China youth unemployment hits high as recovery falters
China youth unemployment hits high as recovery falters
87 comments
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I remember Spain having traditionally a very high youth unemployment rate, just checked https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/youth-unemployment-rate and it's 28%. Also I remember Swedish youth always struggled and there it's similar to China with 19%.
I guess what is different is that this is new to China. Now you can't get a job when you're young and when you're 35 you're too old to work.
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Just in case anyone else was wondering, the unemployment rate for youth (up to 24 years old) in China is 21%.
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That's really interesting, I hope they can bring those numbers to a better place. Youth unemployment can cause lots of social unrest, especially when there is no plan/policy in place to address it.
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You want to look at seasonally adjusted numbers because it's no wonder that there's massive unemployment the month people get out of school.
Spain and Greece are fucked, yes, structural issues, Italy somehow managed to get back on track. Without seasonal adjustment, during Corona, it was as bad as 70-80% in Greece IIRC.
Three things though that help us soak that kind of thing up: a) mobility between EU countries, b) actual welfare systems, c) not having to pay alimony to your parents, at least not if you're not filthily rich.
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The Chinese government is a democratic republic. The CCP is a democratic institution.
Harvard conducted a 13-year study of popular Chinese sentiment and found 95.5% approval of their government.
If you replace the Chinese form of democracy with the US form of democracy, what will happen when the US popular sentiment is 20% trust in government overall, 20% approval of Congress, and 40% approval of the president?
Your fears are manufactured by the West.
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The article you linked mentioned how that approval rating (for the central government - not the local ones) came to be for rural people: Censorship and propaganda combined with an attitude towards government similar to what you often see with religious people. If something good happens, the big guy far away did it. If something bad happens, it's due to the corruption of men (in this case the corrupt local officials).
Edit: From the article:
“I think citizens often hear that the central government has introduced a raft of new policies, then get frustrated when they don’t always see the results of such policy proclamations, but they think it must be because of malfeasance or foot-dragging by the local government,” said Saich.
Compared to the relatively high satisfaction rates with Beijing, respondents held considerably less favorable views toward local government. At the township level, the lowest level of government surveyed, only 11.3 percent of respondents reported that they were “very satisfied.”
[..] This dichotomy is highlighted by a 2017 Gallup poll, where 70 percent of U.S. respondents had a “great” or “fair” amount of trust in local government.
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Aren't they doing this "let it rot" thing or whatever?
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Lying flat?
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That was the old name. I think it's progressed to a more complex form. I don't really know though, I think you'd need to ask a Chinese young person, and they have their own internet so that's not necessarily easy.
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What's "let it rot" if you don't mind me asking?
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It's Chinese youth basically giving up on the prospect of the careers they were planning for , sometimes just staying with their parents and giving up on the job search. I think it comes from caving to too much family/societal pressure and instead adopting a "fuck this" attitude. The Chinese term is Bai lan (摆烂)
See also "tang ping" (lying flat, 躺平)
The media environment in China is murky at best so I'm honestly not sure how much of it is a real phenomenon and how much is propaganda of some sort.
*edited a typo
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I only know about it from bits and pieces here and there, but it's a large soft-style protest where they refuse to participate in the economy as much as possible. When they get a job, they do it as poorly as possible without getting in trouble. If they can not have a job somehow, then they don't get one.
According to google, the Chinese words are pronounced Bai Lan in English.
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Well at least we're all going down together?
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Buh bu but muh 800 million lifted out of "extreme poverty".
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Youth unemployment of over 20%, let's hope they can improve those numbers, that's pretty grim.
87 comments
Sounds like Chinese graduates are having the same issues as a lot of Western graduates.
Damn that sucks. I hope things improve for them. (and us too)
I don't know. You are starting to see where education level is no longer providing the premium that it used to in the labor economy. So, you have hazardous jobs with a labor rate assuming anyone can do the job and professional jobs where it was assumed that this isn't the case. It turns out that those hazardous jobs need an increase in pay to attract workers, but part of the reason everything is built in China is because of lower than average labor costs.
If you are a new graduate, you may want to wait for a job in your field rather than take a 996 job at a factory.
At least they won't be suffering under the burden of being both unemployed and in tuition debt. It baffles me that Western universities still demand so much money for what has become a basic employment requirement, and even worse that lots of them are more expensive to foreigners.
Because governments don't want to fund it and it is worth it in some programs.
Anglo universities, not "Western" universities. Also, mostly the US as other Anglo places have sane state programmes to fund tuition, e.g. in the UK you only have to pay instalments if you're actually earning money. Systemically such a system is much closer to the e.g. German "all you pay is some administrative fees we'll get our money back from income taxes" type of funding.
Not at all all countries do the "everyone should go to college" thing, either.
Similar issues, but rates are different. ~7% vs ~20% youth unemployment rates are very different stories. Right now my corner of the country is practically begging for workers, we simply doesn't have the warm bodies post-covid to fill the open positions. Anyone with a pulse, 18-80, is welcome to work for a decent wage, degree or no, and still 7% of the youngins are not employed.
I'm not an economist, but to me 7% unemployment is bad, 20% is a crisis waiting to happen.
Yet the unemployment rate was much higher during the last recession, we hit somewhere around 25% overall unemployment rate until they stopped counting workers who simply left the workforce.
Another cultural victory for the west!