Combined with the record-breaking 11.58 million graduates this year, the pressure on the job market is unprecedented.
Qin Jie, born in the 90s, gave up his graduate study in investments after realizing the falsified economic yearbook data provided by the regime had hindered his progress in research and verification of the data.
Like many young Chinese who invested their youth in colleges, Qin realized that “the worship of academic credentials is useless,” he said to the Chinese language edition of The Epoch Times.
Involution
Involution has become a popular term and phenomenon on Chinese social media in recent years. It refers to fierce competition, scarce rewards that strip away the rights and interests of most people. It is a phenomenon that is observed in all walks of life in today’s Chinese society.
Qin believes that involution is a tactic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
It forces people to engage in long hours of labor-intensive, but low-paying jobs. People lose their capacity to think or resist because of physical exhaustion. As a result, people accept the difficulties as their fate; it is a kind of “learned helplessness,” he said.
Yu Zhiguan, a Chinese writer in Ireland, blames the expanded college enrollment policy as part of the cause of involution.
For instance, the gross enrollment rate for higher education jumped to 42.7 percent in 2016 from the previous 30 percent in 2012, according to the Chinese report.
Yu said that the competition for good-paying jobs is like a pyramid, with only a few of the best positions at the top. The Chinese market is now filled with too many graduates competing for a very small number of available jobs.
She graduated from a major Shanghai university. She’s held onto every possible job to make money, running around among several part-time jobs. She said, “My grandparents rely on less than 200 yuan ($27.86) of pension in the countryside.”
Three years of pandemic control had a detrimental effect on the entire society which quickly geared into the mode of involution.
A Systemic Struggle
Ms. Ren (pseudonym), formerly an instructor of Party ideological and political work, said the universities had to fake the data of students’ placement because the employment rate dived.“The involution is even worse for governmental workers,” she said.
She took the Party secretary at her institution as an example, who’s been very active in doubling the workload and the complexity of duties for everyone, despite the efficiency being even lower, she said.
Many workers at the universities are only temp, salary cuts are common. She said, “To cover the car loan, the mortgage, and the credit card bill, you’ll have to take what’s available.”
Dissident Lin Shengliang agreed the involution has had the most serious impact on those who work in the government, as best described whenever the regime launched the so-called “institutional reform,” “military streamlining,” and “simpler administration.”
To his knowledge, many police were forced to take early retirement. He believed the acts were meant to ease the regime’s fiscal demand.
Some local grid stations were canceled, and grid staff were either reassigned to local communities or simply fired, he said.
Lin explained, to ordinary people, the involution is exhausting and frustrating both mentally and physically; to the CCP, the involution is a power struggle. The information blockade within China, however, has prevented people from seeing it happening within the system.
He said, “Now the tigers are fighting against each other, the sheep were kept in the dark. But it won’t take long before the tigers turn around and hunt down the sheep.”
