Why Chinese students are abandoning architecture

I recently convened an urban studies summer school in a top university in Shanghai and asked the assembled class of architectural master’s students: “Who wants to be an architect?” Not one hand was raised.

This was not the typical reticence of Chinese youngsters; this was a class of architectural students who have given up on architecture. They are all hoping to escape architectural education, so that they might progress to classes in AI, digital transformation or some other hi-tech sector where they believe jobs exist. For them, architecture is a dead end.

As my Chinese students are discovering, there are too few jobs in the sector, the pay is low and the work is unappealing. Notwithstanding the Norman Fosters and Zaha Hadids of this world, the same is largely true in the West. But architecture retains its appeal in the West, in part because it is seen as a high-status profession, not a job.

Students have given up on building the physical world in the hope they’ll earn more in the virtual one

Architecture only emerged in China as a viable independent profession twenty-five years ago. As the country modernized, students had more freedom to choose creative degrees. Architecture was seen to be an easy-going, inspiring career. It was also an escape route from rote learning and the promise of a laborious desk job.

But now, in China’s tightening jobs market, thousands of arts graduates are competing for each role. Internships are often unpaid, while junior architects earn as little as $500 per month. The nine-nine-six working week of old (working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) is back. Chinese architecture students seem desperate to avoid it.

Many still hope to reach a well-paid job, of course, consistent with their status and years of studying. But the reality they face is very different. Studying architecture is increasingly considered to be a sign of decadence or gullibility. What sort of fool studies architecture in the hope of a more comfortable life?  This attitude is a symptom of a bigger problem. In recent decades, the Chinese understood that they could represent their aspirational goals through their buildings. “Better City, Better Life” was the slogan of the 2010 Shanghai Expo, which was intended to showcase China’s urbanity and civilized development to the rest of the world. Of late, that belief in building “the future” (or as it’s sometimes referred to, “China’s century”) has been replaced with a sense of cynicism.

China has fallen out of love with architecture. China’s pragmatic former leader Deng Xiaoping once said that it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice. The same mantra increasingly seems to apply to China’s attitude to construction. It doesn’t matter who designs and constructs a building so long as it works.

Which explains why university architecture courses are disappearing. The numbers of students enrolling in the subject has slumped to unsustainably low levels in many leading universities. Even engineering — for decades the top subject chosen by parents for their children — is in decline, largely due to the parlous state of the construction sector and the economy more broadly.

It would be a step too far to say that China’s architectural renaissance is over, but its real estate sector has been in the doldrums since the country’s draconian Covid lockdowns. When China Evergrande Group, one of the country’s largest development companies, was liquidated in January with $320 billion of total liabilities (the world’s most indebted developer), the mainstream construction sector and its secondary businesses struggled to survive. The Chinese Communist Party intervened to minimize the impact on the rest of the economy, but it was impossible to contain the fallout. China had constructed more than 290 square meters of surplus commercial housing. The construction industry has now stagnated, falling by 4 percent year-on-year. 

An outsider might not notice this slump, in large part because there is still plenty of building going on across China. Unfortunately, many of these are projects that left the architect’s drawing board years ago. There is little new work coming in to fill the order books. People are getting nervous.

I have also noticed among Chinese architecture students a growing acceptance of the western belief that there are “limits to growth.” They no longer believe in the project of building the future. Could it be that the turn away from architecture — which has happened so swiftly and casually — reflects a pessimistic shift in how young Chinese people see their role in society? Or are they merely responding to the economic fluctuations taking place? It’s not entirely clear.

To stabilize things somewhat, the CCP has said that it wants to oversee the “construction of a digital China.” Design students have responded by giving up on building the physical world, in the hope that they might earn more constructing the virtual one.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.