Employment Crisis? Welcome to Beijing
In virtually every focus group and virtually every conversation I've had since arriving in Beijing, one theme has been consistent: there are jobs to be had.
I was last here just before the Olympics. I remember a countdown clock in Tiananmen Square, scaffolding and beautification projects everywhere, and a massive sense of civic pride. Today, with the Olympics receding into the past—or at least temporarily overshadowed by the financial crisis—you’d perhaps expect a more subdued environment.
But you’d be wrong.
Let’s start with traffic. It still takes an hour to get across town, even though the roads are wide and traffic planning is good. That’s because there are so many cars here. That may sound painfully obvious, but here’s something that isn’t: there are fewer bicycles. Strikingly fewer. And that speaks to a rising tide of prosperity.
There are also more buildings here, and they’re substantially taller buildings. Fly into Beijing and for many miles you see a variety of one-story living and factory spaces. But as you approach the City, you now see many miles of high-rise living spaces and, like Saõ Paulo, several competing downtown business hubs. The difference between Beijing and Saõ Paulo, of course, is that in Beijing, these competing business hubs aren’t generational replacements for one another—downtown’s not moving, it’s multiplying.
But here’s the real news: there are more jobs here. Many of these aren’t jobs you or I might want. None of them pay what you’d want to be paid. But they exist, and relative to the local economy, they’re good jobs, and getting better. I don’t want to paint an overly rosy picture. There have been challenges here over the past couple of years. If the employment market is good, it’s relative to the U.S. employment market, not to the employment market here two years ago. At the airport, I spoke at some length to a recent college graduate in marketing who had been looking for a marketing job for several months—he was working at the airport to make ends meet—and he told me that his story was common among his graduating class.
Now here’s the thing: there was a job at the airport available to tide him over. I asked how many of his friends had this sort of jobs, jobs they didn’t want, or were overqualified for. He said, “most of us.” I’ve heard variations on his story a number of times from a number of sources since I came here. But the moral of the story is always the same. With a national savings rate hovering around an incredible 40%, a retirement age of 55 for men and 50 for women and monitory policy that keeps the relative cost of goods and labor unnaturally low, China can afford to increase its average standard of living significantly without undermining its competitiveness. As a result, this economic engine continues to crank out jobs fast enough to absorb the massive influx of people from the provinces to big cities like Beijing. Sustainable? Probably not. But that's true for most things from the environment and energy supply to deficit spending.
Point is, for the moment, it's working. Well.
Posted on 4 February 2010 by David Kippen
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