A Chinese professor has claimed that the country's youth unemployment rate might have hit close to 50 per cent in March.

His comment focussed on the weak labour market condition of the country and contradicted the official figure as stated by the government.

The National Bureau of Statistics said that the month's jobless rate for people between the ages of 16 and 24 was 19.7 per cent, less than half of what Peking University professor Zhang Dandan estimated, reports Channel News Asia.

If 16 million non-students "lying flat" at home or relying on their parents were included, the rate could have been as high as 46.5 per cent, Zhang wrote in an online article in Caixin, a respected financial magazine as quoted by Channel News Asia.

The official youth jobless rate, which only includes people actively seeking work, rose to a record 21.3 per cent in June after the world's second-biggest economy lost steam in the second quarter. Policymakers have struggled to put the economy on a more stable footing since the COVID-19 pandemic, the news portal reported.