On duty at four-thirty in the morning, off at six-thirty in the evening, take-home just over three thousand
I read that Elephant News piece twice. A twenty-one-year-old woman, graduated in early-childhood education, took a sanitation job: on site at 4:30 a.m., off at 6:30 p.m., fourteen hours, and after social insurance comes a little over 3,000 yuan a month. The tone the piece gave it was “no job is beneath another”. She said two things herself: no office politics to deal with, there are festival benefits, and earning a living by her own labour is nothing to be ashamed of.
My first reaction was anger. No job is beneath another, but wages have a hierarchy.
Why does the writer’s own child not go out and sweep the street? When a piece like this is run as propaganda, do the people who run it believe it themselves?
Netizens say the person credited as “Elephant News anchor Wang Zhe” in that video is AI-generated. I cannot verify that sentence, so I will not sign it. But if it is a digital human, I am not surprised at all. Reading a script aloud is exactly the first task to be cut once somebody starts saying that “the division of work is getting coarser”.
Then I turned the anger on her. What I said was: a twenty-one-year-old girl, not exploring more career possibilities, not building skills that are harder to replace, taking work that any fifty-year-old can do with hands attached — all those school years were wasted.
After that line I paused. Because there was another line I had wanted to say for a long time, I just did not dare say it about her.
I wasted my schooling too
Garbage school, garbage major, garbage degree; having it or not having it makes no difference.
That is not a tantrum. The market handed it to me. My school cannot clear the first filter in a recruiting system; the name of my major on a CV does not buy a single interview. That is a fact, not a verdict, and admitting it beats building it a staircase down.
Still, I used the wrong two characters. “Wasted” means those years bought nothing back, and that can be checked. The years I was paid twenty thousand a month were not negotiated for me by a piece of paper; a person who can wire API, skills and an agent together and finish the whole job himself is not somebody who failed to learn. The market once paid twenty thousand for a sheet of waste paper, which tells me the thing worth money in those two years was never on the paper.
So I filed that account in the wrong place. What the market owes me does not get seen just because I call myself stupid.
Twenty-odd years of schooling fed everybody except me
I have not finished saying that hard line. In fact the university education in this country is garbage; apart from the nine elite schools, it has already rotted in the AI era.
Rotted how. For decades on end a lecturer stands in front of you with slide decks made for Windows XP. Microsoft stopped shipping security updates for XP on 8 April 2014, and the decks are still sitting on that system. What they teach should already have been retired the year I graduated.
So who did all those years of schooling feed? The Ministry of Education’s 2025 bulletin on national education, published in July 2026, is plain about it: there are 3,167 higher-education institutions in the country, of which 1,278 are ordinary undergraduate schools (149 of them independent colleges), 1,554 are vocational colleges, 248 are adult higher-education institutions; total enrolment across all forms of higher education is 48.7257 million; the number of full-time teaching staff in higher education is 2.2236 million.
The wages of those 2.2236 million people come out of these students. For tuition I will only work in orders of magnitude: there are 21.3577 million students in ordinary undergraduate programmes, counted at 5,000 yuan a head a year — Shanghai proposed raising the average tuition of public colleges from 5,420 to 7,215 yuan in 2023, Henan lifted undergraduate tuition in 2025 from 3,400 to 4,400 for humanities and 3,700 to 5,000 for science and engineering, and more than four in five private undergraduate colleges raised fees in the 2025 sample. Multiply it out and you are past a hundred billion. I did that multiplication myself; treat it only as an order of magnitude.
That hundred billion gets split across 3,167 school gates. It fed the lecturers. It fed the administrative and support staff. It fed the restaurants, the guesthouses, the print shops and the shopping malls around campus. And right before graduation it fed real estate too. You finish studying, you have to land somewhere, you buy a flat, and the money comes from home. I have no sample for that; everybody knows whose money it is.
It did not feed me.
There is an even blunter account. In the same bulletin, graduates of ordinary and vocational undergraduate and college programmes in 2025 came to 11.0510 million, and graduate-degree completions to 1.1665 million. I am not adding these to the hiring-side figures later in this piece; different ministries set different definitions, so I keep them apart. I just put the two numbers here. The hand that issues the diploma never knows how many sheets the hand that receives CVs needs that day.
Three news items, one table
The sanitation worker is the clearing price of the bottom tier. Three thousand yuan, fourteen hours: that is the whole amount that tier is willing to spend on a person.
A former colleague of mine at NetEase told me the HR recruiter who once hired him now sells insurance. My previous company cut its HR people down to almost nothing.
As for me: laid off at 35, went out and applied around, and now I sit at an outsourcer’s desk.
Read as three rows on one sheet, these are not a soft industry. They are the transitional tier of white-collar work turning into a destination tier. Delivering food, taking outsourcing contracts, selling insurance used to mean “holding on until the next one”. Now you hold on and it becomes the end point, because the next one never arrives.
The insurance industry’s own numbers say it best. On the solvency reports filed by life insurers, individual insurance agents fell from roughly 9.12 million in 2019 to roughly 2.126 million at the end of the first quarter of 2026: seven million gone in six years. That second figure only covers the few dozen firms that filed on time, so the true total is higher than it. Even while shrinking like that, the same industry is replacing itself upward: Ping An Life has recruited more than 600 so-called high-talent managers since a pilot began in June 2025, 85 percent of them bachelor’s degree or above, with Tsinghua, Peking University and New York University on the list.
When an insurer hires a former HR person, a former buyer, a former salesperson, it is not handing somebody a job. It is buying the contact map in that person’s head. An HR person’s asset is precisely a sales lead: they know everyone in the company, plus everyone who knows everyone in the company. Once the leads run out and the commissions go to zero, the person is left to their own devices. Next time a post reading “urgent hiring, high-calibre talent” lands in front of you, this one sentence is all the reading you need.
Whether they need people: check one thing only — are they afraid of losing you
The autumn-hiring piece I read is headlined “Hell only has eighteen levels, but autumn recruiting interviews took twelve rounds”. Its own account goes like this: one candidate sat twelve rounds and waited about four months for the offer, another was rejected at eleven rounds, one person did seven interviews in a single day from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, three to five rounds is normally considered enough, and there are cases of nineteen rounds and “more than thirty”. The two numbers it cites are that 81.9 percent of respondents were set a written test or take-home task, and that 90 percent of offers land in the hands of 10 percent of candidates. Those are the article’s own figures; I am reporting them the way it does.
One test is enough to tell whether people are needed: are they afraid of losing you.
Short of people shows up as snatching: signing bonuses, an unprompted raise, a same-day push for your answer, an interviewer willing to spend twenty minutes selling you the job.
Short of posts shows up as dragging: more rounds, a higher applicant-to-slot ratio, outsourcing day-rates pushed down, headhunter fees discounted.
Every signal I can see is on the dragging side, without one counterexample. A company that truly needs people does not treat you this way; treating you this way means they do not need you, they are using you to advertise themselves.
Listings are not transactions
The official totals for this year are framed like this: on the Ministry of Education’s definition there will be 12.70 million graduating students in the class of 2026, 480,000 more than last year; the official spring-campaign claim is “more than 12.68 million posts provided”, with over 11,000 campus fairs supplying “more than 12 million pieces of job information”.
That the two numbers sit this close together is itself a sentence worth writing down. Job information is listing volume, not transactions. One hole gets applied for hundreds of times.
Yet platform-side post counts are rising. Liepin says new postings in the first week after the 2026 Spring Festival rose 18.81 percent year on year while active candidates rose 15.78 percent; on Zhaopin the share of posts explicitly demanding a master’s rose 4.2 percentage points year on year, and robotics demand rose 36.6 percent. The three industries taking the largest share of fresh-graduate postings in the third quarter were, in order, human-resources services at 5.8 percent, software and IT services at 4.6 percent, and internet at 4.1 percent.
The accurate statement is not that total demand has shrunk. It is that the kind of post that could catch this cohort has disappeared.
And note: the number-one industry, human-resources services, is not the HRBP inside an internet company. It is RPO, dispatch, outsourcing. Demand is stripped out of the firm and turned into a business of selling heads outward. The threshold has not risen; the toll booth has moved.
I listed the unemployment figures in the previous post and will not repeat them. The shape is one sentence: steady overall, hard below twenty-five.
Three firms passed him technically; one HR person vetoed him
This one came from a commenter under my previous post, and I bring it across as written: “The hard thing in China is that at my age I can still get interviews. In two or three years, once you are laid off it is basically permanent unemployment. A colleague of mine, 38, was pushed out by his manager. He interviewed at several companies, three of them passed him on technical rounds and he got the pass notices, and at the end HR vetoed him on age. Age anxiety in the Bay Area can be fought by out-working it; here it really falls off a cliff at 37 or 38. Anyone with foresight between 33 and 35 has already felt it and started cutting back.”
I think semi-permanent unemployment is the most useful coinage of the year. It does not mean there is no work. It means the work does not intend to let you stay three years: it puts you in a position that can be withdrawn at any moment, and keeps withdrawing until you find another position somewhere else.
The 38-year-old passed three technical rounds, which tells you he can do the work he would be hired for. What stopped him is not competence and it is not the people who interviewed him. It is somebody who never said a word to him and only looked at the year he was born.
A master’s from the class of 2026, sent to ByteDance as an outsourcer
The other screenshot is a slice from a live career-call. The text on the screen reads: expected pay 18K; education and age, first-tier bachelor’s plus first-tier master’s, class of 2026; internships, one mid-sized firm plus Tencent; already holding a development offer. The line under analysis says — the post is ByteDance outsourcing, Shenzhen, salary between 10 and 15.
The host of the call draws that graduate a path: small outsourcing shop, small in-house team, outsourcing arm of a large software firm, mid-sized software company, large software company, mid-sized internet company, large internet company. That is not a career plan. That is a redemption route: work first for an employer that refuses to give you standing, then buy yourself up through it, one floor at a time.
The business of selling that route has grown up too. On the right of the frame, white text on red reads “Lao Duan, guaranteed admission to Zhejiang University, inventor of the simulated job” and “the simulated job has helped more than 200 people through their probation”. Its pitch is: they set requirements for you to build, an expert from a big firm acts as mentor, they review your code one on one, and you get to experience working at a big company. The same person then tells you to learn “operating AI to write code”, claiming Java, Python, Go, AI applications, operations and front end are all covered.
I sat at that table at 35. The twenty-six-year-old in that screenshot sits at the same table. Nine years apart, same job, only the wording of the status has changed.
This is the most concrete shape of a shortage of posts: nobody is refusing to take you. The row that takes you does not say “regular employee”.
Recruiting talent without fixed rules
Some companies write “we recruit talent without fixed rules” in their culture page, and then filter on degree and age. One thing in public, another in private, all theatre.
I wrote the first half of this argument in my previous post: the values slogan on the wall is for outsiders and investors, and it is also shown to you when they want to move against you. Here is the second half. That line on the careers page is written for outsiders; the condition table behind it is the one written for you. Nobody ever hands both sheets to the same person at the same time.
That Youzan email: vanished jobs used as a live demo
Going back, on 4 July 2024 Youzan announced internally that it was suspending HRBP posts “for a phase”: every HRBP had one week, by 12 July, to move internally, would report to a business lead, would have to do actual business work and no longer anything to do with human resources; the Organisation Growth department was dissolved at the same time, leaving only the HR Management Centre.
What the email wanted to say was that once things are intelligent, people’s capabilities cover more, processes get short again, and the division of work gets coarser. The evidence it used: one demo that cut three dozen UI designers down to three.
A batch of people lost their posts, and that loss was written into an internal letter and used as product-confidence material. China Youzan (08083) sells tools that raise efficiency for merchants; the coverage quoted its share price at 0.074 Hong Kong dollars. When a share costs a few cents, the first demo case has to be your own staff.
The original InfoQ headline carried the phrase “efficiency like Foxconn, innovation like Google”. On a balance sheet that combination has exactly one implementation: deliver with Foxconn efficiency, advertise and value yourself with Google’s vocabulary. So the narrative side is always cut first. HRBPs, organisation growth, employer brand: none of them look like they sit on the delivery line.
HRBP is Yan Song, but the man who drops the enforcer is not stopping the blow
Yan Song is roughly that position. He entered the Grand Secretariat in the twenty-first Jiajing year and fell in the forty-first; for some twenty years in between he endorsed edicts, drafted them and carried the blame for the emperor, while the Jiajing emperor spent his years in the Western Park doing Daoist rites and not holding court, never loosening his grip on power for a day. After Yan Song fell, the surtaxes continued, the relief payments continued, and the handling of Japanese pirates in the south and Mongol pressure in the north continued. Not one policy changed; only the man executing them did, and the replacement did the same work.
The chief minister is disposable. The requirement is permanent. Blame travels downward, decisions travel upward.
So when people say an HRBP is listed among the treacherous ministers but is really the emperor’s chess piece and enforcer, that judgement is structurally right. The tech community cheered when HRBPs were cancelled, and the cheering had grounds: derived power spent years holding scores, nominations, pay bands and headcount, and it cashes itself out too. The resentment is not entirely misplaced.
But if we compare, two things must be added. Yan Song’s kind of piece at least had power; he held the seat for twenty years, and what was confiscated from him was so large that surviving records disagree about the total. An HRBP’s kind of piece has no estate to confiscate; when the post was cancelled, what they were offered was a transfer within one week. Both are tools. One can bite back its owner. The other is a line of cost on a report. What differs is bargaining power.
Cutting the layer that stands in the middle never means cutting the thing that layer does. HRBPs went, but scoring, elimination and the performance distribution did not go with them. They moved into the hands of business leads. Closer to the money, closer to you, with no three-pillar process to constrain them and no face out front taking the abuse for them. That knife removed the buffer, and the post where somebody catches everyone’s resentment. What is left is the same set of decisions, only less transparent.
The only manager a managed person can see is always the first one optimised away. On the report his work is called administrative cost; in feelings it is called unlikeable. The same thing has happened to every middle layer: the station master’s dispatch rights went to an algorithm, the on-site project manager was replaced by platform settlement, the bookkeeping firm’s accountant collapsed into a piece of software.
The money saved by efficiency does not stay on the selling side
That line in the email, “the division of work gets coarser”, was addressed to every middle layer, including posts like mine that have been hollowed out by something I wrote myself. Cancelling the HRBP and my own hand turning my job into an API are the same event in two departments. The only difference is that I was the willing one: I saw it a step before the company did, then executed it on myself, and paid for it alone.
Not a cent of the efficiency saved along the chain stayed on the selling side. Youzan proves to a client that it can cut thirty people. The budget the client saves does not go to paying outsourcers more; it goes to cutting the outsourcer’s rate, or simply buying an agent to do it in house. So the more efficiency is sold as a feature, the cheaper the person who delivers it becomes.
I ran this account in “Out of Debt Is Light” already. Here is only its nomadic sentence: the post did not disappear, it was merged, and the money the merger saved flowed to whoever buys the solution and the tooling.
What I feel on the outsourcer’s side is the rate. The same event on the other side is called corporate cost-cutting; on mine it is called this month’s quote being lower than last month’s.
Who that line about wasted schooling should have gone to
Back to the twenty-one-year-old. She almost certainly does not lack for other roads out there; the other roads are worse: an assembly line with no insurance and no notice period, a livestream room, delivery runs. Part of that three thousand is bought with social insurance, and for somebody with no safety net the trade may not be a loss.
Her major was early-childhood education. That trade was knocked over by the market before she was. I wrote the birth figure earlier and will not repeat it; here is only the result. Fewer children, kindergartens closing, and that certificate going cold in her hand. She did not pick street sweeping out of a pile of offers. She picked the one post still willing to pay insurance out of an industry that is closing its doors.
“Go explore more career possibilities” comes with preconditions: a degree that opens a door at all, a family you do not have to send money to, and somebody else carrying the cost of a mistake. With all three, it is called choice. Missing any one, it is called the only road left. What she lacks is conditions, not wits.
I have used that ruler of irreplaceability on myself. Laid on me it is called being short-changed; laid on her it was called wasted schooling. I do not accept that double standard either.
And “no job is beneath another”, “structural mismatch”, “your major is irrelevant, go and learn AI” — what these have in common is that they keep the diagnosis on the individual side. To admit a shortage of posts you would have to go on to distribution, to who gets the efficiency dividend, to why firms are not hiring. Nobody wants to write that. Call it mismatch and the responsibility lands back on you: not working hard enough, wrong major, wasted schooling.
Those lines where I called my own degree garbage are precisely the effect this rhetoric is designed to collect.
A sentence from 1985
On 23 September 1985 Deng Xiaoping said a passage in a speech to the National Conference of the Communist Party of China, collected in Volume Three of his Selected Works: “The purpose of socialism is to make the whole people prosperous together, not to polarise. If our policies lead to polarisation, we have failed; if a new bourgeoisie emerges, then we really have taken the wrong road.”
That is the sentence I want to ask about. AI has arrived. Where does productive capacity concentrate? At the speed and depth visible now, does that sentence still stand?
A person who studied for twenty-odd years, fought through round after round of competition to get into a bachelor’s and then a master’s, and cannot find one decent, secured job afterwards — how is that prosperity? It is not even a comfortable life. The career-call screenshot I pasted earlier shows exactly this kind of person: first-tier bachelor’s plus first-tier master’s, a Tencent internship, a development offer already in hand, and the last row reading ByteDance outsourcer.
The numbers the Statistics Bureau published in January 2026 for 2025 are: national per-capita disposable income of 43,377 yuan, urban residents 56,502 yuan, rural residents 24,456 yuan; the national income median was 36,231 yuan, only 83.5 percent of the mean. A median below the mean means the mean is being pulled up by the top slice.
My mother’s two hundred and the city pension of ten thousand
My mother is in the countryside and gets a little over two hundred yuan a month as her pension. City retirees I know take ten thousand. Put those two numbers side by side and call that common prosperity?
That ten thousand is a specific person, not an average, so I do not treat it as typical: the per-capita urban employee pension sits around thirty-eight hundred, and the urban-rural gap is more than tenfold. I did that ledger in “My Mother Gets 200 Yuan a Month, 5,160 Gets Taken From Mine”, so I will only nod to it here without re-listing the numbers.
Now look at where the wealth starts. A demolition household in the city takes several million a head and the flats are distributed per capita; a rural person who came to the city to work carries several million as a loan on their back and repays it for most of a life. The core of that contrast is not who worked harder. It is that the starting point and the channel of accumulation are institutionally separated. This is also about common prosperity.
The People’s Bank of China’s 2019 survey of urban household assets and liabilities gives these figures: average total assets of an urban household 3.179 million yuan; the top ten percent of households hold 47.5 percent of all sampled household assets; the bottom twenty percent hold 2.6 percent. And that is cities only, with the countryside excluded. Add the countryside in and that curve only gets steeper.
Money flows to capital, not to labour
Someone sent me a harsher set: a wealth Gini of 0.62, the richest ten percent of households holding 66.8 percent of wealth, the poorest ten percent holding 0.6 percent, a gap of 111 times. I could not find a reliable primary source for that set, only academic estimates on a completely different definition, so I will not sign it and I do not build it into the argument. What I will sign is that central bank survey above, and the Statistics Bureau’s own income measure — I listed that figure in “Out of Debt Is Light” and will not repeat it. It measures one year’s flow and excludes assets already accumulated, so it always looks better than the wealth gap.
This society does not respect working people. Money runs to capital, not into workers’ pockets. Consumption is created by labour and ought to be spent by the people who labour, rather than taken by the few who own the means of production.
That is where “not short of people, short of jobs” actually lands. Posts were never distributed by headcount; they are distributed by who holds the means of production. Whoever holds it buys tooling; whoever buys tooling merges posts; and the person whose post got merged is thereafter called a candidate in a hiring system. The 1985 sentence set polarisation as the test of failure, so today the way to check it is not to look at growth but at share, and at the doors.
Closing
Not short of people; short of jobs. I accept that sentence now, and accepting it makes me not happy at all.
The propaganda keeps being filmed, the rate keeps falling, and that three thousand is still the same number. The debt the market owes is not repaid because I admit I am slow, so I am not going to keep collecting it on its behalf either.
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