By AFP
Published 14 Feb 2010
BEIJING - SIX years after moving into a maze of bunkhouses on the outskirts of Beijing, Yu Ping still frowns as she heads home along the muddy lanes lined with grocery stores, web cafes and hair salons.
The security devices saleswoman is one of hundreds of thousands of young university graduates - known as the 'ants' - scraping by on meagre salaries from unstable jobs as they try to take advantage of China's economic miracle.
'I'm planning to move - I've had enough of living here,' said the 27-year-old Yu, who lives in a tiny 10-square-metre flat in Tangjialing village with her husband, a computer hardware salesman. The apartment is so minuscule that the couple cannot have a proper wardrobe - they use their only chair as a makeshift dresser.
University graduates in China were once dubbed 'the favoured children of Heaven' - they won decent jobs from the government upon graduation, and housing was one of the many perks offered to them. But the country's three decades of economic reform have made such privileges a thing of the past and forced many 20-somethings into a fierce battle for decent jobs - and an unenviable life in the cramped suburbs.
China had more than six million new university graduates in 2009, but by year's end, only 87 per cent of them had found jobs, meaning nearly 800,000 were yet to be employed. Beijing alone has more than 100,000 'ants', and other mega-cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou in the south have similar worker armies, according to the book 'Ants Tribe', based on two years of surveys among the huge workforce.
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