Opportunities with enterprises in export manufacturing and trade fields are even more bleak. Affected by the international financial crisis, private enterprises around the Zhujiang River Delta and the Changjiang River Delta, which employed 34.2 percent of university graduates in 2007, went into a recession in the very beginning of 2009.

At the same job fair Che Xinglai attended, Huo Jingying, supervisor of the HR department of Wuxi Zhiwei Technology, got over 80 resumes in the morning session alone. With two years' recruitment experience, she has noticed obvious differences this year, with graduates much less picky about job locations and salaries. "Perhaps they have some idea from the media that the financial crisis means the job market is grim." Recently, Tencent Web did a survey on university students' job expectations. There were 20,000 replies, with bachelor graduates expecting a monthly salary between RMB 1,000 and 2,000.

On the same day as the job fair mentioned above, the "Forum on Financial Crisis, Expanding Domestic Demand and China Economy Strategy" was held at the China Strategy Studies Center of Peking University. The president of Peking University Zhou Qifeng said: "Under the financial crisis, finding employment for graduates becomes one of the hardest nuts to crack, and we are trying to find the best way to help them."

Figures from the National Statistics Bureau show that there will be over 6 million graduates in 2009. With 4.8 million graduates still unemployed from recent years, the number of graduates seeking employment in 2009 will soar to over 10 million.

Job Security Is the New Priority

Ten years ago, universities and colleges began to expand their enrollments, and every year since then their graduates have seen a "grim" job market. According to official statistics, the number of graduates in 2006 was five times that of 1999. This year the situation is even worse, for it is the first time that a global financial crisis has afflicted China since reform and opening-up commenced in the late 1970s.

The attraction of foreign-funded enterprises has waned due to layoffs and pay cuts, pushing more graduates to seek public service roles. "The current employment situation in the finance field is somber. Becoming a public servant seems more stable, regardless of the middle-level incomes and social securities," says Tang Yuan, a finance major at Renmin University. She has just finished two examinations conducted by the Finance Ministry of China and the People's Bank of China respectively.

The 2008 Report on the Recruitment Situation of University and College Graduates published by Shanghai Foreign Service Co., Ltd. shows that since the global financial crisis, job security has now become graduates' main concern. This point has been proven by the 1,040,000 applicants that have signed up for the 2009 National Civil Servant Recruitment Examination to compete for the 13,566 vacancies in government departments, a chance of 1.3 percent. Each position has an average of 78 people competing for it, a substantial increase over last year's 60:1. Netizens consider it the cruelest competition in history.