With unemployment in Chinese cities increasing substantially, especially among educated young people who are unable to find work, protests have erupted in many of China’s colleges and universities.
The dissatisfaction of the protestors with the authorities and society has risen sharply. Unemployment has risen in China, and society and regime are unstable. Protests by students frequently erupt in China’s colleges and universities due to the closure of the epidemic, rising unemployment, and social instability.
On the evening of May 26, students from Tianjin University held a rally and demonstration because they were dissatisfied with the authorities’ extreme epidemic prevention measures and shouted the slogan – “Down with bureaucracy!”
There was also a protest at the adjacent Nankai University. On the evening of May 24, students at Beijing Normal University marched on campus against the “Zero-COVID” policy. On the evening of May 23, protests also broke out at the China University of Political Science and Law.
On the evening of May 15, Peking University students gathered on the campus to collectively protest these measures which have marred their career prospects severely.
Student protests have broken out frequently in universities in Beijing and Tianjin. It is conceivable how far social dissatisfaction has evolved. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is very worried about a repeat of the Tiananmen June 4 Student Movement.
China’s “zero” epidemic prevention self-destructed the economy, and the students are deeply pained. The country is in shambles and the people are retreating as large-scale technology companies have been purged by the government and laid-off workers one after another.
Small, and medium enterprises (SMEs) are also struggling to survive. The lockdown caused stores to close, cinemas to close, factories to shut down, service industries to shut down, and schools to close; it trapped consumers, trapped workers, created logistical chaos, and even shut down the economy. The consequence is soaring unemployment and social instability.
Jiang Xiaobai, a liquor brand that focuses on the youth market, was reported to have laid off 1,000 employees and 40 percent of its Hangzhou branch. Social Media reports called it a “layoff storm.”Midea Group, the leader in white goods, was also involved in the “layoff storm”. Some netizens posted that Midea’s layoff rate was as high as 50 percent.
In any case, the soaring unemployment rate in China has been hidden. According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of the Communist Party of China on May 16, the national urban survey unemployment rate rose to 6.1 percent in April, of which the unemployment rate of youth aged 16 to 24 reached 18.2 percent, a record high.The number of Chinese university graduates in the class of 2022 is an unprecedented 10.76 million. The “2022 College Student Employability Survey Report” released by China’s “Zhaopin Recruitment” in May shows that so far, the signing rate of boys is 22.2 percent, which has shrunk by almost half from 54.4 percent in the previous year, and the signing rate of girls is 10.4 percent. It is almost 1/4 of 40.1 percent of the previous year.
Beijing also announced in April that “Beijing 2022 college graduates will go to rural areas to support agriculture”, which feels like “going to the mountains and going to the countryside” in the past.