David DruryMarie W. Arneberg(eds.)

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David Drury

Marie W. Arneberg (eds.)

No More Forevers

The Chinese Labour Force in a Time of Reform

No More Forevers

No more forevers captures the dramatic period in the lives of Chinese workers as they have had to come to grips with restructuring, changes in the responsibilities of the state owned enterprises and the growth of a marketised economy with new relations between workers and management. This book report is a result of a co-operation between the National Evaluation Center for Science and Technology in Beijing, and Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies in Oslo. The book contains the result from the first survey conducted jointly by the two institutions: The Survey of Occupational Mobility and Migration (SOMM). The survey was designed to investigate to key processes in the shaping of the labour market of the Chinese cities at the turn of the century: the migration of workers from the country side into the cities, the restructuring of the public sector, the growth of the private sector and the changes in inequality and social stratification. These topics were pursued by surveys in three cities, representing different stages or

adaptations to the restructuring of the economy. A report in Chinese is available from the National Evaluation Center for Science and Technology in Beijing

No More Forevers David DruryMarie W. Arneberg(eds.)

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David Drury and Marie W. Arneberg (eds.)

No More Forevers

The Chinese Labour Force in a Time of Reform

To

Deputy Director Ye Dan 1953–1999

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ISSN 0801-6143

Cover page: Jon S. Lahlum

Cover photo: Curt Carnemark / Mira / Samfoto Printed in Norway by: Centraltrykkeriet AS

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1: The SOMM Sample Cities ... 4

Figure 1.2: Overview of the questionnaire ... 8

Figure 2.1: Services Provided by State and Collective Enterprises ... 26

Figure 2.2: Transition and Transmutation: contending theories of social change under economic reform ... 33

Figure 3.1: Demographic profile of the population by age, sex and floating migrant status ... 40

Figure 3.2: Place of permanent registration (hukou)... 42

Figure 3.3: Household Composition ... 43

Figure 3.4: Legacies of the Past: Education levels by age group ... 47

Figure 3.5: Who belongs to the Communist Party? Respondents age 18 and above... 49

Figure 3.6: Labour force participation rates by age ... 52

Figure 3.7: Main reason for being out of the Labour Force, Persons age 16 to 64... 53

Figure 4.1:Employment by Type of Ownership: : Employed persons aged 16 and above... 61

Figure 4.2: Who works Where? Some characteristics of the workforce by ownership: employed persons aged 16 and above... 63

Figure 4.3: Date work unit was founded, by type of ownership Percentage of current workers in each type of ownership (n=2654) ... 67

Figure 4.4: Occupation group by Official Work Status: Percentage of all employed aged 16 and above... 69

Figure 4.5: Hours worked per week in the main job, by ownership of work unit: percentage of employed within each ownership type... 71

Figure 4.6: Prevalence of Labour Contracts-Percentage of employees aged 16+ who have signed contracts... 73

Figure 4.7: Length of Labour Contract by ownership: Employees with contracts age 16 and above... 74

Figure 4.8: Work unit medical coverage by ownership: Employees age 16 and above ... 78

Figure 4.9: Self-protection: Self-paid commercial health insurance by work unit ownership, employed aged 16+... 80

Figure 4.10: Work unit provides any family medical coverage, by type of ownership ... 80

Figure 4.11: Work unit provides any old age benefits, by form of ownership: employed age 16+ ... 81

Figure 4.12: Commercial old age insurance and saving for old age: currently employed persons age 16+... 81

Figure 4.13: Type of housing... 83

Figure 4.14: How the household obtained its living quarters ... 83

Figure 4.15: Randomly-selected adult in the household receives housing allocation from the work unit, by type of work unit ownership... 85

Figure 4.16: Total Household income in the past 12 months: Mean amounts (RMB) by quintiles... 91

Figure 5.1: Life-time work participation. Percent who have ever worked for pay or profit, by sex and age... 106

Figure 5.2: Number of work units worked. Percent distribution of adults 16 years and above who have ever worked, by city ... 111

Figure 5.3: Employed adults (15 years and above) by employment sector. For private sector employees, also by sector where they started their career. Percent ... 117

Figure 6.1: Laid-off (xiagang) workers as a percentage of the Labour Force, by Sex and Age (n= 200) ... 163

Figure 6.2: Profiles of Laid-off (xiagang) workers age 16 to 64: Sex, Age, work unit ownership and labour force status (n= 200) ... 164

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Figure 6.3: Main reason for layoff: laid off workers age 16 to 64 (n= 180)... 165

Figure 6.4: Number of months spent in layoff status, laid off workers age 16 to 64: cumulative percent (n= 180)... 166

Figure 6.5: Difference between Education levels of Laid off workers and other Labour Force members: Percentage at each level of education ... 167

Figure 6.6: Plunge into the sea or stay in the boat? Characteristics of jobs taken by laid-off workers, 1992-98 ... 168

Figure 6.7: Who are the Unemployed? Age, Sex, Layoff and Household Registration status, age 16-64 ... 172

Figure 6.8: The unemployed have much less education; employed and unemployed, age 16-64 (n=5018) ... 173

Figure 6.9: Number of months spent unemployed at the time of the survey: Unemployed, age 16 to 64 ... 174

Figure 6.10: Actions taken to find work (n= 228) ... 176

Figure 6.11: Greatest obstacle to finding a job (n= 217) ... 176

Figure 6.12: Re-employment services received by current unemployed and laid-off workers, age 16-64 ... 179

Figure 6.13: Main Source of personal income while not working: Currently unemployed and laid-off workers, age 16-64... 187

Figure 6.14: Medical coverage from any source: Unemployed or laid-off, age 16-64 (n=672) ... 189

Figure 6.15: Old age support from any source: Unemployed or laid-off, age 16-64 (n= 668) ... 189

Figure 6.16: Inflexible, frightened or just practical? Laid-off and unemployed people's willingness to accept various re-employment options. Persons age 16-64... 191

Figure 7.1: Distribution of the surveyed adult population (16 years +) in the 3 cities by migrant status and registered hukou. Percent ... 205

Figure 7.2: Distribution of adult migrants living in the 3 cities who came during 1994-1998... ... 206

Figure 7.3: Network in the city, percent of floating migrants arriving 1994-1998... 210

Figure 7.4: Reason for coming. Percent of floating migrants arriving 1994-1998 ... 210

Figure 7.5: How floating migrants found accomodation. Percent ... 211

Figure 7.6: Enterprise ownership. Percent of employed by migrant status and sex ... 213

Figure 7.7: Percent of employed in high-skilled professions (professionals, managers leading cadres)... 213

Figure 7.8: Ever been bullied by locals. Percent of floating migrants arriving 1988-1998 ... 222

Figure 7.9: Locals perceiving rural migrants as a severe threat to city people's jobs. Percent of non-floaters by labour market status and education level... 223

Figure 7.10: Preferred place to stay. Percent of floating migrants ... 225

Figure 7.11: Attachment to place of origin. (index) ... 227

Figure 8.1: Returns to education. Wage per hour by education level, employment sector and city. Yuan... 237

Figure 8.2: Factors of highest importance regarding job choice. Percent distribution of adults 16-65 years, by age group... 238

Figure 8.3: Preferences regarding work-unit ownership. Percent of adults 16-65 years who prefer working in the state sector, by age and city... 239

Figure 8.4: Rating of government performance to resolve the unemployment problem. Percent of adults by city... 242

Figure 8.5: Poverty headcount index by hukou status and unemployment. Percent of persons below official city poverty line ... 247

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Figure 8.6: Relative prosperity incidence. Percent of persons in top income decile (10 % richest people in the city measured by household income per capita), by labour market attachment of household members ... 249

List of Tables

Table 3.1: Dependency ratios ... 44 Table 3.2: Highest education by sex: percentage of population aged 16-64 ... 46 Table 3.3: Working-aged population ... 50 Table 3.4: Absolute sixe of the working-aged population by labour force status: persons age 16

and above ... 51 Table 3.5: Labour force status by sex: percentage of population aged 16-64... 51 Table 3.6: Retirees: percent of the city population and percent of retirees employed... 55 Table 4.1: Urban China: percent employment growth compared to the previous year, by

ownership... 60 Table 4.2: Number of employees in the work unit, by ownership: percentiles, employed

persons aged 16 and above ... 64 Table 4.3: Employed by industry group: percent of persons aged 16 and above ... 65 Table 4.4: Employment by occupation group: percent of persons aged 16 and above... 68 Table 4.5: Presence of a labour union in the workplace and union membership by ownership:

percent of employed aged 16 and above... 75 Table 4.6: Workers receiving medical insurance coverage from the work unit. Multinominal

logistic regression coefficients: employed persons age 16-64... 79 Table 4.7: Mean monthly wage and bonus income in the main job (RMB): employed persons

age 16-64 ... 87 Table 4.8: Factors affecting hourly wage: linear regression coefficients, employed persons age

16-64 ... 89 Table 4.9: Total Household income in the past 12 months... 91 Table 5.1: Number of job shifts according to age group ... 102 Table 5.2: Labor force participation, work experience and incidence of early retirement among

men and women ... 107 Table 5.3: Age at retirement by period (decade) of retirement. Mean for retirees still alive in

1998 ... 107 Table 5.4: Way of getting the first job, by period of entry. Percent of adults 16 years and above

in October 1998 ... 107 Table 5.5: Ways of getting a job. Percent of all job entries from October 1993 to October 1998

... 108 Table 5.6: Ways of getting a job. Percent of all non-agricultural job entries from October 1993

to October 1998 by occupation ... 110 Table 5.7: Ways of getting a job. Percent of all non-agricultural job entries from October 1993

to October 1998 by sector ... 111 Table 5.8: Mean number of work units worked in by respondents and percentage who have

worked in one, two, or three or more work units. Population 16 years and above who have ever worked, by city, sex and age ... 112 Table 5.9: Would respondent like to change jobs? Percent of employed population 16 years and above... 112 Table 5.10: Is respondent satisfied with present job? Percent of employed population 16 years

and above ... 112 Table 5.11: Job entries and job changes. Percent of job entries during October 1993 to October

1998 by type of entry, and percent of the employed who changed job during the period ...

... 113

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Table 5.12: Employment matrix. Number of adults in the SOMM sample (in 1000 persons 15 years and above), by employment status in first job versus current job (October 1998)...

... 116

Table 5.13: Occupational class in October 1993 - October 1998 by initial education level. Percent of jobs held in the period ... 125

Table 5.14: Distribution of Occupational Classes according to political attainment. Percent of all employed in the occupational class who are members of the Communist Party ... 125

Table 5.15: Generation-composition of occupational classes. Percent of employed in class by period of entry... 126

Table 5.16: Leaving a job. Percent of the employed who left a job during the period October 1993-October 1998, without taking up new employment immediately, and distribution of reasons why the job ended ... 131

Table 6.1: Urban China: Job Creation and Registered Unemployment 1994- 98 ... 160

Table 6.2: Unemployment by sex and age: percent of labour force age 16 to 64... 171

Table 6.3: Factors affecting the transition from unemployment (with active job-seeking) to employment, 1993-98 ... 184

Table 6.4: Government and work unit support for unemployed and laid-off workers: Percent of respondents who received support during the current period of unemployment, age 16-64 . ... 187

Table 6.5: Total personal income last month and total household income in the past 12 months: Unemployed, laid-off, and employed persons age 16-64 ... 189

Table 6.6: Percentage of unemployed, laid off and out of labour force respondents who have not received medical reimbursements from a former employer: persons age 16+ ... 190

Table 6.7:”If you could set some requirements for being terminated from your old work unit, what would be your main demand?” Percent of laid off workers, age 16-64 ... 192

Table 6.8: "What is the most important task of governments to address the problems of unemployed and laid off workers?" Percent of the laid off/ unemployed, age 16-64... 192

Table 7.1: Year of arrival of permanent and floating migrants living in the three cities in November 1998... 206

Table 7.2: Demographic characteristics of migrants. Sex, age and marital status... 208

Table 7.3: Household composition. Percent of adults by type of household they live in ... 208

Table 7.4: Percent of persons with senior secondary or tertiary education ... 209

Table 7.5: Industry structure of the employed by city, sex and migration status (floaters versus non-floaters). Percent of employed persons 16 years and above ... 212

Table 7.6: Estimated wage per hour¹⁾ and working hours per week in main job, total wage earnings per month in all jobs. Mean (standard deviation) of non-missing cases. Ordinary workers²⁾ 20-50 years of age... 214

Table 7.7: Wage discrimination of floaters, women, and women floaters: Percent reduction in hourly wage compared to male non-floaters [95 % confidence interval]. Ordinary workers 20-50 years of age... 215

Table 7.8: Mean annual household¹⁾ income (in yuan: total, per capita and per adult equivalent), poverty incidence and poverty gap ... 217

Table 7.9: Characteristics of poor versus non-poor floating migrants from rural areas. Percent of households ... 218

Table 7.10: Access to housing, subsidised medical care and old age pension... 220

Table 7.11: Ranking of floaters and non-floaters by self-assessed living conditions level and mobility... 221

Table 7.12: Visits and remittances by floaters to place of origin ... 226

Table 7.13: Rights to land, how land is operated and the effect of land confiscation threat. Percent of rural-urban floaters ... 227

Table 8.1: Industry preference: Percent of adults 16-65 years by preferred industry... 240

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Table 8.2: Opinions on what is the most important task for the Government to address the

unemployment problem. Percent of adults by city ... 241

Table 8.3: Self-assessed changes in living conditions. Percent of households ... 242

Table 8.4: Indicators of living standards and inequality. Analytical unit is the person. Income is measured at household level in per capita terms... 244

Table 8.5: Composition of the city population, the poor and the rich. Percent of persons by household type ... 251

List of Boxes

Box 1.1: The SOMM data set at a glance ... 10

Box 3.1: The household registration (hukou) system ... 42

Box 3.2: Levels of education in China... 46

Box 4.1: Types of ownership in the SOMM... 62

Box 5.1: The hazard ratio ... 113

Box 5.2: Class schema for urban China... 120

Box 6.1: Defining unemployment in the survey ... 170

Box 7.1: Migrant definitions applied in the SOMM... 204

Box 8.1: Typology of social groups used for identifying social consequences of reform ... 246

List of Abbrevations

ILO International Labour Organisation TVE Township and village enterprises

SOE State-owned enterprise

ACFTU All-China Federation of Trade Unions

EMU European Monetary Union (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg)

GDP Gross domestic product

NRCSTD National Research Centre for Science and Technology for Development OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (European

Monetary Union countries plus the United Kingdom, the Scandinavian countries, Japan, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Iceland, South Korea, and Switzerland)

RSI Randomly-selected individual in the household SOMM Survey of Occupational Mobility and Migration

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Preface

Jon Hanssen-Bauer

ket. On the 14 arty decided to go forwards ocialist Market Economy. kers as wned

k with the Natio- eijing since 1994 This book contains The Survey of Occupatio- y: the migration of , the growth of These topics were pursued ucturing of the econ-

ector at Fafo’s Centre afo. They realised the oject, but could unfortu-

oject, and his gentle e ted supporter

vernment officials. We Yanfeng The following organisations y Group: Ministry of La- Technology, State Planning inistry of Public tate Commission ureau of Statistics, Develop- No more forevers comes at a time of great changes in the Chinese urban labour market. On the 14

November 1993 the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party decided to go forwards with establishing a nationwide integrated and open market system: the Socialist Market Economy.

The research presented in this book captures the dramatic period in the lives of Chinese workers as they have had to come to grips with restructuring, changes in the responsibilities of the state owned enterprises and the growth of a new economy with new relations between workers and management.

Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies in Oslo has been privileged to work with the Natio- nal Research Center for Science and Technology for Development (NRCSTD) in Beijing since 1994 with the aim to monitor the social consequences of economic reforms in China. This book contains the result from the first survey conducted jointly by the two institutions: The Survey of Occupatio- nal Mobility and Migration (SOMM). The survey was designed to investigate to key processes in the shaping of the labour market of the Chinese cities at the turn of the century: the migration of workers from the country side into the cities, the restructuring of the public sector, the growth of the private sector and the changes in inequality and social stratification. These topics were pursued by surveys in three cities, representing different stages or adaptations to the restructuring of the economy.

Ye Dan, the Director at NRCSTD and Geir O. Pedersen who at the time was Director at Fafo’s Centre for International Studies, initiated the cooperation between NRCSTD and Fafo. They realised the need for empirical studies of China’s restructuring process, and saw the benefit of cooperation between the two think-tanks. Ye Dan played a crucial role in launching the project, but could unfortu- nately not see its completion.

His death in 1999 was a loss that was keenly felt by all who worked on the project, and his gentle guidance was sorely missed. Without his commitment and support, this project would not have been possible. The new director of NRCSTD, Wang Yuan, has also been a wholehearted supporter of the projects, and his enthusiasm and sense of direction has been crucial in the final phases of the work.

Crucial support and guidance was provided by Chinese researchers and government officials. We would in particular like to thank Professors Li Lulu of the People’s University in Beijing and Ge Yanfeng of the Development Research Center of the State Council. Their insights into Chinese labour market issues and the restructuring process were invaluable to the project. The following organisations provided valuable input through their participation in the project Advisory Group: Ministry of La- bor and Social Security, Ministry of Personnel, Ministry of Science and Technology, State Planning Commission, State Economy and Trade Commission, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of Civil Affairs, Ministry of Construction, Ministry of Education, State Commission of Family Planning, State Bureau of Industry and Commercial, State Bureau of Statistics, Develop- ment Research Center of the State Council.

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The fieldwork in the three cities of Beijing, Wuxi and Zhuhai would not have been possible without the co-operation and support of the city co-ordinating organisations and their staff: Beijing co-ordinators Professors Chen Tao and Jiang Ya at the Department of Social Work at China Youth Political University, Wuxi co-ordinators Professors Xin Wangdan and Li Hongyi at the Department of Social Sciences at Wuxi Light Industrial University, Zhuhai co-ordinators Vice Director Xia Xianqing at Zhuhai City Bureau of Statistics, and head of Zhuhai Urban Survey Team Zhao Laizhong. Coordination was also provided by Department of Sociology at China Renmin University, Wuxi City Bureau of Public Security, Beijing City Bureau of Public Security, and Beijing City Commission of Science and Technology.

The Norwegian Government (Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs and NORAD) made the project possible by providing the necessary funding. We would also like to thank Zhu Yinglu (former ambassador), Ma Enhan (current ambassador), and Xing Jijun and Luo Delong (former first class secretaries of science and technology) at the China Embassy in Oslo for their support.

At NRCSTD the project has been ably led by Wang Fenyu, with the following team members: Li Lulu, Ge Yanfeng, Fan Lihong, Wang Junfeng, Deng Xueming, Ju Wenzhong and Yuan Fang. At Fafo the team was lead by David Drury, and team members were Chris Buckley, Marie Arneberg, Jon Pedersen, Aadne Aasland, Kari Riisøen, Siri Størmer and Willy Egset. In many projects

“cooperation” becomes a word that lacks meaning and gloss over a fundamentally asymmetric relationship. However, the two team leaders created a truly cooperative spirit, and managed to stimulate the teams on both the Chinese and Norwegian side to find solutions to the many problems that such a complex project pose.

The overall purpose of the NRCSTD-Fafo cooperation is to provide high-quality information based on scientific research for policy-makers in China. It is our ambition and hope that the information documented in this book will be useful for Chinese policy makers. For us, the formulae on which the project is based: that the two research milieus have different comparative advan- tages has been a successful one. NRCSTD and Fafo have a long term commitment to cooperation.

We hope that this report is the first in a series of reports based on empirical studies in China.

Oslo, March 2001 Jon Hanssen-Bauer Director

Fafo, Institute of Applied Social Science

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1 The Survey of Occupational Mobility and Migration

By David Drury

1.1 Introduction

Four days into the new century, Planning Minister Zeng Peiyan, chief of the State De- velopment Planning Commission, an- nounced that private enterprises were to be put on "an equal footing with state-owned enterprises" for the first time since the Communist victory in 1949. The central government would:

“...Actively guide and encourage private investment [and would] eliminate all restric- tive and discriminatory regulations that are not friendly toward private investment and private economic development in taxes, land use, business start-up and export. Except for areas that are related to national security and those that must be monopolised by the State, all other areas of the economy should allow private capital to enter” (Pomfret 2000).

While understanding that such pronounce- ments should be treated cautiously, foreign analysts saw the statement as a new sign that the leadership had recognised the private sector as the key to China's economic future.

Growth was still occurring, and at an admi- rably fast pace compared to most developing economies, but the boom years of the early 1990s were clearly over. Faced with nine- teen straight months of price deflation to due weak consumer demand, rising unemployment and slow investment in both the public and private spheres, the government faced difficult choices.

China is one of the twentieth century's great economic success stories. The reforms begun under Deng Xiaoping in 1978 have brought undoubted benefits to the Chinese people in the form of greater freedom of movement geographically, freedom to

choose an occupation or change employers, and above all higher material living standards. The reformers' early vision of a planned economy supplemented by market regulations and small-scale private enterprise has gradually evolved into today's ”socialist market economy” in which central planning plays an increasingly smaller role and market principles guide the allocation of investment capital, materials, human re- sources and even social welfare support.

But the reforms have always been carried out as a step-by-step process with many false starts and failed experiments, and the way forward is no more clear today. One hundred and fifteen million people entered the labour force between 1990 and 2000;

over 100 million more will be joining over the next ten years and there are already well over 100 million surplus labourers in the countryside (Shen and Spence 1995: 365).

In past years the social explosion implied by those figures was averted by the steady growth of employment in state and collective enterprises, together with an easing of restrictions on movement to urban areas and the rapid rise of private business. But the state and collective sectors have stagnated since the mid-1990s, and by the turn of the century state enterprises alone were shrink- ing by more than three million workers per year. Public enterprise output has fallen even faster as a share of the nation's total, even as the state sector has continued to ab- sorb the lion's share of new investment funds. Where will these hundred million new jobs come from?

For now the Chinese leadership is commit- ted to further reform in the economic sphere.

All but the largest state owned enterprises

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will be privatised; legal and social security reform will continue; China will open itself further to foreign investment as it joins the World Trade Organisation. Even so, urban unemployment is expected to remain at historically high levels of 10 percent or more for the next five to ten years (UNDP 1999).

1.2 Themes

This book presents the findings of the 1998 Survey of Occupational Mobility and Migra- tion (SOMM), a snapshot of the state of reform at the end of 1998 as seen through the experiences of ordinary people and their families. It explores the micro-effects of reform as revealed by a cross-section of urban people – their work situation and employment paths in recent years, their standard of living, and the consequences of migration and unemployment. Most of the new information in the report is based on large-scale surveys of residents and migrants in three cities which have had quite different histories of reform: Beijing, Wuxi in the Yangtze river delta near Shanghai, and Zhuhai, a freewheeling Special Economic Zone in the South.

China's transition from a planned to a market economy is not simply a matter of re- placing public with private ownership. The reforms have had much wider effects on urban employment and labour market processes. The following are some of the general dimensions of change that we will be exploring in the report.

A new structure of opportunities: One effect of the transition has been an increase in the diversity of employment along with large shifts in the pattern of industries, occupations and ownership. People have been squeezed out of agriculture and basic industry while sectors such as retail trade, services and finance have expanded dramati- cally and entirely new types of occupation have emerged. The new occupations and sectors offer handsome rewards to people with the right training and skills, but the un- educated are losing ground as the old egali-

tarian structures of wages and seniority break down. Moreover China's education system has gone through a series of wrench- ing changes over the past 50 years, and mil- lions of middle-aged workers now face unemployment burdened with outmoded and poor-quality schooling.

The emergence of labour markets: During the pre-reform period China did not have labour markets. In urban areas the supply and demand for labour was determined through a system of centralised planning.

The manpower needs of enterprises were set by the plan, and overstaffing was common as a way to avoid urban unemployment. The limitless supply of labour in the countryside was sealed off from the cities by the household registration system, which placed strict controls on rural-urban migration. China's system of household registration (hukou) limits a person's ability to move or work outside the area where they were born. The tightest restrictions are on people moving from rural to urban areas, and in most places it is very difficult to change one's registration. Labour mobility was extremely low, and a typical employee might spend his or her entire working life in the same enterprise. But the basic terms of the employment relationship have changed. The labour contract system, first introduced in the mid- 1980s, allows employees to be hired for a specific period of employment with no guar- antee of re-employment. The centrally planned system of work allocation and trans- fers has gradually shifted toward a system that allows more choice for both for the worker and the employer. Chinese workers now have essentially four channels for job movement: traditional work unit assignment or transfer, seeking work through different types of employment exchange or labour intermediaries, individual job search, and self-employment.

Arrangements for providing housing, medical and old age benefits posed another major obstacle to labour mobility, as benefits were usually financed and administered by individual enterprises and were not transferable.

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These systems are gradually being replaced as housing is privatised and medical and pension plans are administered through local or provincial agencies or are bought directly from commercial insurers.

New wealth, new fears: An important goal of the reforms was to promote efficiency by giving enterprise managers more autonomy in determining staffing levels, wages, benefits and working conditions. As a result Chi- nese workers are faced with new kinds of work incentives, both positive and negative.

Public enterprise managers have re- introduced a variety of bonuses and piece- rate systems to reward productive work, incentives that had been banned during the Cultural Revolution years. Private sector firms will pay high wages to attract skilled workers and managers; rural migrants find that even low-level jobs pay better than what they could earn at home.

On the other hand, wage inequality has increased and workers under all types of ownership must now confront the possibility of becoming laid off or unemployed. By mid- 1998, at least 11 million employees had been placed in a new employment category, xia gang, which removes them from work but grants a small living allowance and rights to company benefits for up to three years. A much larger number of the unemployed have no work and no ties to a former employer, and only a small minority of them are receiving unemployment insurance, training, or help to find a new job. A mini- mum living standards programme is being put in place for families most in need, but very few families are covered. The present system is not working well, and there is in- tense debate about the best way to provide and finance social security under conditions of prolonged high unemployment.

Competition from the countryside: Geo- graphic mobility is another factor that has re-shaped job markets and urban life in general. In the 1980s restrictions on the movement of rural people to the cities began to be relaxed to fill the growing need for urban

labour. By the middle of the 1990s there were between 60 and 100 million peasants in the cities, most of whom were working with temporary residence permits or with no permits at all. As a source of cheap reliable labour these floating migrants have been a boon to employers, and migrants' small- scale trading and service activities have im- proved the quality of city life through in- creasing the range of goods and services available. But "the rising tide of migrants"

has also brought wage competition, conges- tion, fears about crime, and civic resentment on the part of locals. As economic growth has slowed, competition from migrants has complicated the task of finding re- employment for residents who have lost their jobs.

Making sense of it all: The reforms have shaped the basic conditions of daily life.

Most urban people have benefited a great deal from changes over the past twenty years. Incomes are higher, housing is larger, food and consumer goods are far more di- verse and affordable, and personal initiative is more likely to pay off. Equally important, the gradual pace of Chinese reform (compared to Russia, for example) has allowed time for some quite fundamental changes in attitude to occur. A prime example is the shift away from an entitlement attitude toward employment. As Rawski (1999) puts it,

“In 1980, 1985 or even 1990, the idea that firms might sack large numbers of SOE [state-owned enterprise] workers would have seemed incredible to China's urban populace. But by 1992 or 1993 even the dullest SOE employees must have realized that in the end the state would not protect their tenure – and that the end was coming soon.”

But getting used to it does not mean that everyone is happy. The rules for ”making it”

in urban China – attaining a decent living, security, social respect – have radically changed. Market reform has incurred tre- mendous social costs for some sections of the populace, and people are well aware that

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B eijing

Wuxi

Zhuhai

there is a great deal more change to come.

Above all the transition demands flexibility, and that is not a trait evenly distributed in the population.

1.3 Three Cities

The survey presented in this book does not represent urban China as a whole. Beijing, Wuxi and Zhuhai were not chosen randomly, but were selected after an investiga- tion of more than two dozen candidates located throughout China's coastal provinces.

Our intent in the research was to explore the effects of the transition in cities of different scale, region, and with different economic profiles. Sampling of respondents within each city area was done according to strict statistical standards, but the sample as a whole is best understood as a series of sys- tematically chosen case studies.

Beijing's economy is dominated by state enterprises and government services, and the older system of labour allocation has been relatively slow to change. Beijing is now faced with serious problems of unemployment and layoffs in the state sector. Wuxi, an ”open coastal city” near Shanghai, has followed an economic development model based on collective enterprises and has ab- sorbed large numbers of rural labourers. It was also a test city for policy initiatives to reform state enterprises in the late 1980s.

Zhuhai, near Macao in the South, was a relatively undeveloped provincial centre when it became a Special Economic Zone in 1980.

Labour practices became market-oriented quite early in the reforms, and the economy is dominated by private, foreign and joint venture enterprises.

Market reforms have never been imple- mented in a uniform way across China, and the locations and divergent histories of the cities allow us to compare some of the effects of different local policies and institu- tional settings. In Chapters 3 and 4 we will return for a much closer look at the cities' demography and labour force characteristics, but a brief sketch of each place is of- fered below.

Figure 1.1: The SOMM Sample Cities

Beijing: old ways, new ways

Beijing is the nation’s capital and one of China’s largest cities. At the end of 1997 the entire Beijing metropolitan region had a population of 12.2 million. Of the three cities in the SOMM sample Beijing has the widest range of occupations and offers the broadest scope for occupational mobility.

That is partly due to Beijing's much greater scale but it is also because of the city's unique position as the seat of national government. That creates opportunities in administration and Party organisations, science, media and other fields which can only be supported at the national level. Service sector employment (public utilities, education and health, research, finance and insurance, other public and private services) has grown rapidly during the years of market transition. It is now the dominant sector and was responsible for 114 billion RMB or 57 percent of the city's Gross domestic product (GDP) in 1998 and some 60 percent of employment. But Beijing is not just a government service town. It is also one of China's largest manufacturing centres and throughout the 1990s supported a booming construction industry. Manufacturing and construction output accounted for 39 percent of GDP and a slightly smaller share of employment. Commercial agriculture made up

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about 4 percent of GDP in 1998 (Beijing Statistical Yearbook 1999).

The State-owned sector still controls a commanding share of the economy in Bei- jing. State-owned work units were responsible for roughly two-thirds of all employment, and another 10 percent was in collective enterprises. Particularly in the state- owned sector the traditional systems of planned labour allocation and management have remained relatively intact despite Cen- tral government reforms in these areas.

However Beijing is also home to a growing and quite sophisticated set of foreign-owned companies and joint ventures, as well as Chinese owned companies and individual or family owned businesses.

Beijing exemplifies the dilemma of stability versus efficiency in developing a labour market. On the one hand, it is very important for China's leadership that social stability be maintained in the nation's capital. This is an important reason for the continued domi- nance of the state sector and for Beijing's relatively slow evolution toward true labour markets. But state enterprises have been troubled in Beijing, as elsewhere, and the concentration of state enterprises may prove to be a liability as these units restructure or are allowed to go bankrupt.

Layoffs and unemployment have become prominent social problems. One response of the city authorities has been to improve unemployment insurance and other social security arrangements for residents. Another response, by no means unique to Beijing, has been to shore up the labour market pros- pects of local workers by limiting competition from outside. In many occupations and industries, employment of migrant labour was restricted even before the current down- turn in the economy, and the restrictions became tighter after 1997. Migrants without proper working papers have been expelled, and many concentrations of migrant housing in the city centre have been torn down to make room for new construction.

Wuxi: new wealth from the collective sector

Wuxi is located in one of the most economically advanced regions of China – close to Shanghai, in the delta region of the Yangtze River – and it is nationally famous for the development of township and village collective enterprises. It had a population of about 1.1 million in 1998.

Wuxi was chosen to represent the ”Sunan”

or south Jiangsu model of development in which township and village industries and other collective enterprises have historically played a leading role (see Ma and Fan 1994, Christiansen 1992). Wuxi’s collective enterprises expanded rapidly in the 1980s and early 90s, absorbing large numbers of rural labourers from the surrounding rural coun- ties and from other provinces. It was designated as one of China's Open Coastal Cities in the mid-1980s as part of a program to attract foreign export-oriented investment.

Since the market reforms began in 1978 the city's population has grown by nearly two- thirds, with over half of that growth due to net in-migration. GDP per capita also grew rapidly after 1985, and along with expan- sion, the structure of the economy changed.

The share of output in manufacturing reached its peak in the mid-1980's but has fallen steadily since 1991, from 69 percent to 58 percent of the total. Agricultural has declined, while the share of services increased from 22 percent to 38 percent of the total.

In recent years economic and population growth has slowed and the structure of ownership has begun to shift away from state and collective enterprises. In 1996 the state accounted for 57 percent of the workforce in the industrial sector, but only 41 percent of the output. Collectives were responsible for 22 percent, and foreign or joint ventures – with a much smaller share of the workforce – produced nearly 30 percent of all industrial output. State and collective enterprises have been hurt by over-staffing and competitive pressures, and the number employed

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in these enterprises has been constantly falling since 1995.

Wuxi was a trial city for national plans to rationalise the structure of capital in state enterprises by allowing some to go bankrupt and others to transform themselves into share-holding corporations with workers holding a portion of the shares. The number of mergers and bankruptcies increased dra- matically in the mid-1990s. With local collective enterprises facing heavy competitive pressures and state enterprises being restruc- tured, the problem of layoffs and unemployed workers has become increasingly pronounced, though on a much smaller scale than in Beijing.

Zhuhai: to become gloriously rich, or a little less poor

Zhuhai is "a dazzling pearl, like a morning sun" according to its promotional site on the Internet. It was chosen to represent the new unfettered market economy of south-eastern China, in which domestic and foreign private enterprises dominate production and the state focuses on administration, social services and infrastructure.

Zhuhai is located in another of China’s most economically advanced regions, the Pearl River delta. It is adjacent to Macao and close to Hong Kong. At the end of 1998 the total population was about 1.2 million, of whom about 40 percent were floating migrants. Like California, it is said of Zhuhai that ”people live there but no one was actu- ally born there.” That is an exaggeration, but there is much truth to it: Zhuhai was a city of about 360,000 when it was designated a Special Economic Zones in 1980.

As part of its early efforts to open up the economy to foreign investment the central government set up a series of Special Eco- nomic Zones (teshu jingjiqu), primarily in south-eastern China. Zhuhai was one of the first four Zones. Within these enclaves private companies paid lower import and income taxes, and qualifying companies (such

as those bringing in sought-after technolo- gies) paid no taxes at all for the first two to five years. Joint ventures with foreign firms were relatively easy to establish. Equally important, companies within the Special Economic Zones were given much more autonomy in pricing, marketing, production, and in managing their employees. As early as 1980 foreign and joint ventures were allowed to lay off unnecessary workers and set their own wages (Xie and Costa 1991:

321-22, Crane 1991).

In short, Zhuhai had an economy that was market-oriented from the very beginning of its take-off as an industrial centre. By Chi- nese standards Zhuhai and the whole south- eastern region have had a long history of acting in accordance with market principles, and that applies to provincial and local government as well as employers. For example, Zhuhai's municipal government has adopted a range of practical measures to attract good quality labour from elsewhere, and the city's regulation of outside labour is relatively relaxed and benevolent. According to local government regulations any resident of one year’s standing or longer comes under the administrative category of long-term residents. All temporary residents can take up local household registration after five con- tinuous years of residence, provided they have no criminal record and have stable employment and housing.

As the management of labour and of wages in Zhuhai was transferred to market mecha- nisms early on, the proportion of workers who obtain jobs through state allocation is now quite small. Even a large proportion of its technical high school and tertiary students find jobs through the marketplace.

One official summarised the city's labour market philosophy as "mutual choice, equal competition, survival of the fittest.”

Zhuhai has also been at the forefront in providing the legal basis for a ”portable” social security system that is not based on ties to a specific work unit. In 1993 Guangdong Province passed the Zhuhai Special Eco-

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nomic Zone Employee Social Insurance Regulations which stipulated that all enterprise employees in Zhuhai had to be covered by old-age, medical, worker’s compensa- tion, and unemployment insurance through insurance companies. Costs would be jointly borne by the government, enterprises, and the individual worker. A similar process was begun for local government employees. At the national level similar regulations were issued two years later, but they only covered basic old-age insurance. The Zhuhai legisla- tion is quite progressive, and is intended to make it possible for people to change jobs without losing benefits. However, as we will see from the survey data, implementation has not come very far in the private sector.

The city's main industries are in manufacturing electrical machinery and parts, electron- ics and communications equipment, com- puter discs and other newly emerging industrial fields. Total gross industrial output was 49 billion yuan in 1998, and most of this wealth is created by private industry. Some 77 percent of industrial output was from private enterprises, and 60 percent derived from private foreign or joint enterprises. Al- though the state-owned and collective sectors use more workers per unit of output, they are also a minority in terms of employment. Combining across all types of economic activity state and collective work units account for about 37 percent of all jobs.

Unemployment is rising in Zhuhai, as in the sample other cities. According to official statistics, registered unemployment doubled from 1994 to 1996, and in 1998 Zhuhai had the highest unemployment rate of the three cities. With its heavier reliance on foreign investment capital and exports, all of south- eastern China was hard-hit by the Southeast Asian financial crisis and the devaluation of competitor countries' currencies in 1997-98 (Solinger 1999:1-5). Zhuhai was severely affected, as more than three-quarters of its export trade is with Hong Kong, Macao and Southeast Asia. From 1997 to 1998 total exports rose by only one percent (to about 3

billion yuan) and then dropped by nearly 10 percent in 1999.

In a sense, the three cities might be said to represent three distinct stages in the development of China’s labour market. At present Beijing is still dominated by a planned and bureaucratically administered economy, although there is an increasingly large and sophisticated private sector and state enterprises are themselves going through fairly drastic restructuring. In Wuxi planned administration and the marketplace coexist, and as the older forms of state and collective enterprise decline, they are replaced by market-oriented arrangements. Zhuhai may represent the future of the Chinese urban economy in some respects, with a system in which the marketplace predominates.

1.4 The Survey

The SOMM is the product of a long- standing research co-operation between the Fafo Institute of Applied Social Science and the National Research Centre for Science and Technology for Development (NRCSTD) in Beijing. Fafo is an independent non-profit research institution based in Oslo, Norway, and NRCSTD is a branch institute of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China.¹ The project was carried out with the generous support of the Royal Norwegian Foreign Ministry, along with matching funds provided by NRCSTD and its parent organisation.

Research co-operation between NRCSTD and Fafo dates back to 1994 and the present project began in August 1996. After a first round of discussions with Fafo on the basic scope and design of the research NRCSTD's first step was to form an Advisory Panel with practitioners from government and ex- perts from the academic world. Two members of the Panel, Ge Yanfeng from the De- velopment Research Center of the State Council and Dr. Li Lulu of People's Univer- sity, worked closely with NRCSTD on all

1 In 1998 the name was changed to The National Evaluation Center for Science and Technology.

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later stages of the project and contributed to the Chinese version of the Final Report.

The next steps were to carry out a literature search and to conduct interviews with officials in the ministries of Labour and Public Security, the State Planning Commission and nine other ministries and commissions.

The interviews were most helpful in identifying current and upcoming policy issues, the types of data that were most urgently needed for policy purposes, and unpublished research that had been done by the ministries. This groundwork also yielded two NRCSTD papers on migration policy issues.

The Questionnaire

Questionnaire design was a long and tortu- ous process with many creative arguments that carried over from the conference table to the dinner table. To look at mobility in all its dimensions calls for quite detailed information about the job and work unit, the person and his or her household setting, and the sequence of job movements over time. The questionnaire had to be both wide ranging and in depth, had to cover the person's current situation and recent history, and capture information at both the individual and household levels.

Figure 1.2: Overview of the questionnaire

It was not possible to cover the full range of topics for everyone in the household, as the practical interviewing time limit for surveys of this kind is about 90 minutes in China, even with a trained interviewer. The solution was to begin the interview with a household section that asked demographic, migration and employment information for all household members. The remaining questions were are asked of one randomly selected individual (RSI), chosen from household members who were at least 16 years old. In the analyses information from the full household roster is always used when it is available, but for many topics we rely on the sub-sample of RSIs.

Figure 1.2 shows how the questionnaire was structured. The household roster is followed by questions on the RSI's parents and spouse to collect data on inter-generational mobility. There is a section on the transition from school to work and characteristics of the respondent's first job, followed by an extensive 5-year work history. This is a month by month record of the person's primary employment, second jobs, periods of layoff or leave, unemployment, job search activities, training and retirement. A series of follow- up questions was asked about each state or episode. The work history record spans the period from October 1993 to November/

December 1998, or nearly all of the current socialist market economy phase of reform.

All Household Members

•Demographics

•Household composition

•Education

•Party membership

•Labour force status

•Information about the current or most recent job

Selection of RSI

Information on RSI's Parents and Spouse (if not in the household)

Transition to work and the First Job

Work, Unemployment and Training History, 1993-1998

•Characteristics of the main job

•Second jobs

•Periods of lay-off or leave

•Unemployment

•Looking for work

•School and training

•Temporary work

•Retirement

Benefits, Living Conditions and Attitudes

•Medical and old age benefits

•Housing

•Income

•Job satisfaction

•Preferred occupation and work unit ownership

•Opinions on unemployment and re- employment policies

•Government performance in helping the laid-off and unemployed

Geographical Mobility

•Measures of migration

•Assistance in finding work and housing

•Documents and permits

•Barriers and problems encountered in the city

•Ties to the home place

•Opinions on agricultural land policy options

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Other parts of the data set cover medical and pension arrangements, income, housing, job satisfaction and aspirations, migration, and opinions about proposed reforms.

The Sample

Sampling was one of the most challenging aspects of the design. In the past most urban surveys in China have focused either on the population with local household registration status or on the migrant population. To make rigorous comparisons between the situation of migrants and locals it is essential to have a unified sample, but no detailed maps or other comprehensive sampling frames were available for any of the cities. Another com- plication is that some segments of the migrant population live in shops, construction sites or other non-residential places.

To solve these problems two types of sample were drawn. The majority of respondents were selected from two-stage cluster samples based on Residential Committee lists.

Residential Committees are neighbourhood- level administrative units found throughout urban China, usually made up of 400 to 1000 households. The first stage was to se- lect a sample of clusters (Residential Com- mittee areas) in each city after stratifying the list according to location and size. The chances of a Committee being selected were proportional to the number of households it contained. In the second stage of sampling we focused on the selected areas and made lists all households living within their boundaries with help from the local Resi- dential Committee staff. Then households were selected from each cluster.

To capture migrants living on construction sites or in other workplaces we selected a separate group of clusters based on neighbourhood-level police stations. These are the local units responsible for keeping records of registered migrants, including those who do not live in normal housing. Individual migrants were then sampled from the police station lists, and the migrant's entire household (if any) was included in the survey. For both migrants and residents a third stage of

sampling took place during the survey interview itself. Within each househould one randomly-selected individual (RSI) was chosen for more extensive questions about work history, migration experience and other topics.

The target number for the sample was 7500 households, evenly divided among the three cities. Because migrants are a minority, they were over-sampled relative to their propor- tions in the population to obtain more reliable estimates. In all analyses statistical weights were applied to compensate for sample design effects like this, and to adjust for any biases due to non-response. A detailed description of sampling procedures appears in the technical appendix to this report.

The outer limits of cities can be defined in many ways, and some outlying parts of the cities' metropolitan areas were not included in the SOMM sampling frame.² There were also some Residential Committee areas with high concentrations of police, military and civil servants which we were not allowed to sample, particularly in Beijing.

Lastly, readers should note that each of the three cities is a completely independent sample, and for that reason the analyses in this report are normally presented separately for each city. Although the survey estimates are based on reliable probability samples within each metropolitan area, the cities can not be combined to represent urban China or any other meaningful unit.

Fieldwork

The survey was pilot-tested in May 1998, with interviews of 300 households in Beijing and Zhuhai. The Pilot was a small-scale but comprehensive test of the entire survey operation, including sampling procedures, field organisation, training and data entry. About

2 The excluded areas in Wuxi and Zhuhai were small but in Beijing all the outer suburbs were excluded, covering some half of larger Beijing population.

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15 percent of all cases were re-interviewed for quality control, and team leaders or NRCSTD researchers observed 20 percent of all interviews. Immediately after the Pilot there was a two-day debriefing seminar for field staff at all levels.

The main survey fieldwork was carried out in November and December 1998, with a field staff comprised 302 interviewers, 44 team leaders, and 20 re-interview/ quality control staff across the three cities.

Interviewers in Beijing and Wuxi were social science university or graduate students; in Zhuhai, interviewers were recruited from the city residential committee authority and all had worked for the 1996 sample census or other surveys. All interviewers received 40 to 50 hours of training on the questionnaire and field procedures. NRCSTD also arranged for radio, newspaper, and television publicity about the survey.

The field organisation functioned smoothly and produced a final tally of 7326 completed household and RSI interviews, a response rate of 95 percent. This is a good response rate for urban China, especially for surveys involving large numbers of floating migrants. Local Residential Committee staff were asking respondents to stay home on the night of the interview and helping interviewers to find the sampled structures. All completed interviews were checked by a team of editors, who also helped with the re- interview caseload. In total, about 15 percent of all households were re-interviewed for quality control: 10 percent were selected at random and received a short re-interview, and another 5 percent were re-interviewed more extensively due to signs of problems with the original questionnaire.

Analysis and Reporting

After the data were entered and cleaned the NRCSTD and Fafo teams began preparing reports in Chinese and English. The NRCSTD team first produced a limited- circulation Preliminary Tabulation Report in Chinese to make the most important findings

immediately available to policy makers and the academic community. The Fafo and NRCSTD groups worked from a common data set, and analyses and report drafts were freely shared. Fafo researchers visited Bei- jing in mid-1999 to conduct a seminar on multivariate analysis techniques and the NRCSTD team came to Oslo in November 1999 for a conference on the policy implica- tions of the findings.

Box 1.1: The SOMM data set at a glance

• Sample size (including vacant units and non-interviews): 7835 households

• Completed household and RSI interviews: 7326 (2446 Beijing, 2437 Wuxi, 2443 Zhuhai)

• Total household members covered:

19,752

• Response rate: 95 percent

From the outset it was agreed that the Chi- nese and international versions of the report would be parallel but independent. Censor- ship, or the possibility of censorship, played no part in that decision. Rather, it was understood on both sides that an international audience would require a great deal more background information on recent Chinese history, institutions and policy issues but would be familiar with basic market con- cepts and economic theory. For most Chi- nese readers the ”backgrounding” requirements would be quite the opposite. Our NRCSTD colleagues reviewed the chapter drafts for factual accuracy and were most helpful in correcting misconceptions about the Chinese legal framework, service processes, official statistical definitions, and many other matters. However all final deci- sions on the issues to be addressed and in- terpretation of the statistical facts were left to the individual writers and editors on each side. The Fafo authors bear full responsibil- ity for all analyses and interpretations in this report, and any remaining errors.

1.5 Contents of the Report

The next three chapters set the stage for later analyses with a summary of China's institu-

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tional development and an introduction to the SOMM sample.

In chapter 2, The Background of Reform, Christopher Buckley gives an historical overview of the various phases of development in recent Chinese history, with an emphasis on the period of reform since 1978.

Dr. Buckley also discusses the key policy and political developments that have shaped social and geographic mobility in China over recent decades. Finally, he explores some the broader issues that are raised by examining social, occupational and geographic mobility in contemporary urban China, such as rising levels of income inequality, growing regional differences in economic performance, and the continuing role of government in employment, social life and welfare.

In chapter 3, Profiles of the Labour Force, David Drury looks at some of the demographic and social factors underlying labour market behaviour in the SOMM data. With its low dependency ratios, the demography of Chinese cities contributes to a high level of demand for jobs. In the SOMM sample cities, three-quarters of the entire population are of working age. The populations of all three cities are ethnically homogeneous, but they all have substantial numbers of floating migrants. Overall differences in the education levels of men and women are not large, but older people and those of rural origin stand at a great educational disadvantage in the labour market. Labour force participation rates are high, particularly for women.

However in market-oriented Zhuhai a more Western style pattern may be emerging in which women work through their young twenties, then withdraw during the prime child-raising years if they can afford it and re-join the labour force in middle age. Retir- ees are the largest single group of non- working people, but life has been difficult for them in recent years. The real value of pensions has fallen and many retirees from financially troubled enterprises have not been receiving pensions that are owed to

them. Others have been forced into early retirement as an alternative to being laid off.

In Chapter 4, Working People, David Drury, explores the new patterns of industry and occupation, working conditions and benefits that have arisen in the sample cities, with an emphasis on differences between state, collective and private ownership.

Along with the shift from manufacturing to services and trade and the explosive growth of the private sector, there is clear evidence that the era of lifetime employment has ended. About half of all employees in the sample now have work contracts; private sector workers are less likely than others to have contracts, and when they do the contract period tends to be short. Private companies appear to be violating the laws on working hours on a massive scale, although compliance is much better in some cities than in others.

Regarding medical insurance and old age support, the SOMM data show that a great many working people are ”falling through the cracks” as China struggles to bring private sector employees into the system and introduce new forms of finance and risk pooling. Private sector firms are much less likely to provide benefits, and the development of insurance alternatives is still at a very primitive stage. Privatisation of the housing stock is making steady progress in the sample cities, but for those who rent from the work unit or local authority housing remains a fantastic bargain. Women are much less likely than men to receive these valuable subsidies, even when seniority in the work unit and other factors are taken into account. Wage differences are modest by international standards, but they appear to be growing. Although foreign and joint venture firms pay much higher wages in Beijing, the state remains the best-paying sector overall when industry, occupation and personal characteristics such as education are taken into account. Education is by far the most important factor in determining how much a person makes, and where the market has the

David DruryMarie W. Arneberg(eds.)

David Drury

Marie W. Arneberg (eds.)

No More Forevers

The Chinese Labour Force in a Time of Reform

No More Forevers

David Drury and Marie W. Arneberg (eds.)

No More Forevers

The Chinese Labour Force in a Time of Reform

Table of Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Boxes

List of Abbrevations

Preface

1 The Survey of Occupational Mobility and Migration