China Says Faces Huge Problem Finding New Jobs

BEIJING - China faces a huge challenge finding jobs for all its people, especially university graduates, a senior minister said on Tuesday, though he admitted some sectors of the economy faced staff shortages.

Minister of Labor and Social Security Tian Chengping said there would be 24 million new urban job-seekers on the market this year, but the government would only be able to find jobs for half of them.

"Our analysis at present of the employment situation is that in the future pressure for jobs will still be very great, and the situation is still very serious," Tian told a news conference on the sidelines of China's annual meeting of parliament.

Those job seekers will include almost five million new university graduates, as well as rural laborers who continue to flood toward cities looking for better paid jobs, and those laid off by moribund state-owned industries, Tian said.

Despite China's labor woes, some areas are actually facing a lack of workers, though Tian said the problem was temporary and not widespread.

Chinese media reports have said that some of the country's export powerhouse provinces, like Guangdong and Fujian, have been finding it hard both to keep workers and to find new ones, despite the country having the world's largest population.

"Although some places have a temporary lack of workers, I think this is not a bad thing," said Tian, speaking in the Great Hall of the People.

"It can be a job opportunity for workers, and could help them get raises in salary and other conditions," he added.

What the government needed to do, Tian said, was raise the skill sets of workers, who are mainly from rural areas, to train them to work in an economy where companies are increasingly moving up the value chain.

China's registered unemployment rate in urban areas was 4.1 percent at the end of 2006, unchanged from the end of September and down a touch from 4.2 percent at the end of 2005.

The registered urban jobless rate, the only official measure of employment in China, captures only a part of the job market. Economists say the underlying rate is at least twice as high.

Tian, while not outlining any specific new measures to help the employment market, did say that some university students should perhaps set their job expectations lower as only 70 percent of them could expect to find work upon graduating.

Far better they offer their services to China's poor and underdeveloped inland regions, he said.

"University students must change their concept of employment and be willing to go to the grassroots where skilled people are needed, to the central and western parts of China," Tian said.

"Only that way can the employment problem be properly solved."