My maid and her husband, a driver, have scrimped and saved and crammed themselves into a tiny flat in Shanghai for decades with one goal in mind: to give their only son a crack at the “Chinese dream”.

Now those decades of deprivation have reached their climax as the cherished child of these hard-working people graduates from university and takes his first job: as a construction worker. And he counts himself lucky to have a job.

Small wonder that Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has recently been out gladhanding graduates who are facing one of the toughest job markets since the Communist party stopped giving them careers by fiat. For, like obesity and diabetes, a glut of unemployed graduates seems to be one of the unintended side-effects of economic development in China.