In 2025, China's 12.2 million new college graduates — an increase of 430,000 over last year — will start their adult lives at a time of dramatic uncertainty for China and the world. Since 2020, urban youth unemployment has hovered around 20%. This is a cohort that has weathered the pandemic and is now facing down Trump’s escalating trade war with China. How are they making sense of what lies ahead? And how will they chart their course for the future?

To answer these questions, the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA) is hosting a panel discussion moderated by Barclay Bram, CCA Fellow on Chinese Society, featuring Yi-Ling Liu, Journalist in Residence at the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism; Biao Xiang, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany; and Li Zhang, Professor at the University of California, Davis.

To learn more about this topic, read Barclay’s The 19 Percent series. 

Speakers

Yi-Ling Liu is Journalist in Residence at the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. A writer and editor covering AI and Chinese society from a human-centered lens, she is currently writing a narrative nonfiction book on the Chinese Internet, to be published by Knopf. As a writer, her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Wired, and the New Yorker on topics ranging from science-fiction novelists to national burnout crises to gay dating apps. As an editor, she launched and led the China desk at Rest of World as the first China editor and helped edit Chaoyang Trap, a collaborative newsletter exploring daily life and culture on the Chinese Internet. She is a New America Fellow, a recipient of the Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, and an Overseas Press Club Foundation Scholar. 

Biao Xiang is Director at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Social Anthropology in Germany. Biao Xiang studied sociology at Beijing University, China, and received his PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oxford, UK. He was a professor of social anthropology at Oxford before he joined MPI in 2021. His main research addresses various types of migration and mobility—internal and international, unskilled and highly skilled, and for reasons momentous and mundane—in China, India, and other parts of Asia. Through the lens of migration, he has examined a wide range of political economic issues, including state-society relations, labor, social reproduction, and mobility governance. Xiang is the winner of the 2008 Anthony Leeds Prize for his book Global Body Shopping and the 2012 William L. Holland Prize for his article “Predatory Princes.” His 2000 Chinese book, 《跨越边界的社区》 (published in English as Transcending Boundaries in 2005), was reprinted in 2018 and 《自己作为方法》 (Self as Method, co-authored with Wu Qi) was ranked the Most Impactful Book of 2020 in China according to Douban. 

Li Zhang is Professor at the University of California, Davis (UCD). Li Zhang’s research concerns the social, political, spatial, and psychological repercussions of market reforms and post-socialist transformations in China. She has served as interim dean of the Division of Social Sciences (2015–17), chair of the Anthropology Department (2011–15), and director of the East Asian Studies Program (2003–06) at UCD, and president of the Society for East Asian Anthropology (2013–15). She is co-editor of the Issues of Globalization series by Oxford University Press. Zhang has authored several acclaimed works, including Strangers in the City (2001), In Search of Paradise (2010), and Anxious China (2021), which explore themes such as internal migration, middle-class aspirations, and the rise of psychotherapy in urban China. She earned her PhD from Cornell University and has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and multiple awards from the American Sociological Association.

Barclay Bram (moderator) is a Fellow on Chinese Society at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. He received his DPhil from Oxford University's School of Global and Area Studies. He conducted ethnographic fieldwork in China in 2018–2019 on mental health and psychological counseling. Barclay is a journalist at the Economist where he is senior producer of the Weekend Intelligence. His writing has appeared in the Economist, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the London Review of Books, Wired, and Granta.