GUANGDONG (SCMP): Most mornings, Joey Zhang can be found in an unusual setting for young professionals: with her laptop open and her bag placed beside her chair, she sits in a Communist Party community service centre in Guangzhou – a facility traditionally occupied by retirees and custodial workers when it isn’t sitting empty.
About four months ago, Zhang worked as a brand planner at a private advertising company and spent her mornings in a high-rise office. Then came a round of lay-offs after her employer began cutting staff, as artificial intelligence increasingly replaced parts of marketing and brand planning work, leaving her among those let go.
Suddenly unemployed, Zhang, now in her 30s, found herself struggling in a slowing job market with long, often anxious days. At first, she tried using cafes to job hunt. But the extensive search quickly left her with anxiety over her choice of haven.
“At Starbucks, a 30-yuan coffee only buys you a few hours of space,” she said. “I had to keep a white-collar look just to justify sitting there and I didn’t feel comfortable sitting there too long with staff and other people around me. It felt awkward.”
In May, a neighbour told her about a community service centre nearby. Curious, she went to look. When she saw the free air conditioning, free Wi-fi and power outlets, she knew she would come back.
Initially intended primarily for party activities, many of these service centres have been renovated into spaces accessible to all residents in recent years. The trend comes amid a broader campaign state media and local governments refer to as an effort to improve community services and public facilities, with China Daily calling the revamped centres “living rooms for all”.
In megacities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, there are often low-priced canteens, study spaces, and reading corners available to the public.
Party service centres have recently become known as free alternatives to cafes and paid co-working spaces, with posts about facilities and their amenities circulating on Chinese social media platforms.
Now Zhang spends most weekdays between 9am and 6pm at the free, low-pressure alternative to commercial spaces. They help her keep a routine while looking for work. Staying at home became difficult after the job loss, as she didn’t want her mother-in-law to know she had been unemployed for a long time.
“No one is watching, and no one is asking anything,” she said of the service centre. “It’s all free, and I feel welcomed here.”
In nearby Shenzhen, 45-year-old human resources manager Zheng Wenjing said she spent nearly three months job hunting early this year at various service centres in the city. More than 2,300 were operating in Shenzhen as of June, according to state news agency Xinhua.
“I went to many of them and they are easy to find,” Zheng said. “They were quiet, air conditioned, well maintained and good for focus.”
She added that mortgage pressure made the search more urgent.
“Spending time in Starbucks would have been too luxurious without a job,” Zheng said.
China’s overall urban unemployment rate stood at 5.1 per cent in May, down slightly from 5.2 per cent in April, but higher than a year earlier.
Social media chatter about the free work spaces followed last year’s popularity of so-called pretend-to-work offices, reported on by domestic news outlets such as Beijing Youth Daily. In those offices, jobless people pay for desks and office routines while hiding their unemployment from loved ones. -- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
