HONG KONG - A record seven million students will graduate from universities and colleges across China in the coming weeks, but their job prospects appear bleak - the latest sign of a troubled Chinese economy.

Businesses say they are swamped with job applications but have few positions to offer as economic growth has begun to falter. Twitter-like microblogging sites in China are full of laments from graduates with dim prospects.

The Chinese government is worried, saying that the problem could affect social stability, and it has ordered schools, government agencies and state-owned enterprises to hire more graduates at least temporarily to help relieve joblessness. "The only thing that worries them more than an unemployed low-skilled person is an unemployed educated person," said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia Business School economist.

Lu Mai, the secretary general of the elite, government-backed China Development Research Foundation, acknowledged in a speech this month that less than half of this year's graduates had found jobs so far.

Graduating seniors at all but a few of China's top universities say that very few people they know are finding jobs - and that those who did receive offers over the winter were seeing them rescinded as the economy has weakened in recent weeks.

"Many companies are not expanding at all, while some of my classmates have been hired and fired in the same month when the companies realized that they could not afford the salaries after all," said Yan Shuang, a graduating senior in labor and human resources at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

David Fuller's view Insufficient jobs for graduates has often been a problem in developed economies over the last fifteen years but it is a comparatively new concern for China as the economy has slowed in recent years.

China's stock market has continued to underperform, despite a good rally from December 2012 into February 2013 (weekly & daily). It remains historically cheap (P/E & Yield) for one of the world's faster growing economies but this latest pullback may continue to deter investors, leading to a further stage of base formation extension before the next significant recovery occurs. Meanwhile, some significant upward dynamics are required to indicate that investment demand is returning.