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What keeps Shanghai, where the birth rate is the lowest in China - at minus 3.2 percent - dynamic in its growth in so many industries all at once? It is the city's continuing import of young talent from the rest of the country.
This is the view of Zhou Haiwang, a researcher at the Institute of Demographic Studies under the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. In fact, he pointed out, in 2003 more than 2 million people aged between 20 and 34 found jobs in Shanghai, accounting for more than 40 percent of the city's total number of young workers.
The demographic survey carried out at the end of 2004 shows that workers from other regions already make up a quarter of the city's total population.
In one of his recently published research papers, Zhou noted that from the 1990s to the 2000s, the number of people aged between 15 and 59 enlarged as a proportion of Shanghai's population from 66.3 percent in 1992 to 71.7 percent in 2003.
Meanwhile those aged between 20 and 34 saw their share decline from 24.3 percent in 1992 to 20.1 percent in 2003, as the number of those aged between 40 and 54 grew from 19 percent to 31.9 percent.
Shanghai is only one example of the fierce battle being fought among industrial cities on the east coast for young and skilled workers. Their competition for skilled and professional human resources is likely to rise to an unprecedented level in the next few years.
In Shenzhen, one of the major manufacturing hubs in South China, the municipal government recently reported that the city has identified just 53,000 people vying for its 105,000 vacancies seeking skilled workers and technicians.
There is only one candidate for every five technicians' jobs advertised by Shenzhen companies.
As 68 percent of Shenzhen firms are complaining about the difficulty of enlisting the kind of technicians who can live up to their expectations, the crisis is likely to get only worse in the next five years, when the city is in need of 2.1 million skilled workers, the municipal report predicted.
The People's Daily recently raised the alarm by saying that in comparison with the developed economies, where skilled workers and technicians account for more than 35 percent of their total workforces, the Chinese equivalent is only 5 percent.
"The extreme shortage of skilled labour," the newspaper said, has seriously affected the country's development of manufacturing and services.
According to Ding Dajian, a professor at China Renmin University's School of Labour and Personnel, the shortage of skilled workers is a national crisis, and is likely to get worse as more international companies are relocating their manufacturing operations to China.
One company in the coastal city of Qingdao, Shandong Province, recently complained that it was still unable to find the right person when it offered as much as 13,000 yuan (US$1,566) per month, for its vacancy for a moulding technician.
This is not exceptional. In the southern Pearl River Delta, where the nation's largest cluster of export companies are based, moulding technicians capable of computer-aided design all make well over 100,000 yuan (US$12,048) per year.
Without such incentives, it is hard to think how the moulding industry could have, according to figures from online industry sources, grown by 25 percent year-on-year since the mid-1990s.
In a society where meeting the ever changing requirements of international purchasing orders hold the key to many companies' survival, even less skilled moulding workers can easily make 6,000 yuan (US$722) per month.
Software programmers are also in major demand in China.
Overall, among the 70 million skilled workers in the country, 60 percent hold only junior level training, while those with more advanced skills account for just 4 percent, China Youth Daily reported.
There are about 100 million young farmers-turned-workers, with only minimal vocational education, seeking off-farm jobs.
As a consequence, China Youth Daily said, sub-standard products knock 2 percent off gross domestic product every year.
Lack of in-house training has been one of the major causes of the poor average skill level of Chinese workers. Also according to the People's Daily, Chinese companies are spending only 0.2 percent of net profit on training their employees.
It is a State policy that companies should allocate 3 percent of their yearly profit to training. An average Chinese worker only has 60 yuan (US$7) set aside for improving his or her skills.
A survey found that among 325 companies in Central China's Hunan Province, 117 of them have never spent a penny on workers' training, not to mention the fact that, for those that did, the training materials were often outdated or unsuitable.
Existing training courses at technical schools, for example, show "some obvious inadequacies," according to Song Jian, an official at the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.
Universities cannot do much to alleviate the problem as they focus more on the academic skills needed by a minority of workers.
The Communist Youth League of China is working with the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and some other government agencies to promote an ambitious development programme for young skilled workers aimed at training half a million young technicians in five years.
The programme is linking up with local Communist Youth League organizations nationwide.
Many local governments, especially those hosting large quantities of foreign direct investment, such as Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, have been pouring money into technical training and various rewards for skilled workers.
(China Daily May 6, 2005)
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