The Journal. - China’s Plans for Its Unemployed Youth: Send Them Away

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

An economic downturn in China has resulted in historically high youth unemployment. At the same time, China’s leader Xi Jinping thinks the countryside is in need of rejuvenation. WSJ’s Brian Spegele explains how the Chinese leader is trying to tackle both issues in one fell swoop. Further Reading: -China Has an Idea for Its Legions of Unemployed Youth: Send Them Away  -How Bad is China’s Economy? Millions of Young People Are Unemployed and Disillusioned  Further Listening: -Why Millions of Chinese Young People Are Unemployed  -China’s Property Market Crisis  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our colleague Brian Spiegel is a reporter based in Beijing. But recently, he spent a lot of time in the Chinese countryside. You go out to these rural places and they're just still really basic struggles. So roads that don't work, plumbing that hardly works, jobs that don't exist. Rural China is a very poor place still. you know, jobs that don't exist. Rural China is a very poor place still. Brian was there to report on an initiative that's being pushed by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Get young, unemployed people from the cities, send them to the countryside. Send them to rural China to work and live. The goal is to give young people a sense of purpose, to help rural areas, and to revitalize the Chinese economy. So yeah, we started showing up in villages there that, to the best that we could tell, had been where we thought the volunteers were living. And the struggle was you might only have one or

two volunteers in each village. So are you just like knocking on doors being like, hello, does a volunteer live here? Correct. Have you seen the college volunteers? And so if you couldn't find them or they didn't want to talk to you, you kind of had to travel quite a large distance to get to the next village. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. This push to get young city people to move back to the country is a shift for China. For the last four decades, people from the countryside have been looking to get out of the countryside because of a lack of economic opportunities. And so now we see the government saying to young unemployed people, actually, we'd prefer it if you would consider going back to rural areas. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business,

and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, November 13th. Coming up on the show, Xi Jinping's plan to send young people to rural China. We'll see you next time. with them. Ooh, must be mating season. And hiking with them. Is that a squirrel? Bear! Run! Collect more moments with more ways to earn. Air Mile. Last December, Xi Jinping gave a private speech to senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party. In the speech, he said that China's rural areas need help on all fronts. A huge part of Xi's domestic agenda is what he calls the rural revitalization campaign. And the idea is that there is this huge discrepancy economically, politically as well,

but just in every sense of the word, between the countryside and urban China. And one of the solutions that Xi proposed? We need to encourage more college graduates to go back to the countryside. We've seen tens of millions of people do everything they can to get out of the villages over many years now. So we need to reverse the brain drain. Why is this happening now? Like, why didn't Xi try to send more young people to the countryside, say, five years ago? It's the youth unemployment in the cities.

China is very scared of having huge numbers, and we're talking tens of millions of young unemployed people or underemployed people. They're unemployed because the economy is at its weakest state in many, many years. The other aspect is that there's an expectations gap. Many people graduating from college today, they desire kind of these white-collar sorts of jobs, high-paying, stable, and just not enough of them exist. More than one in five young people in China are jobless, according to government numbers from June.

It's a problem for a couple of reasons that I can, off the top of my head. One is, you know, purely a social stability aspect, right? Stability is everything for the party and for the government. And if people don't have jobs, they're more likely to be bored, which might lead them to be unhappy and resentful of the state. Another aspect of this is longer term economic consequences. What we do see in China is because people aren't able to find stable employment, they put off things like getting

married and having children. China's already got a demographic crisis. The population is falling. So every year that young people are not able to find jobs, they're putting off marriage, China's already got a demographic crisis. The population is falling. So every year that young people are not able to find jobs or putting off marriage, you know, settling down, having kids, that, you know, threatens to exacerbate the demographic crisis in China. Back in the 1970s, something like 80% of the Chinese population lived in rural areas. Today, it's estimated to be closer to 36%. But even as Chinese citizens have flocked to the cities,

the government has continued to romanticize rural life. Now, Xi is trying to send back the talent that the countryside has lost over the years. After his speech, new programs started to pop up, and existing ones were expanded. So, as a young person in this city, how would you hear about this? How would you know where you would be going? Or, like, do you get to sign up for a particular program? So, in your last year of college, we could see that there were a number of kind of recruitment events. And basically, the Communist Party Youth League,

maybe some professors, they would gather you in a lecture hall and they would talk about the benefits of going to the countryside, what you might learn and why you should sign up. And then after that, there would be an application process. What do these programs look like? I think it looks a little bit different in each province. And this would range from anything from spending a weekend cleaning up trash in a village

to signing up for several years to go down and work very closely with farmers. Brian spent a lot of time reporting in one province in particular, Guangdong. Guangdong is in the southeast of China, and it's home to big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou. We think of these huge, huge cities of tens of millions of people, but actually much of Guangdong is actually quite rural. If you go into the northern part of the province and the western part of that province, it's very, very, very rural.

Local Guangdong officials have been really aggressive in promoting Xi's plan. The reason we focused Local Guangdong officials have been really aggressive in promoting Xi's plan. The reason we focused on Guangdong first is that the government there had put out this action plan and they said over the next two years we're going to recruit something like 300,000 young people to participate in rural areas. And that number struck me as particularly big and very specific also. And of those, one portion of those people would be basically city kids who are going to be plucked out of the cities and put in villages as poverty relief volunteers, if you will. And so we want to understand what does it look like if you sign up

through the party to go and do this? What are you actually doing? What does your life look like? Why would you do this? Did you wind up talking to many young people who'd taken up these offers? Yeah, we did. And it was difficult, but we managed to find some of them. Many didn't want to talk to us, fair enough. But, you know, we met one woman, Chen Liming, who'd been there. She was actually one of the first, very first volunteers to go out into the countryside. Her daily work was actually in a government office. And so one of the first, very first volunteers to go out into the countryside. Her daily work was actually in a government office. And so one of the things she did was to promote the local rice crop to tell the world why the rice from her area was better than the other rice.

It was a branding job. It was a branding job. But then another part of what she did was actually basically doing, as she described it, propaganda work for the local government. So she'd go around, as far as we understood, and make happy videos about life in these rural places. And she would then post them on social media. What I took away from that as an early volunteer, one of the things that the government was very aware of is that we need to create a positive message about life in the countryside, romanticizing life in the countryside, that then Chun, as somebody who was one of the early adopters of this, might then influence other people to follow her lead.

Brian saw a lot of volunteer jobs that connected tech-savvy college graduates with farming and agricultural needs. One guy we met, he had actually been a graduate student. He went back to graduate school and decided to study agriculture. And then he signed up for this program. And he was basically sent to a farming village. It seems that what he was doing was trying to help the farmers in this village source higher quality seeds. And what was interesting is that story was very much about him using his personal network as a former graduate student to go out and help farmers source the seeds that they need.

So he was an example exactly of what Xi Jinping talks about, of a lack of talent, a need to get more talent into the country. People with networks, people with an understanding of how distribution channels might work for things like advanced seeds and this sort of stuff. channels might work for things like advanced seeds and this sort of stuff. And one solution, in the eyes of Xi Jinping, is for young people in China to pull up their bootstraps, which this time, not from you. It's through their Uber Teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your teen to your Uber account today. Picture this. You finally get to the party, and it's the usual drinks and small talk. today. Becoming the hero of your own night. Unapologetically full-flavored cocktails with a 13% punch.

Seagram 13. Dare to make your own luck. Must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Available at the LCBO. In the 1960s and 70s, after China's communist revolution, then-leader Mao Zedong pushed millions of young people from the city out to the countryside. It was part of a wider move away from capitalism known as the Cultural Revolution.

On the surface, we think of the movement as being very ideologically driven. The idea being that Mao wanted city folk to go and learn from the farmers, right? To experience life in the communes, to from the farmers, right? To experience life in the communes, to work the fields, this sort of thing. But what I was surprised to learn when I dug into some of the historical academic research about the history of this movement back in the very origins of it, actually in the 1950s, was that it was actually born out of high unemployment in the cities themselves. So there was actually, beyond kind of the ideological aspects during the Cultural Revolution, which everyone knows today, there was actually a very

practical element, which I think we're seeing interestingly repeated right now. Xi Jinping himself was one of the young people who were sent down to the villages during that time. When he was 15 years old, he was uprooted from a very privileged background in Beijing. His father was a senior government official, and he was sent to the countryside in this little village in northern China. And he spent seven years living there. And that was really, as he described it later in life, a life-altering experience, kind of his political awakening that would serve him going forward. It was formative for him. Completely formative for him.

What was he doing while he was out there for seven years? So, you know, based on the official story unveiled by the government, he was farming fields. He was herding sheep. He was reading Marx. The government likes to really present Xi as somebody who read really widely during that time. So yeah, he was basically a, you know, a farmer. Was this what inspired him to revive this idea today? That's one aspect of it. And he himself talks in kind of glowing terms about his time in the countryside. And, you know, the official media in China, the state media in China,

has created this image of Xi as a man of the people, as a man who, as a leader, who looks out for the interest of farmers in particular, of the countryside in particular. So far, though, the work that you're describing doesn't sound, like, too terribly different from what some of these college grads might be doing in the city. Like, did you get a sense of whether they were struggling or if it was pretty relaxed?

Like, where was the challenge for them? Well, no, I think in many ways, one of the big takeaways that I got out of this is participating in this program was a way to put off the challenges of city life. So in the cities, you might be doing the same work, but you might be getting paid a menial wage, and you've got to pay for your rent and everything else, and the rat race and everything else. Here, you might be doing menial work,

but then the government's going to provide you at least a place, some shelter over your head and three meals a day. Do they get paid? So they're technically called volunteers, but when we'd ask them, they would get a stipend of a few thousand kuai a month, so a few hundred dollars a month. You certainly don't do this program to get rich, but I think what people told us was in some cases they didn't know what they wanted to do coming out of college. And so this was a way to just buy themselves some time. Xi Jinping said that sending young people out to the country would stiffen their spines and push them to embrace hardship.

But for some of those participating in the program, it's not really about that. For them, these jobs out in the countryside could potentially lead to jobs in the Chinese government, often returning them to the cities. So many people are striving to get into the government right now, to work for the government, and that's because the work is stable. And yeah, people are doing everything they can to set themselves apart, and I think this is one way they're doing it. Definitely, one of the things on people's minds or, you know, driving their decision to participate in these sorts of programs was making themselves look good when they

eventually try to join the government a few years from now. in these sorts of programs was making themselves look good when they eventually try to join the government a few years from now. Do you think these young people are going to stay long enough to revitalize the rural areas the way she has planned? Well, this was the question that we asked of everybody who met with us. And we didn't meet a single person who said they wanted to stay for the long run. So at least based on the people that we met, it seemed pretty much across the board that the government had not figured out a way to convince people to move there long term. And so then we're kind of at square one. How do you fix this problem of brain drain?

And it is really difficult. What happens if this whole initiative doesn't work? In a different era in China, I think the government would have used more market mechanisms to try to solve a problem like youth unemployment. What we see today is them relying on the party to try to solve some very, very complicated problems. And I think one of the things that I find myself asking is,

with that power that the party is bestowing unto itself, comes a tremendous amount of responsibility as well. Expectations that the party is going to be able to solve these quite complicated problems. And if it's not able to solve these problems, then what? We don't have an answer for that right now, but I think that's one of the things that I'll be watching for. That's all for today, Monday, November 13th.

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