In August the Chinese government released a shocking piece of data: A record 21.3 percent of Chinese citizens between the ages of 16 and 24 in cities were unemployed. It promptly decided to suspend future publication of its urban youth unemployment rate. The current data is bad enough; it’s about the same youth unemployment rate across the Middle East on the eve of the Arab Spring.crocoslots
The Chinese Communist Party knows very well that young, educated and unemployed people concentrated in big cities have the capacity to challenge authority. After all, that is how their own party started. For decades, the party-state’s legitimacy depended on economic growth and improving living standards that are now in jeopardy. Instead of meeting the needs of frustrated youth by generating new jobs and opportunities, the aging leadership has doubled down on authoritarian repression as its primary policy response to a worsening economic crisis.
This isn’t the first time the C.C.P. has had to contend with urban unemployment. For more than 70 years now, the problem has bubbled up only to be either contained by a political crackdown or relieved by favorable economic developments.
After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Chinese peasants fled the dilapidated countryside to find work in the big cities. To restrain this migration, the party imposed new rules that prevented citizens from obtaining social services away from their registered home cities. Spared from the competition of rural job seekers, city dwellers had more secure employment.
New shocks to the economy and demographics raised the threat of youth unemployment yet again through the 1950s and ’60s. With the economy faltering after the disastrous Great Leap Forward and loss of Soviet aid, a generation of Chinese urban baby boomers were about to graduate into a worsening job market. In 1966, Mao Zedong started the Cultural Revolution to partially redirect these youths, who ended up causing so much turmoil that Mao shifted course, beginning a nationwide “down to the countryside” movement to force a whole generation of urban youth to till rural fields.
In the late ’90s, state-owned enterprises, which were pillars of the Mao-era economy, conducted widespread layoffs as a part of market reforms, threatening urban employment yet again. The Asian financial crisis compounded things, and laid-off state workers and pensioners protested in rust belt cities in northeastern China. China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 — which brought a surge of foreign investment and jobs — saved the day.
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