SHANGHAI - Who is unemployed and how many people
are unemployed in China, a nation of 1.3 billion? Who is
being counted and who is being excluded depends on whom
you're talking to, and often how badly the counters want
to keep the rate down.
The official figure is
4.2 percent, but the World Bank says it is closer to 10
percent nationwide - more than 20 million out of a
workforce of more than 200 million. Officially, the
urban labor force is around 248 million.
The
government says it hopes to keep it just under 4.7
percent. But that official rate only counts those
officially registered as unemployed. The official
statistics probably disguise the truth about the impact
of massive layoffs as Beijing goes about economic
restructuring and closing inefficient enterprises.
When trying to calculate the number of laid-off
workers, outside analysts reject China's official
figures and estimate the real urban unemployment rate to
be around 10 percent, and about 12 percent in
particularly hard-hit cities such as Shenyang in the
northeast, Wuhan in the south, and Shanghai on the
coast. China also acknowledges some high numbers: the
China Urban Labor Survey conducted by the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences uncovered 12 percent
unemployment among respondents in a sampling of major
cities.
An October 2003 World Bank report, using 2002 census data and
surveys, identifies 10 provinces and cities with
unemployment rates over 10 percent, including Liaoning
province with 17.68 percent, followed by Helongjiang
15.43 percent, Tianjin 13.96 percent, Hainan 13.42
percent, Jilin 13.88 percent, Qinghai 12.30 percent,
Shanghai 11.99 percent, Inner Mongolia 11.35 percent,
and Chongqing at 10.76 percent.
In 1999, the
government counted 5.75 million unemployed, but if
laid-off workers were included, the number jumped to
9.37 million.
20 million drop out of the
workforce The Labor Ministry said that in 2002
the total urban workforce, including towns, was 247.8
million. China also acknowledges that about 20 million
have dropped out of the labor force, discouraged, the
World Bank fears, by grim employment prospects for older
laborers with few skills.
The narrow official
definition of unemployment leaves out millions of people
who are out of work, by a common-sense definition. A
good place to start is to ask who is out of work and
needs a job but is not counted in the official
unemployment figures. These are the main categories:
Xia gang, or "off-post" workers, not
registered as unemployed and still contractually tied to
their work-units, possibly receiving short-term very
limited benefits.
Surplus, unpaid but not officially laid off workers
at state-owned enterprises (SOEs), technically hired but
economically expendable.
Laid-off workers still contractually tied to their
work units.
Migrant agricultural and rural workers who move to
cities, an estimated 94 million of them, or more.
Surplus rural workers.
Workers who disappear into the informal economy.
Defining who exactly is unemployed remains one
of the basic challenges facing the government and social
scientists in trying to analyze rising unemployment and
devise sustainable policy solutions. Determining the
scope of the problem depends on the source of
information and considerable confusion surrounds the
dimensions and severity of mass layoffs.
Even
many of those eligible to be counted among the
unemployed choose not to go through the trouble of
registering: A meager unemployment stipend of 240 yuan
(about US$30) per month on average - calculated
according to the whim of the local government, and not
one's previous earnings or social needs - provides
little incentive for going through the bureaucratic
process.
At the same time, many of the
"officially unemployed" try to have it both ways,
picking up unemployment benefits while working on the
side. Though the true rate of "hidden employment" is
impossible to gauge, researchers estimate that around
two-thirds of laid-off urban workers collect wages from
informal jobs.
One of the main factors behind
the growth of the unemployment rate is a statistical
one: the government's recent efforts to integrate xia
gang workers into a new, basic unemployment benefits
system has decreased the xia gang rate while
expanding the unemployed category. The Ministry of Labor
and Social Security has proclaimed that the government
aims to "solve the problem of xia gang by 2005".
This might, however, simply mean that on paper, xia
gang will vanish into the nebulous ranks of the
urban unemployed.
While integrating the two
categories will be a major advance in implementing
unemployment policies, the lack of coordination among
different agencies and across regions still poses an
obstacle to a truly integrated approach to restructuring
the economy. For now, the Chinese will continue to deal
with finding, keeping and losing work the way they've
always done it: unofficially.
Michelle
Chen is an American Fulbright researcher based in
Shanghai.
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