lOl, you first claimed that China is suffering labor shortage and won't be able to find enough workers and now claim that people in China can't find jobs, you always contradict yourself.
Unemployment is a worldwide problem, China , as the world biggest manufacturer, by and large, fares better than most countries.
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LOL , When did I say "China is suffering labor shortage" ??
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Some Economists Question Strength of China’s Labor Market
Official statistics suggest the unemployment rate has barely ticked up since the start of the pandemic, but the data fail to account for large parts of the population
Migrant workers looking for jobs at a building-materials market in Beijing.
As China’s employment situation deteriorated this year, Chinese officials provided a one-time set of figures on people who were employed but not really working, though they didn’t elaborate on how the information was gathered. The statistics bureau said 3.5% of people in cities were “employed but not working” in April, down from 18.3% in March.
Most economists believe the number of people unwillingly working part time is likely greater, or not captured in this data.
In central Hubei province, 31-year-old Chen Xiaomo said her tea shop inside a scenic site near the Three Gorges Dam had suffered a dearth of visitors since the coronavirus spread. No longer able to turn a profit, Ms. Chen decided to close her store for half the week rather than operate full-time.
“The whole site here used to provide income for the local community,” she said. “Compared to before, it is night and day.”
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The situation is also affecting higher-income families. In Beijing, 36-year-old Fang Yin said she gave up on finding work this April when an internet firm she worked for downsized. Trying to find a new job in an economic downturn felt futile, she said.
Although she got a buyout with three months of salary, and her husband still has his job, they decided to cut costs. They have stopped eating out and don’t plan to take their two daughters on international trips this year, instead going to a local wildlife park recently.
“Spending has been downshifted to the basics, which isn’t much,” she said.
Modern China has suffered two drastic hits to its labor market. Economic changes in the 1990s led to a wave of layoffs at state-owned enterprises, sparking protests, including in northeast China’s industrial Rust Belt. In 2008, the global downturn hit China’s export sector, with at least 20 million migrant workers in the manufacturing-reliant southeast losing jobs, according to official figures.
In those episodes, losses were mostly contained and China’s economy quickly rebounded, giving rise to new opportunities.
Today, with authorities worried about debt and overheating home prices, Beijing has less ability to stimulate its economy to create jobs.
“I think it is at least as challenging as the global financial crisis, perhaps more so,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They’re in a much more constrained position because debt-to-GDP is much higher.”
Factories have been relocating to Southeast Asia and other countries with cheaper labor than China. Depending on how the rest of the world recovers from the coronavirus, economists estimate China could lose anywhere from 11 million to 27 million export-related job
But unlike China, the U.S. counts as unemployed some people not working any hours even while technically employed. The U.S. also has a wider array of monthly statistics than China does to reflect such people.
Chen Xingdong, a China economist at BNP Paribas, estimates that once everyone is factored in, as many as 132 million Chinese workers were at one point unemployed, temporarily displaced or furloughed this year—or about 30% of China’s urban workforce. He says it is fair to count displaced migrants as unemployed because farming isn’t really viable for many of them once they have ventured out into cities.
“From an economic point of view, I don’t think those people will work on the land,” Mr. Chen said. “I see them as having no income, no job.”
Feng Weibing, a 51-year-old who has been struggling to find work on interior-decoration projects in Beijing, agrees. While he has land in rural Jiangsu province, he said, “There is no way we can make a living as farmers.
Official statistics suggest the unemployment rate has barely ticked up since the start of the pandemic, but the data fail to account for large parts of the population.
www.wsj.com