When my friend Lee first lost his job in 2023, he was terrified. From the moment he graduated in 2016, he had been working nonstop. He had changed jobs a couple of times, but always had a choice – he had never been kicked out of the job market like this.
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Lee worked in the traditional publishing business, editing children’s books. The industry has been tanking, with the rise of digital books, and the post-pandemic slump doesn’t help. He was laid off with half of his colleagues, with a small severance. Anxious at first, he spent hours browsing recruitment websites and sending out his résumé, but it was no use. “I sent out 100 résumés. When I checked the second day, only eight had been read and none had replied,” he told me.
Eventually, he got a job through a family friend. But it was harrowing – to survive, the publishing house needed editors to also be salespeople, live-streaming themselves playing games like charades, organising events, turning video games into animated books. It made him miserable: why was he producing and selling books to children that wouldn’t help them grow?
When Lee couldn’t meet expectations, he was fired. Suddenly, he was no longer afraid to be jobless. He told me he was struck by the lightning bolt realisation that it wasn’t his fault. Moreover, would he rather still be live-streaming himself playing games and drinking vinegar as punishment for losing, just to win some bread?
This is an entirely new experience for young Chinese. We’ve never been through an economic slump lasting a number of years. We’ve never seen legions of university graduates struggling to find jobs.
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Once upon a time in China, in the 1990s, millions of factory workers and state-owned enterprise employees were laid off amid economic reforms, ending the era of the “iron rice bowl”. Some had to sell blood. But those are distant memories for my generation.