Yaokun Shen is a contributing writer. He graduated from Trachtenberg with an MPP in Spring 2023.

A considerable number of Chinese workers have consciously “laid down” and “rot” instead of seeking employment, sending shockwaves through China’s economy. Rather than commit to high-pressure workplaces with long hours, low wages and discrimination, these workers have chosen to do the bare minimum to meet their needs and responsibilities. 

The lack of desire for job-seeking and the difficulties of being recruited in China’s current job market are the results of combined factors. One of the most prominent factors is the pressure for high performance in workplaces. The typical Chinese worker is expected to commit to compulsory overtime hours without additional pay, regardless of the distinction of their occupations. The iconic “996” schedule is the symbolic representative of the norms of long working hours, demanding office staff to work 12 hours a day, six days per week. Many laborers can only respond to their desperation in a passive manner, and their willingness to work is negatively affected by collusion between the bureaucracy and the businesses that blocks the possibility for workers to express their dissatisfaction.

Beyond the long working hours, Chinese workers are also suffering from veiled age discrimination. Employers in China often establish 35-year-old age restrictions for the candidates, forcing those who exceed this limit to leave work and be excluded from most of the positions in the job market. The “35-year-old curse” has widely spread to all sectors from the civil service to technology, which further increases the unemployment rate in China. Those businesses’ preference for younger workers is for cost-effectiveness; senior staff are comparatively higher paid. 

Traditional employees in Asia are expected to be ready to devote themselves to the benefits of the businesses while seldom thinking about their own interests, while the newest generation of Chinese workers has tended to reject such demands. Unlike the last generation, these new Chinese workers seek comprehensive benefits, i.e., safe working conditions, flexibility and work-life balance beyond merely increased wages associated with promotions. Under pressure to work as hard as possible for their lives after 35, with only scanty salaries to show for it, it’s unsurprising the desire to work has decreased.

The movement to voluntarily reject work threatens the economic and social stability of China, and the Chinese government has tried to persuade young people to “realize themselves through dedication” since 2021. However, the media campaigns did not meet their expectations of effectiveness, while further fueling dissatisfaction in society. Instead of figuring out and solving the essential economic and social problems that triggered the unwillingness to work, the media campaigns prefer rather to blame those who left their workplaces. In March 2023 the official media published articles criticizing the “Kong Yiji Literature(孔乙己文学),” blaming the young college graduates as similar to “Kong Yiji(孔乙己),” a known fictional figure in China who was well-educated but ended up in extreme poverty and humiliation. The Kong Yiji-analogy aimed to target the privileged sentiments of those college graduates who declined to take jobs not “prestigious enough,” while such narratives understated the difficulties of employment and the financial burdens of the public during the economic slowdown since the initiation of pandemic lockdowns in 2020. The public raised further criticisms of the Kong Yiji rhetoric as the government showed no intention of assisting the people suffering from unemployment.

Official media publications are also trying to motivate the public to increase their incomes through hard work. Coverage is given to stories of people who made fortunes through endless endeavors, and these stories spread quickly nationwide. Despite its spread, the correspondence is not that popular. One video of CCTV praising a physical worker angered its audience, who viewed it as apathetic to how he struggled to make a living while only focusing on the virtue of difficult labor. In addition, people have gotten bored with the exaggeration of the media’s propaganda and the glossary stories of how people benefited from ventures, while deliberately ignore the miseries and suffers of the low-income groups. 

Challenges in propaganda are only one obstacle for China’s failed labor policy to maximize the impacts of the increasing number of new graduates from the nation’s competitive universities. China’s youth unemployment rate jumped to 21.3% in June, revealing the extreme economic atmosphere in the post-Covid era. The obstacles of China’s policy are, while Beijing is reluctant to ease its controls in the economy, the Party-State has yet to reinstate or create new jobs to accommodate the unemployed young graduates. The industrial shutdown during the pandemic threatened the jobs in service sectors where many of the young generations found employment. China’s policies, unsurprisingly, thwarted young people’s efforts to secure their jobs, as the focus remained on neutralizing the influences of private sectors. The crackdown against the education industry in 2021 evacuated the entire tutoring industry within weeks, resulted in the immediate unemployment of numerous college graduates who heavily relied on the thriving tutoring industry, directly or indirectly. The clashes from tech to education hampered the service industry’s development and the employment rates as well.

Contrary to its preference for state intervention, China’s rejections of the welfare systems have doomed its effectiveness in economic recovery. China’s fear in welfarism that will end up feeding “parasites” to the society pushed Beijing to be more than cautious in investing in the people’s livelihood. The shrinkage in income and rising expenditures forced the local governments – the direct providers – to cut their budgets in social welfare, including health insurance benefits, pensions and salaries for civil service and public institutions. The cuts in government spendings are exaggerating the public’s anxiety of job insecurity and are stimulating more new graduates to seek their fortune in applying for governmental jobs, only for hedging their stakes on jobs of public institutions, still comparably more stable, against uncertainties at this time. For those who did not survive the fierce competition between a record-high number of applicants into the civil service systems, the only option is to find breadwinning jobs and manage to survive being “laid down.”

So far the CCP still takes the stance that the economic problems in China are the subsequent effect of the inefficient supply side of the labor market, not from weak demand. The burdensome manipulations of the economy have obstructed the operation of market systems, and neither policy projects nor media products are widely accepted by the public. Due to the debt crisis in local governments constraining them from creating jobs by infrastructure investment — the chosen intervention during the financial crisis in 2008 that heavily increased government spending to stimulate the economy — China has limited options to stabilize unemployment. Beijing seems to be far away from rehabilitating the confidence of investors, consumers and young workers alike. Exhausted by rhetoric about the illusionary achievements of dedication, many will continue to accept their fates to be “rotten.”  

This piece was edited by Deputy Editor Kathleen Bever and Executive Editor Nathan Varnell.

Photo by Aleksandr Buynitskiy on Unsplash.