The company gave an ultimatum to some 140 fresh graduates who had been employed there for just a few weeks: either resign with half a month’s salary or pick up a screwdriver and take a poorly paid job on the factory floor. More than 100 chose to leave. FEW COULD have predicted the fallout last month after Xingyu Automotive Lighting, a big car-parts maker in eastern China, decided it had hired too many people over the summer. In China, where worker-protection laws are feeble, sudden lay-offs of this sort are nasty, but hardly unheard of.
But this summer even the adjusted rate has been creeping up towards 20% as well (see chart).
When China’s official gauge of youth unemployment reached 20% in 2023, it caused so much alarm that officials suspended the data series and, after a few months, started releasing an “optimised” (and much lower) rate, based on a different methodology. They will be hoping that Xingyu’s humiliation will prompt private companies also to take note, says Jenny Chan, a sociologist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She says the government wants everyone to “share the national responsibility” and avoid lay-offs if at all possible.
Officials have already ordered state-owned companies to hire more graduates.
For a small daily fee of 30 yuan ($4.50) or so, people can sit at a desk, hang out by the office water cooler, and enjoy the routine of office life as they submit job applications (or scroll on their phones).
Some have dropped out of the rat race altogether and say they are now “lying flat”, or giving up finding a job until the economy improves. Others have become self-described “full-time children”, staying at home to cook and clean for their parents for pocket money. Since last year, offices have been set up in several cities across China by firms with names like “The Pretend to Work Company”. “There’s loads of pretend workers around here,” said one man in a T-shirt and shorts who had been laid off from a tech firm six months ago. For his part, he said he was taking a voluntary break from full-time employment to work on some of his own software projects.
Years of high youth unemployment are starting to reshape Chinese society. This intensely competitive country places a higher value on hard work than most. But now many young people are getting used to the fact that no one wants their labour. Those who cannot cope with so much family time can at least pretend to go to work. Public libraries are another favoured place for the pretend workforce to hang out. On a recent Thursday afternoon the tables in Beijing’s Capital Library, one of the city’s biggest, were packed with young folk. Some were polishing CVs; others playing computer games. And read a lot more books.
