World
The Chinese graduate •
Beijing is staking everything on AI, but in the (already saturated) labour market, it is backfiring
‘A university graduate means an unemployed person,’ write the Chinese on social media. Thus, artificial intelligence is exacerbating the shortage of job opportunities in China, which is insufficient for the 12.7 million recent graduates who will be joining the workforce this year. The government’s efforts to contain the situation are not enough.
China, too, is grappling with the impact of artificial intelligence on the labour market, which has been in crisis for years. According to analysts and researchers, AI is not the main cause of youth unemployment, but it is making the already saturated labour market in Beijing considerably more challenging. The ‘AI Plus’ initiative announced last year by Xi Jinping aims to achieve 70 per cent AI adoption in key sectors by 2027 and 90 per cent by 2030, but the transition is proving difficult, with the rate of job creation driven by AI lagging behind the rate of job losses. Last July, the unemployment rate among young Chinese people aged between 16 and 24 stood at 17.9 per cent, and the number of jobs on offer was insufficient for those who had enrolled at university – this year, it is estimated that around 12.7 million recent graduates will join the Chinese workforce, a record number.
Chinese people interviewed by international newspapers are increasingly disillusioned; they spoke of anxiety, uncertainty and despair. Jin, a 26-year-old recent graduate of the University of Hong Kong, told The New York Times that the only consolation is that it seems everyone is facing the same situation: ‘At least we’re not alone,’ she says. On Chinese social media, a phrase expressing frustration has managed to evade censorship: ‘graduate’ means ‘unemployed’. Many professionals – lawyers, architects and engineers – have reported returning to white-collar jobs just to earn a little extra, whilst applying their skills to train artificial intelligence systems. A survey conducted by a 2025 graduate on Xiaohongshu shows that out of 14,000 people, 10,000 are still unemployed. In another survey on the Chinese social media platform, 3,317 out of 4,637 respondents described their situation as “unemployed since graduation, aimless, lost and anxious”. Beijing has taken remedial action by putting pressure on companies to avoid redundancies, issuing rulings that do not accept cost savings resulting from AI as a justification for job losses. For now, this is not enough.