This article first appeared at ntv.de.
They are young and well educated – but without prospects. Long working hours and a bleak job market are forcing young Chinese people to make unusual decisions.
Many go back to their parents’ home and become “full-time children”. They shop, cook, clean and drive the parents to the doctor. In return they get some kind of salary. Pocket money that can be as much as a month’s wages in a big city.
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For them, the “job” is an escape from their normal professional life. In probably no other country have as many people burned out as in China. Your work-life balance is poor. Working hours from nine in the morning to nine in the evening, six days a week are the norm.
The Chinese have so far willingly neglected friends and family for work, as Xiang Biao, director of the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research, describes it in the ntv podcast “Learned something again”. Without this self-denial, as the expert calls it, China’s economy would not have grown so quickly. People were willing to sacrifice their “daily happiness” in order to work more and harder.
Young Chinese people are told that the hard work of studying and getting degrees pays off. However, after graduating from university, one in five people under 25 is currently without a job. Youth unemployment is now at a record high of over 21 percent.
A problem that we also know in Europe. Portugal has been struggling with high unemployment rates among young people for years. In Italy, Sweden, Greece and Spain the numbers are even higher.
A big challenge for China, especially because the zero-corona policy has put an extremely heavy burden on the economy for three years. The economy is recovering from the pandemic even more slowly than expected.
The corona crisis was an existential shock for young people, says Xiang. The government authorities’ brutal Corona controls traumatized them – because they previously believed that their lives would be good if they only had enough money and their own apartment – a “private paradise” in which they could forget politics.
China’s economy has grown rapidly over decades. Prosperity has continuously increased and more and more families can afford to study. But too many university graduates are now flooding the job market. Many people want an office job that is well paid and stable, but there simply aren’t enough of them.
Young Chinese are saying goodbye to meritocracy. “Tangping”, or “lying flat”, has become a widespread trend: you don’t work at all or only a little in regular jobs. The “full-time children” are the next step in this development.
Economics professor Lu Xi from the National University of Singapore sees the situation at NBC News as a vicious circle. Due to the “involuntary decision” of young people to become caregivers for their parents and not to work, household incomes and, as a result, consumption would fall. This means there are fewer jobs, which leads to more unemployment and therefore even more “full-time children”.
For many people, having children themselves is not an option. Young people are putting off marriage and family. The demographic crisis in China is getting worse.
For some, the only option is to migrate to the countryside: “There are a few small examples of young people who have moved back to the countryside to start a kind of new experiment in life, a new lifestyle,” reports Xiang.
In the 1980s, Chinese people flocked to big cities to work. Head of State Xi Jinping now wants to reverse the development. Last year he called for college graduates to be sent to the countryside to combat high youth unemployment.
This idea has deep roots in the party’s history: In the 1960s and 70s, under Mao Zedong, Beijing sent over 16 million people to work in the villages.
Today there are several volunteer programs for this. The government is hoping for several effects from this: on the one hand, jobs for the many young unemployed people in the cities, and on the other hand, to rejuvenate and modernize the aging villages and to advance the economy there.
The students are recruited directly at the university, reports journalist Brian Sebene in the Wall Street Journal podcast “The Journal”. Communist Party recruitment events talk about the advantages of going to the countryside. After that there would be some kind of application process. The missions vary depending on the province, from a weekend collecting garbage in a village to working closely with farmers over several years.
The most populous province of Guangdong in southeast China wants to attract 200,000 young people to the countryside by the end of 2025. So far only 10,000 have decided to do so. They receive a salary of the equivalent of around $300 per month. Volunteers must stay in the country for two or three years.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, many people can’t stand it any longer anyway: They then move back to the cities, where life is more comfortable and wages are higher. Many young Chinese there prefer to make ends meet with low-wage jobs, such as salespeople or delivery drivers. At major Chinese food delivery service Meituan, one in five drivers is reported to have a college degree. Some people simply stay at university and study instead of embarking on the difficult job search.
The volunteer program in the countryside could also be a springboard for one of the sought-after positions in the civil service, says Sebene. “One of the reasons for taking part is certainly that people want to represent themselves well.” If you work for the Chinese government, you won’t get rich, but you will have a secure job. This then often leads them back to the cities. Sending people to the countryside does not appear to be a long-term solution to youth unemployment in China.
