China’s Lost Generation

Nathaniel Taplin:

In other ways, how­ever, the of­fi­cial sta­tistics may ac­tu­ally un­der­es­ti­mate young peo­ple’s strug­gles—par­tic­u­larly for uni­ver­sity grad­u­ates. A spring 2023 sur­vey by job-search plat­form Zhaopin found that, for the sec­ond year in a row, only about 50% of grad­u­at­ing uni­ver­sity stu­dents had an of­fer in hand by late spring—down from 63% in 2021 and about three quar­ters in 2018. More­over, nearly a quar­ter of those sur­veyed hoped to en­ter the in­for­ma­tion-tech­nol­ogy and in­ter­net sec­tor, where salaries have tra­di­tion­ally been among the high­est on of­fer. That in­dus­try, al­though re­cov­er­ing now, was hit hard by the reg­u­la­tory crack­down of 2021 and 2022, with ma­jor job cuts among key em­ploy­ers such as Al­ibaba, Ten­cent and Didi.

What­ever the true level of youth un­em­ploy­ment is, what does seem clear is that it has marched much higher over the past four years. This is also what of­fi­cial sta­tistics show.