Millennials struggled to get jobs in the Great Recession. Right now, it's even worse for Chinese Gen Zers.
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- Youth unemployment in China has reached 21.3%, which is really bad.
- It's even worse than when millennials were trying to get jobs amid the Great Recession.
- There are 280 million Gen Zers in the world's second-largest economy.
Remember 2009? Let's take a walk down memory lane, to the tune of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" — or "Crystalised" by the XX, depending on what kind of person you were back then.
Third-person Facebook statuses about Obama spring to mind, as do skinny jeans (which really were cool once).
But for people who were young adults at that time, the era was defined by one thing: trying to get a job.
According to the Pew Research Center, the state of the economy was the number one story of the year. "Youth unemployment" was the buzzword. And it was bad.
Nearly a fifth of Americans aged 16 to 24 – 18.5% – were unemployed in July 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This was up from around 11% two years earlier.
In China, this is now even worse.
A total of 21.3% of 16 to 24-year-olds are currently unemployed in the world's second-largest economy, which is in trouble. That's a record high, up from 19.3% a year ago.
It's not exactly the same situation as we faced — China's unemployment is partly down to disruptions from COVID-19, and its restrictions on the private sector make for a very different backdrop. American youth unemployment in 2009 was a result of the financial crisis the previous year that hit young people especially hard in the early stages of our careers or about to enter the workforce.
Ever since, people have speculated that this collective trauma is partly why millennials are a bundle of neurosis and anxiety. A policy director at a think tank told my colleague Hillary Hoffower three years ago that he thinks our generation has "lifelong damage" as a result. Me, all my friends, and our dysfunctional relationships with work and money suggest this is true.
I was part of a "Lost Generation," as millennials are sometimes described. It makes me sad the same thing could happen all over again on an much larger scale. In 2022, there were 72 million millennials in the US; there are 280 million Gen Zers in China.
Given a bad economy can traumatize a generation, we should be seriously worried about China's Gen Z.
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