Rising unemployment in China due to the COVID-19 pandemic could benefit the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by allowing it to attract new, better educated recruits, a Taiwanese security researcher said on Friday.
Chen Ying-hsuan (陳穎萱), a policy analyst at the Division of Chinese Politics and Military Affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a government-funded think tank, made the remarks in an article published in the Defense Security Biweekly magazine.
About 8.74 million university students are expected to graduate in China next month, while Chinese companies’ demand for fresh graduates fell 16.77 percent annually in the first quarter of this year, Chen said in the article, titled “Worsening Unemployment Shaking China’s Efforts to Maintain Stability.”
Six Chinese government departments early this month launched a joint action plan to help new graduates cope with difficulties in finding jobs, especially at a time when the pandemic has forced businesses to stop hiring, she said.
One of the 10 initiatives in the action plan is to use incentives to recruit more university graduates to the PLA, Chen said.
“The unemployment wave could lure more good-quality university graduates to consider joining the military, thus helping the PLA’s plight of having difficulty recruiting the specialized personnel it needs,” Chen said.
“We should continue to watch the results of this recruitment plan and observe whether the PLA’s human capital and its battle capabilities improve,” she said.
Chen did not provide numbers, but according to a Foreign Policy magazine article published in August 2016, nearly 150,000 of the PLA’s 400,000 annual recruits in 2014 were college students and graduates.
While retention continues to be a challenge and high-school graduates still comprise the largest single source of recruits, the PLA is increasingly focusing on education, the article said.
Chen also said that China is facing a threat of labor unrest, as the communist country’s true unemployment rate is said to have reached 20 percent, citing an estimate from Chinese economic analyst Li Xunlei (李迅雷), whose report was taken down from his social media account on April 26, the same day he posted it.
China has recorded at least 168 cases of mass labor protests since January, Chen said, citing data from the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based non-governmental organization.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods