March 2006 China News

Imagine 25 million men and women about the combined population of Australia and New Zealand pressing for new jobs. That is the daunting reality that the Chinese economy faces this year, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has reported.

This is the country's worst employment crisis ever, as the children of baby boomers flood the job market seeking their first jobs. Their parents were born in the early 1960s, and they themselves in the late 1980s.

China can generate only an estimated 11 million new jobs this year, according to the NDRC. And at no time this decade did they exceed 10 million a year.

This means that despite a record number of employment openings about 11 million jobs have to be found for about 14 million people more.

Guo Yue, a researcher with the Institute for Labour Studies under the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MOLASS), told China Daily: "The government is racking its brains to create jobs as it braces for a real tough year."

An even greater challenge is that the crisis will continue for more than just one year, said Du Yang, a researcher at the Institute of Population and Labour Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The mismatch between job supply and demand will continue till 2010, or the end of China's 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10), Du forecast. He agreed that since there is no control over demand, "the only way is to enlarge supply, or to create as many jobs as possible."

The most effective way to create new jobs, he pointed out, is to create a conducive business environment for small- and medium-sized enterprises, especially labour-intensive operations.

Of the 25 million people who need urban jobs, according to the NDRC, 9 million will be those joining the job market, 3 million will be former rural residents who have recently moved to cities, and the remaining 13 million are workers let go or about to be retrenched by their employers, mainly as a result of the continuous restructuring of State-owned enterprises.

Of the 9 million newcomers, 4.1 million will be graduates, more than at any time in China's history, and an increase of 750,000 over last year.

Some job agencies have already reported feeling the pressure of the unprecedented number of applications. "The peak demand was a week earlier this year," said Fan Fangfang, director of the Shanghai Employment Centre's operations in the city's Pudong area.

Traditionally, she told China Daily, the peak season would be two weeks after the Spring Festival (Lunar New Year). "But this year, applicants began swarming our office as soon as we came back from holidays." The Spring Festival fell on January 29 this year.

A second peak period for job agencies will be in late spring, when most college graduates enter the market; and a third just before winter when most contracts come to an end and a new wave of job hopping starts.

But thanks to the fast growth of the economy, the market is also showing helpful signs, according to MOLASS officials. In one recent survey of 2,600 companies in 25 provinces, 80 per cent of employers planned to recruit more workers in the weeks following the Spring Festival.

The number of job vacancies in the survey showed an annual growth of 15 per cent.

Geographically, most vacancies are concentrated in the export-led industries and services in the coastal cities, mainly in the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the southeastern part of Fujian Province, MOLASS data showed.

Zhuang Jian, senior economist with the Beijing office of the Asian Development Bank, told China Daily that despite the seriousness of the situation, the government has no need to resort to administrative means to tackle the jobs crisis.

Instead, he said, the government may come up with targeted solutions based on an analysis of job seekers in terms of their age, education and skills, so as to help them become more competitive in the job market.

Training, for instance, should be more widely accessible for the workers newly migrating from rural areas, he suggested.

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - The NBA has committed its share of fouls in recent years -- it's never a good thing for a player to go after a fan in the stands -- but franchise values keep rising and corporate sponsors are jostling to get into business with the league. A big reason why is China.

Basketball's popularity is booming in China, thanks in large part to two decades of spadework by the NBA. League games have been televised weekly in China since 1991, and its stars have been visiting ever since. The NBA's appeal in China now goes well beyond the national pride in 7'6" Yao Ming of the Houston Rockets, a one-man marketing machine who boasts endorsement contracts with such global companies as Reebok International and PepsiCo.

No sports league has done as well as the NBA in exporting itself to China. "The NBA is poised to continue its evolution from an urban basketball league to a global entertainment company," says Rick Horrow, a sports analyst and visiting expert in sports law at the Harvard Law School.

For evidence, look no further than the NBA's All-Star weekend last Month in Yao Ming's adopted hometown of Houston. Five Chinese TV networks, including the big national broadcaster CCTV, will send crews to provide coverage. By contrast, U.S. coverage was on cable's TNT, which can't match the ratings of the U.S. broadcast networks.

The Chinese networks telecast such events as the T-Mobile Rookie Challenge; Sprite Rising Stars Slam Dunk; Foot Locker Three-Point Shootout; PlayStation Skills Challenge; RadioShack Shooting Stars; NBA All-Star Jam Session presented by Nokia.

To expand its reach, the NBA announced earlier this month that it will offer live webcasts of games over the Internet in China with a partner called NuSports. The NBA also operates a Chinese Web site with a local partner, Sohu.com, which gets about 3 million page views a day.

"We have a very sophisticated base of fans who follow the game and play the game," says Heidi Ueberroth, executive vice president of the NBA, who oversees the league's global expansion.

Analysts say the NBA generates about $3 billion a year in revenues, about 20 percent of it from overseas. China is the league's biggest market outside of the U.S., and revenues are growing by better than 10 percent a year, according to Ueberroth. She's made five trips to China in the past year, and the league has about 50 employees in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, most of them Chinese nationals.

They get a big assist from marketing partners like Adidas, the German-based shoe and sportswear company, which brought Rockets star Tracy McGrady to China last summer to introduce his T-Mac sneakers. Besides McGrady, NBA stars LeBron James and Allen Iverson visited China last summer, courtesy of their sponsors, Nike and Reebok.

"Basketball's the most important sport in China," says Lawrence Norman, a marketing executive with Adidas, which has about 2,000 stores there. It expects to double that number by the time the Olympics are held in Beijing in 2008.

In a twist on the usual pattern of globalization, a Chinese sportswear manufacturer called Li-Ning recently signed a promotional contract with a little-known Cleveland Cavaliers player named Damon Jones who is known as a showy three-point shooter. Chinese fans tend to favor smaller, quicker NBA stars. McGrady has the best-selling NBA jersey in China, followed by Iverson and then Yao.

"They're very proud of Yao Ming, and they watch him on TV, but Tracy is a wing player, he's more athletic, he's more entertaining and they like his style of play," says Norman.

Nothing appears likely to slow down the NBA's marketing machine in China. A week ago, according to The Washington Post , a Chinese flooring company announced a partnership with the league and its retired Hall of Famer David Cowens. Cowens, who is 57, told reporters he likes quality flooring because he used to fall down a lot during games

China wards off Great Wall ravers

Beijing has called up a team of dedicated Great Wall monitors to protect it from damage from tourists, adventurous hikers and party revelers.

The Great Wall, which snakes its way across more than 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles) of China, receives an estimated 10 million visitors a year, mostly to the mere 10 km of wall opened to tourists at Badaling, the nearest stretch to Beijing.

All that traffic had taken a heavy toll on the structure, prompting the move to employ local villagers to keep watch, the report said.

Less than 20 percent of the original facade of the wall near the capital had been preserved well, Yu Ping, deputy director of Beijing's cultural heritage administration, was quoted as saying.

"Almost every brick at Badaling has been carved with people's names and graffiti," the newspaper said.

More adventurous visitors climbed wilder, crumblier sections that are not officially open to the public, making them potentially dangerous and more susceptible to damage.

Stretches of the wall near the capital have also become popular sites for summer raves.

Last July, "some participants were involved in such indecent and illegal activities as urinating and drug abuse on the wall", the China Daily said of a party that was widely reported and sparked a public uproar.

The Great Wall was begun in 221 BC during the Qin dynasty as an earthen structure to ward off invaders, though much of the existing structure was built much later.

The United Nations listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1987 and it is protected against development by Chinese law.

But it is not clear how effective the new wall-watching team will be -- the same villages that will provide the monitors have been exploiting the wall for their own gain for years.

Locals set up ladders at unopened stretches, allowing visitors to climb on to the wall for a price, and have used its heavy bricks to build their own homes.

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