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Singapore: China’s young graduates are struggling. One in five is jobless, there are too many being pumped out of universities around the country, and too few big employers are willing to hire in the middle of an economic downturn. They face a perfect storm of discontent in a country that has promised their lives would be better than their parents.
Now, some local authorities want to send them back to the country to transform China’s mass of urban youth and train a generation of new farmers and rural teachers. In return, they are being offered $500 a month, transport, food, future employment endorsements and study credit to become “five-star volunteers”.
A university graduate volunteer works at a farm in Guangdong. The province wants to lure 300,000 young Chinese students to the country.Credit: Guangdong University
The push in one of its most populous provinces, Guangdong, and by some of China’s ministries and state-owned enterprises, has faint echoes of Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside” movement, which sought to rid China’s youth of their privileged city lives.
Chinese President Xi Jinping was forced into rural China after his father had a dispute with Mao in the 1970s. The hard labour stuck with him. Today, Xi is becoming increasingly intolerant of what he sees as a weakness in the Communist Party and the national economy: slackers.
“Some prefer not to do anything in order to avoid accidents, and muddle through; some encounter conflicts and difficulties, detour, push their own responsibilities to the outside, and dare not take on real challenges,” Xi told a party education conference in April.
Xi visits villagers in Hainan province in April 2022 to inspect projects tackling poverty and rural rejuvenation.Credit: Getty Images
“The implementation is poor; some are uncoordinated, have mediocre abilities and cannot take on heavy responsibilities. Although these problems exist in a small number of party members and cadres, if they are allowed to develop, they will damage the party’s image and hinder the party’s cause and must be seriously resolved.”
Xi faces a different economy from Mao’s agriculture-driven revolution. Decades of strong urban economic growth have seen education levels soar and expectations grow. Almost 12 million college students will suddenly enter the job market this year, a 7 per cent increase on the year before, but China’s COVID-driven economic wobbles have seen major private companies like Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent pause recruitment or start job cuts.
The youth unemployment rate in China’s metropolises is 19.9 per cent, more than double the level of Australia and the United States.
That mismatch between expectations and opportunities is driving resentment through the estimated 20 million unemployed young people around the country.
“China’s employment market is huge, but competition is fierce,” said 21-year-old Cui Yinzhen, an English major at Beijing Normal University, who plans to move overseas to study and find work.
Graduates are being asked to leave prosperous cities like Shanghai to help revitalise the countryside.Credit: Sanghee Liu
“I haven’t considered finding a job in China because salaries are often not satisfactory, overtime is common practice, and personal relations matter a lot, all of which kept me away.”
Cui said half of his classmates were job-hunting while the other half were preparing for postgraduate tests. “Because many companies require a postgraduate degree,” he said. “To keep up with everyone else, many try to secure a job even though salaries are not high at the beginning.”
In Shanghai and Beijing, higher levels of family income have meant some young workers are choosing to wait for a prestigious job in a top-tier firm rather than jumping into a smaller company to make ends meet. Others simply cannot find work as firms in critical sectors such as technology and manufacturing pull back on hiring as the broader economy struggles to recover.
By April the Chinese government had organised more than 110 job fairs across the country this year. In Beijing last week, graduates arrived at stalls at one fair hoping to find a position, only to find out some stallholders did not have any jobs on offer and had only set up shop to keep authorities happy.
Graduates look for work at a job fair in Beijing. Credit: Sanghee Liu
“I looked around the job fair today but couldn’t find any,” said former human resource manager Tao Chunliang.
“It’s a kind of formalism. I worked in Shanghai before coming to Beijing in February. In Shanghai, companies focus on efficiency, if they don’t need more employees, they wouldn’t take part in such events.”
Zhuo Xian, vice department director at the Development Research Centre of the State Council, warned in March that growing levels of youth unemployment would impact the entire country.
“The anxiety, disappointment and confusion generated by college students, who are the most energetic group in society, may affect the confidence of the whole society in the prospects for economic development,” he said.
Graduate teachers have been sent to the countryside. Credit: Guangdong University graduates volunteer service
The state is increasingly ready to intervene. The number of graduates hired by Chinese state-owned enterprises last year surged 24 per cent, adding 760,000 workers to government-run companies in 2022 alone, according to the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. In April, Chinese media outlet Yicai Global reported 10 ministries and government departments had carried out “Spring Breeze Action”, holding 58,000 recruitment activities across the country.
The Ministry of Education announced last month it would hire 52,300 college graduates this year to work as primary and middle school teachers in impoverished rural areas.
Modest houses in a rural village in northern China.Credit: Sanghee Liu
In Guangdong, where people aged between 14 and 35 comprise 35 per cent of the population – higher than many other Chinese provinces – local authorities have set a target of getting 300,000 people into the countryside.
The impacts of decades of urban economic growth are showing up in the rivers that connect the cities with the villages.
Chen Xuanyi, a 24-year-old university student who returned to his hometown of Jinli as a rural volunteer, told the Guangzhou Daily that material life had become increasingly abundant.
“But at the same time it also brought some negative impacts, the river we used for dragon-boat racing, due to serious water pollution, has become a stinky ditch,” he said.
“The communities became ugly-looking and the rural areas became dirty and poor. These problems made me realise the necessity of the country’s rural revitalisation strategy.”
More than 400 kilometres away in Aojiang, social worker Zheng Miaoluan praised the work of the Guangdong party youth league in getting students back into the country.
“I learnt that many poor and backward villages have undergone radical changes through a series of assistance measures, and the villagers have led a good life as a result,” she told government officials in April.
“I am a farmer’s child, born and raised in the countryside, and I hope I can participate in the work of rural revitalisation to make my hometown beautiful and the villagers rich.”
Xi will be banking on workers like Zheng to help get China’s youth moving again.
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