To Save the Chinese Dream

Everyone's familiar with the American dream: work and study hard and you'll get ahead. But China has its own version, which hopeful parents and their children have adhered to ever since the emperor started meritocratic civil-service exams during the Han dynasty. Like the U.S. variant, the Chinese Dream places firm faith in hard work, but perhaps even greater faith in the value of an education, which promises to boost young people out of poverty and secure better lives for them and their families. This vision has had special appeal since Deng Xiaoping opened China to the world and getting rich became glorious.

Now, with China's white-hot economy cooling, millions of youngsters are facing the possibility that a good degree won't be enough. As 2008 wound down, 1.5 million new graduates were still jobless, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Suddenly, it seems, the Chinese Dream is under threat, and that's got Beijing plenty nervous. This was on stark display when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao met with students at a Beijing college in December. "If you are worried, I'm more worried than you," he told them, promising that ensuring their employment was at the top of his agenda, alongside finding jobs for laid-off factory workers.

It's easy to see why Beijing is worried about millions of unemployed have-nots, given their history of turning economic woes into mass protests. But China's students have remained largely meek and apolitical ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. And they represent just a tiny fraction—about 6 percent—of the country's workers. Yet their symbolic value is enormous. "Today's students carry the expectations of two generations," says psychology professor Wei Zhizhong, who runs a clinic in Guangzhou. Should they and their parents lose faith, their fears could spread cynicism throughout society.

Hence the government has begun working to ensure ordinary Chinese don't give up on the country's guiding ethos. New steps include ordering the Chinese military to double its intake of university-trained recruits to 33,000, expanding college-based scientific research to create more postgraduate positions, and trying to lure double the number of new village teachers to poor provinces by offering to pay off their college debts. Most important, of course, is the $586 billion in stimulus funds Beijing is pouring into the economy, most of which will be funneled to state-run companies that build railways, power lines and other infrastructure. The goal is to create up to 9 million new jobs this year. Those aren't just for college alumni, of course, but China's half-million engineering grads can rejoice.

The parents of the 6.1 million students due to collect bachelor's degrees next summer are also hoping such measures work. Ever since enrollments reopened at the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1978, parents have sacrificed huge amounts of money and time on tuition and tutors to ensure placements and degrees for their kids. Now many fear they won't recoup their investments, and that, in a country with no social safety net, their kids won't be able to look after them in their old age.

A case in point is Gong Ailing, a star pupil at a Beijing university, who comes from a peasant family in central China. Gong represents Beijing's worst nightmare. Her father is a 59-year-old peasant who supports his family on $175 a month from a temporary cooking job. "We don't have retirement pensions or social insurance," he says. "So when we get old, we have to rely on our children." The family has spent close to $15,000—a fairly typical amount—to send Gong to college. That's a big bet on the future.