Near stampede at Jiangxi job fair

If you have never seen what a Chinese job fair looks like, you NEED to take a look at this clip. Recruitment fairs usually have more security guards for crowd control and police on standby than other fairs, but it looks like even the organisers of this most recent fair in Jiangxi were taken aback by the turnout. As captured on the clip, a stampede almost broke out but fortunately, it did not. The truth is: the Chinese job market is not growing as spectacularly as the economy is, and with China's improving education system churning out more and more graduates year-on-year and with that many jobs to go around, fresh graduate pay is falling. We hear that fresh graduates are willing to work for as little as RMB1,400 these days. After all, they know if they don't take up this job offer that is placed before them, a thousand other hungry graduates are waiting to fill that space. If you've been to one of these job fairs, you will catch a glimpse of what many of these young people go through, some of whom even have their anxious parents in tow. Fresh out of university and barely having a clue as to what you want for your life, you join queue after queue clutching your one-page resume waiting endlessly, meekly, longsufferingly for a chance to meet that god-like recruiter who doesn't have more than five minutes for you. It is a most exasperating state to be in.

In other job market news,

• Over 80% of Chinese university students dream of studying abroad.
• Fifty-three workers in Shanghai are currently in talks with their former employer over compensation after staging a six-hour rooftop protest over the weekend. They allege that the firm had dismissed them before the new Labor Contract Law comes into effect on January 1.