The high rate of youth unemployment in China and the growing disenchantment of young people, many of whom are “quitting” work, have attracted much attention from global media and public policy makers. The standard narrative associates the problem with the country’s recent slowdown in economic growth. But the problem is much deeper.
The rise in youth depression has been decades in the making and is largely due to China’s rigid education system, past fertility policies and strict migration restrictions. Chinese youth are exhausted from spending their childhood and adolescence immersed in intense and endless studies.
As if the pressure to get into college wasn’t enough, the rigid structure of the school system makes things worse. After nine years of compulsory education, children must pass an exam to enter an academic secondary school, and only 50% of them can pass. Teenagers who fail to pass attend vocational high schools and are destined for low-paying jobs.
A life of studies
Wealthy families in Shanghai and Beijing now pay $120 to $400 an hour for in-person tutoring, while children from less well-off families must study even harder to make up for the extra classes their parents can no longer afford. In the 1980s and 1990s, the streets of towns and cities were full of children. Nowadays, they are rarely seen unless it is a holiday. Even on weekend afternoons, the playgrounds are empty. The children are at home studying.
Another cause of youth depression is loneliness. Due to the one-child policy, which lasted from 1979 to 2016, children in urban areas do not have siblings. And unlike the first generation of only children after the introduction of this measure, later generations do not even have cousins to play with (since their parents do not have siblings either).
A survey of Chinese college students shows that only children are much more likely to experience anxiety and depression than their peers with siblings. Suicide rates in children between five and 14 years old have increased five-fold since 2010.
The family
In rural areas, where about 491 million Chinese live, by contrast, the one-child policy was less rigidly applied. There adults often have siblings with whom to share the burden of parental care. But they face more stress when they have children. Many must look for better-paying jobs in cities, but hukou restrictions prevent them from taking their children with them. Today, about 11% of Chinese are rural-urban migrants, which translates to about 69 million children staying in rural areas.
Rural parents who stayed with their children have begun to face a different problem. After the closure of around 300,000 rural schools between 2000 and 2015, 12% of primary school-age children and 50% of secondary school children must attend boarding schools, which are often far away. Many parents in rural areas work long hours to educate their children, from whom they must separate after the first years of life. Ironically, your chances of meeting are even lower if your child is successful in entering university, because most of these settle permanently in cities.
In 2018, 35% of Chinese adults reported being depressed. The rate was 50% higher in rural areas and among women. For obvious reasons, generalized depression is dangerous for any society, since in the future it can present economic stagnation, low fertility and other problems reminiscent of Japan from the 1990s.
The good news for China is that there are public policy solutions that can be implemented. The first is to get rid of rigid and planned education. Local governments should be able to decide how many schools to build and how many students to accept, and each high school and college should decide who to admit, including students who took time to prepare for and take exams as children. The Government can still regulate schools, but should delegate and decentralize most decision-making to increase the flexibility of the system. This would ease the pressure on children and their parents.
A second step is to lift rural-urban migration restrictions that divide families and condemn rural households to relative poverty. This solution has become especially important as aggregate growth has slowed. Rural areas cannot simply wait their turn for the next growth cycle. They need access to the same opportunities as urban households. In addition, rural labor can increase productivity by taking jobs in low-skilled factories. While college graduates struggle to find well-paying jobs, there are 30 million unfilled vacancies in manufacturing and assembly.
These policies are not without costs. Efforts to change the education system would generate resistance from those who benefit from current measures, and allowing free migration would increase urban congestion. But these actions would also produce clear benefits by boosting economic growth and improving the mental health of young people and their parents in China.
ZNANCY QIAN
PROJECT SYNDICATE
SHANGHAI
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