BEIJING – For China’s college graduates, 2023 is not a good year.

In a normal scenario, they would be gearing up to send out resumes to potential employers, hopeful of securing interviews as soon as possible.

Instead, a viral trend emerged after graduation ceremonies. Students took pictures of themselves lying horizontal on various surfaces still dressed in their graduation gowns, while others appeared to be tossing their degrees into rubbish bins. 

Many social media posts were hashtagged “tangping”, a term that came into vogue in recent years meaning to “lie flat” or give up on the rat race – a reaction to the hypercompetitive culture of overwork in the tech industry.

Shortly after graduation season in the summer, most of these pictures were scrubbed off the Internet. 

China’s youth unemployment rate came into sharp focus in 2023 following month after month of record-breaking numbers. The jobless rate among Chinese citizens aged 16 to 24 in urban areas peaked at 21.3 per cent in June 2023.

This saw the government halting the release of such statistics in August, citing a need to “refine” data gathering methods.

The worrying trend, which has been building over several years, has often been attributed to a lack of desirable, well-paying jobs as well as a slowdown in investment. Government crackdowns on the flourishing tech, education and property sectors made things worse. 

The country’s less-robust-than-expected economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic also did not help matters, with consumers tightening their purse strings and firms thinking twice about expanding and hiring.

At the same time, there has been a surge in the number of college-educated jobseekers over the past two decades – a record 11.58 million university students graduated in 2023. 

China’s leaders have been exhorting the young to stop thinking that they are above manual labour or moving to the countryside, with President Xi Jinping saying that they should learn to endure hardships, or chiku, which literally translates to “eat bitterness”.

Despite the tight job market, not all Chinese youth view their career paths with helplessness and pessimism.

While some choose to tangping or go for low paying jobs, others are adapting to the circumstances and forging their own paths. They are shunning white collar jobs that are perceived to have become juan – hypercompetitive and all-consuming.

This shift represents a significant departure from traditional career trajectories as more embrace an entrepreneurial spirit, noted Dr Christian Yao, a senior lecturer at the Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington who has studied China’s youth employment situation. 

Nearly 75 per cent of entrepreneurs start their first venture between the ages of 19 and 23, said a 2021 report by the China Foundation for Youth Entrepreneurship and Employment, an organisation linked to the Communist Youth League.

“The long-term effects of this trend are twofold. On the one hand, it fosters a culture of innovation, which can lead to a more dynamic and diversified economy,” Dr Yao said. 

“On the other hand, it underscores the necessity for reforms in both the educational sector and job market policies to better align with the needs and aspirations of the younger generation.”

To delve into the complexities of the issue not captured by macroeconomic statistics, The Straits Times spoke to four Chinese youth to elicit their views on employment. 

They spoke candidly about how they have carved out a niche for themselves and redefined personal success on their own terms, but also harbour fears about not progressing in the future.

Here are their stories:

‘I failed 7 out of 9 subjects in college’: Digital nomad from Sichuan

DALI, Yunnan – In laid-back Dali in Yunnan province, nestled between the Cang mountains and Erhai lake, a simply-furnished hostel was home to Mr Gou Xiaodong in November. 

In the historical tourist city, digital nomads like 25-year-old Mr Gou – who runs his own 15-room hostel in his hometown Sichuan remotely – are finding a place to call their own, bonding over long chats, Frisbee and hotpot sessions. 

The commune, called NCC (Nomad Co-Living and Co-Creating) was formed in May 2023. It brands itself as a safe space where views are respected and spontaneity is encouraged through shared accommodation. A single-person room costs 2,300 yuan (S$429) a month.

The ragtag group of people staying in the quiet neighbourhood include a PhD student in early childhood education, a founder of a tech start-up, and an insurance broker who is tethered to her phones and moves from city to city every month.

“They will remind you or check on you, if you’ve eaten when you’re too focused on your work. But the relationship is also not overly intimate,” said Mr Gou.

He shared that he moved to Dali for a month seeking answers to two philosophical questions: “Whether I can find an answer to the sense of insecurity because of the uncertainty of income, and whether I can find a balance between the need to work alone and to socialise.”  

The Straits Times visited the Sichuan native at the commune, where he was often hunched over his Macbook Air laptop corresponding with clients on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, China’s version of Instagram. As a side hustle, he charges an hourly fee of 599 yuan for business advice. 

His first taste of self-employment came when he was 19 and studying for an animation degree at Chengdu Neusoft University, a private college.

“In my first year of university, I failed seven out of nine subjects. I was embarrassed to ask my parents for money; I felt it was a shameful thing,” he recounted.

“The school fees were rather expensive, and my parents were already giving me a living allowance. So I thought it might be a good idea to earn money to cover the cost of retaking the failed subjects.”

He took on gigs such as writing social media advertisements – for 120 yuan a post – and selling tote bags that he designed.

Mr Gou, the elder of two children of parents who ran small businesses such as a hotel and selling fish, went on to complete his degree.

But he was dealt a blow in 2018 after a traffic accident that left him with injuries to his ribs and calf that he needed over a year to recover from.

To make up for lost time, he took a job as a project manager at a Chengdu firm that holds arts events for youth, and worked extra hard, even through public holidays.

Although he drew a comfortable 20,000 yuan monthly salary, he found the art industry’s economic landscape far from rosy in 2022.

“I realised that the industry was undergoing an upheaval. I was asked to find 30 bands to perform, on a budget of 300,000 yuan – and they still had to be somewhat popular. 

“I thought the client must be crazy. He told me, ‘There’s no choice – that’s the market now’. This was the first time I realised the profitability of the arts industry was on the decline.”

He later switched to running his own hostel in a tourist area in Xichang of Sichuan province in May 2023, investing about a million yuan raised through a bank loan, money from his family and his own savings. 

Now at 25, he makes about 8,000 to 10,000 yuan a month from his side hustles; his hostel business has yet to turn in a profit, although he has repaid the bank loan. 

He becomes animated when asked about his business, giving detailed explanations on aspects such as target audience, price sensitivity and peak seasons. 

While on a rented motorbike ride back to the Dali hostel from lunch at the nearby gucheng – a touristy old town lined with souvenir shops, food stalls and arcade games – Mr Gou, who is single, said his experiences over the past year have increased his yearning for home.

Work had kept him from celebrating Chinese New Year with his family this year, and he has even forgotten to send his parents well wishes on their birthdays. But he plans to return to Sichuan later in 2023 to spend time with his family, before Chinese New Year in February. 

The personal sacrifices that come with self-employment beat being caught up in the rat race, he said.

“One should escape the mindset of juan and the way in which one defines personal success. I should be the one defining my own terms of success.”

He added: “I’m determined not to engage in a game of endless competition that doesn’t create real value.”

‘I can’t compete even if I tried’: Guangxi finance undergrad

WUZHOU, Guangxi – Finance major Li Minlian wants to learn many things.

Hoping to pick up barista skills while working in a cafe, the 22-year-old also wants to pick up baking and floral arrangement.

“There’s no limit to what you can learn, so I just want to learn as much as possible.

“For instance in this shop, I’m an apprentice, so I don’t have to pay any fees and can learn how to make coffee like doing latte art and making pour overs,” she told The Straits Times at her workplace in Wuzhou. 

Miss Li is in the middle of an internship period, where students are given six months to gain work experience. 

About 17 times the size of Singapore, Wuzhou is a prefecture-level city with some 3 million inhabitants and three rivers running through it. Xi River, after which the local airport is named, is a major tributary of the Pearl River.

While well known for the black guilingao herbal jelly and liubaocha, a type of fermented tea much like pu’er from Yunnan, the city is largely off the beaten track.

Miss Li found her way to DoubleVee cafe after deciding she had enough of working as an assistant at a law firm in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi province, during the initial part of her six-month internship period.

Having to pay for rent, transportation and food on a 2,000 yuan salary left nothing at the end of the month, she said. She also found the work, which mostly involved photocopying documents and preparing rooms for meetings, boring and monotonous. 

Back in Wuzhou, she earns about the same amount working at the cafe, but the cost of living is much more affordable.

A meal can be had for as little as 12 yuan, and she lives in an apartment in the city owned by her parents, zipping around town on an electric scooter.

When customers come in, Miss Li greets them warmly, taking their orders in Mandarin or the local Cantonese dialect, switching effortlessly between the two while chatting with them when making drinks with practised ease.

A fan of multicoloured cakes and intricately assembled desserts, she dreams of opening her own cafe some day, but she also has a heavy dose of realism about her abilities. 

“When I was young, I wanted to be a lawyer as I felt it would be very cool if I could help people,” she said during a break.

“But then my results in school weren’t good enough and I didn’t score well in the undergraduate admission exam, so I gave up my dream.”

She eventually settled on a three-year programme on finance, which is a less popular major in her college compared to other disciplines.

Miss Li will graduate from Nanning College for Vocational Technology next spring. 

“To be honest, I have no great goals or ambitions right now. It’s my personality – I muddle along,” she told The Straits Times. 

“It’s not that I don’t want to take part in the rat race, I can’t juan even if I tried,” Miss Li said, using the Chinese term for “compete”.

She neither has the drive nor the qualifications to compete in the corporate world, she mused.

Most jobs require a four-year university degree as a requirement, but she has only a vocational education degree, which automatically eliminates her from many of the highly sought-after jobs. 

“When you’re working in an office, there’re also a lot of other factors to be mindful of, like your colleagues and your bosses… It’s too stressful for me, and quite meaningless.”

Videos on how to manage workplace relationships and even self-help books have been popular among some of her classmates, who are desperate to get a white collar job. 

“But I think to myself, if we go in at a lower entry point,” Miss Li said, referring to a vocational degree, “surely people will inadvertently look down on us, and you start the race running behind.”

Asked if she was really content to settle for a job that did not match her education level, she replied with a hint of irritation: “Is it that hard to comprehend that I just want to do a job where I can pick up skills to help me be self-sustaining?” 

Many eateries in the city are looking for help, because the food and beverage sector is still doing well, she said. 

On a rainy afternoon, there was barely an idle moment during Miss Li’s 4½ hour shift.

A non-stop flow of customers and take-out orders meant she was constantly slicing lemons for iced tea, quartering oranges for juices, or preparing portions of milk for various coffee drinks – two months in, her employer still does not trust her with pulling espresso shots.

“One step at a time – she’s got to get the basics right first,” said shop owner Avin Wen when asked why Miss Li was not making the coffee yet.

He said many of his former young employees usually learnt the basics and moved on to other opportunities.

Miss Li, who was within earshot, did not react. She simply continued clearing empty tables, grabbing an umbrella to take out the trash in the rain.

For now, she just wants to learn what she can for as long as she can. “Then I’ll know a bit of everything, so when I no longer want to work for someone else, I can open a little shop of my own.

“After all, I’m only 22.”

‘Something is wrong with our work culture’: Restaurant manager in Chongqing

CHONGQING – Barely four days into her new job at a Teochew restaurant, Ms Gao Yu has already identified several problems with her team members.

Most of her fellow wait staff stand around chatting unless there is a dish to be served, she says; they have a proclivity for lying to cover their tracks; and no one respects her authority as an assistant manager.

Tall and slim, with her hair cropped short, the 23-year-old speaks at length about the rationale of some of her career decisions, pausing only to puff on a cigarette.  

She worked at her family’s construction firm in Chongqing for nearly a year after graduation but felt extremely frustrated. Her parents, who started the company almost 30 years ago, did not heed her suggestion to modernise work processes. 

She said: “No one was telling me whether I did anything wrong, but my father didn’t trust me to deal with the clients.”

It prompted her to quit in August 2023 and move out of the family home, bunking in with an older friend and mentor while figuring out her next steps. She was jobless for three months.

“I’m lucky that my friends are supportive of me constantly trying to improve myself and pick up more skills, or to constantly push myself to do better,” she said. 

Ms Gao was raised mostly by her grandparents after her parents moved from Luoyang in Henan province to Chongqing three decades ago. There, they set up a construction firm, where they were subcontractors for several government-linked projects including, most recently, building temporary quarantine facilities for Covid-19 patients. 

But the slowing economy and property slump mean that business is no longer booming like before, a new reality her parents have found difficult to accept. 

“It means that at times we have to go out to pitch for business but my father isn’t willing to do that, especially if the people he’s pitching to are younger than him... This was a main point of contention when I was working with my parents,” she said.

“I felt that their set-up was very unprofessional, compared with all the other places I’ve worked at.” 

When she was studying computer science at the Chongqing University of Technology, Ms Gao dreamt of starting her own business.

She also toyed with the idea of working in a big company, even though interning at an e-payments firm left her disillusioned.

“As an intern, you’re not really trusted to do a lot, so most of my day was spent sitting behind a computer screen pretending to work hard, which a lot of my full-time colleagues were doing too. 

“But everyone stayed late and would not leave before the boss even if we had nothing to do. That’s when I realised something is seriously wrong with our work culture,” she said.  

While in college, Ms Gao also worked in a series of part-time jobs, first as a barista in a cafe, then in a bakery. Initially hired as a kitchen hand, she went on to work in customer service, manning the bakery’s WeChat account, a job she continued part-time even when working at her family firm. 

Again, she had disheartening encounters.

Ms Gao, who says she enjoyed the customer service aspect, took it upon herself to investigate customer complaints. “I tried to find out what happened but the shop’s staff got upset.”

Such incidents, and ones from her restaurant workplace, replay constantly in her head. “These interactions are what keep me up at night,” she said.

Eventually, she quit her part-time job at the bakery as it took a toll on her mental health. 

The older friend she is now staying with encourages her to take her setbacks less personally, but workplace incidents bear on her mind.

Speaking to The Straits Times over the course of two days, Ms Gao recounted several times how she had stepped up to apologise to a customer on her first day of work when a colleague at the Teochew restaurant broke the cork while opening a bottle of wine.

In each retelling, she comes to a different conclusion: that she had upset the dynamic between her co-workers; that her show of capability was a threat; or that she should have simply tried harder to be a team player. 

“Every day I try a bit harder to gel with my teammates, to try to make them speak more to me… I don’t know how much more I need to give for them to understand I’m not here to teach them how to do their jobs,” she said. 

She does not know if she will continue working in the restaurant. Money, she says, is not an issue if she quits, because she has enough savings for now.

In any case, turning to her parents for financial help or going to work in an office is out of the question.

“It just means that your life is very set, and you can only spend a certain amount of money every month. You’re just like the rest of the country, your spending becomes very limited and it’s a very monotonous existence.

“My greatest fear is being stagnant, doing something where I am not learning,” she said. 

‘I will never go back to regular work’: Speaking coach in Beijing

BEIJING - In Ms Shi Shaocong’s cosy living room in Beijing, which doubles as her workplace and recording studio, the public speaking coach adjusted her selfie camera, then broke into a fluent explanation on how to speak better in an impromptu manner.

A microphone clipped to her beige blazer, she highlighted three workplace scenarios where the tips might come in handy: when receiving praise, giving a summary or providing additional information. 

“Depending on the social setting, being praised may not be a good thing. You can accept the compliments, or direct it to your colleagues. Do not let yourself come across as annoying,” the 30-year-old asserts in well-enunciated Mandarin. 

Making these bite-sized videos to help her followers speak putonghua (standard Mandarin) better is bread and butter for the host and vocal coach, who offers personalised coaching and speaking courses from 99 yuan to 3,000 yuan.

The video clips she posts on Xiaohongshu, China’s version of Instagram where she has 296,000 followers, cover topics that range from different ways to position your hands while speaking, to three methods to get rid of nervous body language before meeting a superior. 

The Hebei native also occasionally does advertisements, such as for bird nest drinks and audio recording devices, after she started becoming a full-time zimeiti – or content creator – in August 2022.

She acquired her skills from young through public speaking contests and eventually earning a postgraduate degree from the prestigious Communication University of China, and through a stint as a host with a mainstream broadcaster in Tianjin.

She first posted public speaking tips as a side hustle in 2021 while holding a regular job in Shenzhen. About a year later, with a couple of videos that had gone viral and a following of 140,000, she decided to plunge into the trade full-time.

She now nets between 20,000 yuan and 100,000 yuan a month.

Ms Shi said that while regular employment offered stability, it “wasn’t the life I wanted”. 

Her previous full-time jobs – from touting air quality products on live stream, to selling clothes in Guangdong – left her seeking more in terms of remuneration and freedom to decide her own time to work. She attributes this to her free-spirited personality, as she dislikes being managed by a boss. 

While using her platform to sell products such as cosmetics on Xiaohongshu could have been more lucrative, Ms Shi said such a route would cause her anxiety. “Brands can look for you today and find someone else tomorrow.” 

But creating lessons with her own brand gave her a stronger feeling of security. “I don’t have to be anxious over whether others would choose to work with me – I can determine my own fate. 

“As long as I work hard, continue to innovate and am sincere in serving others, the target audience will exist, even if it’s a small number,” she said, adding that putonghua coaching will continue to be needed as a good grasp of Mandarin is needed for postgraduate entrance exams and job interviews.

She plans to take up certification in childhood education and as a reading instructor in 2024, with an eye to creating content for kids. 

She relishes how her work allows her a balanced lifestyle.

Her morning routine these days sees her taking her Maltese, Manzai, for a walk near her home before heading to a private Pilates class a short walk away. Her dog roams the studio as she stretches on a reformer machine under the guidance of an instructor.  

“Unless I’m at my absolute wits’ end, I will never go back to a regular job.”

But she believes she would never go hungry, no matter the future work trends and the economic outlook.

“I feel that I would never be unemployed. I can work as a host and be a coach, and if I really need money, I can be a Didi driver, or work as a part-time cleaner in other people’s homes. I can stage a comeback at any time.”