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Reuters“If I had the choice, I would definitely not return home,” says Yuwen, a 33-year-old man who has been unemployed for more than six months, days before the Chinese New Year.
Many of China’s nearly 380 million internal migrants only return home once a year, and the Lunar New Year, the biggest festival for family reunion, is usually the time to do so. That’s why the Spring Festival travel rush, known as “chunyun,” is the world’s largest annual mass migration. The authorities expect a record nine billion trips this time for the Year of the Dragon.
But Yuwen dreads the trip home because he says his relatives will question him about every aspect of his life, particularly his employment situation, including salaries and benefits. His parents know that he has lost his job and have been understanding about it. They have agreed with Yuwen that the best course of action is to lie to his family that he still has his old job.
Yuwen will also spend only three days with his relatives; Normally it would be more than a week. “This will be over soon,” she says.
Hundreds of young people have taken to popular social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Weibo to say they will not return home for the festival. Like Yuwen, some of them have recently been unemployed.
Official data published in June 2023 revealed More than one in five urban residents aged 16 to 24 in China were unemployed.. China then suspended the release of youth unemployment data until last month. The figure now stands at 14.9%, but the data excludes students.
After decades of breakneck growth, the Chinese economy is losing steam and the anticipated post-Covid recovery has not materialized. Its real estate market has collapsed and local government debts are rising.
But the crisis of confidence is perhaps the thorniest issue: Investors worry that China’s leaders are prioritizing party control over economic development. Under China’s leadership, Xi Jinping, there has been a crackdown on private companies, from technology to private tutoring. Relations with the West have also deteriorated in recent years.
DistributeYuwen is a victim of repression by private companies.
In 2014, he decided to pursue a graduate degree in Chinese language education in Beijing, about 185 miles (300 kilometers) from his hometown in Hebei province. It was to “ride the wave of a domestic policy,” because Xi had launched the Belt and Road Initiative a year earlier to spread greater influence abroad.
After graduating, he quickly found work at a private tutoring company and was tasked with managing and training foreign tutors for Chinese students. But in July 2021, the Chinese government banned for-profit private tutoring under the pretext of easing the burden on students. This was a death knell for the $120 billion (£95 billion) tutoring industry.
Yuwen was forced to change careers. He landed a job at a large tech company in January 2023. He was responsible for formulating live streaming rules for their overseas platforms and supervising the work of prominent influencers. But it only lasted five months.
According to Reuters, a regulatory crackdown on Big Tech since late 2020 had already wiped more than $1 trillion off its value. The United States then threatened sanctions against Chinese tech companies over concerns about Beijing’s national security legislation. That proved to be the last straw for Yuwen’s company, which decided to move its overseas operations out of China.
Yuwen says he has submitted his CV more than 1,000 times in the last six months alone. He has not received any job offers even though he has already lowered his salary expectations. “At first I felt quite calm, but then I became more and more anxious. I didn’t expect it to be so difficult,” he says.
DistributeIn the southern city of Shenzhen, physical trainer Qingfeng has decided to travel alone to celebrate the Chinese New Year.
He will lie to his parents telling them that he cannot buy the tickets to return home. “Who doesn’t want to come home to celebrate the new year? But he makes me ashamed.”
After leaving the army in 2019, Qingfeng started working as a fitness instructor and says he could earn about 20,000 yuan ($2,800; £2,200) a month in Shanghai. Last year, he moved to Shenzhen to be closer to his girlfriend, who studies in neighboring Hong Kong.
The 28-year-old found a job in a foreign trade company because he wanted more job stability. But the salary was only 4,500 yuan a month. This was unsustainable as the monthly rent in Shenzhen is at least 1,500 yuan.
Qingfeng left his job after two months and has now landed a position at a new gym that will open after the holidays. But she doesn’t want to see her family because she says she lost almost all of her savings last year. She doesn’t want to give details, but she says: “You can say that I have failed in the stock market.”
In early February, Chinese stocks fell to their lowest level in five years. The US embassy’s Weibo account became an outlet for Chinese investors’ frustrations, with some even asking Americans for help. Some criticized the current leadership. All of those posts have since been deleted.
EPAQingfeng is not sure he can build a customer base at the new gym due to the economic crisis. “Many large gyms have closed lately due to high debt.”
But it’s not just the economy that has stopped some young Chinese from wanting to return home to attend the festival.
Some single women, like Xiaoba, say they don’t want their families to pressure them to marry and settle down.
“I’ve been working all over the country. Every time I go to a city, my mother suddenly finds a man and tells me to go on a blind date. It’s outrageous,” says the 35-year-old project manager.
China’s population has shrunk for the second year in a row.
Its low birth rate has sparked fears that the country will lose young workers, who are a key force in driving its economy. Young people are increasingly reluctant to marry and have children, and the number of registered marriages has been declining for nine consecutive years, according to official data.
In October, Xi said women played a “unique role” in promoting traditional virtues and that a “new culture of marriage and motherhood” needed to be cultivated to cope with an aging population. But the government’s efforts to boost marriage and the birth rate have so far been ineffective.
Xiaoba no longer panics about getting married and enjoys her life. She plans to spend the Lunar New Year with her cat and watch CCTV’s huge New Year’s Gala, which airs every Spring Festival eve, at her rented apartment in Shenzhen.
Yuwen, for his part, hopes that the next Lunar New Year will be better. “I believe I will make it because I am determined. I have never considered giving up.”
But there are things that are beyond your control. “I’m not too optimistic about the economy in 2024.”
Those interviewed have been given pseudonyms.