Burnt out or unemployed – China has more and more ‘boomerang children’ Japanese car manufacturer Nissan is recalling millions of cars

Xi Jinping once promised more education and less poverty. Today we know: Xi did not make empty promises. Chinese youth are better educated than ever and extreme poverty has decreased significantly. Yet more and more Chinese are doubting the policies of the father of the poverty reduction campaign. This is evident in the high youth unemployment, which highlights the dark side of China’s ‘economic miracle’.

Unemployed and burnt out

More education – Xi has kept this promise. Judging by the degrees, the youth in China are better educated than ever before. Nevertheless, many university graduates have difficulty finding suitable work.

One in five people between the ages of 16 and 24 is unemployed – and these are just the official figures. The number of graduates is also a record: many final exams have been postponed due to the pandemic. As a result, millions of university graduates entered the labor market with a delay. And that while the Chinese economy is faltering.

“There are too many graduates. And things are going badly in the IT industry. So I was hit twice,” 24-year-old software developer Shi Wei from Hangzhou, who is looking for a job as a web developer, told SRF.

Life as a “walking corpse”

Due to the lack of work, young professionals accept low wages and overtime. That was the experience of 32-year-old Jack Zheng, who was employed by a Chinese technology giant. Every day outside his working hours he had to answer about 7,000 text messages, he told the BBC. He describes this amount of work as “invisible overtime,” which is expected but not compensated. Due to lack of recovery, he had to give up the job. The stress caused him to develop a serious skin disease.

29-year-old game developer Julie is also burned out. She actually wanted to give up her 16-hour job for a job with better working conditions. But it didn’t come to that. Within two weeks she wrote more than 40 applications and received two phone calls for an interview, the Chinese tells the BBC. However, there was no offer. However, because she could no longer cope with the high workload, she resigned out of the blue.

More and more boomerang children

To take a break from work, Julie moves back to her parents. Since then, she has given up the monthly salary of 2,000 yuan (about CHF 240). Her parents would currently pay for her daily expenses, in return the young woman runs the household.

Julie is not alone in this decision. Chen Dudu, 27, also quit her real estate job because she felt burnt out and underpaid. “After I paid the rent, there was almost nothing left of my wages,” she told the BBC. She moved back to her parents, where she felt like a pensioner. Eventually she became self-employed.

996 working week

According to reports, more and more teenagers in China are suffering from burnout. Given China’s notoriously poor work-life balance, this is hardly surprising. Officially, China has a 40-hour working week. In fact, many Chinese companies operate on the 996 system—from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. This corresponds to a working time of 72 hours per week. For this reason, critics refer to 996 as “modern day slavery”.

Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma is one of the proponents of the 996 work week. “Personally, I think 996 is a great boon for career-oriented people.” Xi shares the same attitude. Due to high unemployment, the General Secretary of the Communist Party has repeatedly issued the following appeal: “Eat bitterness!”

Without complaining, young people should endure hardship to reap rewards, Xi said.

Pray for a better future

Young people want nothing to do with rewards. At least not that of the ‘lying flat’ movement (Tang Ping). The buzzword (including memes) is mainly found on Chinese social media platforms. The movement rejects societal pressure to revise and calls for a “flat” lifestyle. In other words, earn less (and consume less) to rest more.

However, given the demographic change, the pressure on the shoulders of young people will not diminish. The OECD predicts that by 2035 more than 20 percent of China’s population will be over 65 years old.

China’s answer to the uncertain future is: pray. According to a ticket portal, the demand for tickets to temples has tripled, especially among young people, ZDF reports. This is unusual for the secular People’s Republic, where people are only allowed to believe in the Chinese Communist Party.