by Wendy Liu
For Those Whose Concept of China Has Frozen in the 1970s and for Anyone
Who Would Like to Know About Today's China.
8. China of Kaleidoscope
China was definitely not very red but fascinatingly kaleidoscopic when President Clinton visited China in June 1998. The China he saw was surely
not the China President Nixon, President Reagan or even President Bush
(senior) had seen in their days. President Clinton met with villagers near
Xi'an who had not only turned themselves from poor peasants into
well-to-do entrepreneurs, but had also elected directly their own
village leadership; he answered questions from students of Beijing
University who were not young communists bent on making revolution as
their parents had once been but aspiring economists, scientists and
engineers hoping for a better China and a world of peace and
understanding; he met business managers, bankers, stock traders, home
owners and Internet surfers in Shanghai who were mostly interested in
their daily business operations, market development, mortgage payments
and cyber explorations as were their counterparts all over the world; he
was a guest on a local radio talk show there and answered average
Chinese callers' questions of a vast array of topics, from world cup
soccer, traffic jams, or the Asian economic crisis, to staying in
shape; he also joined a group of Christians in Beijing in their Sunday
service which was like many others held regularly in many buildings and
many parts of China with a growing flock of followers; and he saw
HongKong that the world once had worried might fall into deep crisis once
the British were gone, continuing to thrive.
Unemployment, a Capitalist Woe?
In this multi-colored China, the citizens are no longer proletarians holding the "[iron-rice-bowls]". The old socialist welfare system
including free medical care, free education, subsidized housing, lifetime
job security, etc. is all gone. After more than two decades of economic
reforms, especially the reform of the state sector, unemployment, which had
always been considered a capitalist woe, for the first time has become the
country's biggest economic, political and social problem, a dilemma of
progress and development.
In 1995, about 100 million of China's urban workforce were still employed by the state owned enterprises . By March 1998, only 75 million were
left. What was more alarming was that half of the remainder was redundant,
according to China's State Economic and Trade Commission. Of the total
urban workforce of about 200 million, 17 million were officially jobless in
1998 , with 11.5 million of them laid off in 1997 alone . With the
unemployment rate in the rural area at 35% in 1997 , all together by
1998, 136 million people, up to 20% of China's total workforce, were
unemployed. According to another source, China's total unemployed
reached 150 million in 1998 . By 1999, China's urban unemployment was
more than 25% according Chinese economists.
In March 2000, China's Ministry of Labor and Social Security estimated that 11.74 million people
would join the army of the jobless that year, the equivalent to the
population of Shanghai, the largest metropolis in China. Early last
November, when China's census 2000 started, its "floating population,"
those unemployed or underemployed who left the farms to seek jobs and
better lives in the cities? was between 100 million and 200 million
strong.
Again according to the Ministry of Labor & Social Security, in 1999, 5.13 million of the unemployed and the laid-off participated in
various re-employment job training programs, and by
the fall of 2000, as many as 99,292,000 people in China were in the unemployment insurance
programs. But where have all the unemployed gone? And where would
all the newly unemployed find work again? In the private sector, of
course, on which the Chinese government has pinned high hopes.
(To be
continued...)
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