英国《卫报》报道中国青年失业情况，与英国和欧盟相当

2026年07月13日
 

(part 1) China’s graduate glut: millions enter a job market with little use for them - Record numbers find there is little demand for their skills, as entry-level tech roles are hit by AI and automation - 

This time of year is graduation season in China: traditionally a bittersweet period of solemn goodbyes and family celebrations as university students transition from campus life into adulthood. Now it also increasingly represents trepidation about the future. Each year, millions more graduates are thrust into China’s already saturated jobs market. The situation for this year’s cohort, flooding into an increasingly crowded pool of applicants fighting for an insufficient number of positions, is arguably the bleakest yet. Jasmine, a 22-year-old who studied accounting in Shanghai, is among this year’s record 12.7 million college graduates – a 480,000 increase on 2025. She expected to find a job as soon as she finished university, but has sent out about 150 CVs over the past month without success. “It has been much harder than I imagined,” she says. “The lack of vacancies is one issue, and the competition is also intense, especially for jobs that offer weekends off and proper social insurance.” While the jobless rate among 16- to 24-year-olds is 15.6% in China, comparable to the 16.2% in the UK and the 15.1% in the EU, the country’s employment market is especially unforgiving for graduates grappling with the break-neck change taking place in the world’s second largest economy.
 

(part 2) A growing number of recent graduates in China with humanities, arts and languages degrees are finding there is little demand for their skills. Meanwhile, Chinese universities, rapidly overhauling their curriculums in response to the country’s race to become a global leader in a slew of hi-tech industries, are culling “obsolete” degrees en masse. With more than 10 million Chinese students graduating each year since 2022, a figure that is only growing, it is the scale of the situation that is an exacerbating factor, with authorities tasked with finding meaningful work for the equivalent of a medium-sized European nation each year. China’s youth employment has been a persistent issue since 2020 that has “not meaningfully improved”, according to an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) researcher, who did not wish to be named. The trend was initially fuelled by China’s move towards a “productivity- and manufacturing-driven growth model” of high-value industries such as electric vehicles, batteries, semiconductors and robotics, the researcher says. “As the economy shifted, a mismatch emerged between the skills being supplied by graduates and those demanded by the labour market,” the researcher says, adding that the problem has been exacerbated more recently by AI’s “transformative impact”. “Entry-level jobs are often easier to automate or replace, making young workers particularly vulnerable,” the researcher says. “Even graduates with backgrounds in IT services have seen some entry-level tasks increasingly automated by AI.” While the move towards AI- and tech-focused degrees is a universal trend, the speed at which it is unfolding in China’s universities is unique, according to Charles Jeffery Sun, the founder of the consultancy China Education International. “China’s higher education is centrally governed. When Beijing sets a strategic direction, implementation across hundreds of universities happens rapidly,” he says. In response to directives from Beijing for degrees to better match labour demands, Chinese universities culled 12,200 undergraduate programmes, mostly in the arts and humanities, between 2021 and 2025, while introducing 10,200 in emerging fields. It is a situation Sun describes as “painful for many graduates”, but part of a “long?overdue reckoning”. “For decades, Chinese higher education was primarily about access, getting more students into university. The next phase must be about quality and relevance,” he says. Further hindering the jobs market is China’s slowing economy, with Beijing adjusting its GDP growth target to the lowest since 1991 – a range of 4.5% to 5% – as it grapples with aggressive global tariffs, weak domestic consumption, and a shrinking and rapidly ageing population.

见链接 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/13/china-graduate-glut-young-people-job-market-tech-ai

 

[细风细雨]

回复 'Billzhou' 的评论 : 英国好像是有国家出面替你找工作的部门，也是你申请失业救济的部门，失业救济好像是按周发放。

[细风细雨]

回复 '浅川诗音' 的评论 : 英国大学近来也砍了许多专业，大多是人文艺术类的。

[浅川诗音]

中国大学在过去五年砍掉了1.22万个文科专业，新增了1.02万个理工科专业。这种“手术式”的专业调整，在其他国家几乎不可能这么快发生

[Billzhou]

我想知道，中英兩國青年，如果找不到工作，國家給飯吃嗎？比如按月發放生活津貼。