Institute For The Future

Who's the baddest, Chinese peasants or grads?

Over the past few months I've heard two entirely different points of view about which groups in China are more likely to cause serious problems because of their unemployment.  Will it be educated university graduates, or urban factory workers returning to their villages?  Both groups have high expectations of being able to work and of becoming increasingly prosperous, and both have seen those expectations dashed.

Today’s Wall Street Journal article by Ian Johnson, China Faces a Grad Glut After Boom at Colleges, points out that the unprecedented rise in opportunities for higher education over the past decade--30% increases in enrollment, year over year--has resulted in millions of grads...who now can't find jobs.  (By the way, the article has a couple of nice clean higher education data figures, which are not that easy to find on the web in English).  What's worse, the majority of students at the 2000-plus mid-level institutions have had relatively poor educations since these places have mortgaged themselves to the hilt to pay for expansion, at a cost to things like faculty, books, and other academic resources.

I recently met with a Chinese government affairs expert working at a large tech multinational, who sees this group of educated, ambitious young people as the primary source of concern for social unrest in the next few years.  Chinese university students have been protest agents since the inception of the modern Chinese university system, following a long tradition of scholarly commitment to standing up against the rulers in the name of justice.  This tradition alone is not enough for volatility.  But now factor in the effects of students' prolonged delayed-gratification—a decade or more of mind-numbing memorization for tests, 6-day a week school programs--and the pressure they face because of their parents' financial investments in school. As single children they will also be the sole providers for their parents as they age.  You begin to see why the government affairs expert pointed to this group. 

I also recently met with a senior executive at a large Chinese enterprise who strongly believes instead that the peasants are the ones the country needs to pay attention to. An Army Marching to Escape Medieval China, in the Financial Times April 20 (free, registration required), provides a glimpse into the huge gaps between life in the village and life in the city.  Very few willingly return to the countryside.  The youngest generation of rural migrants has readjusted their expectations and would prefer to settle down in the city, not to go back to their villages.   If their only option is to return to what one worker calls a “medieval world” after having experienced better living standards and seen the wealth that floods the city, and if this continues on a longterm basis, there could be big problems.

Update: My colleague Anthony Townsend pointed out that I didn't offer any conclusion.  Um, right.  Here it is:

There will be a small number of people within

each group who will do really new things, such as growing a significant

regional business by starting out small, online; or transplanting an

urban product or service back to the countryside and creating new jobs.

As for who will be more trouble for the government, a traditional

Chinese view of politics would say that university students have the

potential for more organized urban action than do the workers. Migrant

workers will cause all kinds of hell, but they

don't have the same access to the media and their protests would remain

more regional rather than national. The CCP has always been more

worried about controlling urban people than rural.

However, now that you have all these hybrid rural urban factory workers who

identify more with the city than the countryside, and after decades of

loosened mobility between rural and urban, it's possible that a younger

generation of migrants might act in a bolder, more coordinated fashion,

taking advantage of connected networks across the country. We might see

the start of something we haven't seen for awhile in China--a

grassroots peasant uprising that is centered in the city.