China should strive to improve its unemployment statistics, as these are key to better capturing the country’s economic reality and would go a long way toward better implementing leadership’s job-priority strategy in 2025, a scholar has urged.
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The suggestion by Zhu Changzheng, co-founder of the privately run Changping Economic Forum, came amid lingering controversy surrounding China’s urban-unemployment metrics, particularly the jobless rate among the youngest class of workers.
“The current surveyed urban unemployment rate is inadequate for this task and requires necessary reform and expansion,” Zhu wrote in a recent article published in the 2025 outlook issue of Caijing Magazine.
“In the future, employment and unemployment rates will be just as important, if not more so, than gross domestic product in evaluating the effectiveness of government work.”
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, employed individuals are those aged 16 and above who have worked at least one hour in a week to earn wages or business income. Unemployed individuals are those who are jobless but willing and able to work.
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While the “one-hour” standard aligns with the International Labour Organization’s definition, Zhu argued that it fails to reflect critical factors such as a worker’s income level, whether it covers living costs, or how it compares with the local minimum wage.
Counting all [flexible workers] as employed individuals clearly lacks credibility