NANCY QIAN
China’s exceptional growth in recent decades has influenced the education and career choices of young people and their families. But now that high-skilled jobs are drying up and recent graduates are struggling to find work, there is a growing mismatch between expectations and new realities.
CHICAGO – China’s youth unemployment rate, after rising every month this year, reached a record high of 21.3% in June. Faced with hypercompetitive work environments and grim job prospects, many of the country’s young workers and middle-class professionals have embraced the “lying flat” movement – which means opting out of the culture of overwork and consumerism – while others have quit to become “full-time children.” In the wake of these startling trends, the Chinese government has stopped publishing monthly youth-unemployment data, triggering a stream of negative headlines about China’s economic “collapse.”
But is China’s economy really in dire straits? The short answer is no. Since emerging from COVID-19 lockdowns last year, the country’s rebound has been relatively strong. The Chinese economy grew by 6.3% year on year in the second quarter of 2023, outpacing the average annual growth rate of OECD countries.
Moreover, the International Monetary Fund expects China’s GDP to expand by 5.2% this year and 4.5% next year – much higher than its forecasts for the United States (1.6% and 1.1%, respectively), the United Kingdom (-0.3% and 1%), and Germany (-0.1% and 1.1%). Even the rise of jobless young people in China is less concerning when compared to OECD countries like Spain, Italy, and Sweden, where youth unemployment rates have hovered around 20% for many years.
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