London, July 29 Amid record youth unemployment, the Chinese government wants young people to 'go to the farmland' -- but the prospect is unappealing for many, the media reported.
This is the offer facing China’s graduating class of 2023: decamping to work in impoverished rural areas. But many young people are not convinced, The Guardian reported.
More than 11.5 million students will graduate this summer looking to move into a jobs market where youth unemployment is at a record high.
In June, 21.3 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds in urban areas were out of work, according to official statistics, and some economists estimate that the true number could be far higher, The Guardian reported.
While graduates now joke online that their degrees are worthless, the government is trying to push the message that China's gen Z are being too picky.
In March, the Communist Youth League exhorted young people to "roll up their sleeves and go to the farmland".
Xi Jinping, China's president, has called on youths to "eat bitterness" – a Chinese phrase for enduring hardship – to "create a better China".
For older people, such exhortations recall the Cultural Revolution, when urban youths were sent to the villages to work alongside farmers.
"There is a collective memory for Xi Jinping and those around him of Xia Xiang as a very formative life experience," said Rana Mitter, a professor of Chinese history at Oxford University, using the Mandarin term for being sent to the countryside.
For young people, the idea of such toiling being character-building has "almost no resonance whatsoever", Mitter said, The Guardian reported.
This year the ministry of education hopes to recruit 52,300 people to a programme that ships teachers to poverty-stricken areas with "special difficulties". But working in remote, undeveloped parts of China is challenging for even the most experienced educators.
"The high unemployment rate will not encourage young people to work in the countryside… because rural areas do not have the jobs they want to work in," said Nie Riming, a researcher at Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law.
At best, Nie said, teachers may teach in rural areas for a few years as a means of getting an urban job, The Guardian reported.
The bigger problem is that many young people who chose to stay in education longer while the economy was in effect shut down during the zero-Covid years are now overqualified for the jobs available.
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