The Jobless Generation

By David DeVoss

Resentment and delinquency among China's urban youth

"Go all out to fight the battle of crash reaping and sowing." There were two reasons for that bellicose injunction, broadcast to peasants in Guangxi and Hubei provinces. One was that after several years of mediocre harvests China's fertile southern provinces are now blessed with bumper crops. The other is that the area's farms and communes are desperately short of labor, because hundreds of thousands of Chinese youths have illegally migrated to big cities in search of better jobs and a more exciting way of life.

Ironically, many of these young men and women were originally dispatched to rural communes because there were not enough jobs for them in the cities. But last year, encouraged by the new liberalization policies of senior Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, venturesome youths began drifting back to the cities. In an attempt to stem the tide, the Shanghai government announced that no youths working on its 35 state farms would be allowed to return home for three more years. Dozens of students on two such state farms in Anhui province reportedly committed suicide in despair. Meanwhile, others have descended on China's largest city illegally. In Shanghai alone there are now an estimated 300,000 youthful returnees, along with 200,000 younger middle-school graduates who have yet to receive job assignments. After a visit to Shanghai and four other cities in eastern China, TIME Hong Kong Correspondent David DeVoss filed the following report on the country's restless, unemployed youth:

For many young people, the day usually starts with a leisurely coffee at the Dong Hai (Eastern Sea) restaurant close to the Bund, Shanghai's main waterfront road. Others start with exercises on parallel bars in the People's Park. By midday boredom sets in. The unemployed pace the banks of the Huangpu (Whangpoo) River or just wander about aimlessly. There is a lot of window-shopping: by men at the new Jinxing television store on Nanjing Avenue, by women at the First Department Store's display of pleated skirts. In neither location are the displayed goods in stock. Other young people simply while away the hours gazing at goldfish from the deck of the Yu Gardens Tea House.

The only real diversion is provided by Shanghai's 65 movie theaters, most of which open at 6:30 a.m. City authorities have allowed that unusually early opening time to draw some of the jobless young people off the streets. The city's current favorite movie star is Charlie Chaplin. When Limelight opened in June, it was to S.R.O. crowds. The film appeared only because Shanghai's Chaplin fans reluctantly allowed Modern Times to close after a six-month run. Another top attraction is Awara, an Indian melodrama about a disaffected youth who becomes a vagabond after being spurned by society. The film is something of a cult classic, particularly for former members of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's rampaging Red Guards, millions of whom were assigned to communes for re-education during the 1966-69 Cultural Revolution.

But moviegoing is a luxury for which many of Shanghai's unemployed youths have neither the time nor the money. They scramble for a precarious living by scalping movie tickets, acting as brokers for unused ration coupons, or earning commissions on the black-market sale of scarce local products. The more ambitious among them seek out Western consumer items to hawk illegally; popular items include movie-sound track albums, English-language books or clothing patterns laboriously traced from tattered copies of women's magazines. Says one youth who illegally returned to Shanghai from a commune in Yunnan: "The basic rule is that anything Western sells. What do you want for those bell-bottoms?"

Shanghai is losing the battle to induce its discontented young people to return to $24-a-month stints in remote regions and is allowing them to apply for local jobs. So is Peking, which has reduced its unemployment by placing youths in appliance repair centers and handicraft workshops. Last month an editorial in the People's Daily urged party leaders to make even more of an effort to create jobs for unemployed youths. In Nanjing, 600 otherwise unemployable young people have been given jobs as hairdressers and bathhouse attendants. Shanghai last month tried to provide make-work for several hundred jobless young by paying them 53-c- a day to scramble up bamboo scaffolding and help refurbish the city's many stately but decaying Victorian office buildings. There are even special catch-up courses for young people. At the Xiang Ming Middle School, near Shanghai's old French Concession, former Red Guards show up each night to resume their interrupted education. Says School Principal Jiang Xiang: "In our discussions there can be different opinions. They can even admire the countries in Europe and America. We insist only that they take the socialist road."

Sympathy for China's unemployed young people is not universal. The Sichuan (Szechuan) Communist Youth League recently complained that "some young people lack great and far-reaching revolutionary ideas, and some even pursue the decadent way of life of the bourgeoisie." Shu Xun, an English teacher at the Xiang Ming Middle School, worries about the materialism of many students, whose main concern is "getting an automobile or a color TV." Others have taken a revolutionary step further and even dared criticize the regime itself. "I think conditions must be far better in the Soviet Union than they are here," said one bespectacled student on Huai Hua Street. "Alexander Ginzburg and Anatoli Shcharansky can express their opinions to journalists. Who knows who the dissidents are here?"

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