Coronavirus: China tweaks graduate employment rate to include students who find ‘work’ as gamers, bloggers

Name: Coronavirus: What’s going to happen to China’s economy?
Uploaded: 2020-07-06T12:00:08.000Z
Duration: 5 min 59 s
Description: Coronavirus: What’s going to happen to China’s economy?

Graduates who find ‘work’ as competitive gamers and bloggers after finishing university will now be classified as employed in China

Change in criteria has fanned speculation Beijing is trying to inflate employment figures for young graduates amid a worsening jobs market

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Some 8.7 million Chinese college students on track to graduate this summer, but they will enter the worst job market in recent memory. Photo: Xinhua

Sidney Leng

Published: 8:00pm, 6 Jul 2020Updated: 10:36pm, 6 Jul 2020

China has expanded the definition of “employed” for 8.7 million fresh college graduates to cover those that open online shops, play competitive online games or have blogs, as part of an effort to boost the employment rate amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The Ministry of Education ordered universities at the end of June to take note of the new criteria when reporting the employment rate of graduates, according to an official note published by many institutions.

The change comes as the world’s second biggest economy faces huge pressure to create enough jobs for students, one of the most vulnerable groups amid the country’s economic slowdown.

While China’s surveyed-jobless rate was 5.9 per cent at the end of May, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), analysts said the real unemployment could be much higher as many of the country’s 290 million migrant workers are excluded from the official statistics.

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Coronavirus: What’s going to happen to China’s economy?

According to the education ministry notice, dated June 29, new graduates who open e-commerce websites will be grouped as “employed” as long as they can provide a link to the online shop and its registration information.