China's Jobless Graduate Army Falls Through Cracks in Economy (nikkei.com) 84
Record youth unemployment after Beijing clampdown on private sector, FDI slump. From a report: New graduate Glonee Zhang had high hopes when he landed a job at a lithium battery company in Shenzhen last summer. Now, like more than one in five young people in China, he's out of work. An English major entering a post-COVID working world, Zhang thought "the end of the pandemic would bring a bright future." Six months later, he and half of the firm's intake of 400 new grads were laid off when the company's sales slumped by 10% year-on-year. "Sometimes I feel my soul is being torn apart," said a downbeat Zhang, getting by in the meantime doing odd jobs.
Caught between a long-running regulatory crackdown by Beijing on private enterprise, and a slide in hiring by foreign firms in the country, young people now face a record jobless rate of 21.3%. Since the official number only includes people actively seeking work, some economists say the percentage of young people not in employment, education or training could be significantly higher. While the pandemic may have gone, its departure has unmasked a growing structural problem for President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The world's second-biggest economy is producing twice the number of graduates it did 10 years ago, with nearly 12 million this year - but not the jobs they're qualified to do.
"Over the years, China has expanded universities, but China is still a largely manufacturing [and services] based economy," Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, told Nikkei Asia. "This is structural, because the economy itself is big, it's gradually changing. But it takes time for China to become a more advanced economy like Japan, South Korea and the U.S., which have more professional services dominating job creation." In December 2019, before COVID struck, the youth jobless rate was 12.2%. Graduates like Zhang are now forced to consider continuing in higher education or trying for highly competitive but stable government jobs for which they are overqualified. Studying or working overseas is also an option for some.
Caught between a long-running regulatory crackdown by Beijing on private enterprise, and a slide in hiring by foreign firms in the country, young people now face a record jobless rate of 21.3%. Since the official number only includes people actively seeking work, some economists say the percentage of young people not in employment, education or training could be significantly higher. While the pandemic may have gone, its departure has unmasked a growing structural problem for President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The world's second-biggest economy is producing twice the number of graduates it did 10 years ago, with nearly 12 million this year - but not the jobs they're qualified to do.
"Over the years, China has expanded universities, but China is still a largely manufacturing [and services] based economy," Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, told Nikkei Asia. "This is structural, because the economy itself is big, it's gradually changing. But it takes time for China to become a more advanced economy like Japan, South Korea and the U.S., which have more professional services dominating job creation." In December 2019, before COVID struck, the youth jobless rate was 12.2%. Graduates like Zhang are now forced to consider continuing in higher education or trying for highly competitive but stable government jobs for which they are overqualified. Studying or working overseas is also an option for some.
You now need a Masters to flip burgers at McD's! (Score:2, Insightful)
So, sure, they're producing graduates.
Of whatever quality they happen to be.
India tried the same thing.
All these graduates do is bog down the market by depressing wages into the toilet.
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China has some excellent universities. You can expect the CCP to step in to address this issue. Like all dictators, they know that if things get too bad for the young people they are liable to rise up against them.
Re: You now need a Masters to flip burgers at McD' (Score:5, Insightful)
if things get too bad for the young people they are liable to rise up against them
Which is the point where they are sent off to war. I've seen this movie before.
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The CCP seems more likely to just do a violent crack-down, like they did in Hong Kong, and Tiananmen before that.
Their power isn't absolute though. They caved pretty quickly over zero-COVID protests when the scale of them became apparent.
Re: You now need a Masters to flip burgers at McD' (Score:5, Interesting)
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They might explode ZNPP.
Most of all, they are VERY LIKELY to use novichok. They MIGHT use biochemical weapons,but I doubt it.
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No, they will not. They will simply point to Taiwan and say that it is time to invade.
George Orwell was a prescient genius.
Re: You now need a Masters to flip burgers at McD' (Score:5, Interesting)
if things get too bad for the young people they are liable to rise up against them
Which is the point where they are sent off to war. I've seen this movie before.
It's not just the young, at 35 you're considered too old to employ.
China's problem is that it's government is entirely designed to rule a nation of peasants. Subsistence farmers, factory drones, et al. The rising middle class is causing this model a lot of problems so they've had to develop means to make the middle class peasants again, I.E. Social Credit. As a result a lot of wealthy Chinese are trying to move their wealth into western countries where they think the party can't touch it. The thing about the middle classes, as Europe found out in the 17th century is that they start to demand things peasants wouldn't dream of like autonomy, rights and luxuries. If there is a revolution, it'll start in the middle classes like it did in Europe because the Chinese government has the lower classes bottled up... and mass unemployment is just the catalyst that could start it.
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...and all Putin has to do is hold out until 2025 when Trump is back in the Oval Office, then Russia can effectively move the Iron Curtain to the Atlantic with at best token resistance.
What color is the sky in your world? It must be a fascinating place.
Meanwhile in the real world Donald Trump will never hold office again.
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Meanwhile in the real world Donald Trump will never hold office again.
I told my friend in 2016 that there was no way the Republicans would let Trump get nominated, and then after he was nominated that there was no way he would get elected. Even though Trump supporters are a minority in the US, the US electoral system was intentionally created to allow a organized minority of voters to gain control. The electoral college, gerrymandering, voter suppression laws, voter intimidation, social media, Russian/Chinese influence. These things allowed the first Trump presidency. The
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Meanwhile in the real world Donald Trump will never hold office again.
While I would love for that to be true, the Democrats are not doing anything to make it true. Biden fucking the railroad workers was clear: both parties are different faces of the same fucking machine. Trump may make it back into office from people wanting to fuck this shit up since none of the parties are actually trying to help people rather than corporations.
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Which is the point where they are sent off to war.
A big difficulty with this option is that China is lacking young people to support their massively aging population. Killing off a sizeable chunk of the few young people they have, all the while being xenophobically averse to mass immigration, wouldn't help with that source of social unrest. Catch-22?
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I think it's more likely these young geniuses will be allowed to emigrate, but not with their families. In their new homes, such highly qualified, hard-working people will be prime candidates for important jobs in the tech sector.
With the right incentives, no doubt they could be persuaded to exploit their positions to "borrow" the kind of cutting edge technology China's oppressive regime has historically had difficulty developing for itself.
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Not sure what you mean by "allowed to emigrate", you don't need to ask the Chinese government for permission to do that.
Emigration depends on the jobs being there in other countries. I doubt the CCP would rely on it. More likely they will push tech companies to take more people on, and retain them.
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As I understand it, there's a lengthy queue of Chinese people waiting to emigrate. I have been told there are various ways to navigate bureaucratic delays and get to the front of the line.
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What bureaucratic delays? If you want to emigrate you apply for a passport and leave. Passports are very quick and easy to get, there is no queue. I have first hand experience of applying for passports.
If you already have one you just go. China is not the North Korea, you don't need permission to leave.
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Depends which list you look at, but most of the semi-intendent global university ranking lists put some Chinese institutions in the top 10.
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India has some excellent universities, too, but they struggled (and maybe still do) with the same problem: too many of the less prestigious institutions were based on rote memorization. That just creates walking fact lists, not people who can solve problems.
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Uh... ban phones during exams?
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I couldn't say, just passing on what I was told by someone hiring from that pool but seems likely.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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He live
Funny how the most memorable moment of the Chinese killing everyone in their crackdown. Is a guy who wasn't even hurt.
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Was wondering when I was going to see the Chinese troll.
We don't know the guy in the photo wasn't hurt, because we don't know who he was. It is, however, significant that there's been no one claiming, "Yeah, that's me."
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Strange that you just naturally assume that he's fine.
And he hasn't talked to *anybody*. There's one easy way to account for that.
Stupidnomics (Score:1)
China is copying the west. It has a massive demographics problem with an insane old age dependency ratio hitting its economy over the next 20 years thanks to the one child policy. It needs hoards of young people to do jobs that support the old people in it's society.
So the way it's doing this is by 'saving' for the future...by putting people out of work today.
The west did this as well after the GFC (austerity). It's just the sort of absurd outcomes you get when your leaders are wed to the notion that a coun
Re:Stupidnomics (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody has attempted anything as insane or barbaric as was China's One Child policy in the West. Various so-called Progressives certainly wished for such policies for certain groups, but they never had the chance to be so thorough as the CCP.
It is peculiar and disturbing that you would equate "austerity" with something as awful as the One Child policy.
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It's not Like Americans geocoded the native Americans. Oh wait, they did.
While not inventing, Europeans virtually perfected the concept of slaughtering natives and stealing their resources..
Native Americans were perfectly happy slaughtering and eating each other's hearts for tens of thousand of years until Europeans came along. Oh, you thought they were noble or something?
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It's not Like Americans geocoded the native Americans. Oh wait, they did.
While not inventing, Europeans virtually perfected the concept of slaughtering natives and stealing their resources..
Native Americans were perfectly happy slaughtering and eating each other's hearts for tens of thousand of years until Europeans came along. Oh, you thought they were noble or something?
Might be modded up, although it will probably be buried.
Yes, native Americans were just humans like we all are, and could be remarkably cruel. They spanned the whole human trait collection from very good to consummate evil
I think that the Noble Savage meme is just a sidewise expression of guilt for the awful shit that Europeans who came to the United States did to them.
I probably triggered a whole lot of people with that expression of truth.
Re: Stupidnomics (Score:1)
Re: Stupidnomics (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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Re: Stupidnomics (Score:2)
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monkeyxpress did not say or imply that anyone in the West has attempted something like a one child policy, and did not say that austerity was equivalent to it. They said that China was implementing austerity because of the problems the one child policy created.
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Various so-called Progressives certainly wished for such policies for certain groups
What policies are you referring to?
This is going to be disastrous (Score:4, Informative)
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. A nation with a billion atheists facing decades of economic slowdown is going to be bad.
I'd wager it would be better than the same situation with a billion religious crazies.
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What makes you think everyone in China is an atheist?
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What makes you think everyone in China is an atheist?
Propaganda.
A sense of superiority that only comes from belonging to Gods chosen race.
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This:
https://www.cfr.org/background... [cfr.org]
At least as recently as 2020, only ~38% of Chinese are Agnostic or Atheist. Of those only 6.8% are strictly Atheist.
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Only 14% of Chinese report themselves as religious.
It's not quite a billion irreligious Chinese, but it's close.
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Would you report yourself as religious in China, even if you were? I wouldn't.
Meanwhile:
https://www.cfr.org/background... [cfr.org]
(yes this is the same link I posted above)
Most religious Chinese engage in some form of ancestor worship. And no the majority of Chinese are not Atheist.
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Yeah, a billion religious nutters who think that they'd at least have a much better life in the next life if they can't improve their lot in this one by violence, that would be far better for the stability of the country.
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In other parts of the world with poverty and a lack of prospects, religion tides people over. Religion does not appeal to everyone but it works for certain type of people, keeping them hopeful and content, especially when they don't have anything else to give them purpose. A nation with a billion atheists facing decades of economic slowdown is going to be bad.
Maybe at one time, but imagine the USA with it's present day evangelists declaring themselves the true christians. They'd be on a gleeful spree of sending gay trans, and non-christians (their definition of christian)to meet their makers. Is that what you meant by tiding over?
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What a load of bullshit. Religion is not the root f all evil, but still the the long-term champion. Most totalitarian regimes are pale shadows compared to what religion does to people.
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The number of requests for free security- and pentests for their webpages is getting kinda out of hand. Anyone got time to do this one and post the security gaps in their setup here?
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I think Luckyo is an idiot just like many of us here, but your obsessions with him is quite gross. Get professional help.
Let's face it. (Score:2)
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If people want jobs, they will get the skills needed
It's clear it took you more time to write your answer than the total amount of time you put into thinking about the topics you address, while addressing them in such a way as to cause negative emotional reactions in readers. This ticks all boxes for an effective trolling. Well done, I guess.
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While I agree with your assessment of UBI, you offer no solution to people surviving. People are already learning news skills. What difference does it make when the price of food and shelter is not achievable with those new jobs that people skilled into?
I am not entirely familiar with how the price of food and shelter are created; however, that is what needs to be addressed.
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While I agree with most of that, good programmers are not threatened. The code "written" by AI will likely be excessively expensive long-term, due to common bugs and vulnerabilities that are hard to spot but go into millions of software projects. Also, as soon as nobody writes original code anymore for AI to train on, AI will stagnate or, worse, lose skills and get worse (training AI on AI output is doing huge, irreparable damage to an AI model). Give this "AI for coding" insanity a few years and the whole
Who wrote this? (Score:2)
That does not read like a complete sentence. Is it supposed to be a headline? What is FDI?
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That does not read like a complete sentence. Is it supposed to be a headline? What is FDI?
Foreign direct investment.
Bullshit jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
"...China is still a largely manufacturing [and services] based economy...it takes time for China to become a more advanced economy like Japan, South Korea and the U.S., which have more professional services dominating job creation."
Sounds like they need more bullshit jobs [wikipedia.org].
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"...China is still a largely manufacturing [and services] based economy...it takes time for China to become a more advanced economy like Japan, South Korea and the U.S., which have more professional services dominating job creation."
Sounds like they need more bullshit jobs [wikipedia.org].
I hear Netflix has a bullshit job opening for a content manager that utilizes AI to create content for Netflix. The Chinese could apply for that one.
if you don't work 996 you are not an team player! (Score:2)
if you don't work 996 you are not an team player!
The 'crackdown' USA wishes for; right AND left (Score:2)
https://thechinaproject.com/bi... [thechinaproject.com]
For the left we have:
On the positive side (Score:1)
war incoming (Score:2)
I predict China will start, or become involved in an armed conflict very soon.
What better way to kill off most of the ~200,000,000 young disgruntled people that would be the ones to start a revolution against Xi and the other old men in charge.
Plus a good war abroad has the added benefit of distracting the common person from the problems they have at home.
Maybe XI will send some troops to help Putin.