A Chinese university canteen’s job posting for a manager requiring a Ph.D. sparked heated debate, as reported in the South China Morning Post on May 30. The controversy has fueled discussions about the overqualification of China’s young workforce, leading to occupational downgrading and wage underemployment. Many young graduates in China remain unemployed due to the sluggish economy, and those who secure jobs often find them far below their educational qualifications, with lower pay.
The 25-year-old Sun Zhan dreamed of earning a lot of money by securing a decent job with his master’s degree in finance, but he has been compelled to work as a waiter. “My dream job was to work in investment banking. I looked for such a job, with no good results,” he said. Young graduates are worried about the poor employment situation in the country. “This is the situation in China, isn’t it? The moment you graduate, you become unemployed,” said Li, who studied film directing and screenwriting.
Melody Xie is one of the disheartened Chinese youth whose dreams of earning adequate income and living a good life have been shattered. “It’s been a year since I graduated from university but I have no income, no savings and no social life,” she said. Zephyr Cao, who earned a master’s degree from the prestigious China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, questioned the usefulness of his higher education as he earned lower-than-expected wages. “If I worked for three or four years after my undergraduate studies, my salary would probably be similar to what I get now with a master’s degree,” he said.
As the unemployment rate has been around 20 percent, the addition of newly graduated Chinese youth is exacerbating the problem, said Dali Yang, an expert on Chinese politics at the University of Chicago.
“There is a backlog of youths who were supposed to be joining the labour force over the last two to three years, but they didn’t do very well in the job market. As a new cohort of youth graduating from college each year, that makes the job market very tough for the college graduates,” he said. To make matters worse, a study report published by the China Higher Education Research said the supply of the students with higher education will be more than the demand until 2037.
Beijing government has been struggling to improve its job situation which has been in a negative zone since Covid-19. “For many Chinese college graduates, better job prospects, upward social mobility, a sunnier life outlook – all things once promised by a college degree – have increasingly become elusive,” said Yun Zhou, assistant professor of sociology, at the University of Michigan. A job advertisement for 1,730 categories by China National Nuclear Corporation received a massive 1.2 million applications, which highlighted the severe condition of unemployment at the entry level.
Senior journalist Phoebe Zhang opined that the over million resumes for a few thousand jobs showed the desperation of young Chinese jobseekers. “Young people in today’s China are facing a situation their generation has never seen. It is understandable that young people feel scared, hopeless and frustrated, having experienced nothing like this in previous decades,” she said. Tessa Deng mulled moving to the UK for further studies as she was not sure if her law degree would help her get a job in China. “I am a bit worried,” she said. “The only thing I can do is try as many firms as I can and lower my salary expectation.”
The state-run China Daily expressed concern over the “nerve-racking situation for China’s massive number of graduates.” Professor Zhang Jun from the City University of Hong Kong said the students’ aspirations to get better jobs by gaining higher educational qualifications have hit the wall. “The job situation is really, really challenging in mainland China, so I think a lot of young people have to really readjust their expectations,” she said. Moreover, several Chinese businesses are exploiting the situation as they force employees to work for 12 to 16 hours a day.
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As the number of job-seekers continues to increase against the limited number of employments, those who managed to get jobs are forced to work at lower salaries. “Some departments chose to either cut salaries by 30 percent or fire people in response to cost-cutting policies,” said Katherine Lin from the southern megacity of Shenzhen who quit after her salary was cut and her bonus was scrapped. A Chinese economist who wished not to be named said many of the 48 million university students would have poor starting salaries. “Although they cannot be called a ‘lost generation’, it is a huge waste of human capital,” he said.
