Assignment:
Our topic is to analyze and discuss the trend of employment in China. This topic is related to the recent development in China. The direction of development in China directly affect the labour market and employees' working position and opportunities. This report will discuss the issues of employment in China in five respects. Compared to unemployment of other developed countries, the situation of unemployment in China is more complicated because of large population, the variation of industries, the difference between rural area and urban area, the levels of education, and some incomplete and policies, etc.
1. This paragraph focus on how electronic commerce and technology replace the labour, and the transformation of manufacturing to other countries. A sharp increase of unemployment rate existed after 2001 in China. One of the significant factor is that many electronic commerce replaces some industries, and some automated machines take the place of the traditional labor. The electronic commerce includes Tmall, JD, and other online shopping malls in China. Creations of online shopping malls, reducing the income of the real shopping malls, because more people choose to shop at home, online shopping is a convenient way for people who are busy and have no time to go out for shopping.
According to the decrease income of real shopping malls, the need of sealers and the amount of real shopping malls reduce. This problem causes the increase in unemployment rate. Another issue is that more industries begin to use automated machines to replace labor, in order to save the money that pay for the workers.
China is a country that contains large population of labor, if the use of automated machines increases, many workers will lose their jobs. On the other hand, Chinese manufacturing begins to transfer to Southeast Asia, leading to a large group of labour lose their jobs, too. With high speed of the development of internet and technology, the transformation of manufacturing, more people in China can not find a suitable work. Finding the relationships between these factors and unemployment rate is what I want to discuss.
2. Another inseparable piece to the Chinese Economy is its unemployed group. First, while many may ask why is the unemployed group, moreover unemployment rate, important to the studies of China's economy and what are its effects? Therefore, we should first define what unemployment rate is. Unemployment rate is the percentage of legal aged unemployed workers who are willing but failing to find jobs within the current workforce. If unemployment rate increases, then that signals the economy is weakening; and if it decreases, it strengthens the economy but with a cost of inflicting inflation.
Therefore, with the definition in mind, I would like to observe the unemployment rate data from these recent years in China and find the trends that may have helped the development of the Chinese Economy. Moreover, I would also like to observe the minimum and maximum points in the data and link then to events that may have caused the unemployment rate to rapidly increase or decrease.
Finally, "China overtook Japan in 2010 to become the world's second largest economy, [and] ... became the world's largest trading nation and the largest holder of foreign exchange reserves. In 2010, China's income per capita surpassed the $4,000 middle-income threshold" (Yu, 2011, p. 86).
However, despite achieving all these successes in the Chinese economy, China is still considered a developing country. Therefore, for my final observation, I would like to compare the unemployment rate in China with other developed countries to examine if unemployment rate could be one of the main factors that are straining China's growth towards a fully developed country.
3. This paragraph will focus on the issues of employment of Chinese graduates. Education level is an essential factor that affected the employment phenomenon in China. Due to the government policy that accelerate higher education growth in 1999, there were rapid expansion of people with higher education which has caused a large amount of graduate students cannot find a career after they left school.
In China, there is "hardest job hunting season in history" every year, and it is especially hard towards graduates with chinese diploma and also those chinese graduates with a foreign graduation certificate. There is no doubt that the upsurge in graduate students unemployment rate has specific reasons. One of the important reason is that the demand for a job position is greater than the supply in the labor market, in another word, the graduates has became popularization, it means the graduates do not have much advantages compare to the past when they are seeking for a job.
Moreover, both employees and graduates are too picky, graduates consider they deserve some greater jobs with high income, meanwhile, employees realized that there are plenty of graduates and they are not special anymore, so the employees raised the requirements for the applicants. Hence, these are some basic ideas and factors generate the graduates unemployment, the report in the near future will indicates more information about graduates unemployment issues in China.
4. On this paragraph will focus on the economic question exists in the rural area, and how people live in rural area and government solve those problems. China is facing a number of problems in the rural area. The main problem of those is the reduction of the land resources in China. Because the influence of environment and the improper land use lead to the arable land steady decrease. China not only has a large population but also holds large population of farmers, with 50.32% agricultural population. Huge agricultural population only a small amount of arable land, this imbalance leads to the rural population migration to urban.
On the other hand, agricultural production costs continually rising, but the yields and profits continually decreasing. The comparative advantage of agriculture is weak. People in the rural especially for the young are not satisfied with the low income and limits job opportunity. They are seeking for a high-income job and eager to have a better life. China government promulgated some policies to solve problems, one of which is the training for surplus labors educates. With the rapid development of the economy bunch of jobs was provided by new industry like third industry.
Typically, express delivery industry rapid growth with online shopping that is the most general way to consume in recent years. In 2015, the online shopping market sales reached RMB3.8 trillion, with a CAGR of 50% over the past five years, thus driving a surge in express delivery industry.
5. This paragraph is focus on the problem of inequality and poverty in labour markets that different social groups are facing on in each time period, bringing by various government police on regulate and control economy growth. Moreover, reasons cause the huge developing and financial gap between urban and rural, rich and poverty will be analyze and find out. Since 1949 Central Planning was adopted by Communist government, growing heavy industries in urban areas became the most important goal to maintain social control of new established the People's Republic of China.
However, because the goal is strictly focus on urban development, most of rural population cannot enjoy the welfare available to urban residents, and through welfare system, farmer does not have job mobility and strictly arranged work in rural area, which is the essential reason caused the inequality development between urban and rural in the future. From the data: "it show that from 1952 to 1978, the annual growth rate of GDP averaged 6.5 percent. Industrial production grew at 11.4 percent per annum. However, farming output only grew at 2.7 percent per annum during the same period( Li, B., &Piachaud, D. 2004)."
Another problem in China is inequality allocation between different regions. The bigger and richer regions provide more types of job opportunities, and the better facilities and income for labours. Which captured more eyes of who want to find the jobs, in result more labours stay in richer places and less labours want to stay in the underdevelopment regions, and cause the huge competition pressure to the candidates in labour market. The direct victim are those college graduates who are eager for job opportunities.
This inequality development is related to the economy development policy of "China's developing the West" program adopted in 2000. The goal of this program is make the poorest western region in China become the first new rich group. However, the priority development immediately widen the gap between different regions. The living standard between western and other regions of China are significantly different.
In conclusion, this article we mainly want to study is with the economic development how does it impact on employment and unemployment. The motivation of studying China's unemployment rate is to find the relationship and piece together China's recent unemployment rates with recent critical events. Moreover, one major question regarding this subtopic is to solve for is unemployment a key cause to why is China still a developing country despite having the world's second largest economy?
Although there is a high GDP exits in China these days, why Chinese unemployment rate is increase year by year? Through comparing and contrasting unemployment data from China with similar data from developed countries to solve the problems. The high GDP does not concluded the living standard of people are truly enhanced. "There are people suffering from absolute poverty including urban marginalized groups, such as the long term unemployed (or laid-off workers) and low income households, rural-urban migrant workers, and farmers living in remote rural areas( Li, B., &Piachaud, D. 2004)."
From the research, we might get an answer for the current increasing unemployment rate, it relates to the historical economic and political policies. Since the establishment of People's Republic of China in 1949, various policies has been adopted to stimulate economic development, and could we find the better policies to solve these historical problem? This is the question for the future China.