Rising unemployment in China due to the COVID-19 pandemic could benefit the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) by allowing it to attract new, better educated recruits, a Taiwanese security researcher said on Friday.
Chen Ying-hsuan (陳穎萱), a policy analyst at the Division of Chinese Politics and Military Affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a government-funded think tank, made the remarks in an article published in the Defense Security Biweekly magazine.
About 8.74 million university students are expected to graduate in China next month, while Chinese companies’ demand for fresh graduates fell 16.77 percent annually in the first quarter of this year, Chen said in the article, titled “Worsening Unemployment Shaking China’s Efforts to Maintain Stability.”
Six Chinese government departments early this month launched a joint action plan to help new graduates cope with difficulties in finding jobs, especially at a time when the pandemic has forced businesses to stop hiring, she said.
One of the 10 initiatives in the action plan is to use incentives to recruit more university graduates to the PLA, Chen said.
“The unemployment wave could lure more good-quality university graduates to consider joining the military, thus helping the PLA’s plight of having difficulty recruiting the specialized personnel it needs,” Chen said.
“We should continue to watch the results of this recruitment plan and observe whether the PLA’s human capital and its battle capabilities improve,” she said.
Chen did not provide numbers, but according to a Foreign Policy magazine article published in August 2016, nearly 150,000 of the PLA’s 400,000 annual recruits in 2014 were college students and graduates.
While retention continues to be a challenge and high-school graduates still comprise the largest single source of recruits, the PLA is increasingly focusing on education, the article said.
Chen also said that China is facing a threat of labor unrest, as the communist country’s true unemployment rate is said to have reached 20 percent, citing an estimate from Chinese economic analyst Li Xunlei (李迅雷), whose report was taken down from his social media account on April 26, the same day he posted it.
China has recorded at least 168 cases of mass labor protests since January, Chen said, citing data from the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based non-governmental organization.
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
IN FULL SWING: Recall drives against lawmakers in Hualien, Taoyuan and Hsinchu have reached the second-stage threshold, the campaigners said Campaigners in a recall petition against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) in Taichung yesterday said their signature target is within sight, and that they need a big push to collect about 500 more signatures from locals to reach the second-stage threshold. Recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) and Lo Ting-wei (羅廷瑋) are also close to the 10 percent threshold, and campaigners are mounting a final push this week. They need about 800 signatures against Chiang and about 2,000 against Yang. Campaigners seeking to recall Lo said they had reached the threshold figure over the