The real reason China’s educated youth can’t find jobs

They were told with hard work and a good education, they’d get the career of their dreams. But for many young adults in China, that is simply not the case.

For a couple of years now, there have been rumors about the "lying flat" or "let it rot" youth in China , a characterization that the kids are lazy and don’t want to work. But there's more to the story in the world’s second-largest economy.

Some recent graduates are dishing out more money than they can hope to make in a job for interview coaches and job agents. A Bloomberg article said some students are paying $50,000 to try to land a finance job. And still, it’s not enough.

China’s youth unemployment surged to 17.1% in July, up from 13.2% a month earlier, according to the latest government data. This new measure of youth unemployment excludes current students. Experts say the July spike is in part because of students who graduated in June.

In 2023, China’s jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds reached 21.3%, so high the government stopped reporting the data. The government later agreed on a new method to exclude students.

Now these young graduates have a new name: "rotten-tail kids." It comes from the millions of unfinished homes that litter the country known as "rotten-tail buildings," real estate dreams that never came to fruition.

"There is an entire generation of children who have grown up under the one-child policy," said Doug Guthrie , a China scholar and professor of global leadership at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management. "Those children have two parents and four grandparents who have very much focused on their well-being. And maybe they've become a little bit more willing to wait and think, 'Well, if I don't get the perfect high-end service sector economy job that I want, I'll just continue to live at home.'"

Can China turn its youth unemployment problem around? Watch the full interview with Doug Guthrie in the video above.

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