![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Garbled stories
Nov. 6th, 2023 07:47 amMy husband told me he read something somewhere about young people in China not wanting to work the crazy hours (996) and so a lot of them just are not taking jobs because they don’t need to. They are the only child of only children, four grandparents and so there’s adequate resources in family for them.
I thought, wow! This is really interesting because I have taken an interest in demographics for a minute or two, and I distinctly remember that one of the rhetorical strategies to attack the one child policy was to argue that as older generations aged, and retired, and required care, the workers in the next generation or two down would not be adequate to the tasks of funding pensions for them and/or providing services to them in their weeks/months/years of final decline when they cannot care for themselves. If it is possible for a younger generation to slack _while the olds are dying_, then it _feels_ like this particular concern was misguided. I always suspected it was misguided, for a variety of reasons. First, many olds are quite able to and prefer to care for themselves — and others!!! — until very close to the end and then, the end is often very compressed. Second, many jobs that once required many people to do no longer require anyone to do because of automation. I don’t just mean, factory robots. I mean, if you have the ability to turn on a faucet to get water and adjust a thermostat to have comfortable temperature, then you don’t need 2+ people hauling water and fuel for your household. And on and on and on. When you sit in an office looking at numbers representing money taken out of paychecks and put into benefits for others, you maybe don’t fully appreciate this, and if you don’t take the time to really understand how people get their needs met, you might not realize just how important this kind of technological change is.
I have _finally_ taken the time to track down the story that my husband read / heard. It was on NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/15/1199682878/chinas-urban-youth-unemployment-rate-rose-to-21-in-june
OK, it’s not what I thought it was at all.
“It's the high-paying, high-skill jobs that have been shrinking in numbers. And these are what the current cohorts of college graduate students have been trained for, what they're expecting, what they wanted. They're not there.”
All the trends are mentioned in this very short piece: lying flat, 996, pandemic reopening, slowing growth overall and a mismatch between the number of young people who trained for jobs in various sectors and the actual available jobs in those sectors.
When my husband heard this:
“And they'll have grandparents who are from the city. So what this means is that they're going to be inheriting a lot of real estate from their grandparents - not to mention, you know, maybe savings that their parents have been accumulating over time.”
He heard something _that was already happening_ NOT _something that a person with some expertise in the field and the country was anticipating would happen.
Here is a slightly older (by a few months) article on roughly similar topics:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/26/economy/china-youth-unemployment-intl-hnk/index.html
“Exhausted by the pressure to succeed as a photographer, Litsky Li accepted a better offer: quit work to become one of China’s growing legions of children paid by their families to stay home.
Li, 21, now spends her days grocery shopping for her family in the central city of Luoyang and caring for her grandmother, who has dementia. Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.”
Very, very different tone! Also, this is about a slightly different demographic. In the NPR article, the US side source has family in Shanghai; in this story, the family is in Luoyang. Both cities are large and important. But Luoyang benefitted specifically from recent, heavy government investment as part of the belt and road initiative. Another source further down in the article is from eastern Jiangxi province, yet another, and very different part of China. This young woman had been working for a private tutoring company until her job category was banned. Like Li, in Luoyang, she is caring for family members as well, unlike the young woman in the NPR article, who continued to behave as if she was working even after she wasn’t, which is something I’ve run into numerous times before when reading about broad unemployment in the United States.
All the articles emphasize the importance of satisfying work, and all of the articles depict young Chinese women specifically. None of the articles directly engage with the demographic pattern that caught my interest, altho they all touch upon it lightly. Of course, when describing the lack of desirable employment for a lot of members of a particular generation, it is difficult to make the argument that, oh, well, there really should be _more_ members of that particular generation, _even if_ lack of demand because of that policy may be some component of this particular economic configuration.
Meanwhile, here is a Reuters piece on how the Chinese government is engaging with the problem of elder care:
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-issues-guidance-basic-elderly-care-system-by-2025-2023-05-21/
There is a directive to produce elder care facilities to cope with changing demographics. It is pretty easy to imagine that this system, should it actually come into existence, will employ a large and increasing number of people. In the meantime, I think it is safe to assume that a lot of the young people who do not have jobs are probably plenty busy doing things that will be a good match for the rise of that elderly care system’s needs. I’m not saying anyone involved in this is going to love how their life turns out. Nor am I saying it’s going to be super easy to pay for. I am, however, noting that the problems involved here feel kinda familiar.
I thought, wow! This is really interesting because I have taken an interest in demographics for a minute or two, and I distinctly remember that one of the rhetorical strategies to attack the one child policy was to argue that as older generations aged, and retired, and required care, the workers in the next generation or two down would not be adequate to the tasks of funding pensions for them and/or providing services to them in their weeks/months/years of final decline when they cannot care for themselves. If it is possible for a younger generation to slack _while the olds are dying_, then it _feels_ like this particular concern was misguided. I always suspected it was misguided, for a variety of reasons. First, many olds are quite able to and prefer to care for themselves — and others!!! — until very close to the end and then, the end is often very compressed. Second, many jobs that once required many people to do no longer require anyone to do because of automation. I don’t just mean, factory robots. I mean, if you have the ability to turn on a faucet to get water and adjust a thermostat to have comfortable temperature, then you don’t need 2+ people hauling water and fuel for your household. And on and on and on. When you sit in an office looking at numbers representing money taken out of paychecks and put into benefits for others, you maybe don’t fully appreciate this, and if you don’t take the time to really understand how people get their needs met, you might not realize just how important this kind of technological change is.
I have _finally_ taken the time to track down the story that my husband read / heard. It was on NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/15/1199682878/chinas-urban-youth-unemployment-rate-rose-to-21-in-june
OK, it’s not what I thought it was at all.
“It's the high-paying, high-skill jobs that have been shrinking in numbers. And these are what the current cohorts of college graduate students have been trained for, what they're expecting, what they wanted. They're not there.”
All the trends are mentioned in this very short piece: lying flat, 996, pandemic reopening, slowing growth overall and a mismatch between the number of young people who trained for jobs in various sectors and the actual available jobs in those sectors.
When my husband heard this:
“And they'll have grandparents who are from the city. So what this means is that they're going to be inheriting a lot of real estate from their grandparents - not to mention, you know, maybe savings that their parents have been accumulating over time.”
He heard something _that was already happening_ NOT _something that a person with some expertise in the field and the country was anticipating would happen.
Here is a slightly older (by a few months) article on roughly similar topics:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/26/economy/china-youth-unemployment-intl-hnk/index.html
“Exhausted by the pressure to succeed as a photographer, Litsky Li accepted a better offer: quit work to become one of China’s growing legions of children paid by their families to stay home.
Li, 21, now spends her days grocery shopping for her family in the central city of Luoyang and caring for her grandmother, who has dementia. Her parents pay her a salary of 6,000 yuan ($835) a month, which is considered a solid middle-class wage in her area.”
Very, very different tone! Also, this is about a slightly different demographic. In the NPR article, the US side source has family in Shanghai; in this story, the family is in Luoyang. Both cities are large and important. But Luoyang benefitted specifically from recent, heavy government investment as part of the belt and road initiative. Another source further down in the article is from eastern Jiangxi province, yet another, and very different part of China. This young woman had been working for a private tutoring company until her job category was banned. Like Li, in Luoyang, she is caring for family members as well, unlike the young woman in the NPR article, who continued to behave as if she was working even after she wasn’t, which is something I’ve run into numerous times before when reading about broad unemployment in the United States.
All the articles emphasize the importance of satisfying work, and all of the articles depict young Chinese women specifically. None of the articles directly engage with the demographic pattern that caught my interest, altho they all touch upon it lightly. Of course, when describing the lack of desirable employment for a lot of members of a particular generation, it is difficult to make the argument that, oh, well, there really should be _more_ members of that particular generation, _even if_ lack of demand because of that policy may be some component of this particular economic configuration.
Meanwhile, here is a Reuters piece on how the Chinese government is engaging with the problem of elder care:
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-issues-guidance-basic-elderly-care-system-by-2025-2023-05-21/
There is a directive to produce elder care facilities to cope with changing demographics. It is pretty easy to imagine that this system, should it actually come into existence, will employ a large and increasing number of people. In the meantime, I think it is safe to assume that a lot of the young people who do not have jobs are probably plenty busy doing things that will be a good match for the rise of that elderly care system’s needs. I’m not saying anyone involved in this is going to love how their life turns out. Nor am I saying it’s going to be super easy to pay for. I am, however, noting that the problems involved here feel kinda familiar.