With China's leaders struggling to engineer a soft landing for the country's overheating economy, Zhao Guangxi and Zhou Ruidong face a problem more typical of a country mired in a deep recession. Neither man can find a job.
Zhao, 33, is a migrant worker, one of hundreds of shabbily dressed men who loiter beside a small park in southwest Beijing hoping for work as day laborers.
PHOTO: REUTERS
He shares a room with 10 other men, five of whom are jobless. If he is lucky he can earn US$5 a day. Lately he has been unlucky.
Zhou, 20, is a college student, one of several thousand people who attended a recent job fair in an affluent section of northeast Bei-jing. A college degree once meant an automatic good job and salary in China, but Zhou has been looking for work since January. He graduates next month, and he may have to move home with his parents.
"I have nothing, no prospective offers," he said.
The prospect that China's torrid economy could crash-land is spawning fears of a real estate bust, a banking bailout and a wave of inflation rippling around the world. Most experts discount such predictions, but even if China does land softly, such good news is still bad news in terms of unemployment.
By putting the brakes on economic growth, even gently, China is slowing an economy that must roar just to keep unemployment from rising. Employment pressures are so great that even as growth neared double digits in the last 12 months, urban unemployment still rose. In the countryside the situation is far worse.
The political pressure on the Communist Party to continue creating jobs is enormous. Zhao is one of more than 110 million migrant workers who have left the countryside for cities in search of jobs in factories or on construction sites. Zhou is one of a growing number of college students whose unmet job expectations acutely concern the government.
"This is a group of people who traditionally tend to go to the street if they feel dissatisfied," said Liang Hong (
She noted that timing was also sensitive. The 15th anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tienanmen crackdown is only days away.
"It's a very potent group," she said of the college students.
As yet, the frustration of students has not yet led to protests, though some have mockingly mouthed the phrase "Graduation is unemployment."
Protests over layoffs or compensation disputes are a regular occurrence among poorer people, whose desperation makes them willing to risk affronting Beijing.
The complicated challenge was evident in March, when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao (
More recently officials have promised that 70 percent of college students this year would find jobs by graduation day, the sort of promise that unnerves economists who want China to remain committed to a market economy.
China's embrace of capitalism is the reason it has become a manufacturing hub and one of the growth engines for the world economy. Yet it is also why employment is such an intractable problem. The transition from a planned economy to a market economy cost tens of millions of workers their jobs with the closings of inefficient state-owned enterprises. Millions more are expected to lose their jobs in coming years.
Economists say China must sus-tain an annual growth rate of more than 7 percent into the foreseeable future to break even on employment as the country continues to restructure its economy.
Zhou is part of a record expansion in university enrollment that began in 1998, partly as an economic stimulus during the Asian financial crisis. The number of entering freshmen has jumped to almost 4 million students, compared with 1 million in 1998.
Min Tang, an Asian Development Bank economist in Beijing, said the expansion had raised the percentage of 18-to-22-year-olds in college from 4 percent to 15 percent. For many of those new students, college was supposed to bring immediate rewards on graduation. Poor students often borrow money from relatives and feel pressure to pay them back quickly.
Now, though, the job market is more competitive.
"Ten years ago Chinese education was for elites," Min said. "If you graduated from college you were almost guaranteed a good job. Now student enrollment has increased, but they still expect to get the same type of job as before."
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
An Akizuki-class destroyer last month made the first-ever solo transit of a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ship through the Taiwan Strait, Japanese government officials with knowledge of the matter said yesterday. The JS Akizuki carried out a north-to-south transit through the Taiwan Strait on Feb. 5 as it sailed to the South China Sea to participate in a joint exercise with US, Australian and Philippine forces that day. The Japanese destroyer JS Sazanami in September last year made the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s first-ever transit through the Taiwan Strait, but it was joined by vessels from New Zealand and Australia,
SECURITY: The purpose for giving Hong Kong and Macau residents more lenient paths to permanent residency no longer applies due to China’s policies, a source said The government is considering removing an optional path to citizenship for residents from Hong Kong and Macau, and lengthening the terms for permanent residence eligibility, a source said yesterday. In a bid to prevent the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from infiltrating Taiwan through immigration from Hong Kong and Macau, the government could amend immigration laws for residents of the territories who currently receive preferential treatment, an official familiar with the matter speaking on condition of anonymity said. The move was part of “national security-related legislative reform,” they added. Under the amendments, arrivals from the Chinese territories would have to reside in Taiwan for
CRITICAL MOVE: TSMC’s plan to invest another US$100 billion in US chipmaking would boost Taiwan’s competitive edge in the global market, the premier said The government would ensure that the most advanced chipmaking technology stays in Taiwan while assisting Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) in investing overseas, the Presidential Office said yesterday. The statement follows a joint announcement by the world’s largest contract chipmaker and US President Donald Trump on Monday that TSMC would invest an additional US$100 billion over the next four years to expand its semiconductor manufacturing operations in the US, which would include construction of three new chip fabrication plants, two advanced packaging facilities, and a research and development center. The government knew about the deal in advance and would assist, Presidential
RSS