China: Xi urges jobless youth to seek challenges – 06/01/2023 – World

Gloria Li is desperate to find a job. In June of last year, she completed her master’s degree in graphic design. She later began job hunting, hoping to find an entry-level job paying around $1,000 a month in a large city in central China. The few offers she got were internships that pay $200 to $300 a month with no benefits.

In just two days, she messaged over 200 recruiters and sent her resume to 32 companies. She was only called for two interviews. Li said she would accept any offer, including sales, something she would have previously been reluctant to consider.

“A decade ago, China was booming and full of opportunity,” he said in a telephone interview. “Now, even as I try to look for opportunities, I don’t know which direction I should go.”

Young Chinese people are struggling professionally and emotionally as they face record levels of unemployment while the national recovery from the pandemic has been uneven. But the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, urges them to abandon the idea that they don’t deserve to do manual labor or move to the countryside — they must learn to “swallow the bitterness”, recommended Xi, using a Colloquial expression meaning to endure difficulties.

But many young people do not buy this idea. They argue that they studied hard for a university degree or graduate degree and found themselves faced with a shrinking job market, falling wages and an increased workload. Now the regime is telling them to endure hardship. For what?

“Asking this is a deception, a way of asking for our unconditional dedication to tasks that they themselves are not willing to face,” Li said. People like her have received “moral lessons” from parents and teachers about the virtues of facing difficulties. Now, they hear the same thing from the head of state.

In May, the official People’s Daily newspaper featured a quote by Xi on its cover: “The countless instances of success in life demonstrate that choosing to swallow bitterness in youth is also choosing to receive rewards.”

The article, which deals with the leader’s expectations in relation to the young generation, mentions the expression five times. Xi has also been encouraging young people to “seek out self-imposed difficulties”, using his own experience working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution as an example.

This year, a record number of college students, 11.6 million, are entering the workforce, and one in five young people are unemployed. Chinese leadership hopes to persuade a generation that grew up amid rising prosperity to accept a different reality.

The youth unemployment rate is a statistic that the CCP takes seriously, as it believes that idle youth can jeopardize its dominance. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Tse-tung sent over 16 million urban youths, including Xi Jinping, to work in rural fields. The return of these unemployed youth to the cities after the Cultural Revolution was part of the reason the party embraced self-employment and jobs outside the planned state economy.

Today the party’s propaganda machine spins stories about young people who make a reasonably good living delivering food, recycling garbage, setting up food stalls, fishing and farming. It is a form of official manipulation, trying to divert responsibility from the regime for policies that strangle the economy, such as the repression of the private sector, the imposition of Covid restrictions and the isolation of China’s trading partners.

Meanwhile, many people experience emotional difficulties. A young woman from Shanghai named Zhang, who finished a master’s degree in urban planning last year, sent in 130 resumes and received no job offers — just a handful of interviews. Living in a 9 m² room, she can barely support herself on the income of less than $700 she earns from tutoring.

“When I fell to the emotional bottom, I wished I was a robot. I thought if I didn’t have emotions, I wouldn’t feel helpless, hopeless and disappointed. I could keep sending out resumes.”

But Zhang realized that she shouldn’t be too hard on herself. The problems are bigger than her. “To ask us to face difficulties is to seek to divert people’s attention from anemic economic growth and the fact that there are fewer and fewer job opportunities,” Zhang said.

The Communist Party’s speech convinces some people. Guo, a Shanghai-based data analyst who has been unemployed since last year, says he doesn’t want to blame his joblessness on the pandemic or the Communist Party. He blames his own lack of luck and qualifications.

To pay the bills, he canceled subscriptions to online games and music and worked as a food delivery boy, working 11 to 12 hours a day. He earned just over $700 a month. He dropped out because he was physically too exhausting. In other words, he failed to swallow his bitterness.

Xi’s instruction to young people to move to the countryside is equally out of step with the youth and with the country’s own reality. In December, the director determined that the authorities should “systematically send university graduates to the rural area”. On Youth Day a few weeks ago, he responded to a letter from a group of agricultural students who are working in rural areas, praising them for having “pursued self-imposed difficulties.” Published on the front page of the People’s Daily, the correspondence sparked discussions about the possibility of Xi launching a Maoist-style campaign to send urban youth to the countryside. If adopted, this policy would devastate the Chinese dream of upward social mobility, which is so important to young people and their parents.

Wang, a former advertising executive from Kumming in the southwest of the country, has been out of work since December 2021 after the pandemic hit his industry hard. He talked to his parents, farmers, about the possibility of returning to their village and starting a pig farm. Wang said his parents were adamantly against the idea. “They said they spent a lot of money on my education precisely so that I wouldn’t become a farmer,” he said.

In hierarchical Chinese society, manual labor is devalued. Farming in the countryside is even more frowned upon, due to the huge disparity in income between residents of cities and rural areas. “No woman would consider being my girlfriend if she knew I work as a food delivery guy,” Wang said. His chances in the marriage market would be even worse if he became a farmer.