When Li Huawen left her childhood home in China's northern Hebei province five years ago, she believed she was starting down a clearly charted course. She would go to Beijing, attend the prestigious China University of Political Science and Law, and emerge into the world's fastest growing economy with a plethora of job offers.
Instead, nearly a year after she graduated with a degree in financial management, Li was among tens of thousands of students and recent graduates at a job fair in Beijing, wandering for hours Sunday among the recruitment tables in the vast exhibition hall, looking for almost any kind of work at all.
It didn't go well. Though students were out in force -- organizers said they sold more than 40,000 tickets to the two-day job bazaar at the China International Exhibition Center -- actual employment opportunities were scarce. Many big Chinese and international companies that were star attractions in previous years didn't put up booths this time around as the global economic crisis rolls through China, forcing factory closings and mass layoffs across the country.
Li said she only gave her resume to one prospective employer among the 750 exhibitors and didn't hold out much hope of anything materializing from that. The thin, straight-haired 24-year-old is rapidly downsizing her expectations for the future; she's hoping to get into a master's program next fall, but is preparing herself mentally to have to leave Beijing to look for work in one of the smaller cities.
"My family knows that my university is a good one, so they thought I would have a good future after graduating. Now they will be happy if I can just find a common job," Li explained through a nervous smile. "So many people are graduating from university and the economy is not in a good situation. We are an unlucky generation."
That generation includes some 6.1 million graduating students who headed back to campuses Sunday for their final semester before they enter a job market that has tightened dramatically in recent months, even for those with degrees from top universities. Since only 70 per cent of the class of 2008 found jobs, the new graduates will be competing with more than 1 million former students like Li who graduated last year and are still looking for work.
With companies such as Lenovo Group, China's largest computer maker, announcing thousands of layoffs in recent weeks, many students are hoping to ride out the crisis by remaining in school for an extra few years. Others are taking whatever jobs are available to them. The state-run press has detailed the phenomena of recent university graduates -- some with master's degrees -- applying for jobs as nannies and domestic servants in the rich southern province of Guangdong. The People's Liberation Army has also reported a surge in college students enlisting.
"It's a painful time to be graduating. There's a lot of pressure this year," said Chen Li, a 21-year-old industry and commerce student. She said she had handed out dozens of resumes during her two weeks of searching, but while she has a couple of interviews lined up, she has no firm offers yet. "I'll have to take whatever opportunities I get, good or bad," Chen said, exchanging worried looks with her boyfriend.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. Until the economic crisis struck, many young Chinese believed that their country would continue to get richer and richer and that economic prosperity was all but guaranteed to those who had the education and skills to capitalize on the good times ahead. Poor families paid small fortunes to ensure their only children received postsecondary educations, and the number of annual university graduates quintupled between 1999 and 2006.
But a crisis that started when North American demand for Chinese-made products slowed, closing thousands of factories, has now trickled up to the white-collar economy. The Chinese government has repeatedly stated that unemployment among recent university graduates is one of the country's top concerns and a potential threat to social stability.
After five years of decline, the government's official unemployment rate rose to 4.2 percent at the end of 2008 from 4 percent a year earlier. But that number doesn't include either migrant workers or newly graduated students, and the respected China Academy of Social Sciences estimated last year that the real jobless rate to be 9.4 percent.
Even that figure was calculated before the worst of the economic crisis had set in -- the government has since estimated that 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs in the past few months, primarily due to factory closings. Official forecasts suggest that several million more could soon be out of work.
Though students at the job fair had anything but politics on their mind, some experts have predicted unrest as the economic downturn coincides with sensitive dates such as the 20th anniversary in June of the student-led protests on Tiananmen Square and the bloody government crackdown that followed.
"It is normal in periods of economic crisis that different groups will suffer more and choose to take some action," said Weiguo Yang, assistant dean of the school of labor and human resources at Renmin University in Beijing.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Canadian clients may not useMust credit Toronto Globe and Mail(All currency U.S.)
Post new comment