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 \u2013 a facility traditionally occupied by retirees and custodial workers when it isn\u2019t sitting empty.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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<\/a> quickly left her with anxiety over her choice of haven.<\/p>\n \u201cAt Starbucks, a 30-yuan coffee only buys you a few hours of space,\u201d she said. \u201cI had to keep a white-collar look just to justify sitting there and I didn\u2019t feel comfortable sitting there too long with staff and other people around me. It felt awkward.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cliving rooms for all\u201d.<\/p>\n In megacities<\/a> such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen<\/a>, and Shanghai, they often offer low-priced canteens, study space and reading corners to the public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most mornings, Joey Zhang can be found in an unusual setting for young professionals: with her laptop open…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":781309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[62,219302,45,49,48,95,8589,46,22850,142,276586,6549,12157,1942,74992,125,23187,87180,276587],"class_list":["post-781308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-ai","tag-beijing-youth-daily","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-china","tag-communist-party","tag-economy","tag-guangzhou","tag-marketing","tag-mortgage-pressure","tag-shanghai","tag-shenzhen","tag-social-media","tag-starbucks","tag-unemployment","tag-xinhua","tag-zhang","tag-zheng-wenjing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=781308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/781308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/781309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=781308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=781308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=781308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}