China's Youth Unemployment CRISIS – Why China's Gen Z is "Letting it Rot"
China’s economy is facing a lot of big problems right now, but perhaps the biggest is the country’s widespread youth unemployment. You see, Over 1 in 5 young people in China are now unemployed according to the country’s official data with youth unemployment hitting 21.3% in June. And as high as that number is, some economists think that there are reasons to believe that the real number is much much worse.
China’s youth unemployment crisis has gotten so bad, that the country even announced that it will no longer be reporting the numbers in the future as China continues to try to suppress access to information about its floundering economy.
So what exactly is causing this massive youth unemployment? There are quite a few factors at play and they can loosely be divided into two categories: social unrest among the Chinese youth and widespread economic problems.
Let’s start by examining the social unrest. In recent years, there has been backlash from young Chinese people who are rejecting China’s work culture. China has a hyper competitive culture with massive pressure placed on people to succeed. Many Chinese families are very concerned with how to remain in China’s middle class and to have their children improve their social and economic status. China’s hustle culture and focus on climbing the social and economic ladder has led to immense pressure for China’s youth to succeed in school, work, and life.
This hustle culture can be best seen in what’s called China’s “9-9-6” work culture. The “9-9-6” is a work schedule that’s used by many of China’s largest companies and industries and it means that employees are expected to work from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week. Working 12 hour days 6 days out of the week means that many Chinese people are consistently putting in 72 hour work weeks. The “9-9-6” lifestyle has been promoted by some of China’s largest business executives such as Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, who notoriously called the 72 hour work week a blessing. While China’s government has labor laws that are supposed to prevent companies from overworking employees like this , these laws are not enforced by the government since they hinder economic growth. This lack of labor law enforcement and the “9-9-6” culture has even led to employees suddenly dying due to exhaustion and health complications from working excessively long hours.
With many young Chinese people feeling that it is impossible to get ahead even with hard work, many are rebelling against the status quo and China’s “9-9-6” work culture. Two of the most prevalent movements against this work culture have been the “lying flat” and “let it rot” movements. “Lying flat” is a term used to describe rejecting the social pressure in China to overwork and overachieve and looks to set more modest goals – many Chinese youth who subscribe to this movement are minimalist and look only to meet their basic needs, not wanting to work longer hours beyond that point to improve their status. The phenomenon has also been compared to the great resignation and quiet quitting phenomenons in the west doe to their ideological similarities. The term “lying flat” originated from a Chinese social media post and quickly gained traction before the Chinese Communist Party censored the term and began to publicly and harshly criticize the practice.
The “let it rot” movement in China is similar to “Lying flat”, but is more nihilistic and much more explicitly critical and despairing of China’s hustle culture. The term refers to how many young Chinese people have stopped caring altogether about trying to improve their situation and instead are content with letting things deteriorate further and letting the system rot. The lack of work opportunity and social mobility has led many young Chinese people to give up on the idea of a job altogether which has led to higher unemployment and growing concern from the Chinese government. When you factor in the Chinese youth that are not employed, aren’t currently studying, and are not currently looking for work, it’s estimated by some economists that China’s youth jobless rate might actually be as high as 46.5%.
But China's youth unemployment situation is not simply due to a lack of motivation – a wide variety of economic factors have combined to create a poor job market for young people in China. As China’s economic situation has continued to get worse by most economic data benchmarks, many businesses are simply not looking to hire. And this scarce job market is hitting young Chinese people especially hard – the labor market is competitive, so businesses aren’t particularly inclined to hire young inexperienced workers that they would need to train when there are a lot of more qualified and experienced candidates that are also applying to the same jobs.
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