On the campus of the Beijing Foreign Studies University some days ago in a space on the notice board - which usually is reserved for student job offers - there was a couple of sheets with the title: “Announcement for recruitment to the army for this year graduates”. This document, aimed at students who will complete their studies this academic year, announced that the graduates who, after obtaining their degrees, decides to enlist themselves for three years in the army, will enjoy some kind of preferential treatment at the end of their service, and either they’ll decide to find a job in public bodies at grass-roots level or they’ll chose to continue with their studies. Xiao He, a student who is currently studying for a Masters at the university, attentively studies the contents of the notice: “I stopped just to see if there was any interesting job offers, I didn’t expect to find this. As far as I know, in the past, the army mainly tried to enlist boys who were from the countryside as well as those youths who were waiting for jobs in urban centers”.
This notice is just the umpteenth demonstration of the growing concern by the Chinese authorities towards the phenomenon of intellectual unemployment, a problem which has only recently started affecting the country and which has only been worsened by the present financial crisis. As often happens when it comes to China, the numbers involved are huge. When in December 2008 the specialists from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences published their “Blue Book”, the annual forecast on the trends of Chinese society for the following year, they estimated that at the end of 2008 about 1,500,000 graduates would be unable to find a job, and anticipated that by 2009 the situation would only get considerably worse . This is because there has been uninterrupted growth in the number of new graduates from Chinese higher education institutions in a period of time where the economy is clearly contracting.
If we consider that, in China, higher education has traditionally always been reserved for a narrow elite of “Mandarins”, how could this happen? Bai Limin, senior lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, shows no doubts in tracing back the reasons of this situation to the Asian crisis of 1997. Her research highlights how, at the time, in order to avoid a new wave of high school graduates from pouring into a labour market already on the verge of collapse - and, even more, to stimulate internal consumptions to guarantee a safe way out from the crisis - Chinese authorities decided to extend the access granted to higher education, a process which is famous as kuozhao in Chinese. In just an year, from 1998 to 1999, university enrolment raised from 1,080,000 students to 1,537,000 students, an increase of 41,7%.
Since 1998, year by year, the Chinese authorities have ceaselessly been extending the access they grant to universities, and so as a result an “elitist” higher education system rapidly became a “mass” system, to such an extent that this year Chinese universities will produce about 6,110,000 graduates. Nevertheless, as Bai Limin writes, “China’s socio-economic conditions and the structure of the higher education system were unprepared for such a rapid growth in enrollment in tertiary institutions”. It cannot be doubted that this was an epochal decision. But, as a matter of fact, it has been made rather carelessly, without weighing with attention the exigencies of the labour market: the supply of labour force which today comes out from Chinese universities in no way reflects the demand from local and foreign enterprises. As Liu Kaiming, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Organization of Shenzhen, remarks: “This phenomenon demonstrates how at this stage of development Chinese workplaces concentrates on labour-intensive and low wage sectors, which are absolutely unfit for graduates”.
The Chinese press contributed in more than one way to create a climate of alarm. Already in April 2007 on the pages of the People’s Daily there was an article rhetorically entitled: “Should our graduates work as street cleaners?”. In the second half of 2008 there were a lot of stories appearing on Chinese media about the working fate of Chinese graduates, which worried more than one parent. First of all, in November 2008 there was the news that over 1300 master-graduates in Guangzhou would have shown up for a job offer as pig meat sellers. On that occasion, even if the annual salary was as high as 100,000 yuan and the job required to sell meat just for a few months before rising to higher managerial positions in the company, the media seized the opportunity to tell the story of these graduates so “desperate” that they would have accepted to become butchers. When in December a company of environmental services in Dongguan joined a job fair in Southern China offering well paid positions as sewage workers on the condition of being a graduate, cries of indignation arose on the web and in the media in defense of the “violated dignity of university students”.
After the first signals, local and national media reported a spate of stories like these: female university students employed as back-rubbers in public bathhouses in Beijing for 58 yuan an hour; recent graduates willing to work as domestic servants in Shenzhen; “turtles from over the sea” (a popular way to indicate students who, after obtaining a degree in a foreign institute, decide to move back to China) working as estheticians in hotels in the capital; crowds of hundreds of graduates competing for a few jobs as motorway toll collectors in Zhejiang province; thousands of educated youth fighting for some positions as cashiers in supermarkerts in Henan province; tens of graduates ready to work as administrative secretary in a court in the countryside of Jiangsu province. All of this on the background of job fairies crowded as they had never been. The message was very clear: nothing can act as a guarantee to a Chinese graduate that the future will be much better than that of a common migrant worker.
Beyond the media alarmism, there are serious reasons to worry about the situation. As Liu Kaiming said: “The real victims of the financial crisis in China are not the migrant workers, but university students. The crisis has put a lot of foreign export-oriented enterprises in trouble and this has affected many other sectors, clearly reducing their working opportunities ”. From the already cited “Blue Book” of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, we can apprehend that already in 2007 the unemployment rate for graduates was about 12%. As a matter of fact, even the ones who are able to find a job have not much to be happy about: according to figures recently published by the Chinese Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, about 70% of the employed graduates find a position in small and medium enterprises, in private enterprises, through self-employment or in flexible ways, while just 17% is absorbed by State bodies or big State-owned enterprises, the most coveted job destination for Chinese students who long for a life of stability.
The Chinese authorities have already devised some strategies to remedy this situation. The first of these strategies, which is reminiscent of the post-Cultural Revolution practice of sending educated youth to the countryside, consists of sending graduates to work for three years as rural cadres in the rural or disadvantaged areas of the country. It is a very popular measure among the university students in the capital, judging from the fact that this year in Beijing over 20,000 students presented their candidature for just 1,600 available positions. But why should a young Chinese graduate today voluntarily give up the comforts of the urban life and go to live in the countryside? Unlike what happened before, when political propaganda played the main role in society, it seems that today the main incentives are occupational. In a survey, open to the public, hosted on the Xinhua News Agency’s website recently, it was found that of 83 Beijing graduate rural cadres whose contracts will expire this year, 41 of them are planning to take the examination to become a public servant (gongwuyuan), 17 will stay in the countryside and 12 will accept a position recommended by the State. Although these figures have no statistical value, they seem enough to demonstrate how the promise of a job inside the States bureaucratic system, after three years of service, is fundamental in motivating Chinese youth to take leave for the countryside.
A second strategy, which has already been widely experimented in the west, is about guaranteeing a greater flexibility to the labour market, an objective which is followed not only through the gradual elimination of the barriers to internal mobility caused by the hukou system, but mainly through the creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs as salaried trainees reserved for graduates. In an interview released last December in Jingji Cankaobao, an official economic publication, Hu Angang, a Qinghua University scholar who is an authority in the field of Chinese occupational policies, affirmed: “The nucleus of employment protection lies in guaranteeing more flexible jobs to the youth and in establishing more youth-friendly occupational policies”. Even if many specialists look favourably upon this kind of policy, seeing it as an effective tool in either alleviating the pressure on employment and reducing the burden on enterprises, others objected that it is clearly contradicting the provisions of the new Labour Contract Law, which came in force in January 2008, and so they are campaigning for the adoption of adequate “temporary” support measures. Nevertheless, apart from the academic debate, Chinese authorities are moving with rapidity and resolution, as we can see from last April the decision promulgated a three-year plan which calls for the creation of one million of the jobs as salaried trainees between 2009 and 2011.
The consequences of this crisis will last long. There are some signals which point out how Chinese youth have already started experiencing a lack of confidence towards higher education. Since a university degree is no more a guarantee of a steady and well-paid job, less and less students are willing to undertake four tiring years of studies, while many parents hesitate when it comes to the burden of extremely high school fees. When, a few days ago, Chinese provincial governments revealed the figures of the applications for the gaokao (the annual higher education entrance examination) for 2009, it was possible to ascertain how this year the number of participants has had a great drop. According to official figures from the Ministry of Education, if from 2002 to 2008 the number of students enrolled for the gaokao has uninterruptedly grown, rising from 5,270,000 to 10,500,000 candidates, this year there has been a drop of at least 3.8%, equal to 300,000 students. Even if demographic reasons have surely played an important role in this change of trend, Chinese authorities cannot underestimate this new development, all the more since some provinces have experienced a real collapse. In some cases this collapse has resulted in a figure higher than 10%, especially in Shandong and Henan, which respectively lost about 80,000 and 29,000 candidates.
The point is that the policies adopted by the Chinese government do not get to the core of the problem, they just delay a necessary solution. Young people are persuaded to leave for the countryside, to join the army, to go on studying for a master or a PhD, but what will happen a few years from now, when all these people, then in their thirties, will again flood the labour market? The Chinese government can create only a limited amount of jobs within its bodies and, although it’s licit to hope that an improvement in the economic situation will create enough new jobs, the risk of deterioration in the public order is real. If, for now, it seems that young graduates do not blame the government for the hardships that they are enduring, nobody can foresee future developments, especially in the case that intellectual unemployment join hands with other sensitive problems like the rise of prices, official corruption and labour exploitation, something which already happened at the end of the 1980’s. As a matter of fact, in a time of crisis being young and owning a degree is not of much help. Not even in China.
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