Around 210 Million College Graduates in the Next 15 Years: Intense Competition Will Produce Great Talent

I. Each successive generation in China really is stronger than the last

People born in the 1980s and 1990s were once described as decadent, useless, and pampered generations, but that was not actually the case. As the times advance, younger generations born in the 2000s and 2020s surpass older generations in health, development, understanding, breadth of vision, and more.

II. Over the next 15 years, China will produce 12–15 million college graduates a year, including junior college graduates, for a total of about 210 million

That exceeds the combined populations of Japan and South Korea, equals 62% of the US population and 47% of the EU population, and roughly corresponds to the number of people with higher education in the US and Europe. As of 2024, China had 240 million people with a junior college education or above. In other words, that number will double over this period of a little more than a decade.

An unprecedented wave of people with higher education entering the workforce—one that many have not taken seriously.

That is why I previously wrote “Demographic Structure: The College Graduate Dividend and Engineer Dividend Will Continue,” “It Is Not Industrial Upgrading, but the Downgrading of Industries Worldwide,” and “The Squeeze of Three Current Trends: The Kondratieff Depression, China’s Technological Substitution, and the AI Boom.”

College graduates and PhDs are becoming as cheap and plentiful as cabbage, and so are high-tech industries.

III. Hardship, involution, and upheaval will produce people of great talent—including those who engage with the world, those who withdraw from it, and those who rebel

There are similarities with the generation of Chinese youth born around 1890. The imperial examination system was abolished in 1905, and young people began attending modern schools, including military academies, to study practical subjects: Western affairs and technologies, science and engineering, and specialized vocational subjects.

This time, the dividend from the national college entrance examination is coming to a definitive end, and college graduates are becoming thoroughly commoditized worldwide.

The dividends of the era have ended, old paradigms no longer work, opportunities to secure a stable position are fewer, and venturing into business means facing rougher seas. Career planning for college graduates is entirely different from what it was for earlier generations of graduates. This is a new historical turning point in the period since the Renaissance.

Old paradigms for life no longer work, and neither do old worldviews, outlooks on life, and values, ideological paradigms, or understandings of philosophy. People born in the 1970s and 1980s benefited from so many material opportunities that they felt little need for the social sciences and philosophy.

See my earlier article, “Those Born in the ’90s and ’00s a Century Ago.”

IV. This generation of young people is different from the mediocre generation of Japan’s lost 30 years, the so-called “useless Heisei generation”

Japan’s industrial and social structures are too entrenched, and it also has a moderate level of welfare provision as a developed country, so young people opt to lie flat.

Although structures in China will also become entrenched and rigid, the ecosystem is larger, there is more upheaval and change, and there is no comfortable welfare safety net to fall back on. The situations are different. In Japan’s fields of market competition—art, music, anime and manga, games, and so on—intense competition has also produced generation after generation of masters.

In the fortunes of these successive generations, we see historical materialism all the more clearly. The times make heroes, rather than the other way around.

V. In conversations with friends, I have said that those of us born in the second half of the 1980s now need to learn more from Zhu De, Commander-in-Chief Zhu

As people from an older version of the world, we need to keep up with the new era. It is interesting, too, that Commander-in-Chief Zhu had great difficulty joining the Party at the time. He only managed to join after making his way to Europe. He was older, a middle-aged man from the old era, and the young people of the new era rejected him, fearing he was an old geezer rather than someone whose talents were native to the era, much as people now talk about “AI-native talent.”

Many people’s understanding is outdated. There are also many whose understanding is progressing slowly, but who are still figures in the mold of Gu Hongming or Yang Du.

VI. It is also against this backdrop that we need to study Marx + Zhuangzi + psychology

Historical materialism, dialectical materialism, and philosophy of mind VS existential crisis, psychological care, and healing

Also: “The AI Era Needs Marx Plus Zhuangzi More Than Ever”