As Shanghai residents take to the streets to celebrate the reopening of the city, Yuchen Yang and his companions still do not know when its confinement will end.
The 22-year-old Shanghai university student has been on campus since his university enacted its COVID-19 bubble in March.
During the blockade of Shanghai’s COVID-19, the city’s 64 universities closed their campuses, with some 740,000 students trapped in their dormitories. Many of them were given limited time to leave their rooms all day.
Many of them had to go through massive daily tests and rely on universities for food and supplies.
And those in their final year of school missed one of the two most important graduate recruitment seasons in China, making it difficult to find a job.
While the blockade of Shanghai has been lifted for some, college students were not so lucky. (Reuters: Aly Song)
Ms. Yang, who is studying mechanical engineering and is in her final semester, said she had lost several job opportunities.
He was unable to attend job interviews as many companies across the country still insisted on meeting in person.
“I was very anxious in May,” Ms. Yang told ABC.
“I was about to graduate, but I hadn’t gotten a job or finished my dissertation.”
Finally, Ms. Yang received a job offer after a telephone interview with a Shanghai-based company, making her one of the lucky few in the midst of what could be the biggest wave of youth unemployment. of China since the 1990s.
The uncertain path for young graduates from China
The latest government figures show that this year there are about 10.76 million university graduates in China, the highest recorded in history.
China also had the highest youth unemployment rate in history, with 18.2% of 16- to 24-year-olds struggling to find work, compared with 8.8% in Australia at same time.
Young graduates also received less income than the previous year.
Experts fear that China’s younger generation will face a difficult labor market in the coming years. (Reuters: Aly Song)
The average salary for recent graduate jobs was $ 1,356.55 a month, a 12% decrease from last year, according to a report by the task force on the workforce.
In particular, women graduates are at a disadvantage in the highly competitive labor market, as their employment rate is 22.2% lower than that of men graduates this year.
“This is a cohort that is not only facing a very bad job outlook today and this year,” said Professor Dali Yang, a political scientist and expert on China at the University of Chicago.
“But with the job market and so on, this generation will be affected for years to come.”
The latest victims of the slowdown in China’s economy
As the center of China’s manufacturing, finance and international trade, Shanghai has been nicknamed by Chinese youth as the “magic city”.
It is a place where you can look for more career opportunities with more income and a better lifestyle.
But it’s not just young people in Shanghai who are facing fewer job opportunities.
Reducing the youth unemployment rate is crucial to China’s recovery of COVID-19 and political stability, according to Professor Yang. (Reuters: Tingshu Wang)
Economists have already predicted that China will only reach 4.5% of GDP growth this year, well below Beijing’s original 5.5% target.
Last Wednesday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang held an emergency meeting with thousands of representatives of local governments and businesses, warning that China was facing a much worse economic situation today than in 2020 when it began. the pandemic.
He also urged local governments and businesses to “reduce the unemployment rate as soon as possible.”
Professor Yang told Beijing Central Government that reducing the youth unemployment rate is vital to their political stability.
But even at the request of Premier Li, some companies are still struggling to hire more graduates, as the most popular sectors among young graduates suffered major crackdowns last year.
Since the end of 2020, Beijing has launched a crackdown on its technology sector to restrict the power of its companies.
About $ 2.9 trillion in value was removed from the sector in April this year.
The crackdown has now led to large-scale layoffs in the industry, with several technology giants, including Alibaba, Tencent and Didi, laying off thousands of workers.
Another sector facing a similar situation is education, which suffered a loss of $ 140 billion last year after Beijing banned private tutoring with the aim of increasing the birth rate among the population. younger.
It is believed that the prohibitive price of raising a child in modern China, which may include thousands of dollars for additional tuition to access the best universities, is one of the causes of the collapse of the country’s birth rate.
The younger generation is also facing significant pressure to marry and have children, under China’s third child policy. (Reuters: Aly Song)
Since the ban, the sector has shrunk drastically, leading to fewer job opportunities for education graduates.
Estelle Liu, who will be graduating with a master’s degree in teaching from a Shanghai university this semester, said only four out of 20 people in her class got a job offer during the first round of hiring graduates in past.
Ms. Liu was one of four lucky students, but got an offer from a marketing company, a diversion from her teaching training.
Following Beijing’s crackdown on tutoring schools, Ms. Liu became a private tutor offering individual courses for school children. He earned $ 3,128 a month with the concert.
“The income from being a private tutor is much higher than any postgraduate offer I have received,” Ms. Liu said.
But when Shanghai went into confinement, Ms. Liu lost her job.
Silent resistance of young people
With the double impact of the pandemic and the challenges of unemployment, there has been a growing frustration among young Chinese people about their future.
It has led many to rethink their personal autonomy and their relationship with Beijing, which in recent years has been strengthening its control over young people.
Much of Shanghai, China’s richest city, remained closed for months in an attempt to reduce the number of cases to zero. (AP: Si Chen)
In March, a phrase called “bai lan,” meaning “let it rot,” spread widely on Chinese social media and resonated among young people.
It was an updated version of “stretching” that went viral in 2021, which encourages a passive life attitude in the face of increasing economic and social pressures against young people.
Beijing has seen the term “flat lay” as “a threat to stability.”
Wendy Zhou, a media researcher and PhD candidate at Georgia State University, said both “stretching” and “rotting” show the “collective grievances of a hypercompetitive and stifling social environment.”
He also said the spread of the two phrases was an indirect confrontation with the government, which showed a collective pursuit of their own life choices, rather than government control.
Meanwhile, alongside “let it rot” was another phrase that went viral during the Shanghai confinement that made Beijing feel threatened.
In May, a video circulating widely on social media showed Shanghai police with a full PPE demanding residents identified as close contacts to leave their homes and go to quarantine hospitals.
Neighbors refused to follow.
“If you do not follow the order of the city government, we will punish you. After we punish you, it will continue to influence your next three generations,” police said.
“We are the last generation, thank you,” replied one of the young neighbors.
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The phrase provoked a great online response in China.
Many used the phrases to express their desperation for what they say are draconian measures of COVID-0 and the power of growing authority.
The term “last generation” also recalls many of the pressures of marriage and childbirth of governments that have implemented the policy of the third child to deal with their demographic crisis, worrying that the shortage of labor may slow down the its economic growth.
Video and phrase banned on Weibo.
“When I heard young people say,‘ Oh, we’re the latest generation, ’you won’t hear us laugh anymore,” Professor Yang said.
“It’s a feeling of resentment for what is being done to them, but also a cry of despair in the sense that they were hit by all those currents.”
Young people are desperate, but most decide to live with it
As COVID-19 spread from Shanghai to Beijing, more students chose to stand up and fight for their individual rights during confinement.
In May, students at China’s Tsinghua University and Peking University, which have a long history of pushing China’s political movements, staged blockade protests over the schools’ decision to prevent them from dropping out. campus.
Peking University students staged blockade protests in May over an order preventing them from leaving campus. (Reuters: Thomas Peter)
But Ms. Zhou does not believe that these protests form a pattern of resistance.
For her, it depends on the relationship between universities and students, and on whether institutions leave room for negotiation.
“Some other universities and universities in China have also witnessed sporadic acts of resistance, but the students were severely punished and therefore did not become sustainable acts of disobedience,” he said.
And despite growing frustration amid economic pressures and government enthusiasm, many young people still choose to live with the system.
Many join the civil service, which has long been seen as China’s most stable job.
New official figures also show that there are 2.02 million people enrolled in civil service examinations, 52,000 more than last year.
Similarly, while young people encourage each other to “let it rot,” many are still trying to improve themselves in order to be more competitive in the job market.
This year, some 4.57 million students signed up for the postgraduate entrance exam, making it the highest record in …