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China Businesses Technology

China To Add More than 50 Million New Urban Jobs in 2016-2020 (reuters.com) 56

China is striving to create more than 50 million new jobs in urban areas over the five years to 2020, the cabinet said in an employment promotion plan on Monday. From a report on Reuters: It will also aim to hold the urban registered unemployment rate below 5 percent in the same period, according to the document published on the central government's website. "Opportunities and challenges in promoting employment coexist," the cabinet said. The government has said 13 million new urban jobs were created in 2016, beating its target of 10 million. The official unemployment rate has been hovering just over 4 percent in recent years, even as China's economic growth slowed to 6.7 percent in 2016, its slowest in 26 years.
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China To Add More than 50 Million New Urban Jobs in 2016-2020

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06, 2017 @11:05AM (#53812129)

    They're forcibly uprooting the rural population and moving them into the cities [nytimes.com] to provide demand for the crap their factories are putting out.

    • I was just thinking this after reading the article. Two things to consider here. 1) They lie all the time about various economic numbers, forecasts etc.2) communism is great a creating "jobs" even when people don't want them.
    • From NYT's the article:

      "China calls them “ecological migrants”: 329,000 people whom the government had relocated from lands distressed by climate change, industrialization, poor policies and human activity to 161 hastily built villages. They were the fifth wave in an environmental and poverty alleviation program that has resettled 1.14 million residents of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a territory of dunes and mosques and camels along the ancient Silk Road."

  • by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday February 06, 2017 @11:06AM (#53812139)
    Happy to hear they're sticking to regular 5-year plans. Those have always turned out well.
  • by fubarrr ( 884157 ) on Monday February 06, 2017 @11:19AM (#53812233)

    >The official unemployment rate has been hovering just over 4 percent in recent years, even as China's economic growth slowed to 6.7 percent in 2016, its slowest in 26 years.

    The thing is that they don't have much young people to man factories, and they have to many Harward PhDs.

    • by ( 4475953 )

      ...unlike the US, who do not have nearly enough Harward PhDs to run all their factories, let alone people who can spell the names of their prestigious universities correctly.

    • They've already started to automate [techrepublic.com], so it's pretty unlikely that they'll have that problem for much longer. Unless Chinese robots are cheaper than U.S. robots, we should probably invest more heavily in our own robotic manufacturing base just because when human labor is no longer a large part of the cost of the goods, China doesn't have anywhere near as much advantage.
    • they don't have enough young people who want to work in factories, yet they have too many PhDs [paraphrased]

      In Chinese culture, higher education is a big status symbol, much more so than the US.

      In the US, a big-name degree is a relatively minor status symbol UNTIL it makes one wealthy. This is because we know that academic excellence often doesn't translate into earning power, and those with good grades often lack people skills (to be frank).

      But in China, a big-name degree typically has gotten one into hi

  • Sounds like they're making China great again.

  • Doing what? China is soo bubble. The local govts are just....wow.
  • A tale of two Chinas (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DumbSwede ( 521261 ) <slashdotbin@hotmail.com> on Monday February 06, 2017 @12:27PM (#53812733) Homepage Journal

    Anything with the word China in it seems to be red-meat for the Slashdot crowd. Having actually RTFA there isn’t much in there that is different from how liberal democracies go about trying to encourage economic growth. China is mostly Communist in name, but this isn’t to say their system operates identical to ours. I have been to China seven times in the last ten years, so I can give you a reasonable impression of life there. People going about their day-to-day lives do not liver under constant fear and oppression. Life in the big cities is very modern. The country is virtually two countries in one. The modern cities and the backward villages. That said the government wields a big stick in getting big projects done (sometimes without enough forethought). I find most people fear China is going to far outstrip the west in science and economy in the not too distance future, most of the rest think it is a powder-keg about to self-destruct. Neither view is very close to the truth. As China pulls into parity with the west, it’s economy is slowing down because it no longer is leaping from behind by leveraging cheap labor and because labor is not longer staying cheap (because economic success has created a prosperous middle-class) and because automation is destroying cheap labor’s advantage anyway. China is desperate to raise everyone into the middle-class so as to sustain their economy on internal domestic consumption. So while the party is coming to a close, they still hope to get the job largely done without have two separate classes of citizens (city dwellers, versus farmers and villagers).

    • Even, if their consumption will double, tripple, or quadripple it will barely compensate for decline of global demand.

      High added value industries have small market in PRC. The yearly variance in American consumer spending is the size of the whole Chinese domestic market.

      In order to sustain itself on domestic consumtion, China needs to increase household income by 10 times. China is a high tax country, but they do really good at stimulating spending (1/4 to 1/3 of your income can be claimed in monthly tax re

    • Even though I do worry about China (and tactics they have used in the past to get businesses on their soil), China seems to have very similar problems as the US. The US is also definitely two countries in one, with the rural areas and the urban areas (and the red/blue constant squabbling because one side doesn't have a clue about what the other side's needs are.)

      I will say, there are some things China is getting "right". The idea of a middle class and not just tycoons and peasants was what allows the US t

    • by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      I find most people fear China is going to far outstrip the west in science and economy in the not too distance future, most of the rest think it is a powder-keg about to self-destruct. Neither view is very close to the truth.

      Violent revolutions in China are relatively common, roughly every 100 years. There have been uprisings even recently. After the global recession of the late 2000's there were many factory worker protests due to layoffs from the slumping economy due to slower overseas exports. China la

    • Nicely put. If you didn't know, the slowdown in growth rates as China approaches parity falls under the heading of Convergence Theory. Developing economies grow very fast by taking advantage of tools developed by, well, developed economies. As the level of development begins to converge with the West, they experience diminishing marginal returns (what with increasing labor costs and the increasing cost of the "next" improvement) and growth rates fall sharply.

      My concern is that as the middle class rise

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Thank you Wal-Mart shoppers

  • In the last 8 years, over a million jobs were created in the USA, but the majority of them don't pay a living wage, so the number of people seeking full-time employment hasn't changed. Is China going to do any better, and if so, how?

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