An unusually public claim by a Chinese professor that the national youth jobless rate might have hit close to 50 percent in March has stoked a debate about official data and a soft labor market, despite curbs on negative portrayals of the economy.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics said that month’s jobless rate for people aged 16 to 24 was 19.7 percent, less than half of what Peking University associate professor Zhang Dandan (張丹丹) estimated.
If 16 million non-students “lying flat” at home or relying on their parents were included, the rate at that time could have been as high as 46.5 percent, Zhang wrote in an online article in the financial magazine Caixin.
Photo: Reuters
The article by Zhang, associate professor of Economics at the university’s National School of Development, was published on Monday, but has since been removed.
The official youth jobless rate, which only includes people actively seeking work, rose further to a record 21.3 percent last month. Policymakers have struggled to put the economy on a more stable footing since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Zhang’s research focused in part on the impact of the outbreak on the manufacturing hubs of Suzhou and Kunshan in eastern China.
“Employment there only recovered to two-thirds of pre-COVID levels till March, when COVID faded,” she wrote. “Young people remain major workers in the manufacturing sector, so they were hit more badly.”
Additionally, regulations introduced since 2021 in the tutoring, property and online platform sectors have disproportionately hit young employees and the well-educated, she said.
Calls by Reuters to Zhang’s work phone went unanswered and the statistics bureau did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One user on Sina Weibo yesterday said Zhang’s statistical methodology was flawed, as economists generally do not count people who are not actively seeking work when compiling estimates for joblessness.
However, other social media users focused on how hard it still is to find a job in China.
“The reason why so many graduate students flock to sit postgraduate or civil servant exams instead of looking for jobs is because they just cannot find jobs,” one Weibo user wrote.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS