By Ryan Woo, Ethan Wang
BEIJING (Reuters) – Rising unemployment in China is forcing millions of college graduates into difficult living conditions, with some forced to take low-paying jobs or even live off their parents’ pensions – a plight that has given rise to a new working class of “lazy children”.
The phrase has become a buzzword on social media this year, drawing parallels with the phrase “rotten-tail buildings,” which describes the tens of millions of unfinished homes that have plagued China’s economy since 2021.
This year, more college graduates than ever before are looking for jobs in a labor market impacted by COVID-19-related disruptions and regulatory action in the country’s financial, technology and education sectors.
The unemployment rate for China’s roughly 100 million youth aged 16 to 24 rose above 20 percent for the first time in April last year. When it reached a historic high of 21.3 percent in June 2023, authorities abruptly suspended the data series to revise the collection of the figures.
A year later, youth unemployment is still a problem, with the recalculated unemployment rate rising in July to a peak of 17.1 percent in 2024. This summer, 11.79 million college graduates graduated while the economy is still reeling from the housing crisis.
President Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed that finding jobs for young people remains a top priority. The government is calling for more channels for young people to access potential employers, such as job fairs, and has introduced supportive economic policies to increase the hiring rate.
“For many Chinese college graduates, better job prospects, social advancement and a more optimistic outlook on life – all things that a college degree once promised – have become increasingly unattainable,” says Yun Zhou, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan.
Some unemployed young people have returned to their hometowns to live out their lives as “full-time children,” living off their parents’ pensions and savings.
Even university graduates were not spared.
After years of climbing China’s highly competitive academic ladder, the “lazy kids” are now finding that their qualifications do not guarantee them a job in the bleak economic situation.
Their options are limited. They either lower their expectations of well-paid jobs or look for any job to make ends meet. Some have even turned to crime.
Zephyr Cao earned his master’s degree last year from the prestigious China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.
Now 27, Cao lives back in his home province of Hebei and has given up looking for full-time employment after lower-than-expected pay made him doubt the value of his education.
“If I worked for three or four years after completing my bachelor’s degree, my salary would probably be similar to what I get now with a master’s degree,” Cao said.
Cao said he is considering pursuing a doctorate in the hope that his prospects will improve in a few years.
Amada Chen, a graduate of Hubei University of Chinese Medicine, quit her sales job at a state-owned company last week after just one month.
She attributed her decision to the toxic work culture and her boss’s unrealistic expectations. She also received only 60 yuan ($8.40) per day for the first 15 days of her probationary period, despite having to work 12 hours a day.
“I cried every day for a week,” she said.
Chen wanted to become a quality control engineer or a researcher, careers she felt matched her skills as a student of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
But over 130 applications later, she was mainly offered positions in sales or e-commerce.
Chen said she is completely rethinking her career path and may turn to modeling.
UNCERTAIN OUTLOOK
Unemployment among university graduates is not an isolated case.
In 1999, China dramatically expanded the capacity of its universities to produce a better-educated workforce and boost its rapidly growing economy.
But the supply of graduates continued to exceed the supply of jobs, and in 2007 the authorities expressed concern about the availability of jobs. This problem eased but never completely disappeared as more and more young people with university degrees entered the job market.
Even if a student’s major meets the market requirements, the prospects are uncertain.
Shou Chen completed her third year at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications this year, majoring in Artificial Intelligence.
However, despite more than a dozen applications, Chen has still not found an internship and remains pessimistic about the development of the job market.
“It could be worse,” she said. “Eventually there will be more and more people (in this field).”
From 2024 to 2037, the supply of higher education students will exceed demand. After that, the effects of declining birth rates will be felt and the gap will narrow significantly, according to a study published in June in the Chinese Ministry of Education’s China Higher Education Research journal.
The number of university graduates is expected to peak at around 18 million in 2034, it said.
(1 US dollar = 7.1436 Chinese renminbi yuan)
(Reporting by Ryan Woo and Ethan Wang; additional reporting by Qiaoyi Li and Laurie Chen; editing by Shri Navaratnam)
