A job fair in Hengyang, Central China's Hunan Province Photo: VCG

Right before graduation from university this summer, Zeng Ke, a 24-year old, has carved out a clear career path for herself: entering a local clothes factory as a gig worker for some time, instead of jostling with millions of fresh graduates who face odds to find a full-time job.

Majoring in clothes design and production, Zeng, based in Hangzhou, the capital of East China's Zhejiang Province, is full of confidence when talking about the gig work she's doing now - selling clothes via livestreaming on internet platforms.

"Hangzhou is home to many clothes factories and design studios, and more international brands are willing to place their OEM (original equipment manufacturing) orders here," Zeng told the Global Times.

In her eyes, selling clothes via livestreaming, a flourishing business model in China in recent years, does not belong to the traditional gig work category which is more labor-intensive, like a courier or driver working for a ride-hailing platform.

Speak articulately 

"Livestreaming has high requirement on soft skills: you have to speak articulately before your audience, and you need to grasp some knowledge on clothes and clothes-making, for example its texture and structure, to enable your audience to have better understanding of the product," Zeng said.

Considering the gig work's alignment with her personal interests, coupled with free work hours and earnings that are not bad at all, Zeng is satisfied with the path she has chosen for herself. 

"I have made attempts in sending numerous resumes but no job came knocking. I have to feed myself first," she noted, adding that she still wants to settle down on a steady career in the future.

Zeng is among throngs of young people struggling to obtain a job offer this year when the job market is faced with a severe supply-demand imbalance. China's surveyed urban unemployment rate stood at 5.3 percent in the first half of 2023, 0.2 percentage points lower than the first quarter, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed. 

The rate among those aged between 16 and 24 was elevated at 21.3 percent in June, while that among 25 and 59, the majority of the labor market, came in at 4.1 percent, according to the NBS.

'Flood the market'

Every year when the hot summer draws near, swarms of fresh college graduates would just "flood the market". This year, the number hit a record high of 11.58 million. Also, a large group of students who have finished overseas study would come back and jostle for jobs, making employment harder.

Guo Zipeng, who graduated with a computing science diploma from a British university, has recently landed a job in a state-owned firm based in Beijing after several failed attempts.

"I obtained some interview opportunities in well-known internet giants in Beijing, but none of them gave me a job offer. I think they preferred to hire those who have accumulated some working experiences and may get onto a work quickly," Guo told the Global Times.

The internet industry, which acts as a sponge to absorb college graduates is shifting to reducing headcounts to obtain higher efficiency to sustain their business growth.

Quite a number of internet companies both home and abroad have slashed staffing numbers since 2022 due to continued economic uncertainty.

Wang Xiao, a team leader of a Beijing-based venture capital firm, told the Global Times that his team usually has one or two interns who could stay at the posts when the internship wraps up and become full-time employees. "But this year we have none left," Wang said, adding that even the intern posts face fierce competition.

"The tight job market is not a thing that happened just this year, it's actually the cumulative result over the past three years when the pandemic battered the economy," Tian Yun, a Beijing-based veteran economist, told the Global Times. But "we shouldn't be pessimistic" as the market is bottoming out, Tian said, citing the strengthening economic recovery momentum in the second half of the year.

Economic stimulus

"With more economic stimulus plans implemented by the government, the private sector which offers some 80 percent of the jobs is reviving. So more job opportunities should arrive," he said.

Last week, the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planner said in a notice that it will overhaul mechanisms and improve policies to spur private sector investment.

Wang Jianlin, the founder of real estate developer Dalian Wanda Group, said his company will strive to create more than 200,000 new jobs in services and more than 100,000 new jobs for college graduates this year, according to a report by China Media Group.

Li Wenxue, vice president of China's advanced solar panel maker Longi Green Energy Technology, told the Global Times that the company plans to recruit more than 9,000 college students this year, up 50 percent from last year, accounting for more than 20 percent of the firm's job offerings for the year. 

Authorities at all levels have prioritized youth employment, launching and implementing a range of supportive measures to help them obtain jobs.

In June, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) kicked off a 100-day campaign to provide more than 10 million job opportunities for college graduates. 

The ministry asked the heads of local human resources bureaus to visit enterprises and universities to collect job vacancy information and find positions suitable for college students.

China's youth unemployment rate is expected to decline in August thanks to the continuously recovering economy. "The youth jobless rate will likely drop from August, with the graduation season coming to an end," NBS spokesman Fu Linghui said in July.

In a bid to ramp up employment and income, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs recently issued a notice on promoting continuous income growth for poverty alleviation, emphasizing the need to promote stable employment and increase wage-based income for those lifted out of poverty.

Efforts should be intensified nationwide to ensure that the number of impoverished people engaged in work remains stable, with a target of at least 30 million people this year, the notice said.

In the eastern regions, enterprises will be guided to develop more job opportunities, enhance labor cooperation, and ensure that those who have been lifted out of poverty stay employed in their local areas with stable positions and income. For the central and western regions, targeted vocational skills training will be provided to enhance the employability of those who have escaped poverty.

The country has set a goal of creating about 12 million new urban jobs this year, up from last year's target of 11 million, and keep the urban surveyed unemployment rate at around 5.5 percent, with a focus on youth employment, according to the Government Work Report delivered earlier this year.