The bright future of China

‘Those of us who were born in the eighties are the unluckiest!’ declared my niece one day.

To anyone who could remember some of the upheavals of the past, not least the cultural revolution and the political and economic reforms that began in the late 1970s, the remark showed a shocking lack of perspective. Her own mother, who was born in 1961, was deprived of a formal education and then in the early 1990s was among the first to lose their jobs when the state decided to reduce its financial burden and sell off a large number of industries.

Yet I could still understand what my niece meant.

Her generation entered university in the decade after 1999, when China began a rapid expansion of its higher education sector. Competition in the graduate job market grew ever more frenzied. My niece graduated in 2009, along with six million others and at the moment of a steep economic downturn that has had continuing repercussions around the world.

Unable to find satisfying full time employment, she opted for an internship in a regional media group, to discover not only that the job was unpaid but that all the expenses she incurred as a sports journalist were to be covered from her own pocket. Despite her hard work, she was also obliged to surrender every single penny of the ‘red envelope’ which is given to a journalist by the organiser of a press release. Worst of all, without a degree in journalism or media studies, even though she graduated from one of the top universities, my niece had poor prospects of a permanent job in this multi-media group, however able she proved to be. She was even told that she was lucky not to have been forced to pay the ‘management fee’ – a payment extracted from interns by many other media companies in China.

Her desperate financial situation improved just slightly after she took up an internship at a local sports channel and was allowed to keep some of the contents of the red envelope. But there was no immediate improvement in her prospects of gaining permanent employment.

‘Old people, old policy: new people, new policy’ is a phrase on the lips of many an old media colleague of mine. The old policy provides job security and benefits for those who had gained permanent employment in the state-owned media before 1998. Regardless of their skills, the state-owned media companies are obliged to keep them in employment. And those in high positions are guaranteed a good pension, handsome medical insurance and other perks. The new policy, if it can be called such, merely exploits those like my niece, who are young and vulnerable.

Feeling permanently insecure at work, and faced with steep inflation and a continuous rise in house prices, it is no wonder that those born in the nineteen-eighties – who should be the bright future of China – complain that they were born in the wrong era.