'Rotten-tail kids': China's rising youth unemployment breeds new working class

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'Rotten-tail kids': China's rising youth unemployment breeds new working class
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BEIJING (Reuters) - Rising unemployment in China is pushing millions of college graduates into a tough bargain, with some forced to accept low-paying work or even subsist on their parents' pensions, a plight that has created a new working class of "rotten-tail kids".

The phrase has become a social media buzzword this year, drawing parallels to the catchword "rotten-tail buildings" for the tens of millions of unfinished homes that have plagued China's economy since 2021.

A record number of college graduates this year are hunting for jobs in a labour market depressed by COVID-19-induced disruptions as well as regulatory crack-downs on the country's finance, tech and education sectors.

The jobless rate for the roughly 100 million Chinese youth aged 16-24 crept above 20% for the first time in April last year. When it hit an all-time high of 21.3% in June 2023, officials abruptly suspended the data series to reassess how numbers were compiled.

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Citation needed.

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Looks like youth unemployment in Europe is very comfortably below China's at around 14% vs China's 21%. Also notably the European data has been trending down.

To be fair though we don't know what the current rate is in China because they stopped publishing the statistic for some reason.

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