China: Tough times are no deterrent

Published on Sunday 12 December 2010 16:20

While some recent Chinese graduates find success, many are worn down by challenges and disappointments: living conditions can be Dickensian, and six-day working weeks leave little time for anything else but sleeping, eating and doing the laundry.

But what many find more discomfiting are the obstacles that hard work alone cannot overcome. Their undergraduate degrees, many from the growing crop of third-tier provincial schools, earn them little respect in the big city. And as the children of peasants or factory workers, they lack the essential social lubricant - guanxi, meaning personal connections - that greases the way for the offspring of China's nouveau riche and the politically connected.

Emerging from the sheltered adolescence of one-child families, they quickly bump up against the bureaucracy of population management, known as the hukou system, which denies migrants the subsidised housing and other health and welfare benefits enjoyed by legally registered residents.

Add to this a demographic tide that has increased the ranks of China's 20- to 25-year-olds to 123 million, about 17 million more than there were just four years ago.

Yet the lure of the big cities is hard to resist.

"Compared with Beijing, my hometown in Shanxi feels like it's stuck in the 1950s," said Li Xudong, 25, whose father is a grocer. "If I stayed there, my life would be empty and depressing."