Final year Chinese university student Li Teng knows finding a job during the global economic crisis will be tough. Yet he shakes his head at the thought of taking to the streets to protest.
“I think the government is working hard to fix the economy,” the fashionably dressed history major said. “Besides, this is not a problem which started in China. I have confidence.”
How things change.
Two decades ago, China’s youth were at the forefront of a movement to bring democracy to the world’s most populous nation in demonstrations bloodily put down around Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
Today, after years of breakneck economic growth, the young are more pro-government, more suspicious of the West and genuinely proud of China’s achievements, such as the Beijing Olympics, making a repeat of June 4 unlikely.
The China of 20 years ago, where the chaos of the Cultural Revolution was still fresh in many people’s minds, is also very different from the China of today, with its shining skyscrapers, bustling malls and expanding middle class.
“One good thing about young people today is that they are luckier than in the past,” said Bao Tong (鮑彤), a former senior official purged after the 1989 demonstrations.
“My son and daughter grew up in difficult circumstances, with rationed food ... They didn’t have enough nutrition,” he said in a recent interview. “Now, there are no grains coupons, no meat coupons.”
That is a sentiment postgraduate student Zhang Haiping understands.
“In that era, people were very idealistic. But students have changed since then,” Zhang said. “China has changed, whether you’re talking about reforms or the economy.”
The potential for unrest among a disaffected youth has not gone away, though, thanks to the global economic crisis.
More than 6 million university students will try to enter China’s workforce this year. Up to a quarter could have difficulty finding jobs, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said in December, as the economy slows.
Many are already getting desperate.
The Yangtse Evening Post reported earlier this month that in the relatively affluent eastern province of Jiangsu, 46 university graduates had applied for jobs as public toilet attendants, such was the state of the labor market.
“Better to be a ‘toilet master’ than unemployed at home,” it cited one of the applicants as saying.
China’s stability-obsessed government has reacted fast to the economic crisis, unveiling a 4 trillion yuan (US$585 billion) stimulus package and trying hard to find work for graduates, even as village officials in China’s rural heartland.
“In the short term, it’s probably something the government will be able to cope with because they are doing quite a lot to find places for these people as they’re worried about having large numbers of unemployed graduates,” said Rana Mitter, Chinese politics lecturer at Oxford University. “I think over the longer term they will be worried that urban youth in particular have grown up with much greater expectations of what they can have.”
Other students say politics simply does not interest them.
“I’m interested in charity work and the like, but not at all in politics,” said Jiang Yun, a first-year medical student at the prestigious Peking University. “I may pay attention to it, but I won’t get involved. I don’t really have any opinions either way.”
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