An unusually public claim by a Chinese professor that the national youth jobless rate might have hit close to 50 percent in March has stoked a debate about official data and a soft labor market, despite curbs on negative portrayals of the economy.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics said that month’s jobless rate for people aged 16 to 24 was 19.7 percent, less than half of what Peking University associate professor Zhang Dandan (張丹丹) estimated.
If 16 million non-students “lying flat” at home or relying on their parents were included, the rate at that time could have been as high as 46.5 percent, Zhang wrote in an online article in the financial magazine Caixin.
Photo: Reuters
The article by Zhang, associate professor of Economics at the university’s National School of Development, was published on Monday, but has since been removed.
The official youth jobless rate, which only includes people actively seeking work, rose further to a record 21.3 percent last month. Policymakers have struggled to put the economy on a more stable footing since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zhang’s research focused in part on the impact of the outbreak on the manufacturing hubs of Suzhou and Kunshan in eastern China.
“Employment there only recovered to two-thirds of pre-COVID levels till March, when COVID faded,” she wrote. “Young people remain major workers in the manufacturing sector, so they were hit more badly.”
Additionally, regulations introduced since 2021 in the tutoring, property and online platform sectors have disproportionately hit young employees and the well-educated, she said.
Calls by Reuters to Zhang’s work phone went unanswered and the statistics bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One user on Sina Weibo yesterday said Zhang’s statistical methodology was flawed, as economists generally do not count people who are not actively seeking work when compiling estimates for joblessness.
However, other social media users focused on how hard it still is to find a job in China.
“The reason why so many graduate students flock to sit postgraduate or civil servant exams instead of looking for jobs is because they just cannot find jobs,” one Weibo user wrote.
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