In China, the young struggle to find work

Xi recommends that they ‘eat bitterness’

Gloria Li is desperate to find a job. Graduating in June with a master’s degree in graphic design, she started looking last fall, hoping to find an entry-level position that pays about $1,000 a month in a big city in central China. The few offers she has gotten are internships that pay $200 to $300 a month, with no benefits.

Over two days in May, she messaged more than 200 recruiters and sent her resume to 32 companies — and lined up exactly two interviews. She said she would take any offer, including sales, which she was reluctant to consider previously.

“A decade or so ago, China was thriving and full of opportunities,” she said in a phone interview. “Now, even if I want to strive for opportunities, I don’t know which direction I should turn to.”

China’s young people are facing record-high unemployment as the country’s recovery from the pandemic is fluttering. They’re struggling professionally and emotionally. Yet the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, are telling them to stop thinking they are above doing manual work or moving to the countryside. They should learn to “eat bitterness,” Xi instructed, using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.

Many young Chinese aren’t buying it. They argue that they studied hard to get a college or graduate school degree, only to find a shrinking job market, falling pay scale and longer work hours. Now the government is telling them to put up with hardships. But for what?

“Asking us to eat bitterness is like a deception, a way of hoping that we will unconditionally dedicate ourselves and undertake tasks that they themselves are unwilling to do,” said Li.

People like Li were lectured by their parents and teachers about the virtues of hardship. Now they are hearing it from the head of state.

“The countless instances of success in life demonstrate that in one’s youth, choosing to eat bitterness is also choosing to reap rewards,” Xi was quoted in a front-page article in the official People’s Daily on Youth Day in May.

The article, about Xi’s expectations of the young generation, mentioned “eat bitterness” five times. He has also repeatedly urged the young people to “seek self-inflicted hardships,” using his own experience of working in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

A record 11.6 million college graduates are entering the workforce this year, and 1 in 5 young people are unemployed. China’s leadership is hoping to persuade a generation that grew up amid mostly rising prosperity to accept a different reality.

OFFICIAL GASLIGHTING

The youth unemployment rate is a statistic the Chinese Communist Party takes seriously because it believes that idle young people could threaten its rule. Mao Zedong sent more than 16 million urban youth, including Xi, to toil in the fields of the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. The return of these jobless young people to cities after the Cultural Revolution, in part, forced the party to embrace selfemployment, or jobs outside the state planned economy.

Today the party’s propaganda machine is spinning stories about young people making a decent living by delivering meals, recycling garbage, setting up food stalls, and fishing and farming. It’s a form of official gaslighting, trying to deflect accountability from the government for its economy-crushing policies like cracking down on the private sector, imposing unnecessarily harsh Covid restrictions and isolating China’s trading partners.

Many people are struggling emotionally. A young woman in Shanghai named Zhang, who graduated last year with a master’s degree in city planning, has sent out 130 resumes and secured no job offers and only a handful of interviews. Living in a 100-squarefoot bedroom in a three-bedroom apartment, she barely gets by with a monthly income of less than $700 as a part-time tutor.

“At my emotional low point, I wished I were a robot,” she said. “I thought to myself, if I didn’t have emotions, I would not feel helpless, powerless and disappointed. I would be able to keep sending out resumes.”

But she realised she shouldn’t be too harsh on herself. The problems are bigger than her. She doesn’t buy into the eating bitterness talk.

“To ask us to endure hardships is to try to shift focus from the anemic economic growth and the decreasing job opportunities,” said Zhang, who, like most people interviewed, wanted to be identified with only her family name because of safety concerns. A few others want to be identified only with their English names.

The party’s messaging is effective with some people. Guo, a data analyst in Shanghai who has been unemployed since last summer, said he doesn’t want to blame his joblessness on the pandemic or the Communist Party. He blames his own lack of luck and capabilities.

He cancelled his online games and music subscriptions. To make ends meet, he delivered meals last December, working 11 to 12 hours a day. In the end, he made a little over $700 a month.

He quit because the work was too physically exhausting. In other words, he failed in eating bitterness.

THE CHINESE DREAM

Xi’s instruction to move to the countryside is equally out of touch with young people as it is with China’s reality. In December, he told officials “to systematically guide college graduates to rural areas.” On Youth Day recently, he responded to a letter by a group of agriculture students who work in rural areas, praising them for “seeking selfinflicted hardships.” The letter, published on the front page of the People’s Daily, triggered discussions about whether Xi would start a Maoist-style campaign to send urban youths to the countryside.

Such a policy would devastate the Chinese dream of moving up socially that many young people, as well as their parents, hold dearly.

Wang, a former advertising executive in Kunming in southwestern China, has been unemployed since December 2021 after the pandemic hit his industry hard. He talked to his parents, both farmers, about moving back to their village and starting a pig farm, but they were vehemently against the idea. “They said they spent a lot of money on my education so I would not become a farmer,” he said.

In hierarchical Chinese society, manual jobs are looked down upon, and farming ranks even lower because of the huge wealth gap between cities and rural areas.

“Women wouldn’t consider to become my girlfriends if they knew that I deliver meals,” said Wang. He would fare even worse in the marriage market if he became a farmer.