China suspends report on youth unemployment, which was at record high

SEOUL – The Chinese government, facing an expected seventh consecutive monthly increase in youth unemployment, said on Tuesday that it has suspended release of the information.

The unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-olds in urban areas hit a record 21.3 per cent in June and has risen every month in 2023. It is widely forecast by economists to have climbed further in July.

Mr Fu Linghui, a spokesman for the National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news briefing that the government would stop making public employment information “for youth and other age groups”.

He said the surveys that government researchers use to collect the data needed “to be further improved and optimised”.

China’s youth unemployment rate has doubled in the past four years, a period of economic volatility induced by the zero-Covid measures imposed by Beijing that left companies wary of hiring, interrupted education for many students and made it hard to get the internships that had often led to job offers.

The unabating struggle for young people to find work is another sign of concern about the Chinese economy, the world’s second-largest.

It is flagging seven months after the government abruptly ended the zero-Covid push, plagued by falling exports and souring consumer confidence, as well as a dangerous condition known as deflation, or chronically lower prices.

China did issue several other economic reports as scheduled on Tuesday. Many were gloomy: July retail sales and growth in industrial production – a measure of the output of China’s factories, mines and power plants – fell short of expectations. Investments in real estate developments fell 8.5 per cent in the first seven months of the year.

Earlier on Tuesday, China’s central bank made a series of moves that pushed key interest rates to new lows.

The central bank, the People’s Bank of China, is expected next week to lower its benchmark lending rate, which determines the interest rates for mortgages and corporate loans. The aim is to juice the economy by spurring banks to lend more.

The data on youth unemployment is not the first economic report suspended in 2023 by the Chinese authorities. This spring, the National Bureau of Statistics halted the public release of monthly readings of consumer confidence, a series that it launched 33 years ago.

Previous surveys showed that consumer confidence plummeted in 2022 during a two-month lockdown in Shanghai, China’s most populous city. Confidence barely began to recover in the early months of 2023, even after Beijing lifted lockdowns nationwide in early December. NYTIMES