Growth and structural changes in employment in transition China

By clarifying officially published statistics on labor market and employment and combining them with micro survey data, this paper tries to depict the employment growth and structural changes in rural and urban China and to break the myths believed by domestic and international scholars such as “zero growth of employment” and “unchangeable rural surplus labor pool”. The paper provides exact statistics about China’s labor market that previous studies fail to do, explaining how labor market develops, employment in both rural and urban areas increases and its structure diversifies, urban unemployment alleviates and number of rural surplus laborers reduces, as a result of economic growth, reform and opening-up. By examining demographic transition process in China, the paper also predicts the emerging trend of labor shortage, suggests a coming Lewisian turning point and reveals its policy implications to China’s sustainable growth.