Young Chinese Chase the Elusive Butterfly of Meaningful Employment

Some brought binoculars to scan the crowd for desirable prospects. One woman wore a wig to ensure a perfect hair day. Enough young people to fill Dodger Stadium had gussied themselves up for some serious courting, often shelling out big bucks to make themselves as attractive as possible.

But the quarry was a commodity almost more elusive than love in today’s China: a good job.

“I’m confident of my talent and ability,” Xu Hang, 22, said as he struggled to make his way through a teeming mass of equally confident--and equally importunate--young suitors at a recent job fair here in the Chinese capital.

Time was, the youth of this nation had little choice of where they wound up working. They were chess pieces of a Communist state that assigned them jobs where it saw fit.

But as China tries to overhaul its moribund command economy, the old ways of landing a job are also dying a slow death.

For college graduates such as Xu, gone is the former government fenpei system, which guaranteed work but no real say as to what it was, or even where. In its place is a world where personal merit and marketability are increasingly what count, a world of job applications, resumes, interviews and the nail-biting wait for a callback--or a rejection.

“The old way of employment limited our choices,” said student Liang Song, 21. “Now we’re faced with many opportunities, so we can find what we like.”

Available Jobs Getting Scarce

Yet with expanded opportunity has come ever-fiercer competition in the job market. As Beijing awaits entry into the World Trade Organization, the employment picture in once-booming China has become noticeably grimmer. The Asian financial crisis has squeezed the economy tight in the last few years. Inefficient state enterprises are foundering. Millions of urban laborers have been laid off, while more and more rural residents flood the cities in search of work.

Last year, a record 30 million urban Chinese went hunting for fewer than half that number of jobs.

The Communist regime is banking on WTO accession to help get discontented workers off the streets and into newly created jobs. The media here are banging the drum almost daily about U.S. legislation, to be voted on this month, that would permanently normalize trade relations with Beijing.

Among those potentially most affected by WTO entry would be China’s swelling ranks of young people, the product of a mini-baby boom that coincided with the start of the country’s economic reforms two decades ago.

Of the 30 million urban job-seekers last year, 10 million were newcomers to the job market and younger than 25.

Armed with computer savvy, easy mobility and special skills--such as fluency in English--the young often hold an edge in the new economy. High-tech firms and service-oriented companies are exploding across China, leaving behind workers accustomed to traditional enterprises and Soviet-style industry.

“Younger people can find jobs more easily than older people,” said Mo Rong, a researcher at a think tank run by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. “Their thinking has followed the changes in society.”

The most coveted jobs are those in private and foreign enterprises. Since 1991, employment in private and foreign companies has grown by as much as 40% each year, Mo said. By 1997, the private sector boasted 27 million jobs; foreign firms employed 6 million people.

But there are still far more seekers than takers.

“We only need three employees right now,” said one woman who came to the job fair here to recruit for her electronics company.

“Up to now,” she said in the early afternoon, “we’ve received over a hundred resumes.”

In the surrounding crush, gung-ho applicants used field glasses to spot their desired companies out of the 600 that showed up, a third of which were private or foreign firms.

Nearly 15,000 of the 50,000 job-seekers traveled from outside Beijing, newspaper reports estimated. One young man from Shanxi province spent nearly $250, an exorbitant amount in China, on a new suit, photocopies of his resume, transportation, food and accommodations just to attend the fair. Others hired professional resume services to help them look attractive, at least on paper.

A Preference for Foreign Firms

College campuses have tried to prep their students for the rigors of the new job culture.

“We were given a book titled ‘Interview Tips for Students,’ ” said Xu, the self-confident student. “I didn’t learn a whole lot from it. It was too general.”

Shi Xiang, 22, came prepared with a resume, in English, that he wrote himself--he learned the language in an English class--and had his sights set on landing a spot with a foreign company.

“They’re more efficient, and there’s more opportunity for promotion,” said Shi, a senior at Beijing Petroleum Chemical Institute. “Of course, earning more money is one of the reasons too.”

Stiff competition has made it more difficult to get a good job these days, particularly in more prosperous cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, he said. Job fairs and Internet sites devoted to job listings have thrown the doors open wider to competitors from across the country.

Unlike many of his peers, Shi is willing to go back to his hometown in landlocked, poverty-stricken Anhui province if that’s what it takes to nab a suitable opening.

Theoretically, plenty of jobs are available for college graduates, who still form a small minority in China.

But many educated youth, hooked on bright lights and big cities, refuse to take on less glamorous but necessary work, from teaching posts in remote village schools to bureaucratic slots out in the hinterlands.

“This is a question of unbalanced distribution,” Mo said. “Everybody thinks the best jobs are in Beijing or the big cities, with high incomes, and everybody wants those jobs.”

That there is even a choice is a fundamental break from China’s rigid Communist past.

As late as the early 1990s, the fenpei system was still in place, doling out job assignments to students, often according to politics--as plums doled out to children of top officials--as much as need. Even the universities they attended and their majors were dictated by the state, not their own interests.

“In 1985, you sat in school and waited for a teacher to tell you, ‘This work unit has this many openings,’ and what kind of jobs you should look for,” Mo said.

Unfairness, corruption and nepotism in the fenpei system were partly responsible for inspiring students to take to the streets of Beijing in 1989 in protest. Those demonstrations escalated into the massive pro-democracy rallies in Tiananmen Square, which were brutally quashed.

During the ‘90s, as economic reforms picked up, the possibility of employment outside traditional state-owned enterprises increased. Freer internal movement within China also loosened the fenpei stranglehold, although residency laws, which regulate marriage and public education for children, still constrain migration.

“It’s an obstacle for both employers and employees,” said Fu Tingting, a student at prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai. “China should learn from some Western countries and abolish the residency system. . . . That’s a mark of social progress.”

Fu, 22, insisted on a job in Beijing, where her family already lives.

Fortunately, she found one, at yet another job fair. Although she majored in international politics, her new career choice would sound familiar to countless young Americans: She’ll be working for a computer company.

“Job markets are definitely competitive now, but that’s normal. Otherwise . . . we might be assigned to jobs we didn’t want to do,” she said. “That would be boring.”