State-backed media outlet the Global Times has gone on the offensive over China's high youth unemployment rate as Beijing seeks to change the narrative of the serious economic obstacles the country faces.
"In the face of exaggerated rhetoric used by some Western media outlets to discredit China's job market, Chinese young people are showing their hard-working and aggressive spirit to seek employment opportunities and achieve personal value, the Global Times wrote in an article this week.
China's youth unemployment rate—high by even its own way of reckoning, which analysts have called problematic—is a drag on the world's second-largest economy at a time of muted consumer confidence and with the real estate sector in crisis.
The Global Times piece, titled "Chinese youths actively seek jobs, defying Western media smears," features a pair of interviews with young Chinese who have found success in the country's hyper-competitive job market.
Newsweek reached out to the Global Times with a written request for comment.
China's statistics bureau published a 5.1 unemployment rate for December. Notably, that rate includes only city-dwellers who have registered as unemployed.
"Youth unemployment is a global problem. It is in fact a crisis for countries all over the world. The unemployment rate in some Western countries is much higher than that in China," the Global Times cited a professor from Beijing's University of International Business and Economics as saying.
China's reported figure is higher than economic rival the U.S.' 3.7 percent. The world's third-largest economy, Japan, has a projected rate of 2.5 percent for the fourth quarter although China's figure is 0.8 percent lower than Germany's equivalent unemployment rate.
However, the article left out the Chinese government's employment data for young people specifically.
China's statistics bureau said last month that unemployment in the 16-to 24-year-old age bracket was 14.9 percent in December—a high figure but a marked improvement over the 21.3 percent posted in June, the last month before the government stipulated a half-year moratorium on reporting.
When the reports abruptly resumed last month featuring December's data they came with a new methodology.
Subject matter experts were quick to point out the latest report excluded major demographics: people living in rural areas and those who had given up looking for a job.
It included those working as little as one hour per week, which "does not accord to international standards for calibrating unemployment rate," according to Elliott Fan, graduating director of National Taiwan University's economics department.
Last year saw the creation of over 12.4 million urban jobs in China, with an overall unemployment rate of 5.1 percent in December, Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security official Yun Donglai said at a January 24 press conference.
The employment situation for "key groups," including college graduates and migrant workers, is "basically stable," Yun added.
"The trend has highlighted the failure and collapse of the West's attempt to smear China's youth employment," the Global Times wrote.
Youth and college graduates in particular stand to benefit from the expansion of "market-oriented employment channels," public sector jobs, and the over 1 million new intern positions Yun said, citing measures introduced by the central government last spring.
Still, some experts have said the government is passing up more effective approaches to this issue and to pump priming China's slowing economy in general.
One would be to put more money in the hands of the younger generation, the segment of society that is more likely to spend it, Steve Tsang, director of SOAS University of London's China Institute, previously told Newsweek.
The Global Times article comes as Chinese authorities seek to stamp out discussions of the country's economic woes.
In December, an economist's article stating that nearly 1 billion of China's 1.4 billion people were living in poverty kicked off a social media firestorm. The country's ever-vigilant censors hastened to scrub any mention of the topic once it became the No. 1 hashtag on the X-like microblogging platform Weibo.
Also that month, Weibo users who had complained about the state of the economy received a notice in their inbox warning them not to "badmouth the economy" and hinting of possible consequences.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian ... Read more
