Just a few years back, Pei Pei might have been headhunted home to China from London, lured with a fat salary and tagged a "sea turtle" -- a Chinese pun for overseas returnees.
Instead, friends call her "seaweed" -- a less amusing play on words. It also means she's out of a job.
"I had never been unemployed until I came back," shrugged the 26-year-old, a media studies major at London University. "But I do believe I'm typical `seaweed.'"
She might as well have stayed at home. Pei is one of hundreds of thousands caught in the undertow of China's market for student labor, deluged by a glut of graduates.
China's leaders trumpeted job creation as a critical task at this week's annual session of the National People's Congress.
Itinerant farmers are flooding cities where factory hands are already being dumped by state firms gone bust. Now leaders have to figure out how to absorb the nation's best and brightest.
There are 2.5 times as many graduates seeking work now than in 2001, crashing on to the job circuit just as companies, maturing and stingier, are putting a premium on work experience.
Cut-throat competition is squeezing starting salaries, down 40 percent from last year according to some Web site surveys.
Experts question whether this privileged generation is up against economic realities, or unrealistic expectations.
Either way, many students are sucked into the workforce at entry-level posts, grumbling that they're overqualified and underpaid. Rather than answer phones, some are simply choosing to wait.
For sea turtles beaching on the motherland's shores, it's been a rocky homecoming. Their numbers reached a record 22,100 students last year, up 12.3 percent from the previous year, the Ministry of Education reported.
Those in work earned an average 43,000 yuan (US$5,200) last year, down from 60,000 yuan in 2001 and 50,000 in 2002, according to a recent survey by of 51job.com, one of China's biggest human resources sites.
Until the right job comes along, Pei has opted to go back to peddling ads at the agency where she worked before attending London's Goldsmith College. She makes 4,000 yuan a month.
"Study abroad is a kind of investment for the future, it's natural to ask for repayment," said 51job's Wang Jian. "But if young sea turtles have less working experience, they can become seaweed."
Government policy lies behind the rise in job-seeker numbers. In 1999, in part to divert job pressure, China began allowing universities and technical schools to expand class sizes.
Five years on, the tide is rolling in. Some 2.8 million new graduates are fishing for jobs this year, 680,000 more than last year, according to the ministry.
Gone are the talent-poor days of the 1990s. Multinationals like Motorola and domestic tech giants like Legend once had to raid MIT labs or Wall Street trading posts for the right blend of managerial skills, technical know-how and English fluency.
But since the world economy slumped, and China's Internet bubble burst, many large corporations in China have trimmed their payrolls, either by downsizing or localizing en masse. Companies from Microsoft to China's Huawei Technologies have built capacious training centers.
"It's cheaper and easier to hire undergraduates fresh out of top Chinese universities and train them for two or three years," said Caren Zhao, of headhunters China Team.
A decade ago, a returning manager or engineer might command a a US$70,000-US$80,000 package; now top recruits get US$12,000-US$18,000, she said.
Already foreign schooling, which sometimes amounts to a cash-for-diploma gap year, is not the panacea it once was. Some 11,730 people left to study last year, down 6.3 percent from 2002, says the ministry.
A boom in post-grad curricula at home gives aspirants plenty to choose from -- Exec MBA, video game programming, you name it.
China kept the registered unemployment rate at 4.3 percent last year, despite the SARS outbreak, but the real rate may be closer to 10 percent in cities. Labor and Social Security Minister Zheng Silin (鄭斯林) said this week that an estimated 24 million city dwellers would seek jobs this year and the government aimed to create openings for 14 million of them.
Students are the least of the problems, some economists say.
"Their difficulties have nothing to do with the labour market as a whole," said Cai Fang (
"It is that their expectations are too high," Cai said.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was