Manufacturing employment in China

In recent decades, China has become a manufacturing powerhouse. The country’s official data showed 83 million manufacturing employees in 2002, but that figure is likely to be understated; the actual number was probably closer to 109 million. By contrast, in 2002, the Group of Seven (G7) major industrialized countries had a total of 53 million manufacturing workers. In the late 1990s through the year 2000, China saw declining numbers of manufacturing workers, caused by restructuring and the privatization of state-owned and urban collective-owned factories in the cities. Both massive layoffs of urban manufacturing workers and sharp increases in manufacturing labor productivity ensued. Since then, private-sector manufacturing has thrived in both urban and rural areas of China. The reorganized factories are more productive than state-owned and collective-owned factories and are competitive in the domestic and global economies. China’s manufacturing employment began to rise again after 2000, regaining the upward trend of the period from 1980 to 1995. This article begins with an overview of China’s statistical system, including a description of the sources of data used in the analysis presented. Three main sources of statistics on China’s manufacturing employment are compared and contrasted, and a hybrid data series is derived that helps evaluate Chinese manufacturing employment levels and trends from 1990 through 2002. The probable biases in China’s statistics on the country’s numbers of manufacturing workers are asThe scale of manufacturing employment in China dwarfs the numbers of manufacturing workers in other countries; China’s manufacturing sector has shed surplus workers from inefficient state-owned factories, while increasing employment in the private sector Manufacturing employment in China