While Shanghai residents head out into the streets to celebrate the city's reopening, Yuchen Yang and her peers are still unsure when their lockdown will end.
The 22-year-old Shanghai university student has stayed on campus since her university enacted its COVID-19 bubble in March.
During Shanghai's COVID lockdown, the city's 64 universities closed their campuses, with around 740,000 students trapped inside their dormitories. Many of them were given limited time to leave their rooms throughout the day.
Many of them had to go through daily mass testing and rely on universities for food and supplies.
And those who are in their final year of school missed out on one of the two biggest graduate recruitment seasons in China, making it difficult to secure jobs.
Ms Yang, who studies mechanical engineering and is in her last semester, said she had missed several job opportunities.
She was unable to attend job interviews as many companies across the country still insisted on meeting in-person.
"I was very anxious in May," Ms Yang told the ABC.
"I was about to graduate, but I hadn't secured a job, or completed my thesis."
Eventually, Ms Yang received a job offer after a phone interview with a Shanghai company, making her one of the lucky few amid what could be China's largest youth unemployment wave since the 1990s.
The uncertain road ahead for China's young grads
The latest government data shows there are around 10.76 million upcoming university graduates in China this year, the highest recorded in history.
China also recorded its highest youth unemployment rate in history, with 18.2 per cent of people aged 16 to 24 struggling to find jobs, in comparison to 8.8 per cent in Australia at the same time.
Young graduates also received less income than the previous year.
In particular, female graduates find themselves at a disadvantage in the highly competitive job market, as their employment rate is 22.2 per cent lower than male graduates this year.
"This is a cohort that's not only facing a very bad job prospect today and this year," said Professor Dali Yang, political scientist and China expert at the University of Chicago.
"But with job market and so on, this generation will be affected for years to come."
The latest victims of China's economy slowdown
As the centre of China's manufacturing, finance and international trades, Shanghai has been nicknamed by young Chinese people as the "Magic City".
It's a place where you can hunt for more career opportunities with higher income and better lifestyle.
But it's not just young people in Shanghai who face fewer job opportunities.
Last Wednesday, China's Premier Li Keqiang held an emergency meeting with thousands of representatives from local governments and companies, warning that China was facing a much worse economic situation today than in 2020 when the pandemic began.
He also urged local governments and companies to "reduce the unemployment rate as soon as possible".
Professor Yang said for the central government in Beijing, reducing youth unemployment rate is vital for its political stability.
But even with Premier Li's request, some companies still find it difficult to hire more graduates, as the sectors most popular among young graduates suffered from major crackdowns last year.
Since the end of 2020, Beijing has launched a crackdown on its technology sector to restrict the power of its firms.
About $2.9 trillion in value was obliterated from the sector by April this year.
The crackdown has now sparked a large-scale lay-off in the industry, with several tech giants, including Alibaba, Tencent and Didi, sacking thousands of workers.
Another sector facing a similar plight is education, which suffered a $140 billion loss last year after Beijing banned private tutoring with the aim of boosting the birth rate among the younger population.
The prohibitive price of raising a child in modern China, which can include thousands of dollars for extra tuition to get them into the best universities, is thought to be one of the causes behind the country's sinking birth rate.
Since the ban, the sector has shrunk dramatically, leading to fewer job opportunities for education graduates.
Estelle Liu, who will graduate with a Master of Teaching from a Shanghai university this semester, said only four out of 20 people in her class secured a job offer during the first round of graduate recruitment last year.
Ms Liu was one of the lucky four students, but she secured an offer from a marketing firm — a departure from her teaching training.
After Beijing's crackdown on tutoring schools, Ms Liu became a private tutor who offered one-to-one courses for school children. She earned $3,128 per month from the gig.
"The income of being a private tutor is much higher than any graduate offers I received," said Ms Liu.
But as Shanghai entered lockdown, Ms Liu lost her job.
Silent resistance from young people
With the double whammy of pandemic and unemployment challenges, there has been a growing frustration from young Chinese people about their future.
It has prompted many to rethink their personal autonomy and their relationship with Beijing, which has been tightening their control on young people in recent years.
In March, a phrase called "bai lan", which means "let it rot", was widely spread on Chinese social media and resonated with young people.
It was an updated version of "lying flat" that went viral in 2021, which encourages a passive life attitude in the rise of economic and social pressures against young people.
The phrase "lying flat" has been seen by Beijing as "a threat to stability."
Wendy Zhou, a media researcher and PhD candidate at Georgia State University, said both "lying flat" and "let it rot" show the collective "grievances of hyper-competitive and suffocating social environment."
She also said the spread of the two phrases were an indirect confrontation with the governance, showing a collective pursuit of their own life choices, rather than government control.
Meanwhile, alongside "let it rot" was another phrase that went viral during the Shanghai lockdown that made Beijing feel threatened.
In May, a video circulated widely on social media showed Shanghai police in full PPE demanding residents identified as close contacts to leave their houses and head to quarantine hospitals.
The residents refused to follow.
"If you don't follow the order from the city government, we will punish you. After we punish you, it will continue to influence your next three generations," said the police.
The phrase ignited a huge response online in China.
Many used the phrases to express their despair over what they say are draconian COVID-zero measures and the overgrowing authority power.
The term "the last generation" also reminds many of the marriage and childbirth pressures from governments who have implemented the third child policy to tackle its population crisis, worrying the lack of labour force might drag down its economic growth.
The video and the phrase have been banned on Weibo.
"When I heard the young people saying, 'oh, we are the last generation', you won't hear us laughing anymore," said Professor Yang.
"It boasts a sense of resentment of what is being done to them, but also a cry of despair in the sense that they were buffeted by all those currents."
Young people are desperate, but most decide to live with it
As COVID-19 spread from Shanghai to Beijing, more students chose to stand up and fight for their individual rights during the lockdown.
In May, students from China's Tsinghua University and Peking University, which have a long history of pushing China's political movements, held lockdown protests over the schools' decision to prevent them from leaving the campuses.
But Ms Zhou doesn't think these protests would form a pattern of resistance.
For her, it depends on the relationship between universities and students, and whether the institutions allow space for negotiations.
"Some other colleges and universities in China have witnessed some sporadic acts of resistance too, but the students were heavily punished and therefore did not turn into sustainable actions of disobedience," she said.
And despite the growing frustration amid the economic pressures and illusion from the government, many young people still choose to live with the system.
Many are joining the civil services, which has for long been seen as the most stable job in China.
New official data also shows there are 2.02 million people registering for the civil service exams — 52,000 more people than last year.
Similarly, while young people encourage each other to "let it rot", many still try to perfect themselves to be more competitive in the job market.
This year, around 4.57 million students signed up for the postgraduate entrance exam, making it the highest record of applicants in history, with 1.2 million more people than last year.
Professor Yang said like many young people in other countries, young people in China are also part of the "COVID generation" whose life has been significantly impacted by the pandemic.
But he also observed that throughout the years, young people in China are subtly making changes compared to their parents' generation, as they are "less respectful of authority".
"I think that this despair [of COVID-zero policy and unemployment challenges] will be reflected again in the sense that they want to find their own voice and yet they are also being so restricted today," he said.
