How China’s jobless youth were raised to have unrealistic expectations
- A generation of young people was pumped up by an after-school education industry that preyed on the anxieties of one-child parents
- The result? A mismatch between the jobs these highly educated youth want, and the skilled blue-collar positions that need filling
More than 20 per cent of those aged 16 to 24 in China – roughly 30 million people – are unemployed, according to the latest figures. This crisis is believed to have been caused by many factors, including Covid-19 lockdowns and the less-than-stellar economic recovery.
People also blame the 2021 regulatory crackdown on after-school education for removing millions of private tutoring jobs; that career path is no longer available for young people.
Yet the opposite is true. The once-booming after-school education industry has actually fuelled today’s high youth unemployment, particularly among university graduates, whose jobless rate is 1.4 times higher than the overall rate. That figure is likely to increase in June, when 11.6 million fresh graduates flood the job market.
With hindsight, the industry should have been banned at least a decade earlier.
China’s youth labour force was born between 1999 and 2007. They are almost exclusively only children, due to the country’s one-child policy at the time. These are the children who used to be described as “little emperors”, though this gradually came to be replaced by another term, “chicken babies”. These two terms say a lot about the social environment in which these young people grew up.
Excessive attention from parents and grandparents created these spoiled “little emperors”, while the term “chicken babies” was more a reflection of parents’ desire to ensure their children overachieved. The non-stop learning activities were likened to injecting “chicken’s blood” – a reference to a pseudo folk remedy, now banned – into their children from a very young age to “pump them up”.
Regular education was no longer seen as sufficient so “chicken’s blood” took the form of extra classes to push children to get high exam scores, to better compete for places at top universities and get the best jobs.
After-school education companies merely provided the services required by that social environment. An example of this success was New Oriental Education & Technology Group, established in 1993, which mainly focused on preparing students for exams. The company grew quickly and, by 2006, it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The parents of these children were easy prey for the industry. They invested heavily in their children. If they didn’t, they feared that their children would lag behind the others.
Such a large investment and high expectations had dire consequences for today’s young people – they feel the weight of this pressure constantly and therefore tend to avoid taking risks.
This is reflected in the record number of applications to join the civil service this year – government jobs are traditionally considered to be a safe choice. Some 7.7 million people took the civil service exam this year, competing for just over 200,000 jobs, according to CNBC analysis.
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Their aversion to risk is also reflected in the record 4.74 million people who took the national entrance exam for graduate schools last year, many probably hoping to defer job hunting in the tight market.
The most damaging aspect, however, is the sense of superiority the intense-learning environment gave these young people. Being some of the most educated people in China in decades, they were told the sky was the limit. But the reality is that they are trapped by their education.
In fact, today’s unemployed young people share similarities with Kong Yiji, the fictional scholar. Just as Kong was a victim of the old imperial examination system, so young people have become victims of an exam-oriented system that was taken advantage of by the after-school education industry.
And, just as Kong could not take off his shabby scholar’s gown and find manual labour, young people in China today find it difficult to disown their long-held beliefs and find work in factories. There is a clear mismatch between the jobs they want and the jobs that exist.
China has an acute shortage of skilled blue-collar workers, needed to operate machines in hi-tech manufacturing facilities. It is estimated that nearly 30 million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled in China by 2025, about half of all jobs in the sector, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. This is not good news for China if it is to realise its “Made in China 2025” plan.
This is how the after-school education industry contributed to today’s situation of a large number of unemployed young people who are not prepared for the jobs that exist in China.
Addressing this mismatch requires a change of public perception. Workers must be valued, with better social status and greater public respect. This won’t be achieved overnight. And the dismantling of the after-school education industry did not address this core issue. Rather, it has forced parents to find ways round the problem. For some, that means tutoring their children themselves.
But it is a good start, nonetheless. The social vacuum left by the industry could be filled by short-term job opportunities, for young people to better understand life beyond exams. That is, if we want to avoid seeing history repeat itself.
To address the more pressing issue of unfilled skilled blue-collar jobs, unemployed young people could be subsidised to take technical training courses and get the help they need to make the transition, one they have been taught to resist so far.
April Zhang is the founder of MSL Master and the author of the Mandarin Express textbook series and the Chinese Reading and Writing textbook series.