Unemployed, despondent, childless: China's youth is giving up

Economic downturn - Unemployed, despondent, childless: China's youth is giving up

This article first appeared on 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 do the shopping, cook, clean and drive their parents to the doctor. In return, they receive a kind of salary. Pocket money that can be as high as a monthly wage in a big city.

The hashtags #FullTimeDaughter and #FullTimeSon have been used millions of times on Chinese social media platforms in recent months.

For them, the "job" is an escape from their normal working life. In probably no other country are so many people burnt out as in China. Their work-life balance is poor. Working hours from nine in the morning to nine at night six days a week are the norm.

The Chinese sacrifice themselves for work

The Chinese have so far willingly neglected friends and family for work, as Xiang Biao, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, describes it in the ntv podcast "Wieder was gelernt". Without this self-denial, as the expert calls it, China's economy would not have grown so quickly. People were prepared to sacrifice their "daily happiness" in order to work more and harder.

Young Chinese are told that hard work pays off in terms of studies and degrees. However, after university, one in five people under 25 are currently without a job. Youth unemployment is now at a record high of over 21 percent.

This is a problem that we are also familiar with in Europe. Portugal has been struggling with high unemployment rates among young people for years. In Italy, Sweden, Greece and Spain, the figures are even higher.

More graduates, fewer and fewer jobs

A major challenge for China, especially because the zero-corona policy has had an extremely negative impact on the economy for three years. The economy is recovering from the pandemic even more slowly than expected.

For young people, the coronavirus crisis has been an existential shock, Xiang explains. They were traumatized by the brutal corona controls imposed by the government authorities - because they had previously believed that their lives would be good if they only had enough money and their own apartment - a "private paradise" where they could forget about politics.

China's economy has grown rapidly over decades. Prosperity has risen continuously and more and more families can afford to go to university. However, too many university graduates are now flooding the job market. Many want an office job, well-paid and stable, but there simply aren't enough of them.

Farewell to the meritocracy

Young Chinese are saying goodbye to the meritocracy. "Tangping", or "lying flat", has become a widespread trend: they do not work at all or only a little in regular jobs. The "full-time children" are the next step in this development.

Lu Xi, professor of economics at the National University of Singapore, describes the situation at NBC News as a vicious circle. The "involuntary decision" of young people to become their parents' carers, so to speak, and not to work, would reduce household incomes and, as a result, consumption. As a result, there are fewer jobs, which leads to more unemployment and therefore even more "full-time children".

Having children themselves is not an option for many. Young people are putting off marriage and family. The demographic crisis in China continues to worsen.

For some, the only option is to move 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 life experiment, a new lifestyle," reports Xiang.

Xi sends young people to the countryside

In the 1980s, the Chinese flocked en masse to the big cities to work. Head of state Xi Jinping now wants to reverse this trend. Last year, he called for university graduates to be sent to the countryside in order to combat the high level of youth unemployment.

This idea has deep roots in the Party's history: in the 1960s and 70s, Beijing sent over 16 million people to work in the villages under Mao Zedong.

Today, there are several volunteer programs for this purpose. The government hopes that this will have several effects: On the one hand, jobs for the many young unemployed in the cities, and on the other, to rejuvenate and modernize the outdated villages and advance the economy there.

The students are recruited directly at the university, reports journalist Brian Spegele in the Wall Street Journal podcast "The Journal". The Communist Party's recruitment events talk about the advantages of going to the countryside. There is then a kind of application process. The assignments vary depending on the province, from a weekend collecting garbage in a village to working closely with the farmers for several years.

University graduates with low-paid jobs

The most populous province of Guangdong in south-east China wants to attract 200,000 young people to the countryside by the end of 2025. So far, however, only 10,000 have decided to do so. They receive a salary of around 300 dollars per month. The volunteers have to stay in the countryside for two or three years.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, many of them can't last any longer than that anyway: They are then drawn back to the cities, where life is more comfortable and wages are higher. Many young Chinese prefer to eke out a living there with low-paid jobs as salespeople or delivery drivers. At the large Chinese food delivery service Meituan, one in five drivers reportedly has a university degree. Some simply stay on at university and study instead of embarking on the difficult job hunt.

However, the volunteer program in the countryside can also be a stepping stone to one of the coveted positions in the civil service, says Spegele. "One of the reasons for participating is certainly that people want to present themselves well." Those who work for the Chinese government may not get rich, but they have a secure job. This then often leads them back to the cities. Sending them to the countryside therefore does not appear to be a long-term solution to youth unemployment in China.