Chinese college graduates have faced a severe job shortage for years. The National Bureau of Statistics reported in May that the nationwide unemployment rate in April was 6.1 percent. It was 18.2 percent for people whose ages were between 16 and 24. Things will be even worse when 10.76 million students graduate from college in the upcoming two months.
The Chinese Communist Party’s solution is to send the college graduates to farmlands. Recently, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security jointly issued a notice to guide college graduates to work or establish their own business in remote towns or rural communities and ask villages to “actively absorb college graduates to serve as village workers.”
The government will provide incentives to small businesses that employ college graduates in villages, home services, and elderly care. However, Chinese college graduates prefer to work for high-paying companies in large cities, and there is a wide income gap between rural and urban areas.
People compare this government initiative to the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (上山下乡)” movement that Mao Zedong initiated for the city teenagers during the Cultural Revolution. During that campaign, Mao sent several millions of teenagers from the cities to live in remote farmland for ten years, separating them from their families and ruining their lives.
Source: Epoch Times, June 13, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/6/13/n137588in57.htm