What happens when a group of young people with outstanding résumés compete for the same job opportunity? That is the premise of An Exciting Offer (in Mandarin, 令人心动的offer), a sort of workplace version of The X Factor in which contestants vie for a single position. The show brings together university students and recent graduates trained at some of China’s most prestigious domestic and foreign institutions who, over the course of a month, work in internships under the guidance of experts while a panel of commentators in the studio assesses their successes, failures, and progress.

The format, inspired by the South Korean show Good People, lets viewers glimpse the insecurities of a generation raised to stand out and obsessed with proving it belongs. In its seventh season, broadcast last autumn, the competition moved to Dragon TV, part of the Shanghai Media Group (SMG), one of China’s major state audiovisual conglomerates.

That edition began with 10 aspiring television presenters: two were eliminated in the preliminary test and the remaining eight spent 30 days living and practicing their communication skills in the Shanghai network’s newsroom. Contestants were tasked with finding stories, locating sources, verifying information, writing scripts, conducting interviews, reporting from the street and performing live broadcasts. Across eight challenges, their experiences revealed to viewers the less visible side of a job that starts long before the red tally light goes on.

The tension is seasoned with every ingredient of a talent contest: suspenseful music, close-ups, trembling hands, tears, hugs, rivalries and on-camera confessions. Unlike other reality shows, the audience does not vote and there are no eliminations during the season. Each task gains contestants points and only those who reach 100 advance to the final interview, where the candidate who receives an offer to join Dragon TV is chosen.

Since its debut in 2019, the program had devoted four seasons to lawyers and one each to doctors and architects. But returning to law for two consecutive editions had made the format more predictable and the formula was beginning to show signs of fatigue.

To refresh it, the show’s producer, Tencent Video — one of China’s leading entertainment platforms — brought Dragon TV on as a co-producer in 2025, opening its doors and placing well-known faces in charge of training, such as veteran interviewer Chen Luyu. From the studio, former CCTV presenter Zhang Quanling and debate specialist Chen Ming provide the most substantive commentary, which also serves as short lessons in the craft, while comedians and internet personalities bring a fresher tone.

The move to a new sector proved a digital success: the seventh season led two of Weibo’s (China’s version of X) variety-show popularity rankings for 56 consecutive days and logged more than 1,200 appearances on that social network’s trending lists. The forum dedicated to the contest on Tencent Video also surpassed four million posts, the highest total for an entertainment program on the platform in all of 2025.

Part of that renewed interest lies in the figure of the presenter itself, at a moment when the boundaries of the profession have blurred, with hundreds of influencers speaking daily to audiences of millions and artificial intelligence writing scripts, voicing them, and even presenting news. An analysis in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Bao, reproduced by the state news agency Xinhua, presents this edition as a vindication of a profession whose survival can no longer be taken for granted.

Those hoping to fill that role on the show do not lack credentials. For example, Li Yujia graduated top of her class from the Communication University of China; Pang Zheng earned the same rank at the Shanghai Theatre Academy; Wang Yu studied at Cambridge; and Wang Yunlin had already worked as a presenter on Cantonese television. But those merits soon become another source of pressure. “Is that top rank that once brought me glory now my shackle?” Li asks in one episode. “You’re already excellent; don’t be so hard on yourself,” mentor Chen Chen tries to reassure her.

The real premise of the show becomes clear when the contestants — young people who are used to standing out — enter a setting where every mistake fuels comparisons and every compliment from a mentor increases the pressure. The mechanics echo the popular Chinese term neijuan (内卷), used to describe a spiral in which, faced with scarce opportunities, everyone is forced to work ever harder just to avoid falling behind. The result is a vicious cycle of demand that intensifies competition without producing real progress. In English, it could be compared to the idea of a “rat race.”

Anxiety and frustration

In fact, since its early seasons, some viewers have nicknamed the contest “An offer to make you feel bad,” overwhelmed by the contestants’ impressive list of degrees, awards, and experiences. One of the most talked-about moments of the last season was the elimination, before the internships even began, of a graduate from Tsinghua, China’s most prestigious university. Although, according to the network’s data, most of the audience consists of young people with higher education, there has been no shortage of calls on social media for a season “featuring ordinary people.”

The success of the format thus contains a paradox: why does a generation tired of competing spend its free time watching others fight over a job? Some internet users answer that the show reflects the anxiety and frustration they feel themselves, but at the same time it offers some consolation: on screen, at least, mistakes are explained and talent, discipline, and perseverance end up being recognized.

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The catastrophic Tibet-Nepal flood, which has left hundreds dead and thousands missing, has drawn renewed attention to the risks of living in mountain regions with glaciers, as all indications suggest that the disaster was triggered by the collapse of one of these ice masses. The phenomenon is known as a GLOF, or glacial lake outburst flood, a sudden flood caused by the breaching of a glacial lake.

Climate change and rising temperatures are fueling these events: such floods have become six times more frequent over the past century. Major mountain ranges such as the Himalayas, the Andes and the Alps are among the areas most exposed to these disasters. An estimated 15 million people worldwide live at risk from glacial lake floods, half of them in Peru, India, China and Pakistan. Monitoring glaciers and glacial lakes is no easy task, especially in developing countries, but it saves lives: last year, a Swiss village was evacuated two days before the collapse of another glacier.

“Glaciers have been retreating since 1950, and since 1990 that retreat has accelerated. The last four years are among the five with the greatest losses on record, while over the first 25 years of the 21st century the rate of retreat has doubled compared with the previous 25 years,” explains Juan Ignacio López, a glacier expert at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology (IPE-CSIC). “The Himalayas are no exception; it is one of the global hotspots for ice loss,” he warns. Given the retreat is occurring worldwide, “it is clear that it is not due to local factors but to the temperature increase driven by human-caused climate change.”

This retreat has many effects on the climate system and ecosystems, but it is also contributing to the growth of glacial lakes, which store meltwater. Since the 1990s, the number and surface area of these lakes have increased by 50%. “The water is not held back by a solid dam like those built by humans, but by moraines [ridges of ice and sediment] or blocks of ice, which are highly unstable. When they become destabilized for any reason, they can trigger a sudden flood, or GLOF,” says Jesús Revuelto, who studies the phenomenon at IPE-CSIC. Combined with growing population pressure in mountain regions, this creates risks for millions of people living in those areas.

The first global map of GLOF risk, published in Nature Communications in 2023, shows that the regions most vulnerable to this type of flooding are Central Asia, particularly China, Nepal, India and Pakistan, which share the Himalayas and other mountain ranges; the Andes, including Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina; and the Alps, spanning Switzerland, Italy, France and Austria. Other risk areas include northwestern North America, Iceland and Scandinavia, although the potential impacts there are considerably lower.

Around 15 million people live in these regions, according to the study. Half of them are concentrated in mountain areas of Peru, India, Pakistan and China. López sums it up this way: “More than half of the world’s population exposed to glacier-related risks lives in the Himalaya and other high Asian mountains. Another very challenging area is the Andes, especially in Peru, where there have been many accidents in the 20th century, but precisely for that reason, much has been invested in measures to reduce risk to people and mortality has fallen.”

From the beginning of the 20th century to the 2010s, the annual average number of documented GLOFs increased nearly sixfold, rising from 7.6 per year in the first decade of the century to 43.7 in the 2010s. Revuelto explains: “On one hand, the world population has grown, and there’s a greater chance of having videos of these events, which sometimes occur in remote places. On the other hand, climate change is raising temperatures, causing more ice to melt from the glaciers that flow into these lakes, which can destabilize them, break the natural dams, and trigger major landslides or flash floods.”

More than 3,100 glacial floods

The historical GLOF database compiled by the University of Vienna has identified 3,151 glacial lake outburst floods between the years 850 and 2022 across 27 countries. Most have occurred in North America (833), Central Asia (569), the Alps (443) and the Andes (337). It should be noted that in some of the world’s most remote mountain regions, such as the Andes and the Himalayas, GLOFs were harder to document before the advent of satellite imagery. In fact, it is still unclear which glacial lake burst after the glacier collapse in Tibet.

Because many of these events occur in isolated areas, they often cause no casualties. Even so, the study found that 44 glacial floods claimed at least 3,636 lives, not including events from the past four years. One of the deadliest occurred in Peru in 1941, when a chunk of glacier fell into a lake, triggering a wave that breached a natural dam and unleashed a flood that devastated the city of Huaraz, killing more than 1,800 people. On Thursday, Peru’s National Institute for Research on Glaciers and Mountain Ecosystems warned that at least 58 lakes in the Andes are at “very high risk of overflowing.”

How can future disasters be prevented? Revuelto points to an example from Europe: “Switzerland did it last year in Blatten. They monitored the glacier and slopes with sensors, seismic equipment… They found major displacements and evacuated the village two days before a huge flood.”

In the Alps, resources are available to closely monitor glaciers and other unstable ice masses. In developing countries such as Nepal, India and Pakistan, however, the challenge is far greater. “There are more potentially dangerous areas and steeper slopes, so it is difficult to monitor all the mountains. But at the very least, we should have identified and mapped the areas that are susceptible to this type of landslide, as well as the valleys where they might end up,” he concludes.

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