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Download  Each year millions of young Chinese graduates flock to the major cities in the hope of gaining their dream white collar job.

This year alone, there’ll be about 6.3 million Chinese graduates.

But with more people looking for jobs than vacancies, most will either be unemployed or underemployed.

It’s an issue which has got many young people fearing their future.

Experts predict that if the situation isn’t solved soon, it could pose serious social problems.

Shuk-Wah Chung has the story from Beijing.

Here in downtown Beijing you can see a new young consumer class emerging.

This place is called Sanlitun Village, a commercially developed square which only popped up two years ago.

In the middle, is a huge screen showcasing the latest fashions; there’s a two-storey Apple store crammed with people testing out the latest i-gear; and small cafes and expensive restaurants are dotted around the sides.

But take a train about an hour away, and the picture is very different.

Here in this Beijing suburb, a long line of street vendors sell cheap and oily food; trucks roar past blowing out huge puffs of smoke; and shops blare out distorted music hoping to attract customers.

Xiong Zhi Chao lives here.

He’s from Hebei, a province situated to the northeast of Beijing.

He studied construction, graduated in 2009, and then came to Beijing looking for work.

But after trying unsuccessfully for six months, he finally took a job as a refrigerator salesman.

“I couldn’t find any opportunities in my field. When I came to Beijing I attended a lot of job fairs and sent my resume to lots of construction companies. But people wanted experience, or a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, except I only have a diploma. I spent six months looking for work but I had to make a compromise, so I got a job in selling fridge equipment.”

Xiong Zhi Chao tells me it takes him two hours everyday to get to and from work.

A long journey especially compared to the amount of money he makes.

His salary is about 300 US dollars after tax each month. He gets a 15 dollars bonus if he sells a fridge.

Most of his monthly income goes on food, rent and transport.

“I sometimes feel hesitant about going out because I don’t have a lot of earnings, and this affects my confidence, so sometimes I feel afraid when talking to people.”

According to the latest figures, there’s at least a 12 percent unemployment rate for young graduates.

In 2000, the rate was only half that.

Part of the reason is more people are going to university and looking for white collar jobs while China remains a largely industrial economy.

As a result there’s a lot of menial work for students who don’t want it, says Geoffrey Crothall from the China Labour Bulletin.

“The job market is still based on low cost low skill labour. On average there are six or seven million new graduates entering the job market each year. They want to find jobs that will offer good prospects, good pay, but at the moment all they can find are jobs that pay barely more than what they could be earning if they worked at a factory with no qualifications whatsoever.”

The government has pledged to cut back on university enrollments by an annual five percent.

They also plan on spending more than six billion dollars this year to stimulate employment, with an emphasis on helping recent college graduates. However, there’s a bigger change that needs to occur – the education system.

According to Philip Beck, a recruiter for Meijob.com, students aren’t taught skills for the “real world”.

“All the graduates we’ve spoken to and the research that we’ve done, very few universities in China do anything to teach these students how to find a job. They do absolutely zero to teach them how to present themselves, how to prepare even a two or three-year plan for their career life and most of them don’t know what they want to do. So if they were taught how to be a little bit more focused in their job search I don’t think that we’d have the million or so graduates who are unemployed or underemployed. So I think the education system in China really needs to change to focus on helping these graduates find a job.”

Yin Chengji, a spokesman for the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, says the government is working to reform the curriculums in colleges.

Labour specialist Geoffrey Crothall warns the youth unemployment problem threatens China’s social economic stability.

"I think in five, certainly ten years time it’s an issue that could be problematic. It’s an issue that the government certainly has to pay attention to now. It shouldn’t just wait for things to become more serious ten years down the line."

Another issue is the culture.

In China, young people are expected to reach a certain independent level when they finish university.

But the pressure caused by parents and society means it’s almost impossible.

This causes anxiety in many graduates, as recruiter Phillip Beck has seen.

“They have incredibly high expectations on what salary they’ll earn. That they will be able to buy property within three to four years; that they’ll be married before 28. And if they fail to meet any of those criteria then they feel they’ll be a disappointment to their parents. So many of them not wanting to disappoint their parents move away from their hometown and struggle in bigger cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.”

Back in Beijing suburbia, Xiong Zhi Chao tells me that that life in the capital wasn’t what he expected.

“At the beginning I was competent and competitive. Even though with no internship experience I thought I’d be able to make it. But I spent six months doing this. I thought about going home because life was really hard. I was living in a single room and cooking, dining, doing everything in that room! And I thought why do I have to live like this? But now my life is getting better and I’m not considering going back home. I came all the way here to work out of a comfort zone.”

His feelings are typical of many young migrants living in the city

This song, created by two brothers who now live in the Beijing suburbs, has been an online hit.

“Though we have nothing, we are tough in spirit; though we have nothing, we are still dreaming; though we have nothing, we still have power,” go the lyrics.