BEIJING (Reuters) - Rising unemployment in China is pushing millions of college graduates into a tough bargain, with some forced to accept low-paying work or even subsist on their parents’ pensions, a plight that has created a new working class of “rotten-tail kids”.
The phrase has become a social media buzzword this year, drawing parallels to the catchword “rotten-tail buildings” for the tens of millions of unfinished homes that have plagued China’s economy since 2021.
A record number of college graduates this year are hunting for jobs in a labour market depressed by COVID-19-induced disruptions as well as regulatory crack-downs on the country’s finance, tech and education sectors.
The jobless rate for the roughly 100 million Chinese youth aged 16-24 crept above 20% for the first time in April last year. When it hit an all-time high of 21.3% in June 2023, officials abruptly suspended the data series to reassess how numbers were compiled.
Unfortunately, the tankies are also impeding the change we actually need (e.g. expansion of workers rights). It’s harder to get involved in leftism when such a large part of vocal leftists are tankies.
I’m not really impressed with the other kind of leftist either, TBH. Anarchism is just a vague concept and the movement itself is mostly infighting. All the useful work I see being done is coming from within mainstream activism.
Workers rights activists are leftist activists by virtue of advocating for workers rights, IMO.