Concern is growing about employment, or the lack thereof, in China. Some suggest that unemployment in cities has reached crisis levels, citing the fact that workers from a range of backgrounds—former state-sector workers, rural laborers from China’s vast interior regions, and even recent college graduates—are all having a hard time finding jobs. Others argue, pessimistically, that the economy cannot produce enough new jobs to employ the large numbers of new entrants to the labor market, let alone the newly unemployed. Still others point to large differences in income between urban/rural and coastal/interior regions, and to the persistence of China’s residential permit (hukou) system, which links access to public services and benefits to where one is born, as evidence that those in the rural interior continue to be excluded from employment opportunities in China’s booming cities and coastal areas. All of these observations indicate that a combination of failures, both market- and policy-related, may contribute to the system’s inability to provide jobs equitably to all of China’s able and willing laborers. China’s success or failure in employing its workforce will have enormous impact on its future economic performance, social equity, and political stability, and can be considered the first of its major employment challenges……
(in Oi, Jean, Scott Rozelle, and Xueguang Zhou (eds) Growing Pains: Tensions and Opportunity in China’s Transformation, Stanford: The Walter H. Shorenstein, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, pp. 27-55.)
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