By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 24, 2006; A11
ZHENGZHOU, China -- A tide of more than 30,000 students with polished résumés and high hopes surged into a job fair here so eager to meet with employers that they shattered four glass doors and splayed the side walls of an escalator in what became a near riot.
As the crowd of youths swelled out of control, students and security guards said, police tried to beat back the throng but to no avail. Pushing, screaming and climbing over one another, the students charged on, heading for the booths inside the Zhongyuan International Exhibition Center, where company recruiters waited with the keys to China's new economy.
"You didn't even need to walk in the main hall, because people were sweeping you along all the time," said Hou Shuangshuang, 23, an e-commerce major with long hair who was among the students who overflowed the job fair when it opened Sunday. "At some points, your feet couldn't even touch the ground."
Hou and her classmates from Zhengzhou University, along with students from other schools in this Henan province city about 500 miles south of Beijing, provided a dramatic example of rising anxiety over employment among millions of Chinese students. After years in which graduates were ensured of a good job in the fast-growing economy, the number of degree-holders has outstripped the number of jobs, and the guarantees have evaporated.
"I don't think we have a very bright future," said Yu Honghua, 23, another e-commerce major at Zhengzhou University who shoved her way into the fair. "I saw only one company that needed students who majored in e-commerce, and they just needed one person."
The disappointment voiced by Yu and others in her situation has become a major worry for the Chinese Communist Party. An open-ended rise in living standards, particularly for the educated middle class, has been part of an unspoken pact under which the party retains a monopoly on political power despite the country's turn away from socialism.
So far, the party has delivered on its part of the bargain: The economy has grown by more than 9 percent a year recently, and the main beneficiaries have been educated urbanites. Content to claim their share in the prosperity, most students have shown little interest in politics since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
But a large pool of unemployed or underemployed university graduates, some analysts have suggested, could become a new breeding ground for opposition. An educated opposition, they said, would have far more organizational and ideological ability -- and present a greater threat to the government -- than the left-behind farmers who have been the main source of unrest in recent years.
The Labor and Social Security Ministry estimated recently that as many as 4.9 million youths will graduate from universities by the end of 2007, up by nearly 20 percent over 2006. Another 49.5 million will graduate from high school, also a 20 percent increase. The sharp climb in graduation rates represents a dramatic improvement in the lives of many Chinese, made possible by the economic transformation that has taken place here over the past quarter-century.
But indications have emerged that, booming as it is, the economy may not be able to absorb that many degree-holders into the jobs for which they are being trained. "The fact is that it's very hard for college students to get the right job these days," said Zhang Xuxin, a Zhengzhou student with close-cropped hair and plastic-rimmed glasses who plans to pursue postgraduate studies next year. "You may have a job, but it's very hard to have an ideal one."
A waitress in a German restaurant near Beijing's Ritan Park, for instance, said she has been looking for work in the computer industry since graduating last summer, but in the meantime, she has to serve sausages and beer to pay the rent because nothing is available in her field.
Tian Chengping, the labor and social security minister, predicted that about 1.2 million of the 2007 university graduates will have similar trouble finding employment. As a result, his ministry announced Tuesday, colleges will be forced to restrict admissions into study programs with low postgraduate employment rates. At a conference in Beijing, ministry officials said they also are seeking to improve employment counseling for high school graduates who do not plan to attend college.
Tensions over employment after graduation have exploded repeatedly in recent months, betraying the pressure students say they feel. Students at Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College, affiliated with Zhengzhou University, rioted in June when they discovered that their diplomas would not be the same as those from the university itself, putting them at a disadvantage in job hunting. A similar riot erupted last month at the Ganjiang Vocational and Technical Institute in Jiangxi province south of here. The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy has recorded 10 such disturbances since summer.
Zhang, who studied liberal arts with a major in English, said students from provincial universities such as Zhengzhou's have the most difficulty finding appropriate jobs. Those from the "top 10," he said, usually find employment immediately. The employment center director at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University said, for example, that every 2007 Tsinghua graduate should be able to choose from five job offers.
But Yu and Hou, aware they might end up like the Beijing waitress, said they rose at 6 a.m. Sunday to get ready for the job fair. They had already bought entrance tickets for the equivalent of 60 cents. Then, with six classmates, they set out, changing buses to get from their suburban campus to the downtown center, arriving about 8 a.m.
They struggled through the crowd and approached the entrance. By then, Yu said, the mayhem was underway. "I was pushed onto the escalator," she recalled, "and I heard people screaming, 'The escalator is broken!' "
A security guard, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said the doors were supposed to open at 8:30, but he and his colleagues opened them an hour early because of the crush. By then, he said, a large plaza in front of the center was full of students, and hundreds more overflowed into the street, unable to make their way through the gate.
"Society assumes that college students should find a job and that they can find one," said Peng Tao, 23, an English major from a small town in neighboring Hubei province, "so we are under great pressure and have to grab every single chance that comes by."
But Peng said that when he arrived about 10 a.m., as the pushing and shoving was at its apex, he was so shocked by what he saw that he turned around and went back to his dormitory.
Researcher Jin Ling contributed to this report.
