Sitting Amid a Pile of Jewels: Youth Unemployment and Waste Recycling in China

This chapter looks at the relationship between waste recycling and unemployment as well as the various countertactics that young people adopt to make a living and improve their material conditions in Chinese cities. Youth unemployment and waste recycling are a central part of Chinese society today and provide a meaningful perspective for our understanding of the social and economic changes of the country. The emergence of youth unemployment in China has been the unpleasant but necessary by-product of the shift in its political economy. While geographers studying childhood have focused on paid labor and domestic work, researchers of the older youth category have paid particular attention to the hardships young people encounter in their passage to adulthood. The analysis of how these spaces come into being can greatly contribute to our understanding of the unemployment-informality nexus broadening our knowledge of economic geography, both empirically and theoretically.