The company’s labor costs per worker — wages plus benefits — have been rising 30 percent or more each year. That is faster than the national pace of 21 percent for migrant workers, although there have been signs that pace may have slowed recently with a broader deceleration in the Chinese economy. And it is considerably faster than the 13 percent annual increase in minimum wages — roughly three times inflation — that the government has mandated through 2015.

Wages at Hongyuan Furniture are rising particularly fast because it is in an area of Guangzhou that was slower to develop. Before wages began surging five years ago, the company paid $90 to $120 a month to new workers without experience. Workers then were also expected to pay $13 to $40 of their monthly pay for the first six months to their foreman in a sort of informal apprenticeship, said Ni Bingbing, the company’s vice general manager.

Plenty of college graduates apply for jobs at the company, but they are not desperate enough to accept blue-collar tasks, Ms. Ni said. The sauna factory has better ventilation than many Chinese factories, but it is not air-conditioned. The many power tools kick up a fine mist of sawdust that coats every surface — not the sort of place where a college graduate can go to work in a dress shirt and then head straight to a restaurant or nightclub in the evening.

Subsidized by Parents

One unusual social dynamic created by the one-child policy is that many college graduates are only children with parents and grandparents who continue to nurture them into adulthood.

“Their parents, their grandparents give them money; they have six people to support them,” Ms. Ni said. “They say, Why do I need to work? I can stay home and get 2,000 renminbi a month, why should I get on a bus every day to earn 2,500 a month?” That is how Mr. Wang has managed to get by for most of the last three years without a job. Despite some grumbling, his parents send him money to help support his modest lifestyle.

He rents a small but tidy studio apartment. It consists of a bedroom with a pink tile floor roughly 10 feet on a side, holding a low bed and a bedside table with a laptop on it. A plugged hole in the wall shows that a previous occupant had an air-conditioner to cope with Guangzhou’s heat, but Mr. Wang makes do with a fan. An adjacent room, about 10 feet long and just three feet wide, holds a tiny kitchen, shower and toilet.