A growing proportion of Chinese workers lack the specialized abilities needed to power the country’s increasingly sophisticated economy.
Up to 9 percent of China’s workers lost their jobs during the economic shutdown and have been unable to find new work because they lack marketable skills, according to a study by Peking University.
The problem is especially acute among the country’s 290 million internal migrant workers, most of whom lack any skills beyond manual labor.
Since the pandemic struck, the Chinese government has prioritized professional training, pledging the equivalent of $15 billion to fund vocational programs.
However, few graduates of such programs report finding work in their new fields within three months of graduation.
“Don’t expect our course to help you find good employment, even when the government says so,” warned the director of a Chengdu vocational school that trained more than 1,000 people last year.
Government subsidies fail to pay the cost of teaching, the schools complain.
A school teaching cosmetology, for example, receives a government stipend of 800 renminbi (rm) per student but it costs the school 2,000 rm to teach the full 300-hour course. As a result, the government gave the school permission to cut the course to 120 hours, which leaves students inadequately prepared for the job market.
“Our goal is to help students learn the basics, not become an expert,” said one training program official.
TREND FORECAST: China is betting on its people.
And, as we reported, the 20th century was the American century and the 21st century will be the Chinese century. The business of China is business. The business of America has been war.
For nearly a decade, Gerald Celente has forecast societies that would thrive in the age of globalization and economic contractions would be “self-sustaining.” The Chinese government’s “dual circulation” policy, articulated by its leader Xi Jinping, is that it must retool in a world of declining economic demand and rely less on exports and more on robust domestic demand, thus becoming more self-sustaining. While most of the world is still locked down, China quickly opened up for business.
Unlike the United States, where the Bigs keep getting bigger and the one percent has gotten over a trillion dollars richer since the March lockdown while majority of people got poorer, in China, small and medium size businesses (SMEs) represent more than 90 percent of the enterprises in the country and contribute over 60 percent to the GDP.
