Spare a thought for the rural youth too

There's a "young crisis" brewing in a village in the port city of Xiamen, Fujian province. That village is where I was born and brought up, and I see it as a microcosm of China's countryside.

Many of those born in the 1980s and 1990s in the village couldn't make it to college. But the problem does not end there. These youngsters have neither had the luck nor shown a drive to find a job. They stay at home and eat into their parents' hard-earned savings. A rough estimate shows about 40 percent of the village youth - between 16 and 30 years of age - have fallen into this trap. Girls, however, are better because they are ready to take up assembly-line jobs, the most common ones available in the area.

Officials, economists and sociologists have been racking their brains to find ways of how to accommodate the millions of university graduates into the job market. But the rural underprivileged youth could become an even bigger problem because of their sheer numbers, their lack of skills and their disconnect with the fast-moving world.