China confronts a generation asking what work is for

For decades, the bargain was clear: study hard, find a stable job, and climb. That ladder now has missing rungs, and a generation that did everything asked of it is asking what the promise was worth.

Youth unemployment has become a measure of something larger than the labour market. It reflects a mismatch between the credentials young people were told to acquire and the economy that was supposed to absorb them.

Official responses have ranged from statistical recalibration to calls for young people to embrace hardship. Neither addresses the underlying question of whether the old model still fits a slower, more competitive economy.

How a society answers its young people’s doubts about work is, in the end, a question about what it believes a life is for. That conversation is only beginning.