Ma Yongjian is 27. Last year he was halfway through a master's in computer science in Beijing when he stopped going to class. AI and layoffs at Chinese tech firms had convinced him a good job wasn't coming. He spent his days in the city's parks watching stray cats, and for months his parents had no idea where he was. Hannah Miao tells his story on the Journal's front page. Looking ahead, he told her, “there isn't much hope.”
Ma isn't alone. Zhang Tian, 27, studied landscape architecture because real estate was booming. The bubble burst around the time she graduated. She's been laid off twice, the second time from a job paying about $1,200 a month. Jeremy Li, 28, has sent roughly 100 applications since last fall. He turned down two offers near $11,000 a year that would have meant moving far away. He lives with his parents. Jessica Tang, 29, went freelance three years ago. Her hourly pay has halved.
China's jobless rate for city dwellers aged 16 to 24, not counting students, was about 19% in August. The same age group in the U.S. runs about 9%. For ages 25 to 29 it's 7.5% in China and 5.3% here. One Tsinghua professor thinks the true broad rate is closer to 10%, once you count people who've been out of work two years or more. Steven Barnett of the University of Hong Kong puts city employment about 7% below its pre-Covid path. That's roughly 37 million missing jobs.
AI is taking the first rung
Here's the part that travels. Big employers like Alibaba and ByteDance have been quietly cutting staff. A study of 700 million job postings by ShanghaiTech University found AI cut hiring most for entry- and mid-level workers with one to three years of experience. When Vice Premier He Lifeng polled China's largest employers last year, some guessed AI could remove 30% or more of their roles. Young people have drifted into gig work instead. That pool is expected to reach 320 million this year, more than 40% of urban employment. In a 2025 survey of more than 11,000 science and tech workers, over two-thirds expect AI to take their job within five years. For now, the Journal says, parents are pitching in on living costs. Ma lives on an allowance from his. He knows it can't last.
Our read
We file this under Career, with a Cash Flow (M5) note for parents. The Chinese story has Chinese causes. A property bust, weak demand and a government that pushed AI hard. But the mechanism isn't Chinese at all. In the ShanghaiTech data, AI hit the first rung of the ladder hardest. That's the rung a new graduate stands on. The response Ma chose in Dali, dropping out and living on an allowance, isn't a plan. The response that works here is a skill the machine doesn't have yet. Add a family budget that can carry a graduate for a while without wrecking the parents' retirement.
If you have a child finishing school in the next few years, this story touches one line in your plan. It's the family-support line, the money you'd spend carrying a grown kid through a slow start. Ma's parents are paying his way, and for months they didn't know why. Pull your cash-flow sheet this week and put a number on it. Count the months of a graduate's rent and groceries you could cover from cash, not from the 401(k). If the answer is a shrug, that's the check to make. A parent who's priced the slow start before it comes isn't hunting for the umbrella when the rain starts.