Graphic detail | Call me maybe

China’s minorities have a tough time finding jobs

Discrimination towards Uighurs means they are three times less likely to be called back by employers

IT IS EASY to think of China as monolithic. But the government’s repression in Tibet and “re-education camps” in Xinjiang, in which perhaps 1m Uighurs have been incarcerated, are reminders that not everyone receives equal treatment. New research shows that discrimination against China’s ethnic minorities, who make up 8% of the country’s population, is pervasive, even in cosmopolitan megacities.

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One common way to measure how much racial discrimination there is in a society is by conducting “résumé experiments”, in which researchers send off thousands of fake job applications and count the number of responses by ethnicity. A recent paper by Yue Hou, Chuyu Liu and Charles Crabtree, three political scientists, applies this method to employers in China to see how well job applicants of three of China’s ethnicities fare: the Han, who are the majority, and Uighurs and Huis. The latter two are mainly Muslim minority groups, though the Huis are culturally much closer to the Han than Uighurs.

The study shows that on average, Hui job-seekers had to send twice as many applications as Han applicants do to hear back, and Uighurs nearly four times as many. The gap was even greater for highly educated workers: Uighur candidates who were in the top 1% academically needed to send six times as many applications as equally qualified Han candidates. This difference was also similar in both smaller cities and in the provincial-level regions of Guangdong, Beijing and Shanghai. State-owned enterprises, which have an official mandate to hire more minority workers, appeared at least as biased as other firms.

These figures are especially troubling when placed in an international context. The Economist tracked down over 100 résumé experiments conducted in 15 countries over the past 20 years. These experiments have mainly been done in Western countries where research funding is readily available. Still, we find that Tibetans and Uighurs in China have a much tougher time looking for jobs than minorities in any other countries with reliable data.

Unemployed minorities in China hoping the state will help might well be disappointed. One study, also based on a randomised experiment, found that government officials were 33% less likely to respond to information requests about a cash-transfer programme for the poor if they were signed with a Uighur name.

Sources: Hou, Liu and Crabtree, 2019; Quillian et al., 2019; Bertrand and Duflo, 2017; Distelhorst and Hou, 2014; Maurer-Fazio, 2012; government statistics; The Economist

This article appeared in the Graphic detail section of the print edition under the headline "Call me maybe"

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