What does China's youth unemployment rate tell us? Zhejiang Normal University's Tang Liping mentioned the pandemic's impact on the private sector. The shift toward a quality-driven economy further contributes. These challenges are part of the transformation process.

Tang Liping: I think one of the reasons is due to the pandemic-related economic slowdown, many private sectors were battered, and they had mass job cuts, and they were the big employers of graduates, young people, and especially some well-educated young people. And each year, a great number of millions of fresh graduates enter the job market, and all these interconnected factors contribute to the youth unemployment rate.

Liu Xin: What do you think is the connection between the unemployment number with China's economic transition from one that is very much concentrated on the speed, on the scale of economic expansion, to the quality of the development, Professor Tang?

Tang Liping: Actually, already before the period of COVID-19 pandemic, China already started slowing down, but I think that it represented the Chinese government's conscious efforts to slow down the economy in order to transform the labor-intensive industry into a more service-oriented, knowledge-based economy. So, this may unavoidably cause less job opportunities, but I think these are the growing pains we need to face.