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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

  • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
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    8 days ago

    CCP seems to spend most of its time trying to censor shit than help the economy recover. Maybe manipulating their statistic and stock market isn’t gonna work out as much as they like.

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 days ago

      more like growth for the past 60 years has been easy to come by via free money injection and giving industry a growth mandate to build up for exports. But their economy and population is now maturing, wages are rising, urban housing demand is no longer voraciously insatiable, services are taking over from sheer industrial output, and the rest of the world has begun to look twice at their “cheap” labor that isn’t actually that cheap comparatively speaking. The CCP’s financial policy has not adapted to this new world in the slightest and they have some very tough reckoning to go through.

      • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
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        8 days ago

        Nvidia is worth so much because they’re selling shovels during a gold rush. It’s probably overvalued, but every VC is throwing money at AI projects right now and they’re all buying hardware from Nvidia.

        What does that have to do with censorship?

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Oh man I remember the poor “employed people” manning the retail counters at the silk factory tourist trap I visited in China. They wanted to sell their goods but you could also tell they just wanted something to do after standing there like statues all day waiting for customers to enter the store. Make-work employment can be its own form of hell.

      • oyo@lemm.ee
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        8 days ago

        I saw old women with straw brooms sweeping the side of the (active) freeway.

    • sztrzask@lemm.ee
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      8 days ago

      Except that it’s not planned.

      You can learn more about the subject on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_market_economy#:~:text=The socialist market economy (SME,ownership%20and%20state%2Downed%20enterprises.

      As per that article they literally are against the planned economy and think it’s a dumb idea.

      It’s also not communist - the most apt description would be “state capitalism”. Again, read the wiki page linked above for more details and reasons why.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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        8 days ago

        You know that and I know that but Tankies don’t know that.

        And my favorite argument of theirs is that you have to go through capitalism to get to communism while ignoring that there is less of a socialist state under Xi than there is under Mao. No billionaires or stock market under Mao.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    I thought China was heading for a demographic disaster where their aging population wouldn’t have enough young workers to stay competitive and care for the elderly? Now I’m hearing that youth are unemployed? I’m confused.

    • 0x815@feddit.orgOP
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      8 days ago

      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.

      • FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        8 days ago

        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.

        • 0x815@feddit.orgOP
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          7 days ago

          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.