link to article and video: The real reason China's educated youth can't find jobs transcript from video: "They were told with hard work and a good education, they'd get the career of their dreams. But for many young adults in China, that's simply not the case. For a couple of years now, we've been hearing about the "lying flat", or "let it rot" youth in China, a characterization that the kids are lazy and don't want to work. But there's way more to the story. In the world's second largest economy, recent graduates are dishing out, in some cases, more money than they can hope to make in a job, for interview coaches and job agents. A Bloomberg article said some students are paying $50,000 to try to land a finance job. China's youth unemployment surged to 17.1% in July, up from 13.2% a month earlier. And this new measure of youth unemployment excludes current students. Remember, last year China's jobless rate for 16 to 24 year olds reached 21.3%, so high the government stopped reporting the data after that. The government agreed on a new method to exclude students. Now these young graduates have a new name: 'rotten tail' kids. It comes from the millions of unfinished homes that litter the country, known as 'rotten tail buildings', real estate dreams that never came to fruition. But even before these numbers came out, these young graduates were having issues finding jobs that suited their qualifications and the degrees that they had. Are the jobs there for students or postgraduates who are qualified for certain tasks? Or was this promise to get an education and you'll have a good paying job at the end of it? Was there no gold at the end of the rainbow? Where we're really seeing the 'joblessness' is in the high end tier one and tier two cities. These are kids that have been catered to through their whole lives, they are the only child in their family, and their families have said we're going to put all of our resources into doing well in high school and then going to college and really just having a great life ahead of you. There's only one child for the family to worry about, and they're the focus of the family. So that entitlement is leading to the decision to wait for the perfect job. Waiting for employment is a category in China. You have students, and then employed people, but you also have dài (pronounced 'daya'), which means 'waiting'. " The real reason China's educated youth can't find jobs, Straight Arrow News, Simone Del Rosario (transcript from video) Rising unemployment in China is pushing millions of college graduates into a tough bargain, with some forced to accept low-paying work or even subsist on their parents' pensions, a plight that has created a new working class of "rotten-tail kids." The phrase has become a social media buzzword this year, drawing parallels to the catchword "rotten-tail buildings" for the tens of millions of unfinished homes that have plagued China's economy since 2021. The jobless rate for the roughly 100 million Chinese youth people ages 16-24 crept above 20% for the first time in April last year. When it hit an all-time high of 21.3% in June 2023, officials abruptly suspended the data series to reassess how numbers were compiled. One year on, youth unemployment remains a headache, with the reconfigured jobless rate spiking to a 2024 high of 17.1% in July, as 11.79 million college students graduated this summer in an economy still weighed down by its real estate crisis. President Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed that finding jobs for young people remains a top priority. "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, University of Michigan. Some jobless young people have returned to their hometown to be "full-time children," relying on their parents' retirement pensions and savings. Even those with postgraduate degrees haven't been spared. After spending years climbing China's ultra-competitive academic ladder, "rotten-tail kids" are discovering that their qualifications are failing to secure them jobs in a bleak economy. Their options are limited. Either they cut their expectations for top-paying jobs or find any job to make ends meet. Some have also turned to crime. China's rising youth unemployment breeds new working class, Reuters, August 20, 2024 related past threads: China's economic Bubble will burst soon (in 'Asia' section, June 17, 2012) Chinese students learn to fix air conditioners as government pushes vocational education (Dec 9, 2022)
