China's Unemployment Crisis Explained

China's youth unemployment rate has continued to climb over the last decade and is now significantly greater than other developed economies. So how did this happen? Why is this such a major issue? And what, if anything, can Xi Jinping do to address it?

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00:00 Introduction
01:17 China’s Unemployment Statistics
02:24 Why This is Happening
03:56 Why It’s a Problem
05:06 How Xi is Trying to Solve It

[TimothyCHenderson]

A young, educated and unhappy middle class is a scary thing for any government.

[eezaak]

This has been happening for years. I originally completed a Bachelor of History and Politics and never worked in a related field. Eventually ended up training as a nurse (which was a great choice). Think its a side-effect of boomers screaming about going to college to get a good job. In reality, many people would be better off going to a technical college or doing a trade.

[alkm]

I'm an American working in China. I only have a bachelor's, but for my Chinese colleagues it feels like having a graduate degree is the absolute minimum to get a white collar job here. Even my interns all have a grad degree or are currently working on it. My Chinese cousins all have multiple grad/post-grad degrees. I didn't used to think that a society could be "over-educated", but this might be what it'd look like.

[haidouk]

I remember a Chinese dude last year who was explaining me how lot of young graduates couldn't find a job, and how lot of young men couldn't find a partner (due to consequences of one child policy), and this was pushing a lot of young men to join the army, as the last option.

[carstengrooten]

The thing is, higher education usually costs more money. But people are willing to invest as they hope/assume to get better paid jobs afterwards. So I am not surprised many students don't want blue jobs as it does not pay well enough to pay off their debts. I don't think it is an issue of being lazy

[antonyslaughter]

If they are willing to admit to 20% it’s probably way higher.

[aldrichjosiah]

My Chinese friends told me that so many people in big cities need to take graduate studies just to get a job. Nobody knows how it started, but almost everyone has a masters degree for jobs that usually only need a bachelor's degree in Hong Kong. This means that even if you don't want to get a masters, you are forced to just so you can compete for the jobs.

[namelesssomebody]

Need 5-10 years experience for Entry Level jobs.

[Caius]

Things are certainly quite difficult here in the UK, but I can only imagine the extreme stress in China, after the effort of gaokao and higher education there, to have to put up with so much immense competition.

[djp]

From the age of 6 many of these people would have been working hard to get to uni then to get the degree. Taking a low skill job after all of that would be like admitting you're a failure and wasted the last 15+ years of your life.

[me]

From what my Chinese friends in their 20s and 30s told me, a big part of it is anger and frustration at the system. You've heard of 躺平, or "Lying flat", and you've heard of 摆烂 or "Let It Rot". Last year, a clip went viral on Weibo where someone said "This is the last generation of Chinese", which is a heartbreaking sentiment, but it captured the cultural zeitgeist of young Chinese people pretty well. And I can't say I blame them.

[standardtrickyness]

In my parents generation college was very hard to get into about 3% of people went to college for those that did get in that really was a life changer. College vs non college was basically upper class vs lower class.

[jakesmall]

What they mean is “young people in China won’t work for 1 dollar an hour while working 90 hours per week with no benefits and no overtime”

[ManCatCheese]

I'm a recent graduate in Australia, in the sciences, and I've been unemployed since graduating at the end of 2022. I've lost count of the amount of applications I've filled out. I've had a few interviews but no job offers yet. Every entry level or graduate position advertised has between 50 and 200 applicants within 48 hours, it's just insane. Not to mention the amount of ghost job offers that get constantly reposted on sites like LinkedIn but aren't even really hiring. It's frustrating to hear the media lie about labor shortages and how young people don't want to work, when it's only shortages in industries you can't afford to live off like hospitality, so of course people aren't interested.

[martinblake]

I don't want suffering of any kind to happen to any people. I really pity those unemployed folks.

[moozillamoo]

This is even more stressful considering that this is the first Chinese generation in memory to face recession. Even in 2008, Chinese government was able to print massive amount of money to get its economy going. Not this time, apparently. The gap between expectation and reality must be jarring.

[Minifutzi_o.O]

Well also the fault of their (grand)parents when they're told to become doctors or lawyers.

[snowleopard]

Young Chinese people are not taking manual labour jobs because such jobs don't pay a fair wage. The claim of six figure low skill jobs is a lie.

[LinuxGalore]

I saw a documentary a few years ago showing a PC peripherals manufacturer in China bragging that their sales are 4 times higher, while thanks to automation their staffing levels have gone down 70%. It doesn't take a genius to realise this isn't going to be good for young people looking for a job. The big issue is that once wages pass USD$5 per hour, a factory is better off automating the job than employing someone.

[cristianfamigliuolo]

When the school doesn't consider what the market wants and when the company just wants to pay little for the work.. All resources are wasted. Hence money that is destroyed and devalued