Chinese youth owning their unemployment By Reuters

By Laurie Chen

BEIJING (Reuters) – After quitting the education industry last August because of China’s crackdown on private tutoring, He Ajun has found an unlikely second life as an unemployment influencer.

The 32-year-old Guangzhou-based vlogger offers career advice to her 8,400 followers, charting her journey through long-term unemployment. “Unemployed at 31, not a single thing accomplished,” she posted last December.

She now earns around 5,000 yuan ($700) a month from advertising on her vlogs, content editing, private consultations and selling handicrafts at street stalls.

“I think in the future freelancing will be normalized,” He said. “Even if you stay at your job, you’ll still need freelance skills. I think it will become a backup skill, like driving.”

China is being trained to unleash “new productive forces,” government policies targeting narrow areas of science and technology, including AI and robotics.

But critics say this has meant weak demand in other sectors and risks leaving behind a generation of highly educated young people who missed out on the last boom and graduated too late to retrain for emerging industries.

A record 11.79 million college graduates this year face an unprecedented job shortage amid widespread layoffs in white-collar sectors, including finance, while Tesla (NASDAQ:) , IBM (NYSE: ) and ByteDance have cut jobs in recent months.

Urban youth unemployment for China’s roughly 100 million 16- to 24-year-olds rose to 17.1 percent in July, a figure analysts say masks millions of rural jobless.

China suspended publishing data on the unemployed youth after it hit an all-time high of 21.3 percent in June 2023, later changing the criteria to exclude current students.

More than 200 million people currently work in the gig economy, and even that once fast-growing sector has its own overcapacity issues. A dozen Chinese cities have warned of traffic congestion this year.

The layoffs even extended to government work, long considered an “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment.

Last year, Beijing announced a 5 percent cut in its workforce, and thousands have been laid off since then, according to official announcements and news reports. Henan province cut 5,600 jobs earlier this year, while Shandong province cut nearly 10,000 jobs from 2022.

Meanwhile, analysts say China’s 3.9 million vocational college graduates are mostly equipped for quality jobs in manufacturing and services, and reforms announced in 2022 will take years to remedy underinvestment in training considered long inferior to universities.

China is currently facing a shortage of welders, carpenters, elderly caregivers and “highly skilled digital talent,” its human resources minister said in March.

Yao Lu, a sociologist at Columbia University, estimates that about 25 percent of college graduates between the ages of 23 and 35 currently hold jobs below their academic qualifications.

Many of China’s nearly 48 million students are likely to have poor starting salaries and contribute relatively little in taxes over their lifetimes, said a Chinese economist who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

“While they can’t be called a ‘lost generation,’ it’s a huge waste of human capital,” the person said.

“DOING THE WORK OF THREE PEOPLE”

Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged officials to make job creation for new graduates a top priority. But for younger workers unemployed or recently laid off, the mood is bleak, nine people interviewed by Reuters said.

Anna Wang, 23, quit her job at Shenzhen State Bank this year because of high pressure and frequent unpaid overtime. For a salary of about 6,000 yuan a month, “I was doing the work of three people,” she said.

Her former colleagues complain of widespread pay cuts and transfers to positions with unmanageable workloads, effectively forcing them to resign. Wang now works part-time as a resume editor and mystery shopper.

At a July briefing for foreign diplomats on an agenda-setting economic meeting, policymakers said they had quietly urged companies to halt layoffs, one attendee told Reuters.

Olivia Lin, 30, left public service in July after widespread bonus cuts and bosses hinted at further redundancies. Four district-level offices were dissolved in its city of Shenzhen this year, according to public announcements.

“The overall impression was that the current environment is not good and the fiscal pressure is very high,” she said.

Lin now wants a job in technology. He did not receive any interview offers after a month of searching. “This is completely different from 2021 when I was guaranteed a job interview a day,” she said.

REDUCED STIGMA

Dropped out of the job market and desperate for an outlet, young Chinese share tips for surviving long-term unemployment. The hashtags “unemployed”, “unemployment log” and “available” received a total of 2.1 billion views on the Xiaohongshu platform he uses.

Users describe mundane daily routines, count down the days since they were fired, share awkward chat exchanges with managers or share advice, sometimes accompanied by crying selfies.

The increasing visibility of unemployed youth “increases broader social acceptance and reduces the stigma surrounding unemployment,” said Colombia’s Lu, allowing otherwise isolated youth to connect and “may even redefine what it means to be unemployed in the current economic climate”.

Lu said unemployed graduates understood that blaming the government for their plight would be both risky and ineffective. Rather, she said, they are more likely to slip into an “internalization of resentment and blame” or “dwelling.”

He, the influencer, believes that graduates should scale back their ambitions.

“If we really have entered ‘garbage time’, then I think young people could pick up skills or do something creative, like sell things through social media or make handicrafts.”