Alibaba is so confident Beijing's tech crackdown has ended that it has just listed over 2,000 jobs for fresh graduates

• Alibaba's Taotian Group — which includes Taobao and Tmall — is hiring 2,000 fresh graduates this year.
• The hiring spree is part of its drive to recruit 15,000 staffers after two years of regulatory curbs.
• It comes at an opportune time for China's fresh graduates as youth unemployment hit a record high in June.

Alibaba's hiring over 2,000 fresh graduates this year – signaling that it views an end to China's tech crackdown.

Alibaba's Taotian Group, which includes its Taobao and Tmall retail platforms, put out a massive recruitment ad targeting graduates, per a post on its WeChat account.

There are over 2,000 positions across various cities in China — including Beijing, Shanghai, and Hangzhou — up for grabs for those who graduate between November this year and October next year. The type of roles Taotian is hiring for runs the gamut, including those in technical roles, design, sales, and logistics.

The recruitment drive started last Thursday, and successful candidates will receive their offers in late September, according to a timeline in the WeChat notice. The company did not list the salaries but Alibaba was the best-paying tech company in China with an average $5,000 salary, according to the careers platform Maimai, the South China Morning Post reported in June 2022.

Alibaba's massive recruitment drive comes at an opportune time for China's young graduates as youth unemployment runs rife.

China's unemployment rate for those in the 16 to 24-year-old bracket hit a record high of 21.3% in June — meaning one in five youths were unemployed. The situation got so bad that Beijing suspended the publication of the data from July onwards, citing a need to review its methodology.

It's not just the Taotian Group. Parent company Alibaba Holdings is also on a hiring spree, announcing in May that it plans to recruit 15,000 new employees this year.

The development is a reversal after waves of job cuts in China's tech sector following a regulatory crackdown that started in 2020 and wiped $1.1 trillion off the market value of its Big Tech firms.

But the Chinese authorities are now cozying up to the same companies it had cracked down on as the economy struggles to recover from three years of on-off COVID-19 lockdowns.

In fact, Beijing so desperately wants to revive the economy that it has been reversing major policies it pushed during the COVID-19 pandemic and is trying to boost consumption to stimulate growth.