A month ago, Rachel moved to Shanghai, China, to look for work. “I expect to earn 6,000 or 7,000 yuan [soit 777 euros ou 907 euros]just enough to pay rent and feed myself, but I hope to find a company that allows me to flourish, in advertising or marketing”, explains the young woman. An interesting job: this is what many young people from the Chinese middle class are looking for, even if it means accepting a low salary, or being patient. Graduated in the summer of 2022, while the confinements continued in China, Rachel (she only gave her English first name), 28 years old, had passed a few interviews, before returning to her parents to wait for better days. She almost became “full-time child”, she says with a smile, an expression that has emerged to designate unemployed graduates who decide to stay with their parents and get supported, sometimes in exchange for services. One symptom among others of a slowing economy.
Youth unemployment has never been higher than in 2023. In June, it reached a record high at 21.3%. With a new cohort of graduates, the July figures looked even worse. The authorities have decided to no longer broadcast details of unemployment by age group. The maneuver did not fail to arouse a deluge of criticism online: on the microblogging site Weibo, the subject attracted 140 million views in a few hours.
The reasons for this phenomenon are known: the country has not recovered from three years of drastic zero Covid policy and is experiencing a difficult year. Exports are falling, real estate is experiencing an unprecedented crisis, and domestic consumption is struggling to pick up. Result, despite a weak basis of comparison, the Middle Kingdom should barely achieve its growth objective for 2023, set “around 5%” at the beginning of the year.
Schools under pressure
In this context of crisis, young people, who lack experience, are generally the first affected. Officially, total urban unemployment remains low, at 5% in September, even if this measure is criticized (it excludes migrant workers, considered “rural”). Young people are all the more affected as they work mainly in the sectors most exposed to the crisis (services, the private sector, precarious jobs), and less in the public sector and industry.
As an aggravating factor, the Chinese authorities have launched, between 2021 and 2022, a regulatory campaign against web platforms, such as Alibaba, Tencent or Meituan. Even more affected, the private tutoring sector was virtually banned in July 2021, leading to the elimination of hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs. At the same time, a campaign to reduce the debt of real estate developers led, here too, to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of jobs, both for construction workers and architects, real estate agents and real estate loan brokers. Already burned by the costly zero Covid policy, Chinese entrepreneurs are wondering where the Communist Party’s next campaign will hit.
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