Dashed dreams: the plight of China’s disillusioned youth

One name, more than almost any other, has circulated on Chinese social media in recent months, said Laura He on CNN (New York): that name is Kong Yiji.

A highly educated fellow, Kong sunk into poverty because he couldn’t forsake the “haughty manner of a scholar”, and refused to use manual labour to change his situation. Not that he ever existed. Kong Yiji was the main character in a 1919 short story by the celebrated Chinese writer Lu Xun. A century later, however, his story has begun to resonate with China’s disillusioned youth, who find themselves facing a similar dilemma: pursue a white-collar career and risk unemployment, or settle for the kind of blue-collar job they’d hoped to avoid by getting a good education. And this mismatch between Generation Z’s dreams and the opportunities available is causing real unease in Beijing, which has gone so far as to ban the Kong Yiji hashtag.

Rise of the educated jobless

Beijing is right to worry, said Amanda Lee in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong). The mismatch in expectations is doing real harm to China’s already sluggish economy. The jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds now exceeds 20%. In the cities, one in five are out of work. A huge number are college graduates. To make things worse, lots of small-and medium-sized businesses that usually hire graduates were destroyed by China’s harsh Covid lockdowns, said Cindy Yu in Foreign Policy (Washington). Yet demand for such positions keeps rising as more and more people go to university: a record 12 million will graduate in June. To delay their entry into the jobs market, many are now turning to postgraduate degrees.

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Meanwhile, China’s manufacturing sector is bemoaning a serious shortage of skilled labour, with some 30 million vacancies set to go unfilled by 2025. President Xi’s plan to combat this crisis is to send China’s brightest young minds to the countryside, said Katrin Büchenbacher in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). Just as Mao Zedong once did, he is urging young urbanites to take on menial jobs to revitalise the Chinese economy in rural areas, where poverty is still widespread. And provincial governments such as Guangdong’s, which last month pledged to help 300,000 graduates and young entrepreneurs find work in villages, have responded to his call.

But it’s a strategy that could prove socially explosive. China’s urban youth have become accustomed to a degree of personal freedom in recent decades; they won’t take kindly to being “banished” from the cities that the new generation of middle-class Chinese overwhelmingly call home.