How China Made a Youth Unemployment Crisis Disappear
Back in June, when China’s youth unemployment rate hit a record 21.3%, Western analysts saw it as a sign of a moribund recovery. China’s ministry of statistics responded by announcing it would no longer publish the statistic. Six months on, that move might have had the desired effect.
One out of every five young people without a job would typically be considered a crisis. But in the absence of data, the state of China’s youth labor market has become a matter of anecdote and guesswork, which is likely how Beijing wants it. “They rig their numbers and, when their numbers get embarrassing, they stop producing them," said Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies China’s economy.
“They will get away with it. After a while you’ll have nothing to discuss." The anecdotes and private data we do have show something is still amiss. The polling firm Morning Consult runs a daily consumer sentiment tracking survey in China that shows younger people have consistently lower sentiment than older groups, underlining how much more unsatisfied, economically, the youth remain.
(In the U.S., by contrast, young people tend to have better sentiment than older cohorts.) Anecdotally, there is a “lying flat" movement, where disenchanted young people opt out of the job market entirely. David Bandurski of the China Media Project, which studies the Chinese media landscape, traces the phrase to a viral social-media post from an unemployed youth titled “lying flat is justice," which inspired an entire movement “to opt out of the struggle for workplace success, and to reject the promise of consumer fulfillment." It has clearly appealed to some Chinese youth on social media. But how prevalent is it really? No one
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