picture of the identity fault line, from "Who am I" to "Where are we going"
• MySpace (WuMing XiaoZhan) — The digital server of Seventh Grade youth, shut down in 2013, reappeared on Threads in 2025

Image Sources

This article uses 5 Creative Commons licensed images, all cached in public/article-images/society/ to avoid hotlinking to source servers:

• Taiwanese Puppetry (hero) — Photo: Wang Yu Ching / Office of the President, 2023, CC BY 2.0
• Yakult — Photo: kxz Chen, 2012, CC BY-SA 2.0
• 1990s Digital Pager — Photo: Solomon203, CC BY-SA 3.0
• 2014 Sunflower Anti-ECFA March — Photo: tenz1225, 2014, CC BY-SA 2.0
• New Taipei Tamsui Residential Buildings — Photo: HC Lin, 2023, CC BY 2.0

References