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Unemployment fears stalk once-roaring China
Tue Nov 4, 2008 7:32pm EST
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By Simon Rabinovitch
BEIJING (Reuters) - Short of food and running low on cash, a group of men huddled under a bridge in Beijing and waited for someone, anyone to come by and offer them work, any work.
The global economic slowdown is taking a toll on China and threatens to swell its ranks of the unemployed, undoing impressive income gains made in recent years and undermining the 'harmonious society' that the government prizes above all else.
Hit especially hard are the rural migrants who have long streamed into cities to build office towers, clean streets and staff factories.
Under the bridge in southwest Beijing, an area where construction managers would hire crews in better times, Ren, a day laborer in his 40s, contemplated giving up and returning to his patch of farmland in Hebei province.
"This is the worst I've ever seen it. Normally I can get a job in a few days, but I've been out here a month already," he said.
Whether Ren goes back or not, he and an estimated 130 million rural migrants like him are not legally registered as living in the cities where they work and so do not show up in official employment statistics.
But evidence is mounting that their prospects have turned bleak in the space of just a few months. The government, which bases its quest for social stability on economic strength, has responded with tax breaks, interest rate cuts, big spending projects and pledges to do more.
The suddenness with which China's economy has lost momentum is Beijing's immediate concern. Annual growth in the third quarter sank to 9 percent, well down from its scorching 11.9 percent pace in all of last year and putting the country on track for its first single-digit expansion since 2002.
The extreme ravages since then of the global financial crisis have raised the specter of a further slowdown to 8 percent -- enough to be flirting with recession in Chinese terms.
Most countries would salivate at such growth, but for China it is a tipping point: anything less, experts say, and the economy cannot create enough jobs to keep up with the mass of humanity, at least 15 million people, entering the labor market every year.
"If economic growth fell below 8 percent there would be tension, social tension, complaints and job losses," Chen Xingdong, chief economist at BNP Paribas in Beijing, said.
"You can understand why the Chinese government seems to have become desperate about delivering all kinds of stimulus measures," he added.
FRUSTRATION
A small taste of exactly what the government wants to avoid came last month in the southern city of Dongguan, an exporting hub near Hong Kong. About 1,000 laborers protested outside a toy factory, demanding unpaid wages after the firm, battered by the downturn overseas, closed its doors.
In Wenzhou, an export powerhouse in the east, about 20 percent of workers have lost their jobs, prompting an exodus to the countryside, local press recently reported. Continued...
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