- Recent reports of Xi Jinping telling young people to ‘eat bitterness’ suggests a helpless government asking youth to simply endure. This is far from the truth
Some Western media are good at creating the illusion of objective reporting, presenting one side of the story as the whole picture. One report on Xi’s remarks, for instance, added that he had previously instructed young people to “eat bitterness”, meaning that they should endure hardship.
The key message was about encouraging young people not to be afraid of setbacks and suffering, which can toughen them up. Xi hoped that young people can press on despite the challenges, stay optimistic and find motivation in failure. There is nothing there related to jobs and employment.
Xi’s encouragement was the same as the advice children receive from their parents. But when “eating bitterness” is taken out of context and used in terms of youth unemployment, the meaning gets skewed. The suggestion is that the Chinese government is unable to tackle the problem and is simply asking young people to endure the hardship.
This is far from the truth. China has never tried to hide the structural challenges it faces in tackling unemployment arising from a mismatch between supply and demand of human resources.
In Xi’s recent study session remarks, he highlighted the skills mismatch in China’s job market and called for accelerated efforts to ensure the country’s modern and high-quality workforce was of “sufficient quantity” and “reasonably distributed” in an “optimised structure”. In other words, Beijing continues to prioritise youth development and efforts to optimise youth employment.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education, along with four other state departments, is promoting reforms to fine-tune the higher education curriculum to find a better demand and supply balance for the skills needed to drive the economy.
In the era of the digital economy, e-commerce, fintech and online services are expanding rapidly. New forms of employment are emerging. Young people with digital skills are increasingly finding jobs in these dynamic sectors.
Take live streaming, for example. According to a report last year by the China Academy of Personnel Sciences, which is under the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the new industry of live streaming short videos has given rise to and nurtured 174 new professions, including online marketers and recruiters.
China’s industrial upgrade will produce a more service-oriented economy and this is likely to absorb more workers. The expected growth of the service sector, which accounted for 55 per cent of the economy last year, will also provide more employment flexibility.
The hopes of a country and the future of a nation lie in the hands of its youth – that is what China believes. So there is no reason to doubt the government’s determination to resolve its structural unemployment issues or any other challenges affecting its young people. It will just take time.
The current situation is not all roses for the whole nation’s youth, of course. But China’s young people may have more mettle than we give them credit for. Even though “lying flat” has been popular among some young people, it is more like self-mockery; deep inside, most are not willing to settle for this. And that unwillingness, I believe, will give them the courage to press on.
Wei Wei is the former chief correspondent of the Eurasian bureau of China Central Television, based in Moscow
