ABSTRACT
The extraordinary growth of the Chinese economy since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were introduced in the late 1970s, with the ‘Four Modernizations’ (sige xiandaihua) and the ‘Open Door’ (kaifang) policies set to transform a wide range of hide-bound institutions, was to establish a solid platform for job creation. Even with the ‘one-child’ programme, an army of new entrants to the workforce each school year had to be accommodated, as well those leaving the land to head for the city. With expansion of gross domestic product (GDP) at just under 10 per cent per year for the last few years, the impact on jobs and human resources has been very positive, at least prima facie. ‘If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people (shi nian shu mu, bai nian shu ren)’ says an old Chinese proverb (cited in The Economist, 30 July 2005: 14). This book has attempted to explore how China has confronted such a challenge of harnessing its ‘people-power’, in the contributions of the internationally known set of authors we have assembled to report their research, vis-d-vis the problems of employment and unemployment in the People’s Republic of China. Some of these academic experts work in the PRC and the Hong Kong SAR; others teach and research in overseas locations, ranging from Australia to the United States, with Britain, Canada and elsewhere in between. The upshot has been a wide range of perspectives ranging from the macro-to the microeconomic, from the psychological to the sociological and from broad canvas to the case study (a summary of each of these may be found in Chapter 1).
