Most young people in Chinese state care became state wards as very young children and have disabilities. When they reach adulthood, many of them remain unemployed. Before the economic transitions in the 1980s, the government provided most of these young people with jobs when they became young adults, or they gained employment in welfare enterprises with tax concessions to employ people with disabilities. After the economic transition, many welfare factories reduced their employees or closed down, and state directives for job placement were dismantled.

Many young adults now struggle to find or keep jobs. They then depend on support from the welfare institutions, which prolongs the social isolation they experienced as children in institutional care. Welfare institutions must continue to provide support throughout the lives of the young people in state care, which is financially unsustainable and precludes social inclusion, as revealed in Chapter Seven. It could be expected that the young people who developed greater social networks during their childhood would have improved employment options. Insights from the experiences of the young people who grew up in foster care, rather than institutional care, is a way to examine that question.

Job placement for young adult orphans has become a challenge for child welfare institutions and a bottleneck for the support of new children entering state care. Without a solution, the young adults may have to rely on government support without opportunities to fulfil the usual expectations of adulthood and social inclusion. This chapter analyses the job placement cases of young adults who grew up in foster care in Datong. The chapter applies social network theory to analyse data from the case studies about how young adults used their social connections in their job search. It explores whether the young adults used strong or weak ties to find jobs, and identifies the support that was available to them to overcome the disadvantages in the job market arising from their childhood as state wards, their having disabilities and their growing up in poor rural areas.

The chapter explains the type of social network theory about strong and weak ties used to analyse their experiences.