China's Youth Unemployment Rate at 18.8% in August
As China's youth unemployment rate reached its highest point of the year, controversy arose when it was revealed that a 24-year-old with a master's degree in physics was employed as a contract janitor at a high school.
On the 22nd, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that Suzhou High School, affiliated with Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, announced last week its plan to hire a 24-year-old physics master's graduate as a contract janitor. This news spread online locally and sparked debate. SCMP noted, "Young people are now in a situation where they have to lower their ambitions and expectations for their careers."
According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, the youth unemployment rate for those aged 16 to 24, excluding students, was recorded at 18.8% in August. This is an increase of 1.7 percentage points from the previous month and the highest figure since the new statistical method was applied. When the youth unemployment rate reached 21.3% in June last year, the Chinese government changed the calculation method in November of that year by excluding enrolled students from the statistics. Afterward, the youth unemployment rate slightly decreased to 14.9% in December last year, but the upward trend appears to have continued since then.
Feng Feng, chairman of the Guangdong Reform Council, a think tank under the Guangdong provincial government, told SCMP, "This year, everyone is facing pressure from unemployment," adding, "It is no longer easy to rely on parents." He continued, "Currently, the relatively easy-to-find jobs are limited to fields such as babysitting, housekeeping, and cleaning," and added, "Recently, many university graduates have taken jobs as delivery drivers, but even that sector has now become saturated."
The number of delivery drivers registered with Meituan, a Chinese delivery platform, increased from 3.98 million in 2019 to 7.45 million last year, and the number of drivers affiliated with Didi Chuxing, a ride-sharing service, surged from 13 million in 2022 to 19 million last year. This indicates a rapid increase in Chinese youth working as delivery and ride-share drivers over the past few years.
In this situation, the number of people giving up on employment temporarily to pursue graduate studies is rising, with reports that several universities now have more graduate students than undergraduates. Lanzhou University and the University of Science and Technology of China recently reported having more graduate students than undergraduates, and it is said that the number of graduate students at the Chinese Academy of Sciences is 37 times that of undergraduates.
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