Manufacturing Compensation in China

22 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

Manufacturing Compensation in China

On the basis of published earnings data,

estimated compensation ratios, and estimated hours,

China’s manufacturing employees averaged

about 57 cents compensation per hour worked in 2002

Manufacturing earnings

and compensation in China

Judith Banister

Judith Banister is a

consultant working

with Javelin

Investments in Beijing,

China. She is former

head of the

International

Programs Center at

the U.S. Census

Bureau. E-mail:

Judith_Banister

With by far the world’s largest manufacturing workforce, at more than 100million,1 China is widely known to have

low labor costs. Statistics available for the

first time for the entire country for 2002 now permit

the estimation of those costs with some degree of

precision. Employees in China’s city manufacturing enterprises received a total compensation of $0.95 per hour, while their noncity

counterparts, about whom such estimates had

not previously been generally available, averaged less than half that: $0.41 per hour. Altogether, with a large majority of manufacturing

employees working outside the cities, the average hourly manufacturing compensation estimated for China in 2002 was $0.57, about 3 percent

of the average hourly compensation of manufacturing production workers in the United States

and of many developed countries of the world.

Equally as striking, regional competitors in the

newly industrialized economies of Asia had, on

average, labor costs more than 10 times those for

China’s manufacturing workers; and Mexico and

Brazil had labor costs about 4 times those for China’s

manufacturing employees.

This article evaluates the quality and usability of

China’s statistics on manufacturing earnings and

labor compensation for 2002—the most recent year

for which adequate data are available—and for the

period since 1990. The analysis demonstrates that

China has released just enough relevant data on

average annual earnings and labor-related employer

costs to derive 2002 estimates of annual labor

compensation for 30 million city manufacturing

employees2

 and 71 million noncity manufacturing

employees—those working in town and village

enterprises (TVE’s).3

 Combining the published

earnings figures and adjusted labor compensation

figures for these two groups results in a reasonable

approximation of average 2002 labor compensation

per manufacturing employee in China. A national

time series on compensation for China could not be

developed due to the lack of earnings data for the

country’s noncity manufacturing workers prior to

2002; however, data on trends in real (priceadjusted) earnings for city manufacturing employees from 1990 onward are available and show a

sharp upward trend since 1998.

Because China has not systematically collected and reported adequate data on actual hours

worked by manufacturing employees for the whole

year 2002 or, indeed, for any full year, this article

uses published partial labor force survey information and a set of hypotheses to estimate annual

hours worked by city and noncity manufacturing

employees, thus calculating approximations of

average 2002 hourly labor compensation in manufacturing for these two categories of manufacturing

employees and for China as a whole. Labor compensation estimates are converted into U.S. dollars at

the official exchange rate for 2002.

The article also assesses the probable biases in

China’s statistics on manufacturing earnings and

total labor compensation. The analysis that follows

argues that city manufacturing enterprises in particular have powerful incentives to underreport earnings and other elements of the compensation provided to their employees. The main purposes of

underreporting employee compensation are to

avoid taxes and to minimize required employer and

employee payments to social insurance and employee housing funds administered by urban

@yahoo.com authorities.
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 23

There is, however, a competing bias in city manufacturing

employment and earnings data. Indirect evidence indicates that

many city manufacturing workers are not included in these

numbers at all. In particular, the lower paid migrant manufacturing

workers seem to be considerably underrepresented in the

reported urban employment data for cities, and the earnings of

most of the comparatively poorly paid migrant workers in general

also appear to be excluded from urban manufacturing earnings

data. Whether the net result of these competing biases is to

underreport or overreport earnings of the average urban manufacturing employee for 2002 is unclear; however, it is likely that

the exclusion of the more stagnant earnings of the rural-to-urban

migrants leads to some exaggeration of the trend of rising average

earnings in city manufacturing for the 1990–2002 period.

The analysis that follows discusses the cost to employers of

employee compensation and the competitiveness of Chinese

manufacturing in the global economy. For comparative purposes, official exchange rates were used to convert compensation costs to U.S. dollars. The official exchange rate is the

appropriate conversion rate for compensation cost comparisons,

because it reflects the cost in U.S. dollars that employers must

actually pay for Chinese labor. Compensation costs converted

with the use of commercial exchange rates do not, however,

indicate relative living standards of workers or the purchasing

power of their income, for at least two reasons. First, because

they include costs that are not paid directly to the worker, compensation costs do not provide an accurate portrayal of worker

income. Second, prices of goods and services vary greatly

among countries, and the official exchange rate is not a reliable

indicator of the relative difference in prices between China and

other countries.4

As will be demonstrated in the analysis, the numbers frequently published in the global and U.S. popular media on the

low compensation of China’s manufacturing workers ($0.40–

$1.50 per hour) are within the realm of reasonable estimates.

China is indeed a relatively low wage manufacturing environment, and the country also enjoys other advantages that give it

a competitive edge over many other manufacturing locations

around the world.

This article is the second of a two-part series on manufacturing

labor statistics in the People’s Republic of China (hereinafter,

“China”).5 The earlier article6 focused on levels and trends of

manufacturing employment; this one estimates average hourly

labor compensation for China’s manufacturing employees. A

more detailed exposition of the analysis in the two articles is

found on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Web site.7 Occasionally, that report refers to terminology in Chinese because

the standard English translations of the terms are misleading or

ambiguous and, in some cases, because there is no succinct

and accurate English translation of the term. A complete glossary

of Chinese terms used in this and the earlier article can be found

at the end of the report on the BLS Web site.

Background

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes estimates of hourly

compensation costs for production workers in manufacturing

for 31 economies on its Web site.8 Although most of the countries are developed countries with high-quality data, some

developing countries with adequate data also are included. The

Bureau is working to add countries, including China, to the

published list, but BLS standards for the quality of statistics are

high. Data for China are not yet in accord with BLS comparability

definitions. (See box, this page.) This article assesses the quality

and completeness of those statistics which are available on

manufacturing earnings and compensation in China.

The subsequent analysis is based as much as possible on

information published by China’s official statistical organizations. Most statistics for China are collected under the central

guidance of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and often

are published jointly with the Ministry of Labor and Social

Security (hereinafter, Ministry of Labor). Collecting data on

manufacturing employment and earnings in TVE’s, however, is

the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture, and data on the

earnings of noncity manufacturing employees were first published for the year 2002.9

Focusing on 2002, the most recent year for which adequate

data are available, the upcoming discussion tabulates information on earnings, required social benefit payments, and other

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been a leader in compiling

international comparisons of hourly compensation of manufacturing workers over a wide range of countries. Despite its large and

growing importance in world manufacturing, China has not been

included in the comparisons because of difficulties in obtaining and

interpreting that country’s data and because of concerns about the

quality of the data. Although the two Monthly Labor Review articles

by Judith Banister have greatly facilitated understanding of Chinese

employment and compensation statistics, many problems with

data availability, coverage, and reliability remain, as described in

the articles. Therefore, the Bureau does not plan to include China in

its regular comparisons of hourly compensation costs at this time.

These articles and the associated report on the BLS Web site, which

have been funded by the Bureau, are intended as first steps toward

developing the measures necessary to include China in the regular

comparisons series that currently includes 31 countries. Because

of the widespread interest in expanded country coverage, the Bureau

is indeed considering providing data on China, along with data on

some other countries, the quality of whose data is problematic, but

in a separate format with appropriate annotations. As better data

become available, China and other countries could be moved into

the regular comparisons series.

Division of Foreign Labor Statistics, Bureau of Labor Statistics
Manufacturing Compensation in China

24 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

labor compensation and derives annual, monthly, and estimated

hourly manufacturing labor compensation, in Chinese yuan, for

urban, TVE, and all-China manufacturing employees. These estimates are then calculated in U.S. dollars at the official exchange

rate.

The annual data on labor compensation in manufacturing

used in this article come from the annual yearend statistical

reporting system. (China’s censuses do not ask for earnings

data.) In China’s cities and, to a lesser extent, outside the cities,

each enterprise, economic unit, small business, or self-employed

individual or group is required to report employment and earnings data each year according to the group’s “labor situation”

the previous year and at the previous yearend. The data are

then compiled upward in a statistical reporting chain to the

national government. Accountants or those who report employment and earnings figures on behalf of their enterprises or other

work units (at least, those in urban areas) are given detailed

instructions on how to report monthly, quarterly, yearend, and

average annual figures on employment and earnings. The

instructions are based on regulations released by the NBS,

especially those released in 1990, with further clarifications in

1998 and 2002.10

In reporting annual statistics on employment and earnings,

China’s NBS and Ministry of Labor use an administrative reporting system that ignores the progress China has made in the

statistical definitions of “urban” and “rural” during the last

several decades. As mentioned in the earlier companion piece to

this article, in statistical publications on China’s labor force,

employment and earnings data labeled “urban” actually refer to

cities and exclude employees working outside narrowly defined

city boundaries. Even factories located in suburbs, large

industrial parks, and towns that have been officially established

as urban places since the 1980s are excluded from the so-called

urban statistics on employment and earnings. In the tables and

charts of the current article, statistics are faithfully shown as

they were reported in official publications. In the text, the word

“city” often is used to describe the “urban” data, simply because

those data actually refer to city employees and their earnings.

By contrast, the term “town and village enterprises” (TVE’s)

seems to cover not only rural areas, but also factories in

urbanized places outside narrow city boundaries. Accordingly,

the text uses the word “noncity” to refer to TVE data.

The concept of compensation

The BLS measures of hourly compensation costs include both

data on hourly direct pay (which includes pay for time worked,

pay for vacations and holidays, bonuses, in-kind pay, and other

premiums) and data on employer social insurance expenditures

and other labor taxes (which include employer expenditures for

legally required insurance programs and contractual and private

benefit plans, as well as other taxes on payrolls or employment).

China’s statistical authorities at the NBS also try to use an

internationally recognizable definition of employee compensation in the calculation of China’s gross domestic product.

The NBS defines what it variously translates as “compensation

of employees” or “laborers’ remuneration” (laodongzhe baochou) as follows:

Laodongzhe baochou refers to the whole payment of

various forms earned by the laborers from the productive

activities they are engaged in. It includes wages, bonuses,

and allowances the laborers earned in monetary form and in

kind. It also includes the free medical services provided to

the laborers and the medicine expenses, transport subsidies, social insurance, and housing fund paid by the

employers.11

This passage suggests that China’s government either collects

data on these various components of worker compensation or

at least estimates them for its calculations of China’s gross

domestic product.

The subsequent analysis begins with a description of Chinese

earnings statistics on manufacturing workers and then describes

the sources and methods of estimating the nonearnings portions

of compensation—that is, the social insurance expenditures that

employers must pay on behalf of employees. Two issues that

are relevant to the estimation of social insurance expenditures,

namely, the difference by city in mandatory social insurance

contribution rates and the likely underreporting of earnings to

minimize tax and social insurance contributions, are discussed.

The article then examines the difficult issue of estimating working

time in manufacturing in order to construct estimates of compensation on a per hour basis. Following an analysis of the compensation of manufacturing employees in export-oriented industries

and of migrant workers, the discussion touches on how

manufacturing earnings in China have changed over time and

how the compensation estimates in this article compare with

those published in other venues. Finally, the implications of the

current research results for China’s competitiveness are explored.

Throughout the analysis, separate estimates are made for

urban workers and TVE workers, because the data sources and

the working situations that relate to each group are different.

Where possible, national estimates combining the two groups

are made as well.

Reported manufacturing earnings in

Chinese currency

Earnings and other compensation data for manufacturing

workers in China are poorly and partially reported. The available

data on “wages” or “earnings” come from the annual yearend

reporting system, and the fragmentary figures are published in

the China Labor Statistical Yearbook and, for TVE employees,
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 25

China Village and Town Enterprise Yearbook 2003.

12 Average

annual remuneration for manufacturing workers is called

“wages” (gongzi) when referring to staff and workers, but is

called “earnings” or remuneration (laodong baochou) when

referring to the other employees of urban manufacturing units.

The two terms appear to mean the same thing, and both are

defined as follows:

The total wages and total earnings are calculated this way:

They include whatever is paid to or for the workers in money

or in kind according to relevant regulations, including

salaries paid for a certain time period or payments based on

piece work, bonuses, allowances, subsidies, overtime pay,

and pay for dangerous or challenging duty.13

In this article, the term “earnings” designates the wages or

earnings of both urban and TVE manufacturing employees in

cash and in kind, as reported to statistical and tax authorities.

The term does not include the social insurance payments that

employers are required to pay to city or county authorities on

behalf of their employees or the welfare fund payments given to

employees in the enterprises. The terms “compensation” and

“total compensation” include earnings plus these other elements

of total labor compensation in manufacturing. These definitions

correspond to the definitions used by the Bureau of Labor

Statistics in its international report on hourly compensation

costs.

Table 1 shows that the 30 million on-post employees of

manufacturing enterprises in China’s cities had average reported

earnings of 11,152 yuan for the year 2002.14 Of these employees,

95 percent were on-post (not laid-off or unemployed) “staff

and workers” whose earnings that year averaged 11,001 yuan,

and 5 percent were the 740,000 “other” city manufacturing

workers, who averaged much higher earnings of 17,237 yuan in

2002 (in part because this category includes foreign employees

of China’s manufacturing companies and reemployed or still

employed retirement-age workers with high seniority, and both

these groups probably get higher earnings than the average for

“staff and workers”).

The 11,152-yuan average annual earnings figure of the 30

million workers in manufacturing urban units masks a wide

range of earnings in different urban manufacturing subsectors, as shown in table 2. For example, the lowest-paid group

of city manufacturing workers is the 3 million textile industry

workers, whose earnings average 7,268 yuan per year. The 5

million city manufacturing workers in the subsectors of timber

and bamboo products, food processing, nonmetal mineral

products, paper products, furniture manufacturing, and “other”

manufacturing also earn less than the average urban worker:

their reported average annual earnings are less than 9,000 yuan.

At the other end of the pay spectrum, the 7.5 million city

manufacturing workers in tobacco processing, electronics and

telecommunications, petroleum processing, ferrous metal

smelting, transport equipment manufacturing, and medical and

pharmaceutical products all have average annual earnings of

13,000 yuan or higher.

The recorded 9 million laid-off manufacturing workers still

nominally connected to their manufacturing units averaged a

small annual living subsidy of 2,213 yuan. (See table 1.) This

kind of payment might be considered similar to payments of

unemployment compensation for laid-off or unemployed

workers in developed countries.

Table 3. Published earnings of manufacturing employees in China, 2002

Manufacturing in urban units ..................... 334.39 29.81 229.98 11,152 —

On-post urban manufacturing staff and

workers ................................................ 321.90 29.07 29.26 11,001 —

Other urban manufacturing employment — .74 — 17,237 —

Laid-off urban manufacturing staff and

workers .................................................... — 9.13 — — 2,213

Manufacturing TVE’s1 .................................. 489.22 70.87 2

70.62 26,927 —

Large-scale manufacturing TVE’s1 ........... 168.94 19.05 218.98 2

8,899 —

 Number of

employees

(yearend, millions)

Total earnings

paid

(billions of yuan)

Average number

of employees

(millions)

Average earnings

per employee

(yuan)

Category of manufacturing

workers

Average living

subsidy

(yuan)

Table 1.

1TVE’s are town and village enterprises. 2 Derived from other numbers reported in the table or in the sources.

NOTES: Dash indicates data are not available or not applicable. In the

sources, remuneration for workers in urban manufacturing units and for other

urban manufacturing employees is called “earnings” (laodong baochou), whereas

remuneration for on-post urban manufacturing staff and workers is called

“wages”(gongzi). For manufacturing TVE’s, only the total 2002 expenditure for

earnings (laodongzhe baochou) is reported; the average per employee is not

directly reported. All figures for manufacturing in urban units exclude selfemployed individuals and small privately owned firms.

SOURCES: China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry of

Labor, compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China

Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 29, 34, 46, 169, 171, 179, 230, 243, 249, 473;

China Ministry of Agriculture, TVE Yearbook Editorial Committee, ed., China

Village and Town Enterprise Yearbook 2003 [in Chinese] (Beijing, China

Agriculture Publishing House, 2003), pp. 130–31.
Manufacturing Compensation in China

26 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

In years prior to 2002, earnings data were not published for

manufacturing workers outside the cities. For the reported 71

million manufacturing TVE employees in 2002, the Ministry of

Agriculture published, for the first time, the total earnings

(laodongzhe baochou) paid out for that entire year in all

manufacturing TVE’s.15 Average annual earnings per worker are

derived in table 1 in the same way that the average annual

earnings are calculated for urban manufacturing workers. TVE

manufacturing workers averaged 6,927 yuan in reported earnings

in 2002, 62 percent of the average earnings that year for employees of urban manufacturing units. Workers in large-scale

manufacturing TVE’s had higher average 2002 earnings of 8,899

yuan, 80 percent of the average reported earnings for employees

of urban manufacturing units.

What forms of remuneration are included in the average annual

earnings figures for China’s manufacturing employees? Exhibit 1

lists all the items whose value is required to be included in

earnings data reported by enterprises in urban China for their onpost manufacturing staff and workers, based on written instructions to enterprise accountants and statistical personnel.

Most forms of income, benefits, and subsidies in cash and in

kind are on this list. Cash salary and earnings payments, housing

and transportation provided to workers, meals given to them,

and the value of income tax and social insurance payments

deducted from earnings and remitted to the government on behalf

of employees are all required to be included in the “total earnings”

figure, based on relevant reporting regulations.

One group of benefits that is provided by some of China’s

manufacturing enterprises to employees, but that is specifically

excluded from the earnings figures, is the use of a company

medical clinic or the payment of some employee hospital costs.16

It would seem that this is an important group of benefits which,

conceptually, ought to be included in earnings data. But many

countries share this shortcoming in earnings statistics, with the

result that the Bureau of Labor Statistics specifically excludes

the costs of medical clinics in plant facilities from its comparative

international data on labor compensation in manufacturing.17

This article does not include any estimation of these particular

medical benefits which are missing from China’s earnings data.

One important difference between China’s earnings data

shown in table 1 and the data used by the Bureau in its international comparisons is that the Bureau data relate only to

production workers, while the Chinese data relate to all

employees—that is, both production and nonproduction

workers. Because production workers typically have lower wages

than those of nonproduction workers, it is likely that the inclusion

of both types of workers in the Chinese data leads to higher

earnings levels. However, the production worker data necessary

to match the BLS concept are not available for China, so it is

unclear how much lower Chinese earnings for production workers

would be.

The earnings data do not include figures for the comparatively

small privately owned manufacturing groupings and the selfemployed manufacturing workers in China’s cities. These two

categories of workers together totaled 8.2 million (22 percent of

China’s reported total of urban manufacturing workers) in 2002,

according to China’s State Administration for Industry and

Commerce.18 This feature of China’s earnings data parallels the

same dearth in manufacturing earnings data from many countries.

For reasons of practicality, if a country does not include earnings

for employees in small manufacturing units in its earnings data,

Urban manufacturing employment and

earnings by subsector in China, 2002

Total manufacturing in urban units ... 29,984,619 11,152

Tobacco processing .......................... 233,485 23,744

Electronics and telecommunications .. 1,623,783 17,636

Petroleum processing and coking

products ......................................... 565,505 17,357

Smelting and pressing of ferrous

metals ............................................ 1,900,648 15,032

Transportation equipment

manufacturing ................................ 2,319,421 14,409

Medical and pharmaceutical

products ......................................... 844,857 13,207

Instruments and office machinery .... 464,762 12,720

Smelting and pressing of nonferrous

metals ............................................ 755,646 12,491

Electric equipment and machinery ... 1,441,399 12,405

Chemical fibers manufacturing .......... 263,378 11,404

Printing and record medium

reproduction ................................... 493,497 10,863

Ordinary machinery manufacturing ... 1,921,315 10,668

Special-purpose equipment

manufacturing ................................ 1,400,594 10,406

Cultural, educational, and sport

products ......................................... 294,636 10,390

 Chemical raw materials and

products ......................................... 2,213,256 10,359

Plastic products ................................ 606,800 10,131

Metal products .................................. 897,455 10,075

Food products manufacturing ........... 621,757 10,064

Rubber products ................................ 377,633 10,055

Beverage manufacturing ................... 740,250 9,619

Leather, furs, down, and related

products ......................................... 578,590 9,108

Garments and other fiber products ..... 1,336,191 9,066

Furniture manufacturing .................... 180,484 8,881

Other manufacturing ......................... 601,416 8,781

Papermaking and paper products ..... 592,400 8,668

Nonmetal mineral products ............... 2,116,034 8,123

Food processing ................................ 977,439 7,965

Timber, bamboo, natural fiber and

straw products ............................... 267,666 7,339

Textile industry .................................. 2,841,565 7,268

Table 2.

Urban

employees

(yearend) Urban manufacturing subsector

Average

earnings

per employee

(yuan)

NOTES: These data refer only to urban manufacturing employment and

earnings.The subsectors listed here refer to 29.47 million of China’s urban

manufacturing workers. Rural manufacturing workers in each subsector

undoubtedly have lower earnings than those displayed here. The earnings

figures shown do not include required employer social insurance payments

or other nonwage labor costs.

SOURCES: China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry of

Labor, compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China

Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 179 and 218–25.
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 27

the Bureau also excludes the employees and compensation for

these units from its estimates of hourly labor compensation in

manufacturing.19 Self-employed workers in manufacturing also

are excluded from the Bureau’s estimates. Using data from

manufacturing censuses, the Bureau has researched the effect

of excluding such earnings and found it to be small.

Estimating total 2002 compensation in

manufacturing

To estimate total compensation for China’s manufacturing

employees, it is necessary to add to the reported earnings the

other components of total compensation, including social

insurance payments paid by employers on behalf of employees,

as well as other payments to or for employees that are not

included in the earnings data.

In the urban areas, employers pay considerable sums for

social welfare benefits on behalf of their employees, above

and beyond the employees’ earnings. China’s cities today

have built, or are in the process of building, municipal social

insurance funds and housing funds to which both employers

and employees are required to contribute each month.20 There

are six kinds of funds: an old-age pension fund, a medical

insurance fund, an unemployment insurance fund, a workers’

compensation fund, a maternity leave fund, and a fund in

which money is set aside for each worker by name—money

that the worker can use to help buy an apartment. These

monthly payments by employers to city governments are

mandatory, and stiff penalties are specified for noncompliance,21 but noncompliance is rampant and penalties are

rarely enforced.

The payments deducted from employee earnings for the six

public funds and remitted to city governments are included in

the reported earnings data (see exhibit 1), but the part paid by

employers is excluded.22 Legally required payments to government social insurance and employee benefit programs are

included in the BLS concept of compensation,23 so, in order to

adjust the reported manufacturing earnings to include legally

required employer social insurance payments and other labor

compensation costs, one needs to know the overall perComponents of Chinese urban earnings statistics

The statistical concept of wage (gongzi) or earnings for on-post urban “staff and workers” includes the following components, whether the employees receive the earnings or benefits in money or in kind and whether the earnings or benefits are or

are not taxable items:

Monthly or annual salary income (including base earnings

and additions based on position, seniority, wage scale,

and so on)

Earnings during on-the-job training, probationary period

Employee income paid on an irregular basis

Hourly payment for work performed

Piecework payment for work performed

Bonus payments

Incentive, performance-based payments

Overtime pay

Hardship, danger pay

All kinds of subsidies in cash or in kind

Festival, holiday subsidy

Travel money, food allowance while traveling

Transport subsidy (car or shuttle bus provided, cash for bus

or taxi, and so on)

Personal services such as baths, haircuts

Books, newspapers, magazines provided for employees

Meals provided, food allowance

Housing subsidy (dormitory provided, or directly subsidized

rent or purchase of housing)

Individual income tax deducted from earnings and paid

directly by enterprise to government

Social insurance funds (pension, medical, unemployment

insurance funds, and housing purchase fund) deducted

from the employee's wage and paid by the work unit to

government on behalf of the employee

Money for rent, and utilities (electricity, water)

Money given for fixed line or mobile phone

Clothing subsidy

Subsidy compensating workers for lack of vacation time

Earnings during approved leaves of absence, pay for time

not worked (regular vacation, compassionate leave, to visit

relatives, family-planning operation, national or societal

duty, study leave, leave due to sickness or injury)

Anything that has the nature or spirit of labor earnings, even

 if it is not spelled out in the regulations

SOURCE: Laodong gongzi; tongji taizhang [Labor wages; statistical accounts ] (Beijing, Beijing Municipality Statistical Bureau, 2004), pp. 2–1 to 2–5.

Exhibit 1.
Manufacturing Compensation in China

28 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

centage of the total earnings bill that urban manufacturing

employers paid in 2002 for social insurance and required

housing fund payments, as well as other employee benefit

payments. China’s Ministry of Labor conducted a survey of

11,704 urban enterprises in 51 large and medium-sized cities

throughout the country and collected all relevant worker

compensation data from these organizations for the year

2002.24 This article uses the results of that large survey to

estimate average labor compensation costs in urban manufacturing above and beyond the reported earnings data for

2002 given in table 1. On the basis of the results of this Labor

Ministry survey, the reported 2002 annual earnings should be

increased by an amount equivalent to 53.8 percent of earnings

to estimate the following labor compensation costs (expressed

as a percentage of urban earnings) actually paid by employers:25

Cost Percent

Required employer social insurance

 payments to the government ............................... 28

Required housing fund payments ............................ 4

Additional employee welfare costs

 not included in earnings ....................................... 12

Other labor-related costs

 not specified in detail ........................................... 10

In table 3, therefore, average 2002 total compensation for employees of urban manufacturing enterprises is estimated to

be 17,152 yuan.

Note that the amount China’s urban employers are required

by law to remit to the government every month as the employer

contribution to the social insurance system and, in some cities,

the home purchase fund varies from city to city.26 For example,

the following tabulation shows the additional amount, expressed as a percentage of earnings, that manufacturing employers in three cities are required to contribute:27

 Changshu City, Wuxi City,

 Jiangsu Jiangsu Beijing

 Contribution Province Province Municipality

Old-age pension fund ........ 16.5 22.0 20.0

Medical insurance fund ..... 8.0 8.0 9.0

Unemployment insurance . 2.0 2.0 1.5

Workers’ compensation

insurance ........................ .6–.8 — 1.0

Maternity leave insurance . 1.0 — —

Employee housing fund ..... — — 8.0

Not only do the required employer contributions vary by municipality and city, but also, the amounts have been increasing over

time. Therefore, it is likely that the legally required employer

contribution to the social insurance funds for the average manufacturing employee has increased since 2002.

The inclusion in total labor compensation of the amorphous,

vaguely reported categories of welfare costs and other unspecified labor-related costs just discussed may help offset some

of the likely downward biases in the basic earnings data. To

minimize individual and corporate taxes and required social

insurance payments, urban employers tend to underreport

earnings to the extent possible, neglecting to include some inkind benefits in the reported earnings and offloading as many

employee subsidies and benefits as possible into the welfare

Table 3. Estimated labor compensation of manufacturing employees in China, 2002

Total for manufacturing urban units

and TVE’s1 ..................................... 100.61 8,186 10,363 $1,252 864 $104 4.73 $0.57

Manufacturing urban units ............. 29.98 11,152 17,152 2,071 1,429 173 7.87 .95

On-post urban manufacturing

staff and workers .................... 29.26 11,001 16,920 2,043 1,410 170 7.76 .94

Other urban manufacturing

employment .............................. .72 17,237 26,511 3,202 2,209 267 12.17 1.47

Manufacturing TVE’s1 ...................... 70.62 6,927 7,481 904 623 75 3.40 .41

Large-scale manufacturing TVE’s1 18.98 8,899 9,611 1,161 801 97 4.37 .53

Average

earnings

per

employee

(yuan)

Average

number of

employees

(millions)

Annual compensation

per employee

Monthly compensation

Category of manufacturing per employee

workers

Table 3.

Hourly compensation

per employee

Yuan Yuan Yuan U.S.

dollars

U.S.

dollars

U.S.

dollars

1TVE’s are town and village enterprises.

NOTES: Total labor compensation for urban workers is 1.538 times

earnings and for TVE workers is 1.08 times earnings. U.S. dollars are calculated at the 2002 prevailing commercial exchange rate: 8.28 yuan = U.S.$1.

Hourly compensation is calculated under the assumption that urban

manufacturing employees perform 2,179 actual hours of work per year and

that TVE workers perform 2,200 hours per year. (See text for details.)

SOURCES: Table 1; China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry

of Labor, compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China

Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 29, 34, 46, 169, 171, 179, 230, 249, 473; China

Ministry of Agriculture, TVE Yearbook Editorial Committee, ed., China Village

and Town EnterpriseYearbook 2003 [in Chinese] (Beijing, China Agriculture

Publishing House, 2003), pp. 130–31.
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 29

fund category or “other” labor compensation category. (Underreporting of urban manufacturing employment and earnings is

discussed shortly.)

For TVE manufacturing employees, there is ample evidence

that the reported earnings total may capture almost all of their

total compensation, because TVE workers do not have many of

the social insurance and other welfare benefits that urban

employees often get. For example, by the end of 2002, the number

of rural and smalltown workers with any rural social pension

insurance was minuscule.28 China’s urban towns and rural areas

have very weak or nonexistent social benefit systems for pensions, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, workers’

compensation, and the like. Pension and medical insurance

systems paid into by employers and employees essentially do

not exist in China outside of cities today.29 A survey of large

manufacturing enterprises in Nanjing Municipality, the capital

of Jiangsu Province on the country’s east coast, found that welfare benefits for workers, above and beyond earnings, for the

years 1994–2001 averaged 36 percent of the earnings in urban

state-owned manufacturing enterprises, but only 16 percent of

the earnings in unusually large manufacturing TVE’s in counties

under Nanjing’s administration.30 Now, on the one hand, these

TVE’s surely had an exceptionally high level of welfare benefits

compared with those offered by all manufacturing TVE’s in

China during those years, both because TVE’s in counties

near major cities have better social welfare benefits than TVE’s

elsewhere and because large TVE’s have better benefits than

average-sized TVE’s. On the other hand, average manufacturing

TVE worker welfare benefits in 2002 were very likely a higher

percentage of those workers’ total compensation than in earlier

years. Therefore, pending the discovery of better data for 2002,

the average total of social insurance and other welfare benefits

for China’s manufacturing TVE employees can be tentatively

estimated to be in the range from 0 percent to 16 percent of their

total earnings. A reasonable estimate of such employee benefits

for the average TVE employee in 2002 is 8 percent, the midpoint

of the range. Table 3 estimates average annual total compensation

for TVE employees at 7,481 yuan.

Underreporting of urban manufacturing

employment and earnings

China’s people and work units were unaccustomed to paying

income taxes, value-added taxes, corporate income taxes, or high

payments for social insurance during the Maoist decades from

1949 to 1978. The government extracted the money for its budget

in other ways, but not so visibly as the way taxes are taken out

now. Individuals got benefits in both urban and rural areas, while

earnings were kept very low. Today, during the post-Mao economic reform era, employers appear to have developed a culture

of tax avoidance. For example, when foreign and multinational

companies come to China and attempt to acquire, or set up a

joint venture or merger with, a (usually state-owned) Chinese

company, the foreign company insists on engaging in a due

diligence process to determine whether the joint venture, merger,

or acquisition is in the interests of its owners and shareholders.

The auditors and accounting companies frequently discover that

the target company has two sets of books: “Most domestic

enterprises keep separate sets of ‘management accounts’ and

‘tax accounts.’”31 The “tax ledger” is the set of employee and

financial data reported to the tax and other authorities, and

the “administrative ledger” records a more accurate picture of

the numbers of employees, their actual earnings, the true costs

and income of the company, its actual profits, and more. The

tax ledger is designed to minimize tax exposure, particularly

corporate income taxes, value-added taxes, personal income

taxes for employer and employees, and required social benefit

payments. It is believed that non-public-sector domestic

Chinese enterprises avoid taxation and social benefit payments to an even greater extent than the state-owned and

collective-owned enterprises.

Such tax avoidance in the manufacturing sector probably

has a number of implications.32 First, many urban employees,

especially those who are in-migrants and do not have city

residence permits or those who are temporary or part-time

workers, may be left off the books entirely, at least with regard

to what is reported to authorities. When they are, their employment is kept informal, and neither the employee nor his or

her earnings, which are paid in cash, are reported. This means

that the employee can avoid paying income tax and any required

social insurance deductions, while the employer can avoid

paying the required social insurance payments for the employee. As a result, actual manufacturing employment may be

underreported in China’s statistics, especially in the urban

figures.33

Second, even when employment is reported to authorities,

both employer and employees tend to collude to minimize

reported earnings. Employers in urban areas are required to remit

to the city government social insurance and other payments that

are calculated as a percentage of the unit’s reported total earnings.

These required payments are high by international standards

and have been increasing rapidly: “high contribution rates are

leading to high rates of evasion in the basic pension system,” as

well as evasion of other required social welfare payments.34 Many

employers might perceive that the required payments are

squeezing their profits and are burdensome; they would

therefore have an incentive to underreport employee earnings.

Some of the money actually given to employees (as bonuses,

overtime pay, or financial subsidies of various kinds) may not

be reported as earnings, instead getting shifted to the welfare

fund category or other unspecified labor-related cost category; thus, it is important to include these labor cost categories in a realistic estimate of urban manufacturing labor

compensation in China. It is also likely that many urban enter-
Manufacturing Compensation in China

30 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

prises underreport or leave out of reported earnings the value of

some benefits provided in kind to employees (for example, meals,

housing, transportation, and food distributions). Therefore, it is

likely that even the earnings of urban manufacturing workers

whose employment is reported to authorities are systematically

underreported.

Those employees whose employment is not reported to the

authorities at all, whether in urban or rural areas, are usually paid

lower wages than other employees. According to anecdotal

evidence, the going rate for an unskilled rural or migrant worker

in nonagricultural work in China today is about 500–600 yuan

per month, plus whatever benefits it is essential to provide,

such as simple meals, dormitories, and emergency medical

assistance. Some rural workers are paid as little as 300 yuan

per month, while more desirable workers might get as much as

800 yuan monthly. If unreported workers in the manufacturing

sector average cash pay of 550 yuan per month, and if their

simple accommodations and food cost another 200 yuan per

month, then their earnings total 750 yuan, or U.S.$91, per month,

but only when they are actually working. Thus, if, for 3 months of

the year, they are not engaged in paid employment while planting

and harvesting and while taking time off for holidays, illnesses,

and personal business, then their annual take-home cash plus

in-kind benefits would be 6,750 yuan per year. This estimate is

close to the reported data that yield earnings of 6,927 yuan for

TVE manufacturing workers in 2002.

Annual dollar compensation for

manufacturing workers

To translate reported average annual earnings for China’s

manufacturing workers into dollars (see table 3), the analysis

that follows uses official nominal exchange rates between U.S.

dollars and Chinese yuan. The Chinese yuan was pegged to

the U.S. dollar at 8.28 yuan per dollar for a decade from

1994 to August 2005; this exchange rate is the correct one for

2002 data.35

On the basis of reported earnings data only, China’s 30

million employees of urban manufacturing units had average

2002 earnings of 11,152 yuan, or U.S.$1,347, at the official exchange rate. China’s manufacturing workers in TVE’s averaged

6,927 yuan, or U.S.$837, in reported annual earnings in 2002.

(See tables 1 and 3.) After adjusting reported earnings to

account for additional indirect and direct remuneration for

employees, table 3 estimates that China’s urban manufacturing employees received an average of about U.S.$2,071 in

annual labor compensation for 2002, while TVE manufacturing

employees got approximately U.S.$904. It is important to note,

however, that TVE employment is highly desirable to China’s

rural workers because their TVE earnings are higher than the

earnings they can derive from agriculture.36

Monthly labor compensation in

manufacturing

To calculate the monthly compensation of TVE manufacturing

workers from their average annual labor compensation, it would

be helpful to know whether all or even most of the reported 71

million TVE manufacturing employees work most of the year and

what proportion are part-year or part-time workers. As noted

earlier, it is likely that many unreported workers do not work year

round. If the assumption is made that these 71 million reported

workers represent year-round workers, then their average

monthly total compensation was about U.S.$75. (See table 3.)

Urban manufacturing employees are, generally speaking, yearround, full-time employees. Monthly urban manufacturing labor

compensation was U.S.$173.

Annual hours worked in manufacturing

To calculate the hourly labor compensation of China’s manufacturing employees in 2002 would require data on the average

number of hours actually worked per employee during that year.

Some data have been published on China’s urban manufacturing

employees’ average hours worked in 2002. Specifically, China’s

NBS and Labor Ministry have been conducting a labor force

survey for some years. Most results of this survey have not

been published, but data on hours worked by urban manufacturing workers during 2 reference weeks of 2002 have been

published. According to the survey, urban manufacturing employees in China actually worked an average of 44.86 hours

during the 7-day period from May 9 to May 15, 2002, and 46.0

hours during the reference week of September 24–30, 2002.37

Averaging those two figures results in the estimate that, during 2002, in the weeks when urban manufacturing employees

actually worked at all, they averaged 45.4 hours of work per

week.

The remaining problem is to estimate the average number of

weeks actually worked by urban manufacturing employees in

China during 2002. Because urban employees are supposed to

receive a total of 10 days of statutory holidays per year, it is

reasonable to assume that urban manufacturing employees get 2

weeks of public holidays per year. It is also reasonable to assume

that urban manufacturing employees, on average, missed 1 week

per year for some combination of illness, injury leave, and maternity leave and 1 week per year for personal leave plus work stoppages and downtime due to equipment repair and shortages of

electricity and manufacturing inputs. On the assumption that

China’s urban manufacturing workers actually worked 48 weeks

during 2002, averaging 45.4 hours per week, the average annual

hours worked are estimated to be 2,179 hours.

No data have been published or released on average hours

worked per week by rural or TVE manufacturing employees, even

though such data were collected for September 24–30, 2002, in

China’s October 2002 labor force survey.38 All of the calculations
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 31

that follow are therefore strictly hypothetical. Because labor laws

are more explicit and more enforced in cities than outside the

cities, it is likely that, during each week that manufacturing

employees actually are working, those in cities work fewer hours

than those outside the cities. Therefore, it is in this case reasonable to assume that TVE manufacturing workers averaged 50

hours of work per week in 2002 during those weeks that they

were working. Also, assuming that TVE manufacturing employees took 2 weeks off for Chinese New Year and stopped

work for another 2 weeks for reasons such as illness, injury, family emergencies, personal leave, and factory downtime due to

shortages and breakdowns, this would leave 48 weeks of actual

work per year. In addition, some TVE manufacturing employees

who work in the same county as their home village also may be

involved in agriculture during peak seasons. This assumption is made because most TVE workers come from rural

households that still grow crops, and farm households tend

to need all the labor they can get for planting and harvesting.

However, migrant manufacturing workers would not be able

to get home to participate in agriculture, and some manufacturing workers who live close to their family homes have left

agriculture altogether. It is therefore reasonable to assume that,

say, one-half of TVE manufacturing workers take leave from their

manufacturing jobs for 2 weeks for peak planting time twice a

year (assuming double-cropping, on average) and 2 weeks for

each of two peak harvest seasons, thus working 40 weeks per

year in manufacturing, but that the other half of TVE manufacturing workers do not do agricultural work and, as a consequence, work 48 weeks in manufacturing each year. Under these

assumptions, TVE manufacturing workers would have averaged

44 weeks of actual factory work in 2002 at 50 hours per week,

totaling 2,200 hours for the year.

It is possible that the estimate for the numbers of hours

worked, on average, per year by manufacturing employees in

city and noncity factories is too low. Some investigations in

China’s export zones in Guangdong and other coastal provinces

have discovered many factories in which the employees typically

work the entire year, with a 2-week holiday at Chinese New Year.

In many such export-oriented factories, employees usually work

6 or 7 days each week, totaling 60 to 80 hours per week in whatever

period constitutes the peak season for that manufacturing

subsector.39 This season can last up to 8 months a year. Average

yearly hours actually worked per employee might be as high as

4,000 hours in some China manufacturing enterprises. Suppose

that, in those hardworking Guangdong factories, the average

urban wage in 2002 was 14,958 yuan, as discussed shortly and

as reported in table 4, and suppose also that urban earnings

must be increased by 53.8 percent to include all employer

social insurance payments, welfare costs, and other labor

costs,40 giving an average annual labor compensation of

23,005 yuan, or $2,778. Then, if some city manufacturing

employees worked 4,000 hours in 2002 for that income, hourly

compensation was $0.69 per hour. Outside Guangdong’s cities

in Guangdong Province, reported 2002 average earnings in

industry were 8,345 yuan. (See table 4 and the discussion that

follows.) Increasing this figure by 8 percent to adjust for social

insurance payments on the part of employers results in a total

average labor compensation of 9,013 yuan, or $1,088, in 2002.

For those factories whose workers put in 4,000 hours of

production work that year, per hour average labor compensation was $0.27. This illustration emphasizes why it is

important to determine the actual average number of hours

worked in each year for both city and TVE manufacturing

employees.

Data from China’s 2000 census confirm that, generally

speaking, manufacturing employees in China work a lengthy

week; at least, they did during the last week of October 2000.

The census indicated that 58 percent of manufacturing workers had worked 6 or 7 days the previous week; however, the

census may have classified tens of millions of part-year,

seasonal manufacturing workers from rural areas and small

towns as farmers.41 Such rural (probably called TVE) manufacturing workers would put in far fewer hours in manufacturing per year than those counted in the census or those

working year round in coastal-zone factories. Thus, the

percentage of workers who worked 6 or 7 days probably was

lower than 58 percent.

It is not known whether manufacturing employees whose

factories sell only to China’s domestic market work about the

same number of hours per week, month, or year as does the

average employee of export-oriented factories. Of China’s

reported 70.9 million TVE manufacturing employees in 2002, for

example, only 13.4 million were reported to be producing for

export, while 57.5 million were apparently producing only for the

domestic market.42 An adequate estimate of average annual hours

worked must take into account both of these categories of

manufacturing workers—those who produce for export and

those who produce for domestic sale.

For China, legal limits on working hours or overtime hours are

not likely to yield realistic estimates of actual hours worked.

Factories routinely report that they are abiding by the regulations

when, in fact, employees are working more hours per day, and

many more hours per week or month, than the statutory limits.

One purpose of the double bookkeeping in China’s factories is

to report compliance with laws on minimum wages and maximum

permissible overtime hours when, in reality, the factory routinely

violates the laws. Generally speaking, grassroots investigators

report that the factories do not claim that they paid more total

earnings per month or per day to the employees than they

actually paid; rather, they underreport the actual hours worked

to earn the reported monthly or daily income.
Manufacturing Compensation in China

32 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

Hourly labor compensation in

manufacturing

Despite the limitations on estimates of annual hours worked,

it is possible to produce reasonable estimates of hourly compensation costs for manufacturing workers in China, as is

shown in table 3. According to these estimates, compensation

for employees of urban manufacturing units was about

U.S.$0.95 per hour of work and for TVE manufacturing

employees was about U.S.$0.41 per hour.

The analysis presented herein combines labor compensation estimates for the reported 71 million TVE manufacturing employees and the 30 million manufacturing employees

of urban units to derive estimates for annual, monthly, and hourly

labor compensation in China’s manufacturing sector. As

shown in table 3, these 101 million Chinese manufacturing

employees received an average of approximately U.S.$1,252

in labor compensation in 2002, a figure that works out to about

U.S.$104 in monthly labor compensation and implies an hourly

labor compensation of around U.S.$0.57 for China’s manufacturing employees.43

How does that U.S.$0.57 compare internationally? Chart 1

shows manufacturing hourly compensation costs in China in

relation to the same costs in several other countries. Chinese

costs are 3 percent of those in the United States, according to

data from the BLS series. Even compared with some of the lower

cost countries in the series, Chinese costs are low: a quarter of

the cost level in Brazil and Mexico and less than a tenth of the

average of Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.44

Manufacturing labor compensation in key

export regions

China’s urban manufacturing earnings statistics are reported

by province, which facilitates estimating urban manufacturing

labor compensation for the leading export centers. Using the

same ratio of additional compensation to earnings, namely,

53.8 percent, as in table 3, table 4 adjusts the earnings of

urban manufacturing workers to derive annual, monthly, and

hourly labor compensation for the city manufacturing workers

of four leading provinces in China’s manufacturing import

and export trade. (Actual levels of additional compensation

as a percentage of earnings vary by province and by municipality, but data are not available to adjust earnings by using

different multipliers for the urban manufacturing workers in

different provinces.)

The three provinces of the Yangtze River Delta have a wide

range of urban manufacturing earnings and labor compensation.

As shown in table 4, Shanghai’s 1.3 million city manufacturing

United States China Brazil Mexico Japan

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

100

3

12 12

94

88

33

Chart 1. Average hourly compensation costs of manufacturing workers, selected economies 

 and regions, 2002

U.S. = 100

($21.11)

U.S. = 100

($21.11)

Asian NIE'S 2 1 EU(15)

 SOURCE: Bureau of Labor Statistics, "International comparisons of hourly compensation costs for production workers in 

manufacturing,1975–2003," Nov. 18, 2004; on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/fls/home.htm. For China, data are from this article and 

not from the BLS series. The data for China refer to all employees rather than just production workers.

Asian NIE's are the newly industrialized economies of Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. 2

1

EU(15) are the European Union member countries prior to the expansion to 25 countries on May 1, 2004. 
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 33

workers are comparatively highly paid in the Chinese context.

Their 2002 labor compensation averaged about U.S.$4,078, and

hourly compensation was approximately U.S.$1.87. Manufacturing workers in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Guangdong had lower

labor compensation than Shanghai, but still higher than the

national average.

These city manufacturing earnings statistics for China’s

leading export-manufacturing regions do not yield a true picture

of the earnings paid by manufacturing enterprises in those

provinces. In the first place, it is not certain that the earnings of

most migrant manufacturing workers in the cities of the

aforementioned provinces are included in the urban manufacturing earnings data. Second, no wage data are reported for

the so-called rural manufacturing workers by province, nor

are TVE manufacturing earnings figures reported by province.

However, reported earnings statistics are available by province for TVE industry (gongye) employees. Nationally, 92.4

percent of TVE industry workers are manufacturing employees, and wages of these manufacturing workers are

similar to those of other industry workers. Therefore, TVE

industry earnings by province can be used to estimate manufacturing earnings.

Table 4 also reports 2002 TVE industry earnings and

derives labor compensation for the same regions. Like their

urban counterparts, TVE industry workers in these regions

have higher earnings than the national average. Shanghai

and Zhejiang TVE industry employees were the highest paid,

earning U.S.$0.71 per hour in the Shanghai suburban and rural

areas and U.S.$0.60 an hour in Zhejiang Province’s rural and

industrial zones outside of its cities. Noncity industry workers

in Jiangsu and Guangdong Provinces were not as well paid,

receiving U.S.$0.48 and U.S.$0.49 per hour, respectively.

Earnings of migrant manufacturing workers

In theory, if a worker has migrated from a village to a city and

is employed in a manufacturing enterprise, the employer

should report the migrant’s job and earnings in the “manufacturing staff and worker” category. But in practice, in most

cities of China, migrants who do not possess permanentresident documents are apparently not eligible for urban social

insurance and housing benefits:

Contracted rural migrant laborers are supposed to be

covered [in the social basic pension system] as well.

While the inclusion of rural migrant labor in urban areas

would also reduce the dependency ratio because of the

concentration of migrant laborers in the young working

age groups, present weaknesses in administrative capacity make it questionable whether these workers will ever

draw benefits, especially if they return to rural areas or

move on to other urban areas. In some cases, the pension

contribution is simply an added tax from which the

migrant will derive no benefits.45

There is increasing informal evidence that published urban

earnings data exclude the pay of most migrant workers.46 The

Table Compensation of urban manufacturing employees and TVE1 industry employees, Yangtze Delta provinces

 and Guangdong, China, 2002

Urban manufacturing employees:

National average .......................... 11,152 17,152 $2,071 1,429 $173 7.87 $0.95

Shanghai municipality ..................... 21,957 33,770 4,078 2,814 340 15.50 1.87

Zhejiang province ............................ 13,435 20,663 2,496 1,722 208 9.48 1.15

Jiangsu province ............................. 11,731 18,042 2,179 1,504 182 8.28 1.00

Guangdong province ....................... 14,958 23,005 2,778 1,917 232 10.56 1.28

 TVE1 industry employees:

National average .......................... 6,891 7,442 $899 574 $69 3.13 $0.38

Shanghai municipality ..................... 11,939 12,894 1,557 1,075 130 5.86 .71

Zhejiang province ............................ 10,188 11,003 1,329 917 111 5.00 .60

Jiangsu province ............................. 8,143 8,794 1,062 733 89 4.00 .48

Guangdong province ....................... 8,345 9,013 1,088 751 91 4.10 .49

Adjusted annual labor

compensation Annual

earnings

(yuan)

Adjusted monthly labor

compensation Province

Table 4.

Adjusted hourly labor

compensation

Yuan Yuan Yuan U.S.

dollars

U.S.

dollars

U.S.

dollars

1

TVE’s are town and village enterprises.

NOTES: U.S. dollars are calculated at the 2002 prevailing commercial exchange rate: 8.28 yuan = U.S.$1. Hourly wage estimates for urban workers

are calculated under the assumption that urban manufacturing employees

perform 2,179 actual hours of work per year and that TVE workers perform

2,200 hours per year. (See text for details.)

SOURCES: Table 3; China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry

of Labor, compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China

Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 179, 473; China Ministry of Agriculture, TVE

Yearbook Editorial Committee, ed., China Village and Town Enterprise

Yearbook 2003 [in Chinese] (Beijing, China Agriculture Publishing House,

2003), pp. 156, 174.
Manufacturing Compensation in China

34 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

earlier companion piece to this article47 referred to published

2002 statistics on manufacturing employment in urban units,

totaling 29.81 million, that included 4.59 million rural-to-urban

migrants whose household registration was still in rural areas.

Probably, their reported earnings were part of the published

average earnings data for urban manufacturing staff and workers,

but very likely, many millions more rural-to-city migrant manufacturing workers were not in the reported urban manufacturing

employment or earnings data. There are many possible reasons

for such exclusion, including the fact that many cities and

municipalities in China do not consider rural-to-urban migrants

to be real urban or municipal employees.48 It is not known

whether these migrant manufacturing workers and their earnings

get picked up in the TVE manufacturing data.

It is reasonable to assume that TVE manufacturing employment and earnings data usually include the migrant manufacturing workers in towns and rural areas. The reason is that,

because of the much lower ratio of social insurance costs in

towns and rural areas, there is almost no incentive to leave these

workers out of the data in those areas, in contrast to the situation

in cities, where the higher ratio of social insurance costs affords

a financial incentive to exclude migrant workers. There is no

separate reporting of the earnings of migrant manufacturing

workers either in the cities or outside urban areas.

Manufacturing earnings over time

Most of the data in this article relate to the year 2002 only.

Although it would be revealing to analyze trends in manufacturing earnings over several years, the data required to

construct such series over time are sparse. Published data on

earnings trends for the manufacturing sector are available

solely for urban manufacturing staff and workers. Table 5

presents published information on annual percent changes in

average real earnings for this subset of city manufacturing

employees. Real living standards have been rising in China’s

cities, and real earnings have been rising for urban staff and

workers in manufacturing.49 The “staff and worker” component

of urban manufacturing workers is supposed to include manufacturing workers who migrated into cities from rural areas, but

the rising wages indicated in table 5 probably exclude data on the

earnings of most rural-to-urban migrant manufacturing workers.50

Reported urban manufacturing earnings rose rapidly in the early

1990s, slowly in the mid-1990s, and very rapidly at the end of the

1990s and on into the early 21st century. Tables 5 and 6 and chart

2 show that these generalizations about city manufacturing

earnings trends also hold for manufacturing employees in stateowned units, collective-owned units, and “other” ownership

units (joint ventures, foreign-owned firms, multinational companies, and the like).

Table 6 and chart 2 present trends in real annual earnings (not

including required employer payments for social insurance plans

or other nonwage labor costs) for urban manufacturing staff and

workers in China. In 1990, the 53 million urban manufacturing

staff and workers earned an average of 5,058 yuan (in constant

2002 yuan). As the number of urban manufacturing staff and

workers shrank to 29 million in 2002, the earnings of those

TablAnnual percent change in average real (price-adjusted) earnings of urban manufacturing staff and workers

 in China, selected years, 1979–2002

1979 ............................................................ 9.1 7.4 4.4 —

1980 ............................................................ 5.4 5.2 7.5 —

1985 ............................................................ 4.1 3.4 6.9 17.9

1986 ............................................................ 7.1 8.6 4.3 7.5

1987 ............................................................ 2.2 2.6 .8 7.6

1988 ............................................................ –.1 .5 –2.5 14.0

1989 ............................................................ –4.5 –4.4 –5.7 .9

1990 ............................................................ 7.7 8.6 5.2 4.4

1991 ............................................................ 5.1 4.1 5.4 12.9

1992 ............................................................ 6.0 6.2 3.3 5.5

1993 ............................................................ 9.4 6.2 5.4 1.1

1994 ............................................................ 2.3 1.2 –.3 .1

1995 ............................................................ 3.3 1.6 3.5 1.8

1996 ............................................................ .3 –.4 –.9 .8

1997 ............................................................ 2.0 .5 –.3 2.3

1998 ............................................................ 5.1 2.3 2.4 –1.8

1999 ............................................................ 11.8 10.5 7.6 10.3

2000 ............................................................ 11.4 11.5 6.6 8.5

2001 ............................................................ 10.9 11.3 5.7 7.9

2002 ............................................................ 13.7 14.6 12.0 9.7

Urban stateowned units Total Urban collectiveowned units

Other urban

ownership units Year

Table 5.

NOTE: Dash indicates data are not available.

 SOURCE: China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry of Labor, compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China Statistics

Press, 2003), pp. 36, 39, 42, 45.
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 35

remaining averaged 11,001 yuan, more than double the 1990

average earnings. There was a shift in the composition of the

“urban manufacturing staff and workers” category over that 13-

year period.51 In 1990, the lowest-paid subgroup, urban collective

manufacturing workers, was large (18 million) and held down

average real earnings, while the highest-paid subgroup, privatesector enterprises, was minuscule. By 2002, the highest-paid

subgroup constituted more than half of urban manufacturing

staff and workers. This trend toward the better paid private sector

raised average earnings among urban staff and workers in manufacturing.

Estimates of manufacturing employee

compensation

Many media and other sources around the world have published

very rough estimates of hourly or monthly earnings or total

compensation for manufacturing workers in China. A comparison

of their estimates with those in this article is instructive. For

example, one journal stated that manufacturing wages in China

average about 60 cents an hour,52 very close to the 57 cents

estimated here for total compensation. One newspaper wrote,

“A Chinese factory worker earns the equivalent of less than

$1 per hour,”53 a statement supported by the preceding

analysis, and one that holds true even for urban manufacturing workers, who are better paid than their counterparts

outside the cities.

Regarding particular manufacturing sectors, a newspaper

article said that, in China, employees of auto-parts suppliers have

average wage costs of 90 cents an hour.54 Another author said

that employees of big global automakers in China “make the

equivalent of $1.50 per hour in wages and benefits.”55 Table 2

indicates that China’s urban transportation equipment manufacturing workers had average 2002 earnings of 14,409 yuan,

which would translate into about 80 cents an hour for earnings alone and $1.23 per hour for total compensation. Therefore, the overseas reports of the compensation of auto workers in China are compatible with the data presented in this

article.

One journal wrote, “China is already by far the biggest

garment exporter in the world, with average wages in the

industry of 40 cents an hour.”56 That figure is close to the 41

cents an hour that the foregoing analysis has posited for the

compensation of China’s TVE manufacturing employees.

Garment workers outside the cities are paid less than that,

because they are among the lower paid manufacturing employees in China. Table 2 indicated that urban garment workers

average 9,066 yuan per year, or approximately 50 cents per

hour, in earnings; their total compensation might be about 77

cents an hour. If so, then the estimate of 40 cents per hour is

too low for China’s urban garment workers, but correct for

noncity employees in garment manufacturing.

In general, global media-published estimates of manufacturing earnings or compensation in China are in the ballpark

of reasonable estimates.

Labor compensation costs and China’s

competitiveness

It is widely agreed57 that low earnings and low total labor

compensation costs make manufacturing production in China

competitive in the international market. One of the leading

Table 3. Average annual real earnings of urban manufacturing staff and workers in China, 1990–2002

1990 ................................................... 5,058 $611 5,599 $676 4,149 $501 6,833 $825

1991 ................................................... 5,316 642 5,828 704 4,373 528 7,714 932

1992 ................................................... 5,635 681 6,189 748 4,517 546 8,138 983

1993 ................................................... 6,165 745 6,573 794 4,761 575 8,228 994

1994 ................................................... 6,307 762 6,652 803 4,746 573 8,236 995

1995 ................................................... 6,515 787 6,759 816 4,913 593 8,384 1,013

1996 ................................................... 6,534 789 6,731 813 4,868 588 8,452 1,021

1997 ................................................... 6,665 805 6,765 817 4,854 586 8,646 1,044

1998 ................................................... 7,005 846 6,921 836 4,970 600 8,490 1,025

1999 ................................................... 7,832 946 7,647 924 5,348 646 9,365 1,131

2000 ................................................... 8,724 1,054 8,527 1,030 5,701 689 10,161 1,227

2001 ................................................... 9,675 1,169 9,490 1,146 6,026 728 10,964 1,324

2002 ................................................... 11,001 1,329 10,876 1,314 6,749 815 12,027 1,453

Yuan

Total Urban state-owned

units

Urban collectiveowned units Year

Table 6.

Other urban ownership

units

Yuan Yuan Yuan U.S.

dollars

U.S.

dollars

U.S.

dollars

U.S.

dollars

NOTE: This table presents only the reported annual earnings, which have

not been adjusted to include other labor compensation costs, such as

required employer payments to municipal social insurance systems.

SOURCE: China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry of

Labor, compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China

Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 34–45.

[In constant 2002 yuan and constant 2002 dollars]
Manufacturing Compensation in China

36 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

reasons that some of China’s own domestic manufacturing

industries can sell their products at home and abroad, and

that multinational and other foreign companies are moving

their manufacturing operations to China, is the low cost of

employing manufacturing workers there.

The low cost of labor makes China particularly competitive

in a number of manufacturing industries, including laborintensive, assembly, and reprocessing industries; industries

with low value added; those with simple repetitive steps in

the manufacturing process; and food-processing industries.

As one source puts it, “China has become an essential link in

the global production chain for many labor-intensive products...a manufacturing hub for the rest of the world in low-end

labor-intensive goods.”58 Labor productivity (output per

employee) is low by world standards in these kinds of Chinese

factories, and earnings are correspondingly low.59 In the 1990s

and beyond, China’s employees experienced widening earnings

inequality, as earnings rose for city workers, but basically

stagnated for the least skilled and least educated workers.60

China is not particularly competitive in capital-intensive or

materials-intensive industries.

However, China is beginning to compete successfully in some

kinds of moderately skills intensive kinds of manufacturing. Large

proportions of China’s young adults now have at least a lower

middle school education and therefore are basically literate and

numerate. Also, millions of young and middle-aged workers from

rural areas are eager to get out of the countryside and therefore

willing to work hard in a disciplined manner for pay that is low by

international standards, but higher than they can earn in agriculture. China also has many millions of university-educated young

adults who are especially competitive because they are good in

engineering and technical fields, are hard working and motivated,

and work for a fraction of the salaries received by equally capable

young adults in developed countries. China now produces at

least half of the world’s cameras and photocopiers and onequarter of the world’s television sets and washing machines.61

Indeed, China “is the new workshop of the world, producing

two-thirds of all photocopiers, microwave ovens, DVD players,

and shoes, over half of all digital cameras, and around two-fifths

of personal computers.”62

Labor compensation in China’s manufacturing sector is

higher than it was a decade or two ago. This means that some

other developing countries are now able to compete with

China purely on the basis of earnings per manufacturing

worker. Real living standards have been rising in China’s cities,

and real earnings have been rising for urban staff and workers

in manufacturing, as shown in tables 5 and 6 and chart 2.63

Why are urban manufacturing earnings rising rapidly in

China? Some scholars argue that because labor productivity is

Chart 2. Average real earnings of urban manufacturing staff and workers in China, 1990–2002

Yuan Yuan

Urban total manufacturing staff and workers, real earnings

Urban state-owned units, real earnings

Urban collective-owned units, real earnings

Other urban ownership units, real earnings

SOURCE: Table 6.

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

14,000

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

14,000
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 37

rising rapidly in China’s city factories, we would expect city

manufacturing earnings also to rise.64 Among the forces driving

the increase in urban manufacturing earnings are a sustained

rise in the returns to education and skill, as well as a wage

premium for Communist Party members and others remaining in

protected state-owned enterprises.65 Rigidities in urban labor

markets also have forced earnings upward and impeded competition.66 Other experts contend that the huge supply of surplus

urban and rural workers ought to keep their earnings down:

“The coincidence of rising mass unemployment and rapid

increases in real wages in the late 1990s appears contrary to the

predictions of competitive labour markets.”67 The range of

earnings in Chinese manufacturing has indeed widened, and

the least educated unskilled workers have experienced near

stagnation in their real earnings “under the twin pressures of

heavy migration from China’s villages and [the] intense pursuit of cost advantage from overseas buyers of labor-intensive

goods.”68

In addition to the earnings bill, required payments for other

urban employee benefits have increased.69 China is trying to

build a viable system of pensions, medical benefits, unemployment benefits, workers’ compensation, and housing benefits, at

least for its city population, as discussed previously. One source

argues that required employer payments for these urban social

safety net programs in China are now higher than they need to

be—for example, substantially higher than in Malaysia, South

Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.70 In some cities, the mandated

payments are still rising rapidly. For example,

Average labor costs in Shanghai rose by 15% last year due

to increases in welfare payments, healthcare subsidies, and

housing subsidies. On average local companies paid 10,849

yuan in fixed and optional welfare fees, up 22.4% [from the

year before]. This rise was significantly higher than in cities

such as Kunshan, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, or Ningbo.

71

As earnings and mandated social insurance payments increase, urban China becomes less competitive in the global

context and even in the domestic Chinese context. Shanghai,

for example, is beginning to become too expensive for many

manufacturing concerns.72 Some businesses are moving from

the city to the poorer inland province of Anhui.73 Cities

throughout China are much more expensive for manufacturing

than even their nearby suburbs. Factories can save a third in

power costs and half in wage bills just by relocating a factory

half an hour’s drive outside of Guangdong’s capital city of

Guangzhou.74 Indeed, many manufacturing companies are

now choosing to move their production operations from

developed countries or from China to other developing

countries with lower labor costs. For instance, India, Pakistan,

and Vietnam are becoming competitive as textile and apparel

producing and exporting countries because the cost of textile

production is generally lower there than in China.75 Of course,

China remains highly competitive globally because of its

relatively low labor costs and many other favorable factors,76

but rising labor compensation in China has begun to erode

the country’s manufacturing price advantage.

THIS ARTICLE HAS COMBINED EMPLOYMENT AND EARNINGS

DATA for China’s urban manufacturing workers and for the

noncity TVE manufacturing workers in order to derive approximations of annual, monthly, and hourly labor compensation for

urban, noncity, and all-China manufacturing employees. Reported

earnings and labor compensation data have been adjusted

separately to yield urban data and TVE data. As of 2002, the

latest year for which adequate earnings data are available, average

labor compensation for 30 million of China’s urban manufacturing

employees was approximately U.S.$0.95 per hour, while the

reported 71 million manufacturing employees in TVE’s outside

the cities averaged about U.S.$0.41 in labor compensation per

hour of work. Combining the labor compensation of manufacturing workers in cities and in TVE’s to derive an all-China

estimate results in average labor compensation of approximately U.S.$0.57 per hour of work for 101 million manufacturing workers in China.

The following items should have high priority for future

data collection in China and future research on hourly labor

compensation in China’s manufacturing sector:

1. Data on hours worked. For the important goal of

calculating average hourly labor compensation in

manufacturing in China, a high priority is to get better

data on actual hours worked by employees in the

manufacturing sector. China’s government could itself

gather and publish more systematic data on this important measure, and scholars should also emphasize

gathering information on it.

2. National economic census. During the year 2005, with

reference year 2004, China conducted its first national

census of the economy. This undertaking is expected

to refine, correct, and update data on labor compensation received in manufacturing. When results of the

economic census become available starting in late 2005,

the new information should be used to update the

estimates in this article.

3. Noncity manufacturing labor compensation. Much

more data collection and analytical research are needed

to fill in some of the missing information on rural and

town manufacturing earnings and total compensation.
Manufacturing Compensation in China

38 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

4. Labor force surveys. China needs to design, carry

out, and publish results of labor force surveys using

international standards and definitions. Such surveys

should cover the whole country and should collect

and publish data on earnings and total compensation.

China reportedly will begin a regular labor force survey

in 2006, the results of which will subsequently be

published.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: This article was written under contract to the

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, in order to further

the knowledge of China’s manufacturing earnings and labor compensation

statistics. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect

the views of the Bureau. This research project has benefited from the

valuable feedback of colleagues in China and in other countries on China’s

economy and Chinese business practices. In particular, economists Loraine

A. West and Nicholas R. Lardy served as expert discussants at a November

2004 BLS seminar on an early draft of the full report on the BLS Web site.

Official statistical organizations in China have helped to correct some

errors and point toward missing pieces of information. BLS economists—

in particular, Constance Sorrentino, Chris Sparks, Elizabeth Taylor, Aaron

Cobet, Susan Fleck, Marie Claire Guillard, Gary Martin, Ann Neff, and

Erin Lett—have provided their expertise and support. Patricia Capdevielle,

formerly of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, provided expert advice and

comments. I would especially like to thank Xing Yan (LeLe), Xing Shuo,

Song Jintao, Xing Shuqin, Wang Jianping, Li Fang, Xue Jianwen, and

Robert Boyer for their dedicated research assistance. The opinions,

analysis, and conclusions expressed in this report are solely mine, and any

example, the purchasing power parities used may not accurately reflect

the actual purchasing patterns of manufacturing workers, and the price

data used to construct the parities may not correctly approximate the

relative prices of many goods and services. For a discussion of the

purchasing power of Chinese manufacturing worker incomes, see Judith

Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in China,”

on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/fls/#publications.

5 The analysis presented herein applies to the mainland of the

People’s Republic of China and excludes statistics for Hong Kong,

Macao, and Taiwan.

6

 Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China.”

7

 Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in China.”

8

 “International Comparisons of Hourly Compensation Costs for

Production Workers in Manufacturing,” on the Internet at http://

www.bls.gov/news.release/ichcc.toc.htm.

9

 See Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China,” for further

background information about China’s statistical system.

10 Examples are available of statistical reporting forms and instructions

issued to city enterprises to use to report employment and earnings data

for the calendar year 2003. A “labor situation form” [Laodong qingkuang

biao] was to be submitted to authorities by the end of February 2004.

Wage-reporting instructions were in the publication Laodong gongzi;

tongji taizhang [Labor wages; statistical accounts] (Beijing, Beijing

Municipality Statistical Bureau, 2004), especially p. 2-1.

11 China National Bureau of Statistics, China Statistical Yearbook

2003 (Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 66, 84, 87, 90.

12 China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry of Labor,

compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook (Beijing, China Statistics

Press, published annually); China Ministry of Agriculture, TVE Yearbook

Editorial Committee, ed., China Village and Town Enterprise Yearbook

2003 [in Chinese] (Beijing, China Agriculture Publishing House, 2003),

pp. 130–31.

13 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China National

Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry of Labor, compilers; China

Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 630, 638.

14 Chinese sources did not report earnings data for another 8 million

urban manufacturing employees: self-employed individual manufacturing

workers and the investors and workers in relatively small private manufacturing concerns. It is not known whether this group of city manufacturing employees earns more or less than the “manufacturing employees in urban units.” However, some of the employers of these 8

million workers pay lower social insurance payments or none at all to city

governments.

15 China Village and Town Enterprise Yearbook 2003, pp. 130–31.

16 Wage-reporting instructions, 2004, p. 2-4.

17 See BLS Handbook of Methods (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1997),

Chapter 12, “Foreign labor statistics,” pp. 114–15; and Chris Sparks,

Theo Bikoi, and Lisa Moglia, “A perspective on U.S. and foreign

mistakes or errors remain my responsibility.

1

 The companion piece to this article, “Manufacturing employment

in China” (Monthly Labor Review, July 2005, pp. 11–29), noted that

China’s official statistics reported 83 million manufacturing employees

at yearend 2002, but a variety of other available statistics strongly

indicated that the actual number was more than 100 million.

2 Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China,” noted that

China’s official statistics reported 38 million city manufacturing

employees at yearend 2002. Data on earnings are not available for 8.2

million manufacturing workers in the cities; of these workers, 2.6

million are self-employed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not

include the self-employed in its comparative estimates of hourly

compensation costs, which relate only to production workers. China's

data cover both production and nonproduction workers.

3 TVE’s originally were established as collective economic units run by

local governments in rural areas and towns. The purpose of TVE’s was, and

still is, to employ small farmers and rural laborers in industrial or service

occupations in locations not far from their family homes. This effort

allows China’s vast countryside to become modernized without necessitating massive migration from the villages to cities. In the 1980s, and

especially from the 1990s to today, TVE’s shifted from public toward

private ownership, and many foreign-funded enterprises became classified

as TVE’s. Nowadays, in addition to including small local enterprises, the

TVE category can include very large factories in industrial parks outside

cities, as well as suburban, town, and rural factories. Companies have

incentives to have their factories classified as TVE’s because required social

insurance payments are low, statistical reporting requirements are minimal,

and the companies receive many legal and tax benefits.

4

 To more closely approximate the purchasing power of Chinese

manufacturing worker incomes in U.S. dollars, some type of purchasing

power parity (that is, the amount of yuan required to purchase the

equivalent of $1 of goods and services in China) would be needed. Although

purchasing power parities provide a better measure of differences in relative

price levels than do commercial exchange rates, there are still important

limitations in using them to construct comparisons of worker income. For
Monthly Labor Review August 2005 39

compensation costs in manufacturing,” Monthly Labor Review, June

2002, pp. 36–50, especially p. 49.

18 See Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China.”

19 Sparks, Bikoi, and Moglia, “U.S. and foreign compensation costs,”

p. 49.

20 Xiaochun Qiao, China’s Aging and Social Security of the Elderly:

With Reference to Japan’s Experiences, Japan External Trade

Organization, IDE-JETRO Visiting Research Fellow Monograph Series

No. 388 (Chiba, Japan, Institute of Developing Economies, 2004).

21 “Shehui baoxianfei zheng jiao zanxing tiaoli” (“Provisional

regulations for payment of social insurance fees”), in Laodong he

shehui baoxian zhengce xuanchuan cailiao (Materials on social

insurance policy announcements), Beijing, Haidian District Labor and

Social Security Office, regulation number 259, promulgated Jan. 22,

1999.

22 Wage-reporting instructions, p. 2-5.

23 BLS Handbook, pp. 114–15; Sparks, Bikoi, and Moglia, “U.S. and

foreign compensation costs,” p. 37.

24 All data in this paragraph are from China Ministry of Labor,

Zhongguo laodongli shichang gongzi zhidao jiawei (2003 nian)

[China Labor Force Market Wage Guide 2003] (Beijing, China Labor

Social Security Press, 2004), p. 379.

25 Ibid., p. 379.

26 Loraine A. West, “Pension reform in China: Preparing for the future,” Journal of Development Studies, February 1999, p. 165. In some

cities, the social benefit payment that the enterprise is required to pay the

government is not strictly a percentage of whatever the total gross salary

bill is. For example, in Shanghai for 2003, enterprises had to pay 43.5

percent of the total wage bill, subject to the following constraints: if the

reported total wage bill divided by the reported number of employees

averaged less than 60 percent of Shanghai’s average monthly salary for

the first half of 2003, the enterprise still had to pay 43.5 percent of that

minimum salary threshold; the maximum payment the enterprise was

required to remit was 43.5 percent of the total wage bill that would

represent 3 times the average 2003 Shanghai wage. (See Lulu Zhang,

“Shanghai region: Updates on Shanghai social benefit affecting FIE monthly

overheads,” China Briefing; The Practical Application of China Business,

June 2004, p. 10.) This procedure is supposed to be applied nationwide,

based on State Council Document Number 6. See also Loraine A. West and

Daniel Goodkind, Pension Management and Reform in China, NBR

Executive Insight Series No. 15 (Seattle, National Bureau of Asian Research,

1999), p. 3.

27 Data for Changshu City are from Qiye shenbao shehui baoxian

jiaofei yewu zhinan (Business guide to enterprises on social insurance

payments), Jan. 15, 2004; on the Internet at http://www.changshu.

gov.cn/H/content/HQA0000000000002837.htm. Data for Wuxi City

are from Shehui baoxianfei jiaofei bili mingxi biao (Table of detailed

comparisons of required social insurance payments), 2858 fuwuwang

(2858 service Internet site) at http://www.wx2858.com/XCBST/jyzn/

shehuibaoxian.asp.

28 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, pp. 471, 575–81. China had

21.3 million TVE’s of all kinds in 2002, but only 85,000 of them had any

rural old-age pension insurance. By yearend 2002, a cumulative total of

54.6 million people had ever contributed to any rural social pension

insurance scheme, but during 2002, only 4.1 million contributed to such

a system.

29 Louise Fox and Yaohui Zhao, “China’s labor market reform:

Performance and prospects,” background paper for the China 2002

Country Economic Memorandum (Washington, DC, World Bank,

2002); Xiaochun Qiao, China’s Aging and Social Security.

30 Xiao-yuan Dong, “The Changing Wage-Structures in the 1990s:

A Comparison between Rural and Urban Enterprises in China,” paper

presented at the International Research Conference on Poverty,

Inequality, Labor Market and Welfare Reform in China, Australian

National University, Canberra, Australia, August 2004, Table 1, pp.

28–29; on the Internet at http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/pdf/chinaabstract-pdf/Dongpaper.pdf.

31 Kim Woodard and Anita Qingli Wang, “Acquisitions in China: A

View of the Field,” China Business Review, November–December 2004,

pp. 34–38, and “Acquisitions in China: Closing the Deal,” China

Business Review, January–February 2005, p. 35.

32 See Fox and Zhao, “China’s labor market reform.”

33 See Judith Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China,”

Monthly Labor Review, July 2005, pp. 11–29, for a further explanation

of the underreporting of manufacturing employment and its

consequences.

34 Richard Jackson and Neil Howe, The Graying of the Middle Kingdom (Washington, DC, Center for Strategic and International Studies

and Prudential Foundation, 2004), p. 14.

35 David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale, “China takes off,” Foreign Affairs,

November–December 2003, p. 46; Nicholas R. Lardy, “United StatesChina ties: reassessing the economic relationship,” testimony presented

before the House Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of

Representatives, Oct. 21, 2003; on the Internet at http://www.iie.com/

publications/papers/lardy1003.htm; and Henny Sender, “Self-interest

may lead China to revalue yuan,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 19, 2004, p.

A2.

36 John Knight and Linda Yueh, “Urban Insiders Versus Rural Outsiders:

Complementarity or Competition in China’s Urban Labour Market?”

paper presented at the International Research Conference on Poverty,

Inequality, Labour Market and Welfare Reform in China, Australian

National University, Canberra, Australia, August 2004; on the Internet at

http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/chinaconfabstracts.htm.

37 Jianchun Yang, “China Working Time Statistics,” on the Internet

at http://www.insee.fr/en/nom_def_met/colloques/citygroup/pdf/

China-general.pdf; China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2004, p. 111;

personal communication with NBS officials.

38 Yang, “China Working Time Statistics,” p. 1.

39 See “Excessive Overtime in Chinese Supplier Factories: Causes,

Impacts, and Recommendations for Action,” Verité Research Paper,

September 2004, on the Internet at http://www.verite.org/Excessive

%20Overtime%20in%20Chinese%20Factories.pdf; and Leslie T.

Chang, “At 18, Min finds a path to success in migration wave,” Wall Street

Journal, Nov. 8, 2004, p. A1.

40 See earlier in this article, pp. 27–29.

41 Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China.”

42 China Village and Town Enterprise Yearbook 2003, p. 219.

43 Employment weights are used to calculate an estimate of national

total labor compensation in manufacturing.

44 Note again that the data for China refer to all employees, while

the figures for the United States and other countries refer to production

workers. Employees have higher compensation than production workers, so the data for China are overstated to an unknown degree for

these comparisons.

45 West, “Pension reform in China,” p. 172.

46 Thomas G. Rawski, personal communication, May 28, 2004.

47 Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China,” p. 23.

48 Shanghai municipality, for example, excludes from its employment statistics data on in-migrant workers from other provinces. (See

Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China.”)
Manufacturing Compensation in China

40 Monthly Labor Review August 2005

49 See Nicholas R. Lardy, “Do China’s Abusive Labor Practices

Encourage Outsourcing and Drive Down American Wages?” testimony

presented before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee Hearing,

Mar. 29, 2004; on the Internet at http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/

hearings/hearing14/lardy.pdf.

50 Rawski, personal communication, May 28, 2004; Fox and Zhao,

“China’s labor market reform,” pp. 3, 22.

51 Banister, “Manufacturing employment in China,” table 1.

52 “Is the wakening giant a monster?” The Economist, Feb. 15,

2003, pp. 63–65.

53 George Stalk and Dave Young, “How China gets our business,”

Washington Post, Mar. 7, 2004, p. B3.

54 Norihiko Shirouzu, “China drives auto-parts shift,” Asian Wall

Street Journal, June 10, 2004, p. A5.

55 Joseph Szczesny, “China an exporter by 2007? Will too many

cars force Chinese automakers to begin selling outside the Middle

Kingdom?”; on the Internet at http://www.thecarconnection.com/

index.asp?article=7233.

56 “Is the wakening giant a monster?” p. 63.

57 For a few examples, see Stalk and Young, “How China gets our

business”; Szczesny, “China an exporter by 2007?”; and Chinese Academy

of Social Sciences, Industry Economic Research Institute, Zhongguo

gongye fazhan baogao [China’s Industrial Development Report] (Beijing,

Economic Management Press, 2001), pp. 109, 547.

58 Hale and Hale, “China takes off,” p. 46.

59 Lardy, “China’s Abusive Labor Practices.”

60 Fox and Zhao, “China’s labor market reform.”

61 Matt Forney, “Tug-of-war over trade: As China becomes the

world’s factory, U.S. and European manufacturers are hurting,” Time

International (Europe Edition), Feb. 23, 2004, p. 34.

62 “The dragon and the eagle,” The Economist, Sept. 30, 2004.

63 See also Lardy, “China’s Abusive Labor Practices.”

64 Nicholas R. Lardy, discussant, BLS seminar, Washington, DC, Nov.

8, 2004.

65 See Fox and Zhao, “China’s labor market reform.”

66 Knight and Yueh, “Urban insiders versus rural outsiders.”

67 Simon Appleton and Lina Song, “The evolution of wage structure in

urban China during reform and retrenchment,” paper presented at the

International Research Conference on Poverty, Inequality, Labor Market

and Welfare Reform in China, Australian National University, Canberra,

August 2004, p. 2; on the Internet at http://econrsss.anu.edu.au/

chinaconfababstractshtm.

68 Thomas G. Rawski, “Recent developments in China’s labour

economy,” revised November 2003 from a report prepared for the

International Labor Office in January 2002, p. 17; see also Fox and Zhao,

 “China’s labor market reform,” pp. 3, 22; and the entire Rawski article.

69 Jianchun Yang, “2002 nian zhongguo jiuye qingkuang” [“China

2002 employment situation”], Zhongguo renkou tongji nianjian 2003

[China Population Statistics Yearbook 2003] (Beijing, China Statistics

Press, 2003).

70 Rawski, “Recent developments,” p. 27; see also Bureau of Labor

Statistics, “International comparisons of hourly compensation costs

for production workers in manufacturing, 1975–2003”; on the Internet at http://bls.gov/fls/home.htm.

71 Paul French, “Welcome to bubble town,” Asian Wall Street Journal,

May 27, 2004, p. A7.

72 Iain McDaniels, “A critical eye on Shanghai: Will the city’s

extraordinary growth continue?” China Business Review, January–

February 2004, pp. 8–9, especially p. 8.

73 French, “Welcome to bubble town.”

74 “String of pearls: China’s development,” The Economist, Nov.

20, 2004, p. 44.

75 Mu Xin and Zhenpeng Liang, “Mei caigou shang xuejian Zhongguo

fangzhi dingdan” [“U.S. purchasers have cut textile orders from China”],

Xin kuai bao [New Express], Apr. 28, 2004; on the Internet at http://

www.ycwb.com/gb/content/2004-04/28/content_683077.htm.

76 See Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation,”

for further information on China’s many competitive advantages in

manufacturing.