When Chuhan* graduated from college, her parents fully expected her to take the Chinese National Civil Service Exam. Passing the highly competitive exam would allow her to work in “the system.”
The phrase collectively refers to China’s local governments, state-owned enterprises, and public institutions. “Coveted jobs in ‘the system’ can provide security, status, and help getting a more desirable hukou, a residential permit linked to access to local public services,” reports Reuters.
Chuhan is just one among an estimated 9.09 million Chinese graduates who will try to enter the workforce in 2021. The figure ballooned from a record high of 8.74 million graduates in 2020. “China’s young adults could very well find themselves in the most difficult environment ever to land jobs,” reports the South China Morning Post.
The coronavirus threw a monkey wrench into the plans of Chuhan and her peers, Qimo* and Muzi*. After countless firms froze headcounts, they face a shortage of jobs and increasing family pressure to find stable work. As a result, these young adults need to choose between their ideals and the need to earn a living. Here are their stories.
For these 2016 graduates, graduation was a fresh start. In contrast, the graduates of 2020 and 2021 face a bleak future.
Uneasy compromise
Chuhan firmly resisted the pressure from her conservative parents. She had a different career pathway in mind: to join an NGO or to go into journalism.
In college, she worked as a volunteer in the NGO Migrant Workers’ Home and as an intern journalist in Jianjiao Buluo, an independent website focusing on women workers. Her involvement in these activities opened Chuhan’s eyes to the inequities in Chinese society.
“The first time I saw the ‘handshake buildings’ in some cities in Southern China,” she said, “I was shocked by the stark contrast between the narrow smelly drainage ditches there and the upscale neighborhoods just opposite the buildings.”
Chuhan’s parents allowed their daughter to pursue her extracurricular activities. But as she was about to earn a postgraduate degree, they forbade her from applying for her dream job.
“The pandemic has brought my parents to a more (politically) conservative mindset,” explained Chuhan. Reading the news from push notifications, her parents would constantly say how well China survived the pandemic, sometimes using polarized expressions to stress the Sino-US conflict. She said, “Even during the very beginning when crucial information was concealed, they would put down their anger and say, we could do nothing other than protecting ourselves.”
Chuhan, on the other hand, refused to work in the government. After much discussion, they “each took a step back” and reached an uneasy compromise: she would train to be a teacher in a public school.
“Too many of my peers are heading for a teacher’s position that the human resource managers are spoiled for choice,” Chuhan said. It seems that, like her, many young adults reached a compromise with their parents. She observed that even schools in remote areas are crammed with teaching applicants from top-tier universities like Peking, Tsinghua, and Fudan.
A stopgap solution
For Qimo, college life was a constant flurry of discussing Marxist doctrine, working in the factory, and participating in labor protests. After graduation, Qimo believed that he would continue to work for labor rights and pursue his advocacy as a career.
Little did Qimo know that he would join the 3.77 million hopefuls who took the National Postgraduate Entrance Examination in December 2020. The figure marks a 10.6% increase from the year before.
Since well-paying jobs are scarce for China’s millions of university graduates, the government is encouraging the graduates to stay in school. China’s Ministry of Education announced that it would order universities to expand the number of master’s candidates by 189,000, a nearly 25% increase, to ease unemployment.
Qimo knows that getting into graduate school would not guarantee that he would get a good job. And he faces stiff competition, too. At the university to which he is applying, around 70% of competing candidates are former students who may have prepared for the exam for more than a year or may have lost their jobs amid the pandemic.
Still, Qimo said, “To be honest, I feel there is no other way out for me.” Since the 2018 crackdown on the labor protests at Jasic International, he has lost contact with many of his fellow activists. Some of them are detained through a scheme called Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location. Other activists are under de facto house arrest and are incommunicado.
Nearly all of the activists Qimo knows have undergone a process called “re-education and transformation.” They were made to watch scripted “confession videos” that are allegedly from other detained activists, subjected to frequent interrogations from the secret police or officials of their university’s Communist Party committee, and told that they “achieved nothing (in their activism) other than hurting workers and fellow comrades.”
Qimo was disheartened after their Marxist society disbanded. “What the secret police want to take away from you is your self-verification,” Qimo quoted one of his peers as saying. He continued, “Throughout the process, the pressure we have undergone was not only from the authorities, but also from self-doubt and our organizational mistakes.”
Qimo realized that “the old way proved impossible, yet the new way was yet to be found.” Standing at a crossroads, he hungers for a solid academic base. Amid the “re-education” from university’s Communist Party officials, Qimo intentionally reached out to progressive scholars, discussing social movements as well as China’s present and future.
“It is with the help of many people like these that I can deepen my knowledge and faith in Marxism,” concluded Qimo. He applied for a major in social studies that is related to Marxism and hopes for the best.
In pursuit of a dream
“How would you evaluate Fang Fang and her Wuhan Diary?” the chief editor of a Chinese independent media group asked Muzi in a job interview. The fresh graduate from a top university was applying to be a journalist at the media group.
In Fang Fang’s diary, the Chinese author described China’s anti-pandemic measures and called for government accountability. Chinese state media Global Times said that she “might have become just another handy tool for the West to sabotage Chinese people’s efforts to fight the COVID-19 outbreak.”
Muzi disagreed with this assessment. “Even if Fang Fang made one or two minor factual mistakes in her diary, it is not a reason for Chinese state media to question her motives,” he guardedly replied to the editor. Muzi continued, “As Fang Fang is not a journalist, she has no obligation to fact-check her diary.”
The chief editor smiled and said, “Even so, Fang Fang’s critics would still say, don’t wash your dirty linen in public.” Upon hearing this, Muzi realized that he was in the presence of a fellow dissident and dropped his guard.
Muzi said, “In college, my classmates and I created an independent blog specifically to expose the authority’s shortcomings.” Before the blog was censored, it amplified the #MeToo movement against sexual violence and harassment in Chinese universities by publishing timelines, interviews, and open letters. The blog was popular among student activists.
To Muzi’s surprise, his application as a journalist was accepted at the media group. Since then, he has been “invited to tea” and interrogated by the secret police, specifically after he interviewed female workers on gender equality.
Muzi has no regrets about his career choice. “It suits me better to be an observer and recorder,” he said. “Most of my classmates would not even talk about what they want to do as a career” as they weighed their options based solely on “materialistic standards.” He added that he is also unlike his activist friends “who are more prone to devote themselves to social movements.”
He concluded, “On the choice of profession, the pandemic serves only as the catalyst. It is still our value-based choices that inherently matter.”
In the past, graduates like these young adults belonging to the class of 2014 could compare notes at annual job fairs. As COVID-19 put a stop to traditional job fairs, the new graduates struggle to find scarce jobs online.
Finding a foothold
Chuhan would agree. Working as an intern teacher, she spoke out against the public shaming of students. She found this practice unfair and conveyed her views to her supervisor and fellow interns. Yet their feedback was, “If you were in this position, you would be the same.”
Chuhan did not agree with their opinion. She participated in an online workshop where she learned strategies on promoting equality in teaching practice from a renowned feminist. She also registered to volunteer in Wavelib, the library for the children of migrant workers that is run by the NGO New Citizen Program.
Chuhan now plans to work in a vocational high school. “Quite a few students in vocational high school are academically excellent enough to enter a general high school, yet it is hukou that is blocking them from doing so,” she said. She feels that teaching in a vocational high school would be a baby step toward leveling the playing field for these students. ●
* The identities of the interviewees in this story have been concealed for their safety.
Aloisa Lysandra, an independent journalist based in China, focuses on civic education, labor rights, and gender equality.
