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, suggested that around 22 per cent 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.

"As China's urbanisation quickens, employment pressures from the many surplus rural labourers are getting bigger and bigger," Yi said.

"Currently there are about 100 million surplus rural workers that need to be transferred (to urban jobs)."

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 per cent urban unemployment rate.

China is undergoing an unprecedented urbanisation process as hundreds of millions of people have headed to fast-growing urban areas since the nation's economy embarked on a fast-paced growth track more than 30 years ago.

The country's urban population will rise to over 700 million people by 2015, outstripping the rural population for the first time, state media said in July, citing Li Bin, head of the nation's population planning agency.

China, which has the world's largest population of more than 1.3 billion people, saw its total labour pool increase by 112 million people over the past decade to more than one billion people, according to the white paper.