China needs to create millions of jobs. The difficult question is – How to do this? The “Joe Biden” regime created many jobs in the US by hiring massive numbers of tax/borrowing-supported government workers who probably did not add much (if anything) to genuine economically-viable production.
Now China faces an analogous problem, with the added challenge that communist China does not have a Ponzi-scheme Social Security system for its retirees.
And every country is going to face the issue of increasing mechanization and “Artificial Intelligence” destroying lots of existing jobs. It is just another of those big issues that no-one is talking about.
"… The Chinese government wants the economy to create more than 12 million new urban jobs in 2025 while facing “more pronounced structural employment problems”, Premier Li Qiang said in his annual work report to China’s top legislature, the National People’s Congress, on Wednesday. …
… Calling employment the “cornerstone of people’s livelihood”, Li repeated his sentiment from two years prior, when he kicked off his premiership by vowing to “continue to pursue an employment-first strategy”. …
The issue is “new urban jobs”. What does that mean? Is it “downtown big city” or just “not rural farm work”?
Modern factory jobs are likely to be suburban just due to the required land.
Downtown big city jobs mean thing like financial. And as you point out those are going to be hit by AI.
BTW, this is what makes things like Neom utter nonsense. Saudi Arabia has neither the demand not any prospect for the supply of ultra high productivity information workers. At least China has potential supply.
I’m not sure about that. With four times the population of the United States in about the same land area as the Continental US, China’s physical development has taken a rather different course from what the US and much of Western Europe did post-WWII. Instead of low density suburbs, much of China’s population in cities – and even what we would consider small towns – live in high density 30-story high rises, with easy access to the excellent mass transit in which China has invested so much.
If China can develop factory jobs, there probably would not be too much difficulty getting the staff to the factories. The bigger problem is that China already produces far more real goods than it can consume itself (i.e. it would need growing export markets), but it increasingly has to compete with production from lower wage, lower regulation countries such as Vietnam, India, Indonesia, etc. for those export markets.
In some ways, China has the mirror image of the similar employment problem facing the US once it is no longer viable to hide unemployment through pointless government jobs. At least a sensible US could have the potential to create jobs for its citizens through building factories to replace the (often Chinese) imports on which we currently depend.
Still, in a world of unstoppable automation & AI, every country is going to have to face the challenge of how to provide enough meaningful employment for its population to avoid strife. The German approach of disguising unemployment through keeping young people in college until they are 30 is not one that many other countries will willingly adopt.
Agreed. Apparently China has been very aggressively adopting factory automation – which helps give them scale and lower costs, but does not do much for employment.
And then they need to sell the products of those large factories to someone. Already they are producing more than Chinese consumers can buy – hence the need for export markets. Thereby the twin risks of (a) competition from lower cost countries, and (b) tariffs from the countries to which they export.
On that second point, there have been some analyses suggesting that China’s major trade imbalance is with the US; its trade with the Rest of the World combined is more-or-less balanced. And the “Free Traders” in the US are currently on the back foot. Everybody’s got problems!
Do they? Their fertility has collapsed and their population is beginning to decline. By 2050, they will have lost about 12% of their population from the peak. Maybe there’s a temporary job shortage for the moment but the future is quite the opposite: a structural worker shortage.