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The youth unemployment rate in China reached a new record in May and is expected to rise further in July 2023. Faced with this new labor market reality, some take it with humor. Curious graduation photos featuring “undead” students have surfaced on social media in recent weeks.
First modification:
With RFI’s Beijing correspondent Stéphane Lagarde and Louise May from the Beijing bureau
With her body and arms folded on a fence, lying face down on a railing or in front of the university entrance, Zhang seeks to denounce not the system, but a certain absurdity of existence: spending years studying for the end, not being sure to find a job.
“I discovered these photos of undead students on social media. I found it funny and interesting. I didn’t think about the Tangping*, but I liked the zombie style. It really shows how exhausted you feel at the end of a master’s degree,” says the former architecture student in Wuhan.
These “zombie selfies” are a far cry from the traditional plain graduation photos, even photoshopped, bouquet of flowers in hand and textbook under arm, he points out. at a time when almost 12 million recent graduates have just entered the Chinese job market, a record.
strong unemployment
Another record is unemployment among young people between the ages of 16 and 24, which reached 20.8% last May. Companies are reluctant to hire due to weak demand.
From there to “stay lying”, “tangping” in Mandarin, is a step that the former architecture student, who has found work in the administration, did not want to take: “Half of the master’s students have found work, the rest are still looking. It’s probably because the general atmosphere is not good. There are many exhausting and low-paying jobs. For this reason, many try to enter the civil service. And there are too many graduates.”
Too many graduates in some sectors, but few hands in the factories. The government has launched an educational reform to make up for the lack of employees in the industry. “Insufficient!” say some young Chinese, who wondered about the meaning of life during the Covid years and are now tired of long and stressful working hours, for wages that are sometimes barely enough to live in Chinese megacities, where the cost of living has risen a lot.
* Tangping is a term that appeared in China in 2021, referring to the attitude of some young people to reject the social pressures of the work culture, opting to “lie down, without desire or demand”.
