Asia Journalist

This year almost 8 million college graduates will pour into China’s job market, the highest number ever recorded in the People’s Republic’s history. But rising joblessness among new university graduates in China is creating an army of educated unemployed that some fear could destabilise this huge economy. The high unemployment rate among college graduates has several causes.

In 1999, the Chinese government decided to expand the country’s higher-education system, in part to stimulate a weak economy still feeling the effects of the Asian financial crisis two years earlier. In 2003, China had 2.12 million university graduates; a decade later, the government estimates the number will reach 6.99 million, the highest in the country’s history. (source: TIME)

Chinese photographer Qin Yi documented the student life and graduation process pressure at Qingdao University in China. After four years of study, it is time to say good-bye and each of them will follow their own dreams, hoping to be prepared for the future. See the whole reportage on Photo Sina (only in Chinese):

http://slide.news.sina.com.cn/x/slide_1_64237_85203.html#p=1

This year Australian photographer Yani Clarke spent a month documenting life and death at Nepal’s Pashupatinath Temple, a site that incinerates more than 40 bodies a day. Despite the constant presence of death and grief, Pashupatinath is hardly somber. Clarke’s photos are full of holy men, monkeys, and festivities. But it was still a shock for the photographer, at the age of 21, to engage with death so intimately for the first time.

Erected in the 17th century, Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu, Nepal, is one of the most significant Hindu temples of Lord Shiva in the world – home to orphans, beggars, rabies-riddled-monkeys, un-holy-holy-men and of course: the dead, the living, and both – stuck in the grips of life`s cruel limbo. Pashupatinath is in a state of flux, brought about by modern technologies such as the impending opening of an electric crematorium only a few hundred meters away.

Read the interview with Yani Clarke on VICE.com:

http://www.vice.com/read/living-with-death-in-a-temple-in-nepal

Yani Clarke is a 21-year-old Australian photographer based in Montreal, Canada. Yani was raised in Newrybar — a small country town in the Hinterland of Byron Bay in the Far North Coast of Australia. 

In 2013 Yani worked in tandem with renowned Australian documentary photographer and photojournalist, Jack Picone. In 2014 and 2015 Yani was nominated for the prestigious Joop Swart Masterclass, being one of only three Australians selected.

Land has become increasingly scarce in cities. In Tokyo, a plot of land at a traditional urban cemetery can be astronomically expensive, often reaching USD $100,000 in central areas. If one adds the purchase of the tomb and other associated costs the final price tag can be prohibitively expensive.

And the solution to this lack of final resting places? Japan’s new breed of hi-tech, urban, skyscraper cemeteries.

Clean, convenient, cost-effective and increasingly inclusive of differing religious beliefs — these cemeteries represent Japanese society’s evolving relationship with life, death, technology and the afterlife. Read more:

https://maptia.com/norikohayashi/stories/stairway-to-heaven