A Chinese bank has triggered outrage by offering to help its rich customers secure prestigious internships for their children, prompting a heated debate about privilege and inequality on social media.
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Industrial Bank, a regional lender from Fujian province, said in a now-deleted post on the social platform WeChat that it could arrange for its clients’ offspring to gain work experience at top firms including Google and JP Morgan, according to screenshots circulating online.
To qualify for the scheme, households would need to deposit large new sums with the bank: 10 million yuan (US$1.4 million) for non-private banking customers and 5 million yuan for private banking clients, the post added.
The scheme quickly went viral and triggered intense backlash on Chinese social media. The reaction has been particularly fierce given China’s sky-high youth unemployment rate and a spate of recent scandals involving nepotism in the job market.
On Tuesday, Industrial Bank announced it had paused the offer and apologised for any “misunderstandings caused by incomplete descriptions”, according to the state-run news outlet Securities Times.
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In the statement, the company claimed it had not directly arranged internships for its customers’ children, but had merely intended to refer them to external recruitment consultants, Securities Times reported.