I got stuck in mechanized, repetitive work that consumed a lot of my energy. Since the beginning of this year, China's official youth unemployment rate has reached new highs. 1 in 5 young people is unemployed. However, experts say there is a large number of unemployed people in addition to the official figures. High unemployment exacerbates the phenomenon of "involution" and puts young people in the workplace anxious.
Official data showed that unemployment among China's youth aged 16 to 24 reached a record high of 21.3 percent in June. The "post-95s" and "post-00s" young people have just entered the workplace and are facing a grim employment situation. The intense "involvement" has led young people to fall into workplace anxiety.
Mr. Chen is an engineer, born in 1996, working for a semiconductor company in Beijing. He told reporters that it is difficult to find jobs now, and the interns in the company graduated from famous foreign schools and submitted 6,070 resumes outside, but still did not find a job. His family graduated this year and also did not find a job. He said that although he has a Beijing hukou and can buy a house and settle in Beijing, he feels that there is no need to buy a house because "if you don't buy, there is no pressure to buy a house."
Ms. Julie, who works as a game planner at a company in Beijing, said overtime was commonplace, often coming home after 1 p.m. and "living like the walking dead." After three months of overtime, she said, she found that she didn't know almost half of her teammates. She said that the game planning itself does not require too high education, and the new colleagues are almost all high-caliber students from prestigious schools, and a rare scene has appeared in Beijing's Chaoyang Park. Groups of young people come here to relieve negative emotions in order to treat "mental internal attrition".
"Post-95" young man Stanley (pseudonym) and friends meet to play cards in Chaoyang Park. He told reporters that it had become a place for him to relieve his stress. Behind young people's workplace anxiety is China's high youth unemployment rate. In June, the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds hit a record high for three consecutive months, and by August, officials announced that they would no longer publish the statistics.
Professor Xu Chenggang is a senior fellow at the China Center for Economic and Institutional Research at Stanford University. "The reality is much more serious than that number," he said. He told TV reporters that university statistics showed the situation was more serious. In Shanghai, the employment rate of university graduates is only about 30 percent. In other words, most people are unemployed after graduating from college, even in Shanghai, even if they graduate from graduate school, a small number of people can be employed. Most graduate students are unemployed after graduation. Professor Xu Chenggang said that enterprises generally dare not hire people.
Professor Xu Chenggang said: In addition to the official unemployment data, there are also a large number of unemployed people.
The so-called unemployment rate is based on the urban population, and we all know that most of China's employment is migrant workers. Migrant workers are not included in the statistics, so in the face of high youth unemployment, state media are constantly coining new words to avoid the problem of unemployment. For example, self-employment economy, entrepreneurship, slow employment, employment, etc. The Bureau of Statistics has also done some tricks on the numbers.
On June 15, the Bureau of Statistics explained how unemployment and employment are counted. They said that during the survey reference period (usually one week), people who worked for one hour or more for the purpose of obtaining remuneration for work or operating income were considered employed. In the three years of the pandemic, all walks of life have been hit hard, and news of business closures has been endless. At the same time, the government has also tightened regulations on industries such as internet gaming and education and training, and many companies have had to lay off workers on a large scale.
The previous "three red lines" policy also hit the real estate industry hard, resulting in the disappearance of many related jobs. Unemployment among young people is getting worse. My brother worked for an automation company in Shenzhen and was abruptly laid off in August. His department was completely cut. He said that my brother had old people and children in his family, and he still had a mortgage to repay, which hit him as you can imagine.
Before the epidemic, young people in the village would go out to work in the summer, and there were almost no young people in the village. This year the situation is completely different. In August, most of the young people in the village stayed at home and did not go out to look for work. They had nothing to do, so they made an appointment to go to a banquet to pass the time. My wife's niece is in graduate school in Beijing and will graduate next year. She hopes to get a job at the company where she interned in August.
But that company has been laying off workers. "The involution is too serious," he said, "and going back to her parents is one of her future plans." "In the shadow of high unemployment, a new kind of job has emerged in China - full-time children. Lu Xi, an assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, told the BBC that "the essence of full-time children is unemployment", reflecting the current situation of the entire socio-economic downturn.
October 6, 2023, hello everyone, I am Yi Jiangnan, I like to like and forward, everyone pays attention to "People Watch".