China’s University Graduates to Reach 12.7 Million, Social Crisis Emerging

Graduating from university now often leads to unemployment, and even those who return from studying abroad struggle to find jobs. (Video screenshot)

[People News] Chinese Communist Party officials estimate that the number of college graduates this year will reach 12.7 million, an increase of 480,000 over last year’s figure. Last year, the expected number of new college graduates in China reached 12.22 million. The social crisis brought about by youth unemployment has drawn attention.

Wang Xiaoping, Minister of Human Resources and Social Security of the Chinese Communist Party, announced the number of college graduates this year at a livelihood-themed press conference during the Chinese Communist Party’s National People’s Congress on March 7, saying it is expected to reach 12.7 million, 480,000 more than last year.

Wang Xiaoping frankly admitted that uncertain and hard-to-predict factors are increasing at the same time, and that “stabilizing employment” is facing new changes and new challenges.

This figure had already been officially announced by the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of Education on November 20, 2025, and was reported by official media.

Beginning in 2022, the number of Chinese college graduates has exceeded 10 million year after year. In 2022, there were 10.76 million, an increase of 1.67 million year-on-year; in 2023, 11.58 million, an increase of 820,000 year-on-year; in 2024, 11.79 million, an increase of 210,000 year-on-year; and in 2025, the number of college graduates was 12.22 million, an increase of 430,000 year-on-year.

According to a report by The Epoch Times, in recent years Chinese young people have faced the predicament of “graduation means unemployment,” but officials have deliberately concealed it. Beginning in 2022, China’s youth unemployment rate rose sharply, reaching a peak of 21.3% in June 2023. After that, the authorities stopped publishing the youth unemployment rate. It was not until January 17, 2024, after an “adjustment,” that they released the urban labor-force unemployment rate “excluding students.”

According to official data from the Chinese Communist Party’s National Bureau of Statistics, the most recently published youth unemployment rate (excluding students) was 16.5% in December 2025, declining for four consecutive months to a half-year low.

However, people in the industry believe that because Chinese university students in fact begin submitting résumés, interning, and looking for jobs one or two years before graduation, and even treat “job hunting” as their main activity, if they are still in school and have not found full-time work, they are not counted in unemployment statistics. This group of “pre-unemployed” people is excluded, causing the official data to fail to reflect the real impact of graduates flooding into the market.

According to Wang He, a China expert in the United States, by comparison, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), based on household surveys, includes in the labor force those aged 16 and above who are able to work and have actively looked for work in the past four weeks. If students are actively seeking work and cannot find it, they are counted as unemployed; if they are not seeking work, for example because they are studying full-time, they are not included in the statistics.

According to figures disclosed by the Chinese Communist Party’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security in May 2021, the scale of so-called “flexible employment,” including self-employment, part-time work, and new forms of employment, had reached 200 million people. “Flexible employment” has long been criticized as being, like the old terms “laid off” or “awaiting employment,” another name for semi-unemployment or unemployment.

China now has a large number of flexibly employed people, and if they worked one hour or more during the survey week for labor compensation, they are regarded as “employed.” This includes odd jobs and part-time work. In the United States, by contrast, working 15 hours a week counts as employment, while in France it is 20 hours.

China’s job market is shrinking rapidly, and more and more young people born in the 2000s are being forced to withdraw from the competitive system, choosing to “lie flat” and even mock themselves as “rat people.” Multiple interviewees pointed out that jobs are hard to find, incomes are insufficient to make a living, and, together with distrust of the Chinese Communist Party system, this has caused them to lose hope in marriage, childbearing, and life planning.

Xu Xin, a scholar at Renmin University of China, pointed out that there is now a hidden population band that is “not working, not employed, not consuming, and also not appearing in statistics,” and that “the real social rupture is not anger, but quietly withdrawing.”

Australia-based scholar Yuan Hongbing once said that, as the group with the greatest intellectual energy, being stuck for a long time in unemployment or semi-unemployment directly shakes young people’s confidence in the future.

The well-known mainland economist Liu Yuanchun previously warned that if handled improperly, China’s continuously rising youth unemployment rate could trigger a political crisis. △