As China pauses releasing data on youth unemployment, a look at the trend of its ‘full-time children’

Who are China’s ‘full-time children’?

‘Full-time’ children are people who are usually new entrants to the job market and spend their workdays caring for their parents for amounts such as 2,000-3,000 yuan (around 20,000-30,000 rupees) per month. This is not a high sum by any means, but it is a source of minimum income for young people who are not having to pay for rent and other amenities.

Also, by its nature, this phenomenon is limited to people from a higher income category, who can afford to extend this sum to their children for regular chores for some time. For them, this works as a temporary arrangement until their children find jobs or while they study to attempt examinations for government jobs.

Some have also pointed to the fact that as China’s population ages, older people are looking for caregiving and ‘hiring’ their own children can emerge as an option. But this is not exactly an ideal situation where demand meets supply, as many young workers continue to look for conventional means of long-term employment.

Why they are nevertheless engaging in this setup at all has a range of reasons behind it.

What is the employment situation for China’s youth?

First is the current economic situation in China, particularly what the outlook is like for fresh graduates. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), in the first half of 2023, the urban unemployment rate averaged 5.3 per cent. But the unemployment rate among the population aged from 16 to 24 was much higher – 21.3 per cent.

The larger Chinese economy is also nowhere near the high GDP growth rates achieved from 1978 (when it liberalised the economy) to the mid-2010s. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, there were signs of a slowdown. But two years of strict lockdowns and restrictions of movement through the ‘zero-Covid’ policy have worsened the condition of sectors such as manufacturing and real estate.

Added to that is the competition for jobs as a greater percentage of the population becomes better educated. In 2023, 11.58 million students graduated from university, and this marks the first year that doctorate and postgraduate students have surpassed the number of undergraduate students, according to state-run media outlet Global Times. The number of aspirants for civil services jobs – seen as guaranteeing stable incomes and prestige – is also increasing, with thousands of candidates applying for a single post.

China’s NBS said on Tuesday it had suspended the unemployment data’s publication, purportedly in order to improve the methodology for measurement. Fu Linghui, a spokesman with the NBS, added that the graduate employment rate is “slightly higher than in the same period last year”, Reuters reported. Financial Times also noted that this follows a pattern, with the government no longer publishing several other economy-related indicators in recent years.

But according to a recent article in the magazine Caixin, Peking University economics professor Zhang Dandan claimed that the true unemployment rate could be as high as 46.5% if those who are eligible to work but choose not to do so are also factored in.

She wrote that employment in the manufacturing sector had only recovered to two-thirds of pre-Covid levels till March 2023. “Young people remain major workers in the manufacturing sector, so they were hit more badly,” she wrote, according to a translation in Nikkei Asia. Global Times also reported that a 2022 survey by a job recruitment site in China said slightly over half of this year’s college graduates opted to look for a job, down 6 percent from the previous year.

The urge to ‘lie flat’ against ‘996’

While the ‘full-time children’ trend may not necessarily become a permanent or widespread feature of the Chinese economy, it is not the only such trend to emerge in recent years. It’s noteworthy that while Chinese censors are quick to clamp down on conversations and trends that might seem to be critical of the State, reposts of texts often gain some virality before completely being removed.

For example, according to Reuters, the NBS’s decision on pausing the data being published was criticised by many online. “If you close your eyes then it doesn’t exist,” read one comment liked over 5,000 times on the social media website Weibo.

In 2021, the term ‘lying flat’ gained traction on Chinese social media sites, emerging from one viral post, referring to a state of stepping away from the labour market and the race for jobs. In a larger sense, it talked about the aspiration for a minimalistic lifestyle. “Eating only two meals a day will cost less than 200 yuan ($31.4) per month. Then, I only have to work one or two month(s) a year to make a living,” said one post advocating for it.

The tight competition for jobs and tiring working conditions even after gaining employment were pointed to as stressors behind the idea. One expression of this frustration was found in the term ‘996’, coined around 2019, as a shorthand for the prevalence of 12-hour-long workdays, from 9 am to 9 pm, for six days a week.

Is this a sign of worry for the government?

While the idea of ‘full-time children’ is yet to gain as widespread interest as the earlier trends, state media agencies have acknowledged the trend of lying flat previously. At the same time, they have sent out a message of developing an enthusiastic attitude towards work.

He Junke, a leader of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China (CYLC), said at a press briefing in 2022, “All happiness is achieved through devoted effort, and making endeavor itself is also a kind of happiness.”

Jack Ma, the Chinese billionaire and founder of the e-commerce website Alibaba, also seemed pro-996 when he told his employees in 2019, “If you join Alibaba, you should get ready to work 12 hours a day, otherwise why do you come to Alibaba? We don’t need those who comfortably work 8 hours.”

However, many international commentators have drawn parallels to movements such as “quiet quitting” in the United States, also about younger workers planning to exert minimum effort at the workplace. Both may originate from different contexts but point to similar kinds of stressors for young people, relating to the drawbacks of job setups in most countries. But unlike more high-income countries, such a trend in China would be of greater concern.

Speaking of ‘lying flat’ in 2021, Dr Gavin Chiu Sin-hin, an independent commentator and former associate professor at Shenzhen University, told South China Morning Post that China was “at a crossroads of becoming a high-income economy or finding itself stuck in the middle-income trap”. Young workers’ attitudes to work, therefore, would be instrumental in shaping its future economy.