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Resumen Los medios ofrecen datos contradictorios sobre la situación laboral de los jóvenes chinos. Las tasas de desempleo son bajas pero preocupan mucho a los dirigentes y a la población. El autor responde a esta contradicción demostrando con su examen del empleo juvenil en China que los jóvenes se quejan más del empleo inadecuado que del desempleo. En concreto, lo que preocupa a los titulados universitarios, que representan en torno a la mitad de la población joven que inicia su vida activa cada año, son las ofertas de empleo y los salarios iniciales por debajo de las expectativas y una disminución de las oportunidades de movilidad ascendente. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media reports about the employment situation of China's youth have been somewhat contradictory. Low unemployment rates coexist with heightened concern over this issue among China's leadership and population. The author addresses that contradiction by investigating the employment situation of young people in China and demonstrating that they complain about inadequate employment rather than about unemployment per se. In particular, tertiary education graduates, who represent approximately half of all the young people entering the Chinese labour market every year, are concerned about unsatisfying job opportunities, lower-than-expected starting salaries, and declining chances for upward mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have both enabled and reinforced a shift towards the personalization of politics and collective action that is also occurring in China. In addition to street actions, the country is seeing a continuously growing number of so-called online mass incidents. While they have been attracting growing scholarly attention, most analyses have been based on anecdotal evidence and have treated netizens as a uniform group without evaluating the event's internal discursive dynamics. In order to assess such micro-blogging incidents' actual potential for political change, we investigate the case of the largest ‘online mass incident’ in China since the advent of Chinese micro-blogging services in 2009, prompted by the crash of two high-speed trains near the city of Wenzhou in July 2011. Drawing on the systematic content analysis of more than 4600 micro-blog posts published in the aftermath of the accident, we analyse the events' discursive dynamics, focusing on the composition, transformation, and radicalization of claims and targets. Our analysis demonstrates that the level of radicalism of the Wenzhou online mass incident is rather moderate and that no radicalization took place before the debate levelled down. While the incident significantly enhanced the tendency in Chinese online activism towards the broadening of the critical debate on national affairs, expectations about a democratizing impact of online debates might be premature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the face of severe job problems, China's government has adopted a huge stimulus package in a bid to achieve eight per cent economic growth, which is said to guarantee at least enough jobs for the new entrants to the labour market. The real situation, however, will be much grimmer than statistics indicate. Unregistered groups like unemployed rural migrants, job-searching college graduates, laid-off workers and others together with the officially registered unemployed and the new market entrants could add up to 42 million altogether, while even the most optimistic estimates say only around 15 million new jobs could be created in 2009. Nevertheless, the stimulus package demonstrates an at least temporary shift in economic policy from capital-intensive to labour-intensive growth. Additionally, the new initiatives to boost social-security spending could help to address the grievances of the most vulnerable groups in the labour market. The Chinese government's reaction to the emerging employment crisis once again demonstrates the often underestimated adaptability of China's leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]