Taiwan's Fifth to Ninth Grade Generations: The 'Strawberry' Insult Has Existed for 30 Years, Replacing Three Generations; What's Slanting Is the Escalator Beneath Their Feet

30-Second Overview: Taiwanese people identify themselves by "Grade" (based on the Republic of China calendar), taking the tens digit of their 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," which has been used as an insult for 30 years, was first printed in 1993, targeting the then-twenty-something, now fifty-something Fifth Graders¹; it has since passed down to Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Graders. The people being criticized have changed batches, but the label remains exactly the same. What has moved between these five generations is the "escalator" beneath their feet, symbolizing "hard work brings rewards": it slowed down around 2002, when real wages decoupled from productivity²; its entrance was simultaneously raised by housing prices, with Taipei's price-to-income ratio rising from 6.4 times in 2004 to 15.41 times in 2025³; and then it split into two lines. The line relying solely on salaries has nearly stopped, while the line relying on parental down payments is still moving. This article aims to deconstruct this label.

In March 2025, an account emerged on Threads, posting, "No one seems to notice... it seems like the site is about to close again." This was PChome Online Shopping's "MyChat" (Wu Ming Xiao Zhan), the青春 server for Seventh Graders, which had already shut down in late 2013⁴. Under the 10,000 likes, the comments were all "Give back our accounts" and "But we've all forgotten our passwords."

This was an entire generation liking a piece of youth that only they could access, while others couldn't even press the button. Every generation has such a place: Fifth Graders had the Tsumi Ten (general store); Seventh Graders had MyChat; Ninth Graders have TikTok. The true boundary of generations is drawn there: not in values, but in the lack of a shared login screen.

Paradoxically, the word that causes the fiercest debate among these five generations has changed its target over the past thirty years, yet the word itself has not changed a single character.

One Word, Insulted for Thirty Years, Targeting 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 Fifth Graders; mainstream perception has since shifted downward, broadly referring to young people from Seventh Grade onwards¹. A term originally used to insult a specific batch of twenty-something young people has, thirty years later, become 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 a condensed history of Taiwan's generations. In 1993, it insulted Fifth Graders; in the 2000s, mainstream usage stuck to Seventh Graders; in 2008, during the "Wild Strawberry Movement," the criticized Seventh Grade students干脆 (simply) reclaimed the term as the name of their movement⁵; in 2012, Vision magazine, in collaboration with Yahoo and MyChat, conducted a "New Nine Clans 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 been pushed down to the Z Generation and Ninth Graders.

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, 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 insulted, likely, the twenty-something you were.

No Shared Childhood: From General Stores to TikTok

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

The childhoods of Fifth and Sixth Graders were in the Tsumi Ten (general stores). The Datong Baby, launched in 1969, was given as a gift for purchasing NT$10,000 worth of appliances; that red-clad doll placed in the living room was a proof of status for a family climbing from laborer to middle class⁷; Yakult set up a factory in Taiwan in 1964, costing two dollars a bottle, delivered door-to-door by "Yakult Moms" carrying cooling boxes⁸; the way home from school featured Prince Noodles, Science Noodles, Wangzai labels, and marbles. Turning on the TV, Huang Junxiong's puppet show Yunzhou Grand Confucian Hero aired on TTV in 1970, with Shi Yanshan fighting for 583 episodes, achieving a 97% rating, 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 general stores and grocery shops. Photo: kxz Chen, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Seventh Graders' youth changed the interface. Pagers (BB Call) peaked in 1999, with over four 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 Messenger, the "deng-deng-deng" of MSN going online, and MyChat blogs and photo albums formed a whole set of codes only they knew⁴. The electronic chicken landed in 1997, sold out in a high-end department store in Kaohsiung, 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 Seventh Graders used to send "520" and "1314". Photo: Solomon203, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

For Eighth Graders, the stage was PTT and Facebook. In 2009, Happy Farm had everyone asking, "Did you steal vegetables today?" Ninth Graders are entirely immersed in algorithms: IG, TikTok, Xiaohongshu, Dcard. What changed is not just the platform, but the viewing method itself: for the Fifth Grade generation, a whole street watched the same Yunzhou Grand Confucian Hero at night; for the Ninth Grade generation, 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 the closer 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 general stores to segmented algorithms, Taiwan's media has fragmented from "the whole village surrounding one TV" to "everyone with a phone only for themselves." Ultimately, they did not grow up in the same room. Nostalgia is therefore also each having their own: the server you like, others cannot access.

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 picks, iron-can fruit candy, Morinaga milk candy, Prince Noodles, Science Noodles, Qiqi Milk Plus, each precisely correspond to a specific generation's way home from school¹².

Every Generation is Someone Else's White Rat

If childhoods are lived separately, there is one thing these five generations cannot escape: every generation is treated as the first batch of white rats for a system reform.

The education system changes almost every decade. Fifth and Sixth Graders took the Joint College Entrance Examination (Liankao); high school joint admissions ran from 1958 to 2000, and the university joint exam ran until 2001, with one test determining life. Seventh Graders faced three consecutive blows from education reform: starting in 1996, primary schools implemented "Constructivist Math," requiring children to relearn arithmetic through understanding; scholars later统计 (statistically) found that this experiment made nearly 1.8 million primary school students white rats¹³; in 2001, the Nine-Year Integrated Curriculum went into effect, the Junior High School Entrance Exam replaced the joint exam, and textbooks changed from "one syllabus, one book" to "one syllabus, multiple books." Eighth Graders encountered the 2014 Twelve-Year National Education and Joint Entrance Exam; Ninth Graders face 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 male conscripts served for two or three years, then it shortened continuously; by the end of 2013, male 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 male conscripts born after January 1, 2005 (ROC year 94), will resume serving one year of active duty¹⁴. In other words, the batch of Ninth Graders born after 2005 serves eight months more than the Eighth Grade seniors who served only four months of military training; this is the first "extension" of conscription in seventy years.

Overlaying these system lines reveals a sharper question: every reform is theoretically designed to educate the next generation better and strengthen national defense. But from the perspective of those being reformed, it feels more like: the experiments designed by the older generation are borne by the younger generation. And the designers of the experiments often do not have to be the 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 picture.

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 wages froze. Economist Yang Tzu-ting explains: "The fact that producer prices become lower and consumer prices become higher is the main cause of real wage growth lagging 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 spend nearly half its income on mortgage payments³. The 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; in Taipei, it soared from 6.4 times in 2004 to 15.41 times in the first quarter of 2025, higher than London or New York³. Translated into 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 Ministry of the Interior Real Estate Information Platform)

Thus, the same effort does not reach the same position. The data from the Academia Sinica Taiwan Social Change Basic Survey best illustrates this: the home ownership rate for the 31–40 age group was over 60% in 1996, but dropped to only about 25% in 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's 2020 study published in the Taiwan Journal of Sociology points out directly: "The baby boom generation born before 1972 enjoyed income advantages brought by economic growth, while the younger generation born after 1978 generally has 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 and coming of age around 2000"¹⁶, which corresponds exactly to Seventh Graders.

💡 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 expert opinions pointing out that "Strawberry Generation is a myth," citing that Taiwanese workers have some of the longest working hours in the world, yet salaries have not adjusted for years¹⁷. That is, the accusation of "young people are not tough" contradicts the fact of "Taiwanese workers' extremely long hours" from the very 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 a bit more 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 bridged the gap that salaries could not. In contrast, among young people aged 20–30 nationwide, only 0.89% could 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 who only have 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 that 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 only counts as stopping the fall; it cannot make up for the fifteen years of loss from 2002 to 2017, like the escalator starting to move again, but the floor is already much higher than before.

⚠️ Controversial Viewpoint
The framework of "Generational War" itself has been questioned by many. 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 His point is that pitting young people against the elderly obscures the true fault line: that line is drawn between those with capital and those without, having little to do with whether one was born in 1970 or 1990. Putting this sentence back into 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 generation is inherently so.

The National Chengchi University Election Research Center has long tracked Taiwanese identity: the proportion identifying as Taiwanese rose from 17.6% in 1992 to a high of 67% in 2020, and 61.7% in 2023; the proportion identifying as Chinese dropped to 2.4% in 2023²⁰. Pew Research Center's 2024 survey also echoes this trend, specifically pointing out 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 the academic view is more cautious. Many researchers point out that the dominant factor here is what scholars call the "period effect," meaning that 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-jie, 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 Ketaigrand Boulevard, the peak of the Sunflower Movement where the "Natural Independence Generation" took to the streets. Photo: tenz1225, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

For Ninth Graders, things present an interesting tension. This generation grew up sliding on TikTok and browsing 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 and 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 closeness did not automatically translate 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 Taiwan 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-jie, and Taiwan Doublethink Lab, allowing readers to 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 entire article aims to deconstruct.

Strawberries Didn't Get Softer, The Ground Got Slantier

Stacking five birth certificates together, you see a quiet thing. The 427,212 Fifth Graders born in 1963 entered this world together; the 166,886 Ninth Graders born in 2010 are left, 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 earlier generations reached. This is not because strawberries got softer, but because the ground beneath their feet got slantier, 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 a 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" actually stem from demographic characteristics themselves²⁵. Even the institution that first popularized generational classification is starting to call a halt to this tool.

✦ So, the next time you want to say "Young people today are just strawberries," think about one thing: the word originally insulted, likely, the twenty-something you were. And what truly changed over these thirty years is the escalator you stepped onto when you were young, which was still moving, then slowed down, got steeper, and finally split into two. The reason MyChat's "No one seems to notice me" made an entire generation like it is precisely because every generation has a piece of youth only they own, which others cannot access, and the rent for that piece of youth gets more expensive generation by generation.

Further Reading:

• Taiwan's Slash Generation — The survival math of Seventh and Eighth Graders splitting one salary into three jobs under a low-wage structure
• Taiwan Youth's Career Maze — 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 watershed, from "Who am I" to "Where are we going"
• MyChat (Wu Ming Xiao Zhan) — The digital server of Seventh Graders' youth, shut down in 2013, emerged again 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 Puppet (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