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Facing an unprecedented grave situation of employment, the Chinese
government is giving priority to job creation, as it has for the
first time listed "newly created jobs" as one of its leading
macro-economic control targets.
One of China's projected targets for this year's macro-economic
control is to "create over 8 million new jobs, and confine the
registered urban unemployment rate to 4.5 percent", said Zeng
Peiyan, minister in charge of the State Development Planning
Commission, when delivering the planning report to the ongoing
First Session of the 10th National People's Congress (NPC), the top
legislature, Thursday.
"Though the registered urban unemployment rate has been repeatedly
mentioned in previous years, it is still the first time for 'the
creation of new jobs' to be written into the annual planning report
as a government pledge," said Mo Rong, a senior research fellow in
the Research Institute of Labor Sciences under the Ministry of
Labor and Social Security.
Mo
said that this indicates a major shift of the Chinese government's
focus, from principally pursuing a high economic growth in the past
to seeking a balanced growth of economy and employment in the
future.
Yang Yiyong, vice secretary-general of the China Labor Society,
also noted that this year the government's planning report merely
consists of four projected macro-economic control targets, fewer
than in earlier years. But employment conspicuously ranks second
among them, only after the projected "7 percent economic
growth".
Words like unemployment and layoffs used to be strange to the
Chinese as the Chinese government, for many years after 1949, had
adopted a "cradle-to-grave" employment and welfare policy that
covered the entire population. Meanwhile, Chinese enterprises also
suffered from overstaffing and low efficiency, and lacked vitality
and market competitiveness.
In
the past two decades, China's market-oriented economic reform and
industrial restructuring had sharply cut the redundant workforce of
State-owned enterprises (SOEs), while its oversized population, now
standing at about 1.3 billion, had made the employment situation
even worse.
China's fledgling labor market, developed since a socialist market
economy was introduced in the early 1990s to replace the old
planned economy, is now under immense pressure from a huge army of
job-seekers, a combination of nearly 14 million laid-off workers
from the SOEs, 150 million rural surplus laborers coveting an urban
life, and an annual increase of some 10 million urban youngsters
who have reached the working age.
It
is predicted that in the next three to five years, Chinese cities
and towns will have to provide job opportunities for some 22 to 23
million people annually. Pessimists say that even if the Chinese
economy maintains its current high growth of 7 or 8 percent, the
country will still face a shortage of more than 10 million jobs a
year.
"The employment issue has posed a serious challenge to China's
economic development and social stability, as well as to the
government's goal of building a well-off society in an all-round
way," said Mo the research fellow. "It's high time for the State to
take all necessary macro-economic control measures to promote
employment."
In
his Government Work Report to the current NPC session Wednesday,
Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji stressed that the Chinese government
would adhere to the policy of "the workers finding jobson their
own, the market regulating employment and the government promoting
job creation", and should "do everything possible" to expand
employment.
Official sources with the Ministry of Labor and Social Security
said that by the end of January, the central government had
formulated 10 major policies for employment promotion, which
included vocational training for laid-off workers, small loans for
jobless people who want to start their own businesses, and
exemption of taxes for enterprises willing to hire more
workers.
"This year we will focus on assisting SOE laid-offs and the urban
needy who have been out of a job for a long time," said a labor
official. "We hope they will be absorbed mainly by the service and
labor-intensive industries, as well as by the flourishing
non-public sector."
Some Chinese lawmakers are already feeling some relief from the
government's earnest attitude toward tackling the employment
issue.
"If there is a written pledge in the national planning report,
there will sure be much greater pressure on them (the officials),"
said Li Zongbai, an NPC deputy from central China's Hubei
Province.
He
expected that after this NPC session, governments at all levels
across China would also add the target of "newly-created jobs" in
local development plans, and take corresponding measures to fulfill
it.
According to earlier media reports, some Chinese cities have
already taken the lead to do so. In Jinan, capital of east China's
Shandong Province, the municipal government had included the exact
number of "newly-created jobs" in its annual work report, and had
suggested the local legislature take the figure as a major
criterion when judging the government's performance this year.
(Xinhua News Agency March 7, 2003)
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