Shunning their traditional and deep seated fear of the morbid, Chinese university graduates are turning to jobs at funeral homes amid fierce job competition.

More than a hundred university graduates, including ten with masters degrees, competed for 23 job vacancies at the Guangzhou Funeral Home, south China's Guangdong province.

One girl who didn't want to be identified was hoping to land a job dressing and making up dead bodies. She had worked at a medical institution but a job at a funeral home pays well and has better benefits, she told the Beijing Youth Daily reported.

In Beijing, more than 500 applicants applied for six jobs at funeral homes this year and a quarter of them had master's degrees.

Jiao Jin, a 23-year-old graduate with a degree in management, spent three fruitless months looking for a job in Beijing. Now she works with the dead including facial reconstructions of accident victims. Jiao told China Youth Daily that she is happy with her job.

Embalming and dressing the dead can be quite lucrative for young people just out of school. It pays about 8,000 yuan (1,000 U.S. dollars) a month almost three times the going rate for a university graduate in other businesses.

This is the second time that the Guangzhou funeral home has had a job fair since 1999, the newspaper reported.

"We are very glad to see so many university graduates with high education background apply for jobs at the funeral home," an official from the home was quoted.

With nearly 4.13 million graduates entering the workforce in 2006, 750,000 more than the previous year, young Chinese are facing a severe job crunch in an increasingly competitive labour market.

Source: Xinhua