Age Discrimination in PRC Job Market

Many Thanks to the Companies Below:

Baidu, Huawei, Lenovo, IDC, Gartner, France Telecom ……

CITIC Group (中信产业基金, etc.), CASH Capital ……

I can’t remember all the names of companies I once applied. However, because they didn’t let me in, I visited Wall Street for the first time at 41 years old.

Though not being spoken obviously, I felt age discrimination exists in mainland’s job market. On job ads, many ads stated only hiring candidates younger than 35 or 40 years old. Why are there job ads with obvious age discrimination? I think, one reason could be that in mainland’s job market experience is neglected while overtime working is emphasized. So younger job candidates are more favored. Take one obvious example, it is very difficult for many haigui engineers to find suitable jobs in mainland because in employer’s eyes they are equivalent to new master or Ph.D graduates. 20000RMB per month is almost the up limit for those haiguis. These employers neglected experiences or know-how accumulated in those haiguis. Another reason could be that high paid jobs are clustered in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc. So high end talents clustered in these cities too. Age discrimination job ads appeared accordingly. For those industry transfer job seekers, they face more serious age discrimination in job market.

Xuefei(Michael) Peng