Wanted: recent graduates keen to gain experience in a teaching environment and an adventure far from home. Perks of the role include hands-on experience, CV fodder and, most importantly, job security. Cons include long hours, low pay, limited social life and poor infrastructure in remote locations (running water not guaranteed).
This is the offer facing China’s graduating class of 2023: decamping to work in impoverished rural areas. But many young people are not convinced.
More than 11.5 million students will graduate this summer looking to move into a jobs market where youth unemployment is at a record high. In June, 21.3% of 16- to 24-year-olds in urban areas were out of work, according to official statistics, and some economists estimate that the true number could be far higher.
A slow economic rebound from zero-Covid and a government crackdown on industries that traditionally provided jobs for young graduates have contributed to the high joblessness rate. The economy grew by 6.3% in the second quarter compared with a year earlier, slower than expected. “The labour market has been badly disrupted, particularly for young people,” said George Magnus, an economist and associate at Soas University of London.
In 2021, the private tutoring industry, which previously employed about 10 million people, was hit by new rules banning for-profit tutoring in core subjects. Within months, New Oriental, China’s biggest private education company, had lost 90% of its value and cut 60,000 jobs, and several other firms had taken similar measures. The real estate and technology sectors have faced similar troubles.
While graduates now joke online that their degrees are worthless, the government is trying to push the message that China’s gen Z are being too picky. In March, the Communist Youth League exhorted young people to “roll up their sleeves and go to the farmland”. Xi Jinping, China’s president, has called on youths to “eat bitterness” – a Chinese phrase for enduring hardship – to “create a better China”.
For older people, such exhortations recall the Cultural Revolution, when urban youths were sent to the villages to work alongside farmers. “There is a collective memory for Xi Jinping and those around him of xia xiang as a very formative life experience,” said Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, using the Mandarin term for being sent to the countryside. For young people, the idea of such toiling being character-building has “almost no resonance whatsoever”, Mitter said.
Candice Zhang, 25, graduated in December. She recently got a job as a teacher at a vocational college in Kunming after months of searching. “Like many Chinese young people, I don’t want to work in the countryside,” she said. “The inadequate transport is a great challenge,” and urban jobs had a higher social status and better pay, she added. “This generation has been through a very tough education before university, so when we consider whether to work in the cities or countryside, we prefer a more relaxed working environment.”
This year the ministry of education hopes to recruit 52,300 people to a programme that ships teachers to poverty-stricken areas with “special difficulties”. But working in remote, undeveloped parts of China is challenging for even the most experienced educators. A study published last year found that rural teachers in Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan and Chongqing worked on average more than 50 hours a week and that teachers who chose to stay long-term in the countryside often “lack professional skills”.
“The high unemployment rate will not encourage young people to work in the countryside … because rural areas do not have the jobs they want to work in,” said Nie Riming, a researcher at Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law. At best, Nie said, teachers may teach in rural areas for a few years as a means of getting an urban job.
The bigger problem is that many young people who chose to stay in education longer while the economy was in effect shut down during the zero-Covid years are now overqualified for the jobs available.
That mismatch has led to some choosing to opt out, living with their parents and doing household chores, sometimes in exchange for a small salary.
The pressure to toil in the fields does not come just from the government. Some jobs, particularly teaching ones, require a stint in the sticks as a term of employment. And applicants to certain graduate programmes, such as at Xi’an Jiaotong University, score extra points if they have completed the rural teaching programme.
Mitter said academic incentives were unlikely to placate an “emergent graduate elite who feel the system is not giving them what was promised to them”.
Nor is grand rhetoric from the government. In July, an editorial in the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist party, declared: “When you are young, if you choose hardship, you will choose harvest, and if you choose dedication, you will choose nobility.” Readers were unimpressed. One comment archived by China Digital Times, a website that tracks China’s internet, summed up the mood: “This group of assholes really has been estranged from the masses for far too long.”
