美媒：中国年轻人找工作靠啃老拼爹_BEC初级作文

美媒：中国年轻人找工作靠啃老拼爹

They don't want to work in factories or farms, but at the same time, the white-collar lifestyle remains far out of reach.

For the 7.27 million Chinese students who graduated from college last year -- a number roughly 2.5 times the US figure -- the job market can be brutal: low salaries, long hours and the knowledge that there are millions of other people just waiting to replace you. Those realities look even harsher when you compare the bargain-basement salaries earned by the average Chinese young adult with the exorbitant wealth of China's well-connected.

"It's just ruthless out here," said Wu Shaomei, a chemistry master's student at Northwest University in Xi'an, as she surveyed the crowds of college grads vying for telemarketing jobs at a local job fair last week. "Everywhere you look in this city there are rich people driving luxury cars, but I could work these jobs a whole lifetime and never make enough to buy one of those tires."

China's glut of college grads has been described in national media as a triumph of state-orchestrated education expansion, but it's also created an expectation gap when it comes to the job market. New graduates, many of them first-generation students who grew up on farms, were raised to believe a college degree was a sure route to a comfortable life. But at end-of-summer job fairs, many of these graduates are finding themselves offered salaries lower than what factory workers earn.

In the early years of the Great Recession, some American youth saw the grim job market as an opportunity for "funemployment," but China has coined a different term: "gnawing on the old." The term refers to Chinese youth who don't earn enough to pay the bills, and thus end up "gnawing" through their parents' savings. With average starting salaries of $400 per month and just one day off a week, recent grads in major cities often have little hope of achieving anything resembling financial independence early in their careers.