cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3997245
According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics on the 21st, the unemployment rate of young people (16-24 years old) reached 18.8% in August. It’s the highest it’s been this year. This is attributed to the fact that a large number of students who graduated from school in the first half of this year jumped into the job front.
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Chinese authorities temporarily suspended the release of monthly figures after youth unemployment hit an all-time high of 21.3% in June last year. Since then, new standards have been applied and announced from this year excluding enrolled students from the statistical target. Nevertheless, the youth unemployment rate, which was 14.6% in January this year, is steadily rising.
Last month, the story of 24-year-old Lee became a hot topic on Weibo, a Chinese social network service (SNS). After completing a master’s degree in physics at the graduate school, it was known that he got a job as a cleaner at a high school in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.
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In fact, many young Chinese people are flocking to gig workers (short-time workers). The number of delivery drivers registered on Meituan, a large delivery platform, jumped from 3.98 million in 2019 to 7.45 million last year. The growth of the delivery market slowed due to the end of the “COVID-19 lockdown” policy, but the number of delivery drivers increased.
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Against this backdrop, the Chinese government has recently decided to strengthen its crackdown on slang and newly coined words on the Internet. Some analysts say that they intend to censor terms that criticize the Chinese Communist Party and the government.
This is up to you, it is the official Chinese data.
A brief update: Official Chinese youth unemployment rate for September -just released- is now 17.6% (according to the new methodology that does not include university students). It appears to follow the expected development as youth jobless figures in China tend to fluctuate over the year while reaching their peak in the summer (July and August data), when a large number of graduates enter the job market. The September data is a significant increase compared to January as well as year-on-year.
So given the chinese government has been known to tamper with economic figures in the past, I will remain skeptical, although I don’t see why they would lie about unemployment rising.
So unlike the title of your article, unemployment isn’t going up
China’s youth unemployment rate falls after climbing for two straight months
The Reuters report refers to the September data (read my comment on the September data above), and this is practically always lower than the data in August and particularly in July. And the September 2024 data is higher than the Sep 2023 data. As I wrote in my comment, intra-year data fluctuates. The comparison you make doesn’t make sense, therefore.
Youth unemployment is rising in the long run, this is what the data shows.