A RECENT SURVEY on the employment of college graduates this year suggests that the employment rate for graduates in Northeast China continues to drop following the annual exodus of local talents. Beijing News commented on Wednesday:

The continuing departure of college graduates from Northeast China, which comprises Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces, is a foreseeable result of the area's sluggish growth in recent years.

An industrial powerhouse before the 1980s, Northeast China seems stuck in a wretched economic plight accompanied by plummeting GDP growth. In the early 1980s its economy accounted for about 13 percent of the country's GDP, it then dropped to an all-time low of 8.77 percent in 2007 before climbing to 9.45 percent in 2012, thanks to a national strategy implemented in 2003 to revitalize the region.