ABSTRACT
It is almost a truism to say that China’s economic reform has led to spectacular economic growth, but also has created serious social and political problems. Unemployment (shiye) is one such social problem that demands immediate government attention. In various government announcements, employment is taken to be about “people’s livelihood” (minsheng) and, consequently, the “nation’s stability” (guo’an). Thus, unemployment is now deemed one of the most politically explosive issues to challenge the Chinese government’s overriding priority of social stability. Despite only being officially acknowledged since 1994, unemployment, in the sense of a serious imbalance between the number of job-seekers and the number of jobs, is not an unprecedented policy problem.1 According to recent government announcements, China has in fact entered the third of three employment peaks ( jiuye gaofeng) since the death of Mao: the first peak hit China when sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution returned to urban areas; the second peak was caused by xiagang gongren (offpost workers, or the so-called “40/50” – male workers over 50 and female workers over 40) who were hardest hit by state-owned enterprise (SOE) restructuring in the 1990s. That said, the current economic, social, and policy context means that the social, economic, and political implications of unemployment are unique.
