“I’ve had one, two, three, four… five jobs in the last few months,” says Joy Zhang, a 23-year-old graduate.
She counts them on her fingers as she walks through a line of stalls at a local food market in Chengdu, a city in south-west China’s Sichuan province.
“The fact is there are lots of jobs, the problem is whether you are willing to lower your expectations,” she adds, before turning to negotiate a price for snow pea shoots.
Joy’s experience is not unusual in today’s China, where there are more graduates than employers that need them. Out of her class of 32, only around a third have found full-time jobs since graduating in the summer.
More than one in five people between the ages of 16 and 24 are jobless in China, according to official data from August 2022. The government has not released youth unemployment figures since then.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
She counts them on her fingers as she walks through a line of stalls at a local food market in Chengdu, a city in south-west China’s Sichuan province.
With China’s boom years behind them, millions of young people are confronting a future they did not prepare for - and how they respond will shape the fate of the world’s second-largest economy.
A revolution is taking place in the minds of the country’s Generation Z, according to anthropologist Xiang Biao, an Oxford University professor who spends a lot of time speaking to young people in China.
She begged a tour company to take her on as a guide for the panda park in Chengdu over the summer, she sold hot drinks and she interned at a kindergarten.
Beijing may be worried that this crisis could fester, that social discontent will rise and a disillusioned youth will pose a threat to the Communist Party’s rule.
In his New Year’s Eve address, Mr Xi said that China had withstood the “test of winds and rains” and declared his “full confidence in the future”.
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