SHANGHAI - In a youth hostel in downtown Shanghai, amid the dull roar of a hair dryer, the shriek of a blender and the lingering aroma of spicy instant noodles, Mr Ethan Yi, 23, was pondering the state of the world.

“Why can’t I, a college graduate, find a job?” he lamented as he sat in the hostel’s common room after a day of unsuccessful interviews. “Why is it only jobs that pay just US$400 (S$546) or US$500 a month that want me? Sometimes I wonder, how can it be this hard?”

That is the question being asked in hostels across China.

As joblessness among young Chinese reaches record highs, hostels have become refuges for young people trying their fortunes in major cities, who need a place to crash between back-to-back interviews to strategise on their next networking meeting or to fire off yet another resume.

These hostels have become concentrated hubs for people’s anxiety, hopes, despair and ambitions, all packed into bunk beds that go for a few dollars a night.

At Together Hostel, where Mr Yi was staying, new arrivals scrolled through online job listings surrounded by wall maps highlighting the best spots for Shanghai soup dumplings. Posters advertising local comedy shows went largely ignored by fresh graduates calling their parents for advice or comfort.

Asked what he had been doing at the hostel, Mr Yi, who was sitting idly by the smoothie bar, responded: “Thinking about life.”

Many job seekers arrive with high hopes. Mr Yi, visiting Shanghai for the first time from his home in the central province of Hunan, was delighted to see many foreigners in the city, as he wanted to work in international trade or translation.

He arrived on a Saturday and with several interviews lined up for the week, he spent the weekend sightseeing. At night, he returned to the tidy room and private bathroom he shared with three others for about US$13 a night.

But by the following Monday evening, he felt deflated. An interview that morning, at a start-up, had ended within a few minutes.

Several hours later, he received a rejection notice from another company that he had done an online interview with before arriving in the city.

He wanted a salary of at least US$950 a month, slightly higher than the average in Shanghai, but the likelihood seemed slim.

“Right now, I feel pretty lost,” Mr Yi said, as guests with towels wrapped around wet hair padded through the lobby. “My dad just told me, ‘It’s okay, keep looking’. But honestly, you still have to think about the money problem – I don’t want to waste too much. So my time is limited.”

The hostels are necessary partly because of the hyper-competitive nature of China’s white-collar job market.

The most desirable opportunities are still concentrated in a few megacities such as Shanghai or Shenzhen, even as the number of universities and university graduates around the country has ballooned.

The surfeit of graduates means that candidates unwilling to travel for interviews – and pay their own way – may be easily dismissed.

As the Chinese economy slows, competition has grown even stiffer. Unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds in urban areas rose to a record high of 21.3 per cent in June, before the government stopped publishing the data.

Even some who have landed jobs are paid so little that they cannot afford a deposit on a long-term lease, or are afraid to sign one for fear of suddenly being laid off. That was the case with Mr Yi’s upper bunkmate.

The competition was also weighing heavily upon Ms Zhi Yanran, who had travelled to the hostel the day before from her home in Jiangxi province.

She had done three interviews that day, and had two more the next, for positions in human resources, while continuing to submit new applications in between.

Still, Ms Zhi said she felt she was lagging behind her graduate school classmates, who had started applying for jobs long ago. She began only in September, after “lying flat” – Chinese slang for slacking off – for “a long time”, she said.

How long exactly? About two months, since graduating in June. But that was a long time, Ms Zhi insisted. “It’s so hard to find a job now!”

Though recent graduates have among the highest rates of joblessness, others have struggled too. In the lobby around 9pm, while food delivery drivers flitted in and out as they called out orders, Mr Kris Zhang, 30, lay on a couch trying to nap.

He used to work in the city of Hangzhou as a well-paid computer programmer at e-commerce giant Alibaba until he was laid off in 2023.

He wanted to stay in Hangzhou, where he had already bought a house and an Audi, but could not find a new job there that would pay well enough to cover the more than US$27,000 he needed annually in mortgage and car loans.

So the week before, Mr Zhang reluctantly accepted an offer in Shanghai, while continuing to look for positions in Hangzhou.

He was staying in the hostel in the hope that his stint in Shanghai would be brief. He showed the sparse contents of a silver hard-shell suitcase – a few tangled shirts and shorts, taking up barely a quarter of the space – as if manifesting that short timeline into existence.

Still, Mr Zhang acknowledged that the reality might be more difficult. “Before, you could search with your eyes closed and get dozens of offers a year,” he said. “The situation now is much worse.” NYTIMES