The Delivery Driver with a PhD
Somewhere in Beijing, Ding Yuanzhao is weaving through traffic on a scooter, Meituan uniform on, phone mounted to the
Somewhere in Beijing, Ding Yuanzhao is weaving through traffic on a scooter, Meituan uniform on, phone mounted to the handlebars, a bag of someone’s lunch strapped to his back. He has a bachelor’s from Tsinghua University, a master’s from Peking University, a PhD from Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, a second master’s from Oxford, and a postdoctoral research position from the National University of Singapore. Ding sent out resumes. He went to interviews. Nothing came of it. “Only when I can support myself can I actively look for a new path,” he posted on Douyin.
His name is Ding Yuanzhao. He is 39 years old. And while parts of his story were contested after going viral in July 2025, the credentials were never in doubt and neither was the scooter. What made his story land so hard wasn’t the irony of an Oxford graduate delivering noodles. It was the recognition. Millions of young Chinese people saw themselves in it.
The Deal That No Longer Pays Out
For decades, Chinese society ran on a social contract that felt close to sacred. Score well enough on the gaokao, China’s brutal national university entrance exam, get into a good university, and a stable career follows. The gaokao was designed to be merciless but fair, a system where a kid from rural Fujian could outscore a wealthy Shanghai classmate and change his family’s trajectory entirely. Hundreds of millions of Chinese families bet everything on this promise: money, time, childhood, decades of parental sacrifice. The deal was that it would pay off.
China’s government then dramatically accelerated the bet. In 2003, 17% of high school graduates went on to higher education. By 2023 that figure had hit 60%. Annual university graduates swelled from 2.39 million in 2004 to 11.79 million in 2024. In 2025, 12.22 million students graduated into the workforce. In 2026, 12.7 million are expected to follow. The credential machine was running at full capacity. The jobs machine was not.
China unemployment among educated young people became one of the most politically sensitive numbers in the country. Youth unemployment for 16 to 24 year olds hit a record 21.3% in June 2023. The government stopped publishing the figure. When reporting resumed under a revised methodology, the number came out lower, but even by official counts it reached 16.9% in February 2025 and climbed back to 18.9% by August. Many economists believe the real figure sits higher still. The government knows what it looks like when you bury a statistic, and buried it anyway.
The Arms Race Nobody Can Win
When millions of graduates flood a market that cannot absorb them, employers do the rational thing: raise the bar. Jobs that once went to undergraduates started requiring master’s degrees. Jobs that once required master’s degrees started specifying doctorates. A 2023 study found that more than a third of Chinese graduates were working in fields unrelated to their degrees, while nearly one in four were significantly overqualified for the roles they held. A bachelor’s degree went from a reliable entry point to the minimum viable credential just to get an interview.
Students responded rationally and made the problem worse. If a degree isn’t enough, get a postgraduate degree. In 2024, over 5 million people registered for China’s postgraduate entrance exam. Universities, encouraged by government enrollment quotas, expanded their graduate programmes. The credential inflation fed on itself: more graduates meant lower returns on each degree, which drove demand for higher degrees, which produced more graduates, which lowered returns further. People ran deeper into education precisely as the payoff for education was shrinking.
Ding Yuanzhao played this game better than almost anyone. Two master’s degrees, a PhD, postdoctoral research at one of Asia’s leading universities. By the logic of the system he grew up in, he should have been untouchable. He was not an outlier. He was the system’s logic taken to its endpoint.
70,000 Delivery Drivers with Master’s Degrees
The number that reframes the whole story doesn’t belong to Ding. It belongs to Meituan. As of 2022, at least 70,000 of the platform’s delivery drivers held master’s degrees. More than 20% of drivers across China’s two largest delivery platforms had college degrees. In April 2025, China National Nuclear Corporation, one of the country’s largest state-owned enterprises, posted 1,730 job openings and received 1.2 million applications. The odds of getting one of those jobs were roughly six times harder than getting into Harvard. The positions were not prestigious research roles. They were simply stable. In the current climate, stable is what people are competing for.
The gig economy has become, for a significant slice of China’s educated class, not a stopgap but a landing zone. Delivery work offers something the formal job market increasingly cannot: income today, without the grinding humiliation of a process stacked against you. A university lecturer named Xing Bin went viral in 2023 after spending a month delivering food, riding 210 kilometres a day, climbing 110 floors, earning around 7,000 yuan. He called the work tough but noted that the rules were clear and the payment was reliable. For a generation told to trust in meritocracy and finding it doesn’t quite deliver, the blunt predictability of gig work has its own grim appeal.
On Chinese social media, graduates have revived a character from a century-old short story by writer Lu Xun. Kong Yiji was a scholar who failed the imperial examinations and spent his life trapped between the educated class he aspired to join and the working class he was too proud to accept. Young Chinese graduates have made him a meme, using his story to process their own. “Everyone says a degree is a stepping stone,” one commenter wrote, “but I’m slowly coming to realise it’s more like a pedestal I can’t get down from.”
What 24 Policy Points Can’t Fix
Beijing is not ignoring the China unemployment crisis. In September 2024 the State Council unveiled a 24-point employment strategy covering curriculum reform, vocational training, and mandatory employer investment in staff education. In April 2025 the Ministry of Education approved 29 new undergraduate majors including AI education and geriatric medicine. Universities are now assessed on graduate employment rates. Programmes with persistently poor placement records have been flagged under a new red-yellow card system. A 100-day employment campaign launched in 2025 required universities and local governments to secure at least 100 job opportunities each.
A Policy Response Without a Structural Answer
None of it addresses the structural problem. China spent two decades producing graduates at a pace its economy cannot absorb, in disciplines its labour market doesn’t need in anywhere near those volumes. Reorienting curricula takes years. Manufacturing enough high-skill jobs for 12.7 million new graduates annually, on top of the unabsorbed backlog from previous cohorts, is not something any policy document resolves. The government can mandate that universities produce employable graduates. It cannot mandate that the employers exist to hire them.
The social contract that drove generations of Chinese families to pour everything into their children’s education is under real strain. Ding Yuanzhao’s story is more complicated than the viral version, and he has said as much himself. But the question that appeared in the comments after his story broke is the one hanging over an entire generation: “So what’s the point of education?” It is not a cynical question. It is a genuine one. And nobody in Beijing has a good answer yet.
