China’s TikTok, Douyin, says it created 36 million jobs in the last year, with lots of live-streamers

The central government created a new job title in July for ‘online marketing professionals’, in an attempt to help the job market recover

Beijing says there are around 200 million ‘flexible workers’ in China, including a growing number of online content creators

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Live streaming has surged in popularity in a post-coronavirus China. Image: Douyin, Taobao

Published: 8:00am, 11 Sep 2020Updated: 10:49am, 11 Sep 2020

Short-video platform Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, says it created 36 million jobs domestically over the year-long period from last August in the video and live-streaming sector – one of the few areas where employment is flourishing in the nation’s challenging post-coronavirus labour market.

Among that total, about 20 million are individual content creators and live-streaming hosts, while 8.6 million came from their team members. The rest were from Douyin’s corporate accounts and multichannel networks that help manage and market multiple accounts, according to a report published on Wednesday by the company in partnership with Renmin University.

The report, the first of its kind from a short-video platform, shed some light on the country’s rapidly expanding live-streaming industry that has seen much stronger demand for new hires this year after the pandemic hurt both manufacturing and service businesses, forcing many firms to sell their products online.

It also came after Beijing urged workers to consider flexible jobs while unemployment pressure in the market was still high. Flexible employment, also known as the gig economy, includes the self-employed such as live-streaming hosts, as well as other jobs that do not require fixed working hours. Beijing says there are now around 200 million “flexible workers” in China.

On paper, short-video creators and live-streaming workers are now tallied as “online marketing professionals” – a new job title among those created by the central government in July in an attempt to help the job market recover. The government added that category to the bracket containing the part-time freelance work done by millions of university graduates this year, so that they could be counted as employed to help keep the unemployment rate low among university graduates.