Young Chinese jobseekers who can’t find work feel increasingly lost in oversaturated labour pool

Students lament a ‘degradation of academic qualifications’ in China, as a master’s degree from a top university has become the threshold for many positions

Analysts do not expect China’s labour market to improve much for college graduates in the next year or two

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The latest jobs data shows that 17.1 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds in China were unemployed in November. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 10:00am, 16 Dec 2022Updated: 12:10pm, 16 Dec 2022

Armed with a master’s degree from Hong Kong and a bachelor’s from Canada, Zheng Sihan did not expect her job hunt in mainland China to be so difficult.

“This is my second time as a graduate looking for a job on the mainland,” said Zheng, who earned her undergraduate degree in accounting last year. “I didn’t receive a desirable job offer at that time, so I decided to take a postgraduate year and join a new round of mainland recruitment.”

But even after padding her résumé with an advanced degree, her hunt has yielded even less than it did last year.

“Finding a job on the mainland has become very hard,” Zheng lamented in Hong Kong, where she will finish up her postgraduate programme next year. “It’s getting harder year by year. I probably won’t go back to the mainland to find a job.”

Zheng is among millions of college graduates who have grown increasingly frustrated amid the employment situation in China.

China remains under the persistent pressure of job creation as its headline urban jobless rate rose to 5.7 per cent in November – the highest level since 5.9 per cent in May. And the unemployment rate among young people aged 16-24 remained at elevated level of 17.1 per cent, down from 17.9 in October.

The impact of China’s disruptive zero-Covid policy further complicated the job situation this year as record numbers of fresh university graduates continued to enter the labour pool – an annual trend that is expected to continue with an all-time high of 11.58 million graduates in 2023 – up 820,000 from this year, according to the Ministry of Education.

Meanwhile, graduates returning from overseas universities are also expected to bolster competition in the Chinese job market.