Why Chongqing University Students Scoffed at a 150,000-Yuan Job Offer
Motorcycle entrepreneur Zhang Xue brought 100 job openings to Chongqing University, with research roles advertised at 120,000–150,000 yuan a year — and students mocked the pay on the spot. The exchange has become this recruitment season's sharpest argument about what a degree is worth.
Recruiting at Chongqing University, one of China's top engineering schools, Zhang Xue offered the students a proverb along with the positions: "The bigger the wind and waves, the more expensive the fish" (风浪越大鱼越贵). The founder of a motorcycle brand bearing his name said his company was hiring about 100 people this year, most of them into research roles, with starting pay from 100,000 yuan a year — an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 for graduates of top-ranked universities. First-year employees who finish in the top 10 percent, he added, can lift their pay by half.
The audience did not hear a bargain. Students rejected the packages on the spot, and clips of the visit spread under a hashtag that translates as "Zhang Xue's Chongqing University offer gets scoffed at." The framing itself tells the story: an advertised salary discussed as an asking price, and found wanting.
The most-shared commentary argued that the standoff is supply and demand re-learning its prices. Companies, it said, are using a weak job market to re-price talent — bargain-hunting for elite "985" graduates at assembly-line cost — while students, anchored by the internet industry's boom-era packages, no longer credit promises of "platform" and "promotion" and want cash. Recruiting at a top university on a mid-tier budget, the post concluded, "is performance art," and students who cannot find suitable work "would rather stay home and lie flat." That one post alone was liked more than 6,000 times.
Counterarguments came just as fast. Motorcycle engineering, one reply noted, has never been a high-salary field; 100,000 to 150,000 yuan a year is a reasonable market wage for a fresh graduate outside tech, anyone set on more can still aim at the big platforms, and beyond that it is a matter of personal choice.
The exchange landed in a season when China's graduates are being counseled toward safety rather than the waves. Registration has just opened for the 2027 civil-service exam, with 35,700 posts on offer as graduates chase the "shore" — the slang for a job secure for life. The same autumn produced the 21-year-old whose teaching degree ended in a sanitation job, another datum in the argument over what qualifications now buy.
Zhang Xue's company is still holding out its proverb about storm-priced fish, and its own pitch contains the standoff in miniature: most employees, it says, get a 20 percent raise in their first year — a promise that assumes someone, somewhere, accepts the starting number. Whether this autumn's graduates do is the question the recruitment season will answer.