China's labor market remains stable in Q1

China’s surveyed urban unemployment rate in the first quarter of 2024 came in at 5.2 percent, down 0.3 percentage points year-on-year, indicating an overall stable employment, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday.

In March, the surveyed urban unemployment rate also stood at 5.2 percent, showing a year-on-year decrease of 0.1 percent, per NBS data.

China has been ramping up efforts to stabilize the country’s employment. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security has recently concluded a three-month spring recruitment campaign, distributing more than 6.6 billion yuan ($912 million) in employment subsidies.

The ministry announced that it held about 64,000 recruitment events during the campaign, offering more than 43 million jobs, marking a 10 percent increase both in terms of events held and jobs created year-on-year.

China’s continuous economic recovery and high-quality development of new quality productive forces have significantly bolstered labor employment.

In the first quarter, the rebound in the consumption sector, especially in the service sector, led to a growing recruitment demand, with the yearly growth rate for positions of hotel and dining on recruitment service provider Zhaopin.com increasing by 24.7 percent and 15.2 percent, respectively, according to data sent to the Global Times by the platform earlier in April.

Data from another domestic recruitment site Liepin.com showed that new jobs released in the travel industry on the platform increased by 25.72 percent year-on-year in the first three months of the year.

Thanks to the country’s economic revival, there were remarkable rises in AI-related jobs and salaries during the above-mentioned period. The number of jobs for natural language processing engineers rose by 126 percent year-on-year, while their salaries increased by 12 percent to reach 24,535 yuan per month.