Assignment:
Introduction
Our topic analyzes and discusses the trends of employment in China. This topic is related to the recent developments in China. The direction of development in China directly affects the labor 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 a large population, the variation of industries, the difference between rural area and urban area, the levels of education, and some incomplete policies.
Impact of Electronic Commerce and Technology on Labor
Electronic commerce and technology are replacing the labor sector and transforming manufacturing to other countries. A sharp increase in unemployment rate existed after 2001 in China. One of the significant factors is that much of 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, reduce 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 decreased income of real shopping malls, the need of sealers and the number of real shopping malls reduce. This problem causes the increase in unemployment rate.
Additional issue is that more industries begin to use automated machines to replace labor, to save the money that pays for the workers. China is a country that contains a large population of labor, if the use of automatic 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 laborers to lose their jobs. With the high speed of the development of internet and technology, the transformation of manufacturing, more people in China are becoming unable to find suitable work. Finding the relationships between these factors and unemployment rate is what I would like to discuss.
High Unemployment Rate
One more integral piece of the Chinese Economy is its unemployed group. First, while many may ask why the unemployed group is, 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. The 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 them to events that may have caused the unemployment rate to increase or decrease rapidly.
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. For instance, in 2010, China's income per capita surpassed the $4,000 middle-income threshold" (Yu, 2011, Pg. 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.
Chinese Graduates
This paragraph focuses 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 accelerates higher education growth in 1999, there was rapid expansion of people with higher education which has caused a lot 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 reasons is that the demand for a job position is greater than the supply in the labor market, in another word, the graduates have become popularization, it means the graduates do not have many advantages compared 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 graduate's unemployment, the report shortly will indicate more information about graduates' unemployment issues in China.
Rural Economy
This section focuses on the economic questions that exist in the rural areas, and how people live in rural area and the approaches the government uses to solve their problems. China is facing many problems in the rural areas. The main problem of the people in rural areas is the reduction of their land resources because the influence of environment and the improper land use leads to a steady decrease in more arable land. China not only has a large population but also holds a large population of farmers, with 50.32% of agricultural population. The country faces the problem of a large agricultural population existing on a small amount of arable land; this imbalance leads to the rural population migrating to urban centers.
On the other hand, agricultural production costs are continually rising, but the yields and profits are continually decreasing. The comparative advantage of agriculture is weak. People in the rural areas especially for the young, are not satisfied with the low income and limits to job opportunities. They are seeking for high-income jobs and are eager to enjoy better lives. China's government promulgated some policies to solve these problems, one of which is the training for surplus labors educates. With the rapid development of the economy, much of jobs were provided by new industry like the third industry.
Typically, express delivery industry's rapid growth with online shopping 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.
Inequality and Poverty in the Labor Market
The problem of inequality and poverty in labor markets is apparent in different social groups during each time period, introduced by various government law enforcers who regulate and control the growth of the economy. Moreover, reasons causing the huge developing financial gap between urban and rural, rich and poor will be analyzed and discussed further.
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 was strict focus on urban development, most of rural population could not enjoy the welfare available to urban residents, and through welfare system, farmers do not have job mobility and strictly arranged work in rural areas, which is the essential reason that caused the inequality development between the urban and rural regions.
From the data: "it shows 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 outputs only grew at 2.7 percent per annum during the same period" (Li, B., &Piachaud, 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 labors. This captured more eyes of those who wanted to find these jobs, in result more workers stayed in richer places and less laborers wanted to remain in the underdevelopment regions, and cause the huge competition pressure to the candidates in labor market. The direct victims 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 widens the gap between different regions. The living standard between western and other regions of China are significantly different.
Conclusion
In conclusion, in this article, we mainly studied the economic developments and how it impacts employment and unemployment in China. The motivation of studying China's unemployment rate is to find the relationships and piece together China's recent unemployment rates with current critical events. Moreover, one primary question regarding this subtopic is to explain if unemployment is the pivotal cause to China being a developing country despite having the world's second-largest economy? Although there is a high GDP exit in China these days, why is Chinese unemployment rate is increasing 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 conclude the living standards of people is genuinely enhanced. "People are suffering from absolute poverty including marginalized urban 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 the People's Republic of China in 1949, various systems have been adopted to stimulate economic development, and could we find the better policies to solve these historical problems? The future of China remains a question for many.