China facing huge unemployment pressures

With more than one billion workers in China, the world's most populous nation is facing a huge unemployment problem as only 780 million labourers are employed, the government said Friday. The numbers included in China's "white paper" on the nation's human resources, released on Friday, suggest that around 22 percent of China's labour force is without jobs.
"China is facing huge employment pressures at present and for the foreseeable future," Yi Chengji, spokesman for the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, told reporters at the launch of the white paper. The country's employment situation has long been vague as the government only routinely publishes unemployment statistics on urban workers, excluding rural areas. According to the paper, there were 9.21 million registered urban jobless in China at the end of 2009, resulting in just a 4.3 percent urban unemployment rate.