Jobs /
In March, Xu Yang lost her job after
a decade working at the Beijing office of a U.S.-based multinational
company. The software firm, caught in the fallout from rising trade
tensions and U.S.-China frictions, slashed its China operations — laying
off about 70% of its local workforce, including nearly the entire
marketing department where Xu worked.
Though
she had braced herself for the news, Xu was stunned when her whole team
was dismissed. The deeper anxiety set in some weeks later. “It felt
like being discarded,” she said. “And I began to question my own worth.”
At
46, Xu joined the ranks of China’s more than 200 million flexible
workers, a group that accounted for over a quarter of the country’s employed population in 2023, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
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