Unemployed and unreported: China cancels youth jobless data after hitting record high
By Laurie Chen
Beijing: China’s statistics bureau said on Tuesday it had suspended publication of youth jobless data, citing the need to improve methodology in the way it measured unemployment among young people, which has hit record highs in recent months.
The decision announced shortly after the release of weaker-than-expected factory and retail sales data sparked a rare backlash on social media amid growing frustration about employment prospects in the country.
The most recent NBS data on youth unemployment, published last month, showed the jobless rate jumping to a record high of 21.3 per cent in June.
Young people attend a job fair at a Beijing shopping centre. Youth unemployment is at a high in China.Credit: Reuters
A Chinese professor last month said the country’s true youth jobless rate may have been closer to 50 per cent in March, in rare public comments about the matter published in an article for financial magazine Caixin. That article was later censored.
“At present the majority of graduating university students have already confirmed their employment destination and their employment situation is generally stable,” said Fu Linghui, a spokesman with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
He added that the graduate employment rate was “slightly higher than in the same period last year”.
But young Chinese are facing their toughest summer job-hunting season after regulatory clamp-downs in recent years and a pandemic left traditional sources of graduate employment – including the property, tech and education sectors – bruised.
Some 47 per cent of graduates returned home within six months of graduation in 2022, up from 43 per cent in 2018, state-run China News Service reported last week, citing a private-sector survey.
The NBS’s Fu said data would be suspended because “the economy and society are constantly developing and changing, statistical work needs to be continuously improved”.
Graduate unemployment is soaring across the country.Credit: Reuters
The issue of whether current job-hunting students should be included in jobless statistics and the definition of the age range, “needs further research,” Fu said.
China’s youth unemployment data had tracked the 16-to-24 age bracket.
The NBS’s decision was immediately mocked on Chinese social media, with a related hashtag receiving more than 10 million views on microblogging site Weibo.
“If you close your eyes then it doesn’t exist,” read one comment liked over 5000 times.
“There is a saying called ‘burying your head in the sand’,” wrote another user.
Reuters