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A year after telling young Chinese people struggling to find work that they should “endure the hardships”, President Xi Jinping has changed his tune as the world’s second-largest economy struggles to fully recover.
With youth unemployment remaining nearly three times higher than the overall rate, China’s president struck a more sympathetic tone on Tuesday, ordering the Communist Party’s Politburo leadership to make achieving “full and high-quality employment” an economic priority.
This is in stark contrast to what he told young people last May, when he told them they should embrace hardship, like when he was sent to rural areas as a teenager in the 1960s to do manual labour such as shoveling fertiliser during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
On Tuesday, Xi instructed the Politburo to “give top priority to the employment of college graduates and other young people.”
“[We should] “We need to further develop jobs that can fully utilize our knowledge and strengths,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency quoted him as saying.
China’s economy grew more than 5% in the first quarter from a year earlier, but economists say the recovery has been uneven, buoyed by manufacturing, exports and government investment but with household consumption and investor sentiment still hurt by a slump in the real estate sector.
China’s unemployment rate for 16-24 year olds exceeded 21% in June last year, but the National Bureau of Statistics suddenly stopped publishing the data, citing a need to improve methodology.
The government began publishing youth unemployment statistics again in December, this time excluding students. The April figure was 14.7%, down from 15.3% the previous month but still well above the urban unemployment rate of 5%.
In a statement to the Politburo, Xi said leaders “need to encourage young people to engage in employment and entrepreneurship in key sectors and key industries.” [and] “Urban and rural grassroots and small and medium-sized enterprises”
About 12 million college graduates are set to join China’s workforce this year, but many complain they cannot find jobs that match their qualifications or pay enough to justify the cost of attending university.
Xi told the Politburo that leaders needed to “analyze the causes of labor shortages in some industries and solve the problem of ‘there is work but no one to do it.'”
A year ago, China’s official media published an article highlighting President Xi Jinping’s rural experiences in 1969 as an example for young people today.
“To collect fertilizer, you have to take off your shoes, roll up your trouser legs, [and] “I jumped in barefoot,” he was quoted as saying in one article, which said he had eaten bitters nearly 30 times. [Xi] It was wet and smelly, a mixture of sweat, feces and urine.”
The article stated, “Only by passing the labor test and establishing the idea of ’seeking hardship’ can one bring one’s ideas closer to the people.”
In other remarks to the Politburo, Xi instructed officials to take steps to boost employment for the millions of people who move around China for work – migrant workers.
As construction work dried up due to the sluggish real estate market, many workers have had to look for other jobs, some returning to their hometowns and villages.
“We will stabilize the size of employment and income for people who have been lifted out of poverty, and prevent them from falling back into large-scale poverty due to unemployment,” Xi told the Politburo.
