The 500,000th Postdoc Just Outnumbered the Mules.

China's Postdoctoral Enrollment Passes 500,000

In late August 2026, the serial number ticked past 500,000.

I looked up my own – 299544. That puts me somewhere around the cumulative 300,000 mark. From my number to this one, there are 200,000 people who came after.

Online, another joke was making the rounds. China's cumulative PhD holders are roughly 1.2 million. The country's donkey population, at the end of 2024, stood at 1.2989 million head, and was projected to drop below 1.2 million in 2025. The two lines met at almost the same number. And so the meme was born.

Then someone dug up the mule count. That same year, about 438,100 head. Postdoctoral serial numbers: 500,000. That means China officially has more postdocs than mules.

Camel numbers vary: some sources say 634,000, others push toward 760,000. Horses are still plentiful, around 3.52 million, so 500,000 postdocs are roughly one-seventh of the horse population. Pigs, cattle, and sheep are in a different league, counted in the hundreds of millions, so we won't even go there.

Here's what 500,000 people actually means. That's 0.036% of the national population – roughly one person with a postdoc number for every 2,800 people. Compare it to births: 7.92 million a year, about 660,000 per month, so 500,000 is a little over three weeks' worth of newborns. Compare it to cities: under China's 2014 classification, an urban permanent population between 500,000 and 1 million counts as a "medium-sized city."

Jiangshan in Zhejiang and Dayi in Chengdu both have permanent populations hovering around 500,000, according to their public statistical bulletins. It's hard to imagine every single person in a county‑sized town writing grant proposals.

The Ministry of Education's 2025 statistical bulletin gives another set of numbers: 201,600 new doctoral enrollments that year, 753,600 active doctoral students, and 112,900 doctoral graduates. Public universities, however, can only offer about 35,000 stable teaching and research positions per year – a figure often cited in open discussions. The path into academia has narrowed. Companies, hospitals, local research institutes, and government agencies are absorbing some of the surplus, but how smoothly they do so varies widely from place to place.

A postdoc is, by nature, a transitional position. Two to four years, packed with evaluations, grant applications, household registration (hukou), children's schooling, and the all‑important "next step" after exiting. Many people choose postdocs in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Shenzhen not for academic ambition, but for the hukou. That's a historical legacy, tangled up with the permanent‑position system and other institutional constraints.

As the serial number climbed from 300,000 to 500,000, more people are entering the system at the same time. The system has expanded its intake, but the career destinations on the other side haven't grown at the same rate.

I spent twenty years in school. I entered my postdoc in my early thirties. By the time I leave, more than half of my best intellectual and physical window will have passed. Everyone around me is a spring wound to a fixed timeline: proposal, mid‑term review, final report, Young Scientists Fund, General Program, papers, exit. One misstep, and the whole chain rattles.

The state is scaling up this system to train the next generation of scientists. But science needs failure. It needs long cycles. It needs a thirty‑five‑year‑old who can still take the time to work slowly on something uncertain.

You can afford scale. You may not be able to afford failure. Otherwise, 500,000 is just a pretty serial number.

Donkeys are declining, not because they're lazy. It's because tractors arrived. Agriculture industrialized. The demand for draft animals vanished, reproduction is slow, and the industry naturally contracts. That's a productivity upgrade.

The rise in PhDs and postdocs is a strategic investment in human capital.

And then?

Do the expanded pool of people have matching research topics, funding, and career outlets? 500,000 serial numbers that correspond to 500,000 young researchers who can independently lead projects – that's a workforce. 500,000 similar grant proposals fighting for the same set of "hats" – that's something else. I haven't used that word once, but by now, it's probably surfaced in your head.

The number will pass 600,000. Donkeys and mules will probably decline a little more. But a serial number doesn't tell you who they are.

The real measure is ten years from now, in how many of these 500,000 are still on the front lines of research – and still daring to take on hard problems.

I closed the page where I looked up my serial number.

One search query remained on the screen.