By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING - Oakley Qiao had every reason to feel felt confident when he began his job hunt last September. He was a student at one of China’s top graduate business schools. He already had a few years of work experience. Students applying for jobs at the same time the previous year had gotten two or three offers by the winter, sometimes for a starting salary 20 times the average Chinese annual income.

But on January 20, Mr.Qiao walked away from the campus of Peking University without a job offer .

Most of his 100 classmates face the same problem, even though the school had invited recruiters to the campus every week since the fall. Mr.Qiao said he had handed out resumes to more than 50 companies.

“Everyone’s anxious,”he said.“The companies who come to the job fairs, they just come to give presentations, not to offer jobs.”

Anxiety is rippling through a generation of Chinese who had grown up thinking that economic prosperity was guaranteed them. The great boom in urban middleclass wealth over the past decade and a half is slowing because of the global financial crisis, and the job market for collegeeducated Chinese, even those with degrees from top universities here and abroad, has tightened.

So worrisome has the situation become that some students at Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious, are even talking about joining the army or becoming butchers. (A well-known alumnus recently made a fortune opening pork shops.) The anxiety level of the ruling Communist Party, whose legitimacy is pegged to maintaining economic growth, is rising in step with that of the frustrated workers and job seekers. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said at a recent cabinet meeting that“this year’s employment situation is very grave,”according to a government report. Earlier, the government ordered stateowned companies not to lay people off.

The Chinese government reported that the growth rate for the final quarter of last year fell to 6.8 percent, bringing the rate for the full year down to 9 percent, the slowest pace in at least six years. Analysts say growth could slow to 5 or 6 percent this year, which would be the slowest pace for more than a decade.

Reliable unemployment statistics are hard to find. The official registered urban unemployment rate for the end of 2008 was 4.2 percent, up from 4 percent in 2007; it was the first time the official rate had risen after five consecutive years of decline.

“The figure looks all right, but the real situation could be much more serious, as migrant workers and newly graduated college students were not included in the government count,”Tang Min, deputy secretary of the China Development Research Foundation, told Xinhua.

The plight of college graduates is expected to get worse because Chinese universities are increasing their enrollments. Furthermore, the ranks of overseas Chinese who are returning to look for work are swelling because of the recession in the United States and Europe.

Of 5.59 million college graduates in 2008, an estimated 27 percent were unable to find jobs by the end of the year, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Last November, nearly one million students took the civil service exam to compete for government jobs, a jump of 25 percent over the previous year.

For the students, that meant the odds were dismal: every job opening in the government had an average of 78 applicants.

ASSOCIATED PRESS; DU BIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES, RIGHT


Oakley Qiao, a student at a top business school, gave his resume to more than 50 companies but received no offers. College students at a job fair in Nanjing, China.