When officials in the city of Nanjing invited applications for a clerking post in the municipal government’s court system last month, they expected plenty of interest in the much coveted civil-service positions. But even they were suspicious when their in-boxes filled up with applications from Hollywood starlet Zhang Ziyi, pinup Fan Bingbing and table-tennis champion Liu Guoliang. An internal investigation quickly revealed that one enterprising young candidate for the position, a Mr. Wang, was so desperate to get the job that he had filed more than 100 fake applications — 50% of the total number received. Wang apparently believed that his real application would stand out all the more amid a sea of phonies and that rivals would be scared off by the number of applicants ahead of them in the queue. His cunning plan almost worked — he got noticed — but once authorities discovered what he’d been up to, they banned him from applying to the civil service for the next five years.

[...O]ver the past few years, applications to the civil service have begun to surge: 1.5 million people registered to take the 2013 entrance exams, an increase of nearly 15% year-on-year. And competition for the most-coveted government positions is intensifying. In one much discussed example in October, more than 9,000 (apparently real) people applied for a single job in the municipal Statistics Bureau in the megacity of Chongqing.

As the applications increase, the caliber of applicants is also increasing dramatically, according to Liu Xin, a professor at the Institute of Organization and Human Resources at Renmin University. “In other countries like the U.S., talented people would never choose to work in the civil service — the private sector is always their first choice,” he says. “But in China, it’s the exact opposite.” More and more talented young people are signing up for government jobs, he says.

[...] According to Renmin University’s Liu, that guarantee of job security is one of the key factors driving the renewed interest in the public sector. That guarantee has become increasingly important as the global financial crisis bites harder in China. “As a civil servant in China, unless you quit or make a big mistake, you have a job for life,” he says. “It’s the iron rice bowl. That’s especially important during an economic downturn.” Another plus is that state-sector workers routinely receive free food, free local transport and special access to cheap housing, paid holidays and other perks.

See also Chinese College Graduates Play It Safe and Lose Out, via CDT.

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Post tags: civil servants, civil service, civil service examination, college students, graduates, job market, private sector
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Over the past decade, the number of new graduates from Chinese universities has increased sixfold to more than six million a year, creating an epic glut that is depressing wages, leaving many recent college graduates without jobs and making students fearful about their future. Two-thirds of Chinese graduates say they want to work either in the government or big state-owned firms, which are seen as recession-proof, rather than at the private companies that have powered China’s remarkable economic climb, surveys indicate. Few college students today, according to the surveys, are ready to leave the safe shores of government work and “jump into the sea,” as the Chinese expression goes, to join startups or go into business for themselves, although many of their parents did just that in the 1990s.

Chinese economists worry that waning entrepreneurial zeal could hobble China’s ability to remake its economy and reach the ranks of wealthy nations. “The current education system does not produce people who are innovative,” says Li Hongbin, a Tsinghua University economist who specializes in education and conducted some of the surveys. “That makes it harder for the country to reach its long-term goal of building an innovative society.”

For many, though, the choice is less between state and start-up than accepting factory jobs or holding out for white-collar work.

In a second article, Davis focuses on the sacrifices made by one rural northern family to send their son to college, and the lingering question of whether the investment will pay off financially:

Four years ago, Gao Shangming was convinced that his son Yueqing needed to remain in the family’s one-room apartment and help harvest corn rather than go to college. “Our financial situation wasn’t good,” the 50-year-old peasant farmer says.

But Gao Yueqing was determined to escape the dusty north China mountain village of 200 households where nearly all young people either become farmers or migrate to nearby cities to work in restaurants. His father’s relatives talked up young Gao’s case, as did a respected high-school teacher who told the elder Gao how hardworking his son was.

The clincher: “He told me, ‘If I let him get a college degree, he’d make more money,’” the elder Gao recalls.

[…] Gao Yueqing is set to graduate this June with a degree in accounting, the most practical major he and his father could agree upon. But the younger Mr. Gao, like many Chinese college students, is finding it hard to nail a job, especially one that pays decently.

See also ‘In China, Betting It All on a Child in College‘, via CDT.

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Post tags: civil service, entrepreneurs, graduates, job market, labor market, private sector, state-owned enterprises, unemployment
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Wang Zengsong is desperate for a steady job. He has been unemployed for most of the three years since he graduated from a community college here after growing up on a rice farm. Mr. Wang, 25, has worked only several months at a time in low-paying jobs, once as a shopping mall guard, another time as a restaurant waiter and most recently as an office building security guard.

[…] “I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he asked.

Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are asking the same question. A result is an anomaly: Jobs go begging in factories while many educated young workers are unemployed or underemployed. A national survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university, showed that among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.

See more about China’s “ant tribe” of un- or underemployed graduates via CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ant Tribe, college graduate joblessness, factory workers, graduates, manufacturing, unemployment, white collar
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Often the first from their families to finish even high school, ambitious graduates like Ms. Liu are part of an unprecedented wave of young people all around China who were supposed to move the country’s labor-dependent economy toward a white-collar future. In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.

It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.

“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability.”

Read more about the “ant tribes” via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ant Tribe, college graduate joblessness, graduates, unemployment
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The Chinese born after 1980 are among the most privileged generation in China’s long history. Living after the communist government gave up the radical politics that tossed their parents and grandparents between chaos and penury, they have known only ever-rising levels of prosperity.

In their lifetimes, gleaming new office towers have remade China’s cities. Hundreds of millions have been lifted from poverty. Travel abroad, private cars and apartments and a university education – all once the preserve of the elite – are increasingly common.

Vibrant megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai are the epitome of this good life. So the ant generation comes, bringing its aspirations.

But their very abundance keeps entry-level salaries low, while housing and other costs rise. Real estate prices have doubled in just three years in major cities, outpacing a 40 percent increase in urban wages from 2005 to 2009.

“This is the biggest struggle for China’s young generation today,” says Liu Neng, a sociology professor at Beijing University. “People in their 40s and 50s, now leaders in society, have already experienced hardships, but it’s the younger generation’s turn to face challenges before they become part of the country’s elite.”

Read more about the Ant Tribe via CDT.

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Post tags: Ant Tribe, graduates, IT industry, job market
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We reached Tangjialing after leaving behind Beijing’s smooth six and eight-lane highways and gleaming skyscrapers, the cheap KFCs and luxury malls. We drove past barren farmland and stopped under an arch that proclaimed we had reached Tangjialing. Beyond it, stood crowds of students waiting for buses while they munched pancakes and steamed buns sold on handcarts.

There was no coffeeshop or a teahouse in sight, just rows of former two-storey buildings where fifth and sixth floors had been added to accommodate the business of migrants. An unknown number of these residents depend on public toilets and baths hundreds of meters away from their 10 sq m cubbyholes.

Tangjialing has become a centre of Chinese media attention as a reflection of the fast-paced economy’s inability to create enough meaningful jobs for the annual six million-plus Chinese graduates in their own hometowns. When we wandered down the narrow streets, the students refused to chat.

But Sheng Fei Guo, a bespectacled intern who wears his IBM identity card even on weekends, showed us his spartan one-room apartment worth 500 yuan (Rs 3,500) in rent. We asked him if there was a community place with benches where we could chat. He laughed.

Beijing Today writes that Tangjialing is soon to be bulldozed and rebuilt.

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Post tags: employment, graduates, Tangjialing
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Some estimate that 30 percent of Chinese engineering students will not find jobs after graduation and that the average pay of the college graduates is now approaching that of rural migrant workers. At the same time, factories in Guangdong province cannot find enough labor. What is going on?

The idea that China is running out of unskilled labor is a myth. The news reports typically concentrate on Guangdong but this does not mean the country as a whole is short of unskilled labor. Development in rural areas in the past six years has meant that rural residents, previously denied economic opportunities close to home, now have a choice between going to Guangdong and staying in their hometowns. Many choose to stay. Any “labor shortage” in Guangdong is mostly evidence that the factories should not be located there in the first place.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: employment, graduates, labor shortage
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On the last day of 2009, Snow Li, a 24-year-old law school postgraduate student, arose at 7 am and went online to search for company information.

Li wasn’t preparing a court case but instead getting ready for an interview at a local bank’s law department. Since she finished her second year at China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) last July, Li, like many of her classmates, has been looking for work. She sent out nearly 50 resumes to State-owned companies, banks and law firms, but this is only the third interview she has received.

“Most of my classmates started looking for a job in July, but none of them has had an offer so far,” said Li.

“I really want to be a lawyer or get a job related to law. But if I can’t find one eventually, I will have to turn to some administrative work or jobs less relevant to law.”

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: education, graduates
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Back when Deng Kun was in college, studying biomedical engineering, he imagined himself working for a company like GE by now, helping to design state-of-the-art medical equipment.

Instead, he spends a lot of his time in the cramped and chilly room he shares with a friend in the outskirts of Beijing, playing video games or trying to line up a job as a salesman.

Mr. Deng moved to the capital when he graduated, he says, because “I thought there would be a lot of opportunities here.” He soon found out, though, that “it is not very easy to find a job as an engineer.”

Deng is a member of the “Ant Tribe,” as sociologist Lian Si has dubbed the swelling ranks of underemployed or underpaid Chinese university graduates frustrated by their failure to fulfill their ambitions.

© Liu Yong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Everyone in China who has been to high school has such a file. The files are irreplaceable histories of achievement and failure, the starting point for potential employers, government officials and others judging an individual’s worth. Often keys to the future, they are locked tight in government, school or workplace cabinets to eliminate any chance they might vanish.

But two years ago, Mr. Xue’s file did vanish. So did the files of at least 10 others, all 2006 college graduates with exemplary records, all from poor families living near this gritty north-central town on the wide banks of the Yellow River.

With the Manila folders went their futures, they say.

Local officials said the files were lost when state workers moved them from the first to the second floor of a government building. But the graduates say they believe officials stole the files and sold them to underachievers seeking new identities and better job prospects — a claim bolstered by a string of similar cases across China.

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Post tags: education, graduates, identity theft, personal files
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For Miss Liu, the daughter of poor farmers, a degree was to be her passport out of a life of poverty, a way to escape working in the fields, or toiling as a humble migrant worker in a far-off factory in southern China.

But her dream of making the huge leap from farm girl to college graduate will never become reality. Deeply depressed and ashamed about her failure to find a job to take up when she graduated, and consumed with guilt about the financial sacrifices her family had made for her, Miss Liu brought her studies and her life to a premature end by drowning herself in a ditch full of freezing, filthy water.

[...] Miss Liu’s reaction to her predicament was extreme, but not unusual. In April, a report by the Shanghai Education Commission listed suicide as the leading cause of death among students. And with one in three of this year’s graduates unable to get a job, according to education ministry figures released last week, Miss Liu’s anxiety about finding work is shared by most students.

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Some Chinese universities have inflated graduate employment figures by issuing bogus work contracts as millions struggle to find work amid the downturn, an official newspaper said on Tuesday.

The financial crisis has intensified the problem of graduate unemployment, which stems from rapidly increasing enrolment at Chinese universities, many of which fail to adequately train their graduates.

If widespread, this could cast doubt on recent official reports that graduate unemployment has now substantially eased, with an estimated 6.1 million new graduates in China this year.

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Sun Yizhen considered her university degree in international trade the ticket to a prestigious career with a state-owned enterprise like Bank of China Ltd. in Beijing. Instead, she found herself huddled against a freezing wind in a middle school parking lot in Huai’an, waiting to interview for a job with the local tax collector.

“I never thought I’d go for civil-servant jobs,” said Sun, 21. “But the financial crisis is something that none of us would expect. We’re just desperate.”

The global financial meltdown is taking a toll on this year’s 6.1 million Chinese college graduates and the 1 million still unemployed from last year. The government said the 2009 official urban registered unemployment rate may reach 4.6 percent — a three-decade high — as collapsing exports drag gross domestic product to its lowest growth rate in nine years.

That is turning off the pipeline depositing new graduates with multinational corporations and state companies, forcing many students to lower their sights and consider the once- unthinkable for them: a civil-service career. The last test for central government openings attracted about 775,000 candidates – - or 56 for every job, a 20 percent jump from the year before.

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It is the one business that is never short of clients, and 366 college graduates will this week find out if the city’s funeral industry is the answer to their desperate job search.

The students have all applied for more than 300 vacancies at 18 funeral homes and cemeteries, with pre-interview training to find out if any have what it takes to survive in the trade starting yesterday.

But despite being a business that has had little to fear from the global financial crisis, dealing with the dead is not everyone’s cup of cha. “Working in the industry is considered morbid and I hope you are fully prepared and make a sensible choice,” said Wang Hongjie, of the civil affairs bureau’s funeral and crematory division, as he addressed the hopefuls.

© Sophia Cao for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: financial crisis 2008-2009, funerals, graduates, job markets, Shanghai
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The global financial crisis could hardly have struck China’s university campuses at a worse time. Even before economic growth began slowing last year, graduates had been having a tough time getting jobs thanks to a surge in college enrolment. This year 6.1m students will graduate from Chinese universities, nearly six times as many as in 2000. Next year the figure is expected to rise to about 7m. In 2011 it will reach a peak of nearly 7.6m according to Beijing Evening News, a state-owned newspaper.

[...]In 2006 the government was already trying to find something useful for graduates to do by encouraging them to take up jobs in villages as assistants to rural officials. They were promised preferential treatment after three years in the countryside when applying for civil-service jobs or for places in graduate school. Beijing municipality, which includes a large rural hinterland, says it has already fulfilled its goal of installing two graduates in every village. Last year there were 17,000 applicants in the city for 3,000 such posts. Now the government worries that the first to enroll in this scheme are about to finish their three years and return to seek their employment rewards. In Beijing, officials have urged them to extend their contracts.

The government might draw comfort from a growing interest among university students in joining the Communist Party. In some colleges most of them have put in applications. More than 8% of students are now members, compared with just over 1% in 1990. As party literature laments, however, this is often far less about love for the Communist cause than it is about burnishing credentials. In the Beijing Institute of Technology, a student at the job fair brandishes a CV with the eye-catching words “Communist Party member” at the top.

Xinhua reports on the government’s job creation efforts:

China’s government has pledged to create 1 million jobs for college graduates in the service outsourcing industry in five years.

A document issued by the ministries of education and commerce Friday said China would have 1.2 million trained service outsourcing personnel in a sector worth 30 billion U.S. dollars by 2013.

Outsourcing services include research and development in software, product technology and information technology, and industrial design.

Read more on the job market situation in China here.

© Paulina Hartono for China Digital Times (CDT), 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: graduates, job market, unemployment
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