2023-06-29 21:53:22
With a master’s degree in applied linguistics from one of Australia’s top universities, Ingrid Xie didn’t expect to end up in a grocery store. However, this is the job she found when she finished her studies at the University of Queensland in July last year. Xie herself studied in China, where she studied English in the shade of palm trees at Hainan Tropical Ocean University. After graduating, she went abroad because she thought that she would find a better job that way.
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In Australia, she found work in a Korean supermarket in Brisbane and in February decided to return to her hometown of Kunming, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, to find a job as an English teacher. Xie soon discovered that “many young Chinese study abroad and they all want the same thing.” She says that a friend from the same city recently applied for an English teacher selection test, along with 100 other people. Her friend didn’t get the job.
Youth unemployment in China reached an all-time high in May for the second month in a row. 20.8% of job seekers between the ages of 16 and 24 have not found a job (twice as much as in 2019, before the pandemic). Xie is 26 years old and has not found a job in China since she finished college. “I feel very frustrated,” she says.
Many have shared on networks ironic photos about their poor job prospects After graduation.
This year, instead of the classic hat-throwing, flower-holding, and joyful smiles, Chinese students opted for defeated poses (with many literally just ‘laying flat’), apocalyptic backgrounds, or purely sarcastic shots where they are seen throwing their graduation thesis. pic.twitter.com/MhU5XBqMtR
— RADII (@RADII_Media) June 13, 2023
An increasingly hostile market
Nearly 11.6 million students have graduated in June and face an increasingly hostile job market. The problem of young people who are unemployed and too qualified for the labor market is so serious that they have begun to compare themselves with Kong Yiji, a fictional character from a story by Lu Xun, one of the greats of Chinese literature. Kong is a scholar turned beggar who went to a tavern to drink and was mocked by the locals as being pretentious.
The national media have criticized these memes as self-indulgent. In March, an op-ed in state media said that young people are “unwilling to do jobs that don’t meet their expectations.”
The Chinese economy suffers from a mismatch between available jobs and the qualifications of applicants. Between 2018 and 2021, the number of graduates majoring in sports and education increased by more than 20%, according to Goldman Sachs. In 2021 the Government suddenly banned private classes for profit, decimating a sector that was previously worth some 140,000 million euros. That eased the homework load on schoolchildren, but torpedoed jobs for young graduates like Xie, who had previously considered tutoring as a way to gain teaching experience.
The country is also having trouble filling jobs in the necessary places. Xie has seen job offers that require the teacher to work in a rural school for one year. “I don’t like [la idea de] teach in a rural area, since it is difficult to survive in that environment, especially for girls”, she points out.
Eric Fish, author of a book on Chinese millennials, says that the value of a degree from a foreign university has diminished in China’s job market: “Some recruiters think students may have too many expectations or be too westernized”.
The effect of the pandemic
The Government is aware of the problem. In April it published details of a package of measures designed to stimulate the labor market, including subsidies to firms that hire unemployed university graduates. The Government wants public companies to hire one million interns in 2023, and has set a global goal of creating 12 million urban jobs this year, up from 11 million in 2022.
This year the government has also eliminated the employment and registration certificate, a document that has been used for decades to authorize the transfer of a graduate from a university to an employer.
The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced on May 12 that the certificate was a procedure of the past that had ceased to make sense and that its annulment “would facilitate the search for employment for university graduates.”
China is not the only country struggling to balance its economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Goldman Sachs analysts have also pointed out that in 2021 youth unemployment in several European countries exceeded 20%, while in the United States it was close to 10%.
Xie explains that the lack of opportunities pushes young people to accept any job, regardless of whether they find it interesting or not: “At 25 you don’t even know what you want to do.” For now, she resigns herself to spending a lot of time with her parents and taking care of her cat, Shrimp: “I’m looking for a job that allows me to reconcile my personal life and have time for myself, but I can’t find it.”
Chi Hui Lin contributed to this article.
Translation by Emma Reverser.
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