Monthly Labor Review July 2005 11

I

n recent decades, China has become a

manufacturing powerhouse. The country’s

official data showed 83 million manufacturing

employees in 2002, but that figure is likely to be

understated; the actual number was probably closer

to 109 million. By contrast, in 2002, the Group of

Seven (G7) major industrialized countries had a total

of 53 million manufacturing workers. In the late

1990s through the year 2000, China saw declining

numbers of manufacturing workers, caused by

restructuring and the privatization of state-owned

and urban collective-owned factories in the cities.

Both massive layoffs of urban manufacturing

workers and sharp increases in manufacturing labor

productivity ensued. Since then, private-sector

manufacturing has thrived in both urban and rural

areas of China. The reorganized factories are more

productive than state-owned and collective-owned

factories and are competitive in the domestic and

global economies. China’s manufacturing employment began to rise again after 2000, regaining

the upward trend of the period from 1980 to 1995.

This article begins with an overview of China’s

statistical system, including a description of the

sources of data used in the analysis presented.

Three main sources of statistics on China’s manufacturing employment are compared and contrasted, and a hybrid data series is derived that

helps evaluate Chinese manufacturing employment

levels and trends from 1990 through 2002. The

probable biases in China’s statistics on the country’s numbers of manufacturing workers are asThe scale of manufacturing employment in China

dwarfs the numbers of manufacturing workers

in other countries; China’s manufacturing sector

has shed surplus workers from inefficient

state-owned factories, while increasing employment

in the private sector

Manufacturing employment

in China

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

@yahoo.com

sessed, both at the national level and in the key

export-manufacturing zones.

The analysis emphasizes issues of data quality

and the remaining legacies of the command

economy reflected in China’s labor statistics.

Among the factors included is the excessive focus

of China’s published statistics on city manufacturing employees, to the near exclusion of

detailed data on the more numerous manufacturing

employees working outside the administrative

boundaries of cities. Even within the cities, data

collection and reporting remain concentrated on

the rapidly declining state-owned and urban

collective-owned manufacturing enterprises,

giving short shrift to the not yet adequately

collected or published statistics on the thriving,

growing, dynamic private manufacturing sector. A

major reason for China’s statistical neglect of the

private sector is that the dominance of private and

corporate businesses in today’s economy does not

fit easily into Marxist theory or Mao Zedong’s

ideology.

Because of the many data limitations, a great

deal of uncertainty remains in the work presented

here. A more exacting analysis awaits new and

better data collection and more detailed metadata

from China’s statistical system.

This article is the first of a two-part series on

China’s manufacturing labor statistics. The second article, to be published in the next issue of

the Review, will analyze manufacturing wages

and labor compensation. A more detailed exposition

 Manufacturing Employment in China
12 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

of the analysis in the two articles is found on the Bureau of

Labor Statistics (BLS) Web site.1

 The analysis in the current

article refers to the People’s Republic of China (mainland China;

hereinafter, “China”) and excludes statistics for Hong Kong,

Macao, and Taiwan. Occasionally, Chinese terminology will be

used, because the standard English translations of the terms are

misleading or ambiguous and in some cases because there is no

succinct, accurate English translation of the term.

Background

China’s statistical system has been greatly strengthened during

the most recent quarter century of economic reform.2 Statisticians

in China are steadily learning from international practice as

promoted by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the

International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations system.

China’s statistical organizations endeavor to apply best practices

from other countries—especially developed countries—to the

Chinese economy. Their efforts have been particularly successful in China’s population censuses and in some economic

and demographic surveys—for example, the annual urban and

rural household income and consumption surveys. Nevertheless, China’s statistical system is still affected by categories

and procedures that were established during the command

economy period before 1978 and never revised. Those outdated

categories hamper the analysis of levels and trends of economic

growth, inflation or deflation, employment, wages, and economic

change in the urban and rural economies. In addition, despite

expanding its use of censuses and representative sample

surveys, China continues to employ the method of regular

(usually annual) statistical reporting by all production or

administrative units as its primary data collection instrument.

Most statistics in China are recorded and collected under the

central guidance of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

According to one source, “The NBS carries the responsibility for

organizing, directing and coordinating the statistical work

throughout the country.”3 However, as will be shown later, other

ministries have certain statistical turf that is their particular

responsibility for historical or bureaucratic reasons, and there

seems to be little coordination among the relevant ministries. For

instance, with regard to manufacturing employment statistics,

the Ministry of Labor and Social Security (hereinafter, Labor

Ministry) gathers data on most components of the city economies, leaving a small, but rapidly growing, segment to the State

Administration for Industry and Commerce. However, the collection of data and the reporting of statistics on manufacturing

in rural areas and in towns are left to a part of the Ministry of

Agriculture.4

The analysis that follows is based as much as possible on

information in Chinese sources published by official statistical

organizations. The most useful sources turn out to be statistical

yearbooks from various government ministries. Later sections

of this article compile and compare data on China’s manufacturing employment from the 1995 industrial census and the

2000 population census, as well as administrative data collected

from manufacturing enterprises and reported annually. The

article explains discrepancies among the data sets, to the extent

possible, and discusses the effects of definitional changes on

the available official series of manufacturing employment statistics. Strengths and weaknesses in the published statistics are

highlighted.

Recent employment statistics

Employment figures for China are usually confusing and

nonstandard. They reflect, in part, conventions from the Maoist

command economy period from 1949 to 1978, as well as new

conventions for the semimarket economy of the economic

reform period since 1978. The available data also reflect China’s

attempts to make its economic statistics more internationally

comparable. Recent employment statistics are pieced together

primarily from annual enterprise data. Each enterprise, economic

unit, small business, or self-employed individual or group is

supposed to report employment data each year according to its

“labor situation” in the previous year and at the previous year’s

end. The data are then compiled upward in a statistical reporting

chain to the national government.

Enterprise data refer to who is working in what kind of work at

the end of the relevant year (end of December). The urban

enterprise statistical reporting form that is required to be

submitted to authorities early in a calendar year and that refers

to the previous calendar year asks enterprises for the “labor

situation” (in particular, for the “actual situation that year”)—

and specifically for the numbers of each category of workers at

the end of the previous year.5

 Accountants or those who report

employment and wage figures on behalf of their enterprises or

other work units (at least those enterprises or other work units

in urban areas) are given detailed instructions on how to report

monthly, quarterly, yearend, and annual average figures on

employment and wages. The instructions are based on

regulations released by China’s NBS, especially in 1990 and with

further clarifications in 1998 and 2002, regarding how to report

employment and wages.6

The annually reported figures on total manufacturing

employment in China include all manufacturing employees:

production workers, salaried workers, and supervisory workers. China does not show separate data for these groups of

workers. Table 1 presents figures from China’s annual enterprise reporting system on the numbers of employed manufacturing workers in the country from 1978 through 2002, broken

down into the various categories reported (described in the

next section).
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 13

Structure of manufacturing employment

Chart 1 (based partly on table 1) displays the structure of

China’s manufacturing employment at the end of 2002, the

latest date for which enough statistics are currently available.

The country’s NBS and Labor Ministry published a figure of

83 million manufacturing employees in China, of whom 45

million were called rural and 38 million were classified as

urban. But these data do not take full account of the 71 million

town and village enterprise (TVE) manufacturing workers

reported by the Ministry of Agriculture. The TVE category

includes large factories in industrial parks outside cities, as

Furthermore, there is evidence that the official figure of 83 million

manufacturing workers excludes millions of migrant manufacturing workers. (See also later.)

Of the 38 million urban manufacturing employees at yearend

2002 indicated in Chart 1, 30 million were employed in so-called

urban manufacturing units (danwei), and of these, 29 million

were on-post (not laid-off or unemployed) staff and workers.

Most of these urban manufacturing staff and workers (16 million)

were employed by corporations, joint ventures, and other companies in China’s growing private sector. By the end of 2002,

manufacturing employment in urban state-owned enterprises

had dropped steeply, to 10 million, and in urban collective units

had declined to only 3 million. (See table 1.)

There is considerable overlap between the two categories

making up the urban manufacturing classification: manufacturing employment in urban units and urban manufacturing

staff and workers (zhigong). Urban manufacturing staff and

workers (all of whom have been on-post workers since 1998) are

Official reported manufacturing employment in China, yearend 1978–2002

1978 ...................... 53.32 17.34 35.98 — — — 35.95 24.49 11.46 — 17.34 —

1980 ...................... 58.99 19.42 39.57 — — — 39.47 26.01 13.46 — 19.42 —

1985 ...................... 74.12 27.41 46.71 — — — 46.20 29.75 16.08 .37 41.37 —

1986. ..................... 80.19 31.39 48.80 — — — 48.20 30.96 16.80 .46 47.62 —

1987. ..................... 83.59 32.97 50.62 — — — 49.88 32.09 17.24 .58 52.67 —

1988 ...................... 86.52 34.13 52.39 — — — 51.49 33.27 17.45 .77 57.03 —

1989................... 85.47 32.56 52.91 — — — 52.06 33.44 17.54 1.08 56.24 —

1990 ...................... 86.24 32.29 53.95 — — — 53.04 33.95 17.73 1.35 55.72 51.50

1991 ...................... 88.39 32.68 55.71 — — — 54.43 34.82 17.82 1.80 58.14 53.73

1992 ...................... 91.06 34.68 56.38 — — — 55.08 35.26 17.47 2.36 63.36 58.56

1993 ...................... 92.95 36.59 56.36 — — — 54.69 34.44 15.95 4.30 72.60 67.10

1994................... 96.13 38.49 57.64 54.92 30.31 24.61 54.34 33.21 15.15 5.98 69.62 64.34

1995 ...................... 98.03 39.71 58.32 54.93 30.11 24.82 54.39 33.26 14.17 6.96 75.65 69.92

1996 ...................... 97.63 40.19 57.44 53.44 29.52 23.92 52.93 32.18 13.46 7.28 78.60 72.65

1997 ...................... 96.12 40.32 55.80 51.30 28.44 22.86 50.83 30.11 12.44 8.27 361.49 356.84

1998. ..................... 383.19 339.29 343.90 338.26 — — 337.69 318.83 3

7.42 311.44 73.34 67.79

1999 ...................... 81.09 39.53 41.56 35.54 20.12 15.42 34.96 16.48 6.22 12.25 73.95 68.35

2000 ...................... 80.43 41.09 39.34 33.01 18.75 14.25 32.40 14.15 5.19 13.06 74.67 69.01

2001 ...................... 80.83 42.96 37.87 30.70 17.52 13.18 30.10 11.94 4.25 13.91 76.15 70.38

2002 ...................... 83.07 45.06 38.02 29.81 16.98 12.83 29.07 9.79 3.46 15.82 76.68 70.87

1 Derived urban manufacturing employment is calculated as national

manufacturing employment minus rural manufacturing employment.

2 TVE manufacturing employment was reported officially only for 2002,

when it constituted 92.4 percent of TVE industry employment; figures for

other years are estimated, using the same percentage.

3 Break in series.

NOTES: Dash indicates data not available. All figures refer to the

mainland provinces of China, not including Hong Kong, Macao, or Taiwan.

The data are from China’s annual yearend reporting system, not from census

data and not adjusted to agree with census data.

SOURCES: China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry of

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

Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 8, 10, 13, 16, 21, 23–26, 171, 473. China,

Ministry of Agriculture, China TVE Yearbook Editorial Committee, editors,

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

Agriculture Publishing House, 2003), p. 130.

Manufac-

 turing2 Derived Industry urban1 Total Rural Total Men Women Total

Other

ownership

units

 Urban

collectiveowned

units

Stateowned

units

Table 1.

[In millions]

Manufacturing employment

well as suburban, town, and rural factories.7 On the basis of

the reasonable assumption that the 38 million urban and 71

million TVE manufacturing employment categories are mutually

exclusive, the total manufacturing employment at yearend 2002

was about 109 million, as shown in Chart 1. (This contradiction

and its implications are addressed more fully later in the article.)

Urban manufacturing staff

and workers

Town and village

enterprises (TVE’s)

Manufacturing employment

 in urban units

 Year
14 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

included by definition in the category of manufacturing employment in urban units.8

 In every year for which both series are

available, namely, 1994–2002, the category of manufacturing

employment in urban units is slightly (0.5–0.7 million) larger than

that of urban manufacturing staff and workers. (See table 1.) The

residual half a million to three-quarters of a million workers in

urban manufacturing units include urban reemployed former

retirees and foreign employees of manufacturing units, as well

as employees from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.9

For example, at yearend 2002, China recorded 29.807 million

employed in urban manufacturing units and 29.069 million urban

manufacturing staff and workers, the difference between the

two categories being approximately 738,000. (See table 1 and

chart 1.10) This residual is accounted for by the category of other

urban manufacturing employment, with 738,885 reported for

yearend 2002, of whom 150,470 were reemployed and continuing

workers of retirement age.11 Who, then, were the remaining

588,000 employees in urban manufacturing units? The Labor

Ministry clearly has collected data on how many of them are

foreign personnel, but China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003

does not report this information. (The volume does report that,

in all sectors of the economy, only 50,045 out of all those in the

category of other urban employment, totaling 4.28 million, were

“Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan & Foreign Personnel” at yearend

2002. This small number implies that the great majority of the

hundreds of thousands of foreign experts, technical and administrative workers, teachers, managers, and entrepreneurs actually

working in China have been classified—or misclassified—as

working in rural areas or are not recorded as working at all.)

Therefore, only a small proportion of the unexplained 0.59 million

workers under the classification of “other” urban manufacturing

employees at yearend 2002 could be recorded in the statistics as

foreign personnel. The rest of the “other” urban manufacturing

employees work for urban manufacturing enterprises, but are in

statistical categories such as employees lent from another

company, workers holding a second job, and those working

without a contract because they have not completed employment formalities.12

The larger urban category of manufacturing employment in

urban units included 29.8 million of the 38.0 million total for

yearend-2002 urban manufacturing employment. (See table 1

and chart 1.) The other 8.2 million were in relatively small privately

owned and privately operated enterprises (siying qiye) or were

self-employed individual or family enterprises (geti jiuye) in

urban manufacturing.13 China’s urban (chengzhen) manufacturing workforce in 2002 included 2.6 million workers in getihu

(individual and household enterprises) and 5.6 million working

in privately owned siying qiye. In the latter category, 0.8 million

workers were categorized as “investors” in their own companies,

and 4.8 million were called hired laborers or hired hands.14

On the basis of China’s urban manufacturing employment

data (see table 1 and chart 1), 13 million urban manufacturing

workers remain in public-sector (state-owned and urban

collective-owned) work units. Thus, the private sector now

employs 25 million of China’s reported 38 million urban

manufacturing workers.15 Private-sector manufacturing workers

are counted, and their numbers are reported, but otherwise, far

less information is published about the private sector than the

public sector.

Because of the city bias of employment statistics in China,

there are almost no further readily available details about the 45

million rural or 71 million TVE manufacturing employees. This

information gap is the biggest weakness of China’s statistics on

manufacturing employment. (The article returns to the problematic classifications of urban and rural statistics in a later section.)

Reported trends in manufacturing

employment

As shown in table 1, the officially reported number of employed manufacturing workers in China rose dramatically

during the post-Mao economic reform period, from 53 million

in 1978 to an all-time high of 98 million in 1995, declined sharply

to 80 million in 2000, and then rose again to 83 million by yearend

2002. Rural manufacturing employment has risen with few

setbacks throughout this 24-year period, peaking at a reported

45 million as of the end of 2002. The difference between China’s

reported national and rural manufacturing employment should

be urban manufacturing employment; but this number was not

published for a number of years, and the column in table 1 is

derived as a residual calculation. The figures so derived indicate

that urban manufacturing employment in China rose from 36

million in 1978 to a high of 58 million in 1994–95 and then dropped

to 38 million by yearend 2002. A figure of 38.018 million for urban

manufacturing employment is directly reported in a published

table.16 Therefore, the procedure used to derive urban manufacturing employment in table 1 appears to be defensible.

Employment in urban manufacturing units reportedly dropped

from 55 million in 1994–95 to 30 million by yearend 2002, and

total urban manufacturing staff and workers increased from 36

million in 1978 to 55 million in 1992–93, thereafter declining to 29

million by the end of 2002, on the basis of the reported statistics

in table 1. These employment trends based on the official data,

however, are misleading. The next two sections discuss changes

in definition and coverage that affect the available manufacturing

employment statistics and the trends in manufacturing employment during 1990–2002 after adjusting for the changes to the

extent possible.

Change in the definition of urban

employed

What do the preceding numbers mean? In the first place,

successive figures are sometimes not comparable due to

changes in coverage or redefinition. In particular, the number
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 15

for implied urban manufacturing employment dropped

sharply, from 55.8 million at the end of 1997 to 43.9 million at

yearend 1998, an apparent decline of 12 million in 1 year. A

similar drop is shown for manufacturing employment in

urban units, from 51.3 million at the end of 1997 to 38.3 million

at the end of 1998, and thus down 13 million during 1998.

Employment numbers for urban manufacturing staff and

workers also declined, from 50.8 million to 37.7 million that

year, a drop of 13 million as well. Figures for manufacturing

staff and workers in state-owned units decreased by 11

million that year and went down by 5 million in urban

collective-owned units, while increasing by 3 million in

“other” ownership units.

What happened to these manufacturing employment

statistics during 1998? One reported change was that there

was an important shift in the employment statistics coverage in

urban areas. Starting in 1998, workers who had been laid off

from active employment, but were still connected with their

former employment unit, were no longer deemed employed

and were thus excluded from the employment figures.17

Therefore, these laid-off (“off-post” or “not-on-post” in the

English translation of China’s statistical yearbooks) urban

manufacturing workers are not included in the 1998–2002

numbers for urban manufacturing employment, manufacturing

employment in urban units, or urban on-post manufacturing staff

and workers.18 By yearend 2002, the net result of the layoff and

rehiring processes was that the number of laid-off urban manufacturing staff and workers totaled 9.13 million.

Adjusted trends in manufacturing

employment

In order to gauge trends in manufacturing employment in China,

the analyst must adjust for definitional changes and changes in

coverage in the urban data. It is important to recognize that before,

and even after, the definitional change in 1998, reported urban

manufacturing employment figures for China included, and

continue to include, millions of surplus workers.19 By the end of

2002, of those surplus manufacturing workers, 9.13 million were in

the laid-off category, but through 1997 they were still nominally

employed in their manufacturing work units.

One method for attempting to gauge true trends in manufacturing employment in China is to subtract the reported laid-off

manufacturing workers from the pre-1998 total manufacturing

employment figures (which still included laid-off employees), in

order to get comparable figures for before 1998 and afterwards.

There were reported to be 2 million laid-off manufacturing employees still nominally connected to their work units in 1995 and

of which

 on-post staff and workers: 29.07

 of which

 State owned: 9.79

 urban collective: 3.46

 other ownership: 15.82

 other: 0.74

 NOTE: Official total yearend-2002 manufacturing employment in China was 83.07 million, of which 38.02 million was urban and 

45.06 million was rural. But if nonurban manufacturing employment was best represented by TVE employment of 70.87 million, then 

the total yearend-2002 manufacturing employment in China was 108.88 million.

 SOURCES: Table 1 and text.

Town and village enterprise. 1

 of which

 private enterprises: 5.64

 of which

 investors: 0.79

 hired workers: 4.85

 individual and household: 2.57

 of which

 employment in urban units: 29.81

 of which

 individual and private business: 8.21

of which

 rural reported: 45.06

 or

 TVE: 70.87

of which

 urban: 38.02

Total reported: 83.07 or (urban and TVE ) 108.88 1

Chart 1. Structure of manufacturing employment in China, yearend 2002 (numbers in millions)
16 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

3 million in 1996. Table 2 shows that, after adjustment of the

1995–96 totals for the reported definitional shift, there still was a

steep drop in official total and official urban manufacturing

employment between 1996 and 1998 that cannot be explained by

the one definitional change that has been reported. This table

would appear to indicate that on-post (not laid-off) manufacturing employment in China declined from 96 million in 1995,

to 94 million in 1996, to 83 million in 1998, to 81 million in 1999. If

on-post manufacturing employment were indeed dropping by 2

million manufacturing workers a year, then the total would have

been 92 million in 1997, 90 million in 1998, and 88 million in 1999.

So the official figures for total manufacturing employment from

1997 to 1998 had a loss of 7 million workers that is not accounted

for by the one reported definitional change.

There is no discontinuity between 1997 and 1998 in the official

rural manufacturing data series. The definitional shifts appear to

be only in urban data, and these shifts come entirely from

changed coverage of urban manufacturing staff and workers.

The category of on-post urban manufacturing staff and workers

was dropping by about 21⁄2 million from 1995 to 1996 and again

from 1998 to 1999. If we were to assume that the trend was

continuous from 1995 to 1999, then we would see the following

approximate numbers in the category of staff and workers: 52.3

million in 1995, 49.7 million in 1996, 47 million in 1997, 44.5 million

in 1998, and 42 million in 1999. Instead, the reported 1998 figure

was 37.7 million. Therefore, about 7 million workers were dropped

from the category between 1997 and 1998, in addition to those

workers dropped due to the known definitional shift from

including laid-off workers in employment figures to excluding

them.

Now consider again the trends in China’s manufacturing

employment based on official data, keeping in mind the unexplained loss of 7 million manufacturing workers from the

numbers up through 1997 to the figures for 1998 and thereafter. In 1995, on the basis of official data, China had 96 million

on-post manufacturing workers, and the numbers were dropping through 1997. The reported 1998 official national total

was 83 million. If the inexplicably missing 7 million are added

back in, then perhaps the total was really 90 million, although

that figure still signifies a significant drop in manufacturing

employment from 1995 to 1998. By yearend 2000, the reported

total was 80.4 million (but the true number could have been

more than 87 million if the missing workers were included).

No matter how the official data are adjusted, China’s total

manufacturing employment dropped by around 8.5 million or

more from 1995 to 2000. The official total then rose by 2.6

million from yearend 2000 to 2002. So the net loss of manufacturing jobs in China during 1995–2002 was about 6 million.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that the trend of declining

manufacturing employment in China was apparently reversed

after the year 2000.

Below the national level, official figures for rural manufacturing employment rose until 1995–96 and stabilized from

1995 through 1999, thereafter rising every year since 1999.

Therefore, on the basis of the official series, all the declines in

China’s manufacturing employment in the late 1990s happened

in urban areas. Many who lost their jobs were laid off while still

receiving basic living subsidies from their enterprises, and many

others were subjected to mandatory early retirement. Some

manufacturing workers in urban China also have become fully

recognized as unemployed.20 Of the yearend-2002 registered

unemployed urban workers who were previously employed (2.17

million), 41 percent had lost manufacturing jobs.21 This reduction

in the workforce implies that 0.89 million former urban

manufacturing workers were classified as unemployed as of the

end of 2002.

Manufacturing employment excluding surplus laid-off manufacturing workers in China, yearend 1995–2002

Total Surplus laid-off Rural Derived urban Manufacturing Manufacturing

manufacturing manufacturing manufacturing manufacturing employment in urban staff and

employment1 workers employment employment1 urban units1 workers1

1995 ..................... 95.90 2.13 39.71 56.19 52.80 52.26

1996 ..................... 94.40 3.23 40.19 54.21 50.21 49.70

1997 ..................... — — ————

1998 ..................... 83.19 (3

) 39.29 43.90 38.26 37.69

1999 ..................... 81.09 (3) 39.53 41.56 35.54 34.96

2000 ..................... 80.43 (3

) 41.09 39.34 33.01 32.40

2001 ..................... 80.83 (3

) 42.96 37.87 30.70 30.10

2002 ..................... 83.07 (3) 45.06 38.02 29.81 29.07

1 Excludes surplus laid-off manufacturing workers. Data for 1995–96 are

calculated from the reported figures, shown in table 1, minus surplus laid-off

manufacturing workers. Data for 1998–2002 are the reported figures.

2

 Break in series.

3

 Data not shown because surplus laid-off manufacturing workers are

not included in total manufacturing employment after 1997. Only 1995 and

1996 data are used to calculate estimates presented in this table.

NOTE: Dash indicates data not available.

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

Ministry of Labor, compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 1996 (Beijing,

China Statistics Press, 1996), p. 409, and China Labor Statistical Yearbook

1997 (Beijing, China Statistics Press, 1997), p. 405.

2

[In millions]

Table 2.

 Year
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 17

Apparently, then, manufacturing employment in China

increased vigorously until 1995, declined from that year to

2000, and has risen again since then, regardless of whether

the reported data come from the Labor Ministry and the NBS

or whether the data are adjusted for changes in coverage or

definition. Urban state-owned and collective-owned manufacturing enterprises have lost most of their employed workers

since the early 1990s, as shown in table 1. Most of their former

workers have been laid off, fired, subjected to early retirement,

or retained by their enterprise after it was sold, was privatized, or

became a joint Chinese-foreign company in the decade from

1992 to 2002. Meanwhile, rural manufacturing employment

reportedly has continued to increase, and in urban areas manufacturing employment in the category of other ownership units

grew rapidly during that decade. This category includes manufacturing enterprises with joint (Chinese-foreign) ownership,

shareholding stock ownership, limited-liability corporations, and

foreign-owned enterprises.22 What these numbers appear to

mean is the following:

• China’s manufacturing is becoming less bloated with

surplus workers over time;

• The number of manufacturing workers (however defined

or adjusted) in China has declined somewhat since

1995;

• Urban state-owned and urban collective-owned enterprises have shown steep declines in numbers of manufacturing workers since the mid-1990s;

• So-called rural manufacturing is still growing; and

• Urban private-sector manufacturing employment is

expanding.

Research by Thomas Rawski helps us understand what is

going on in some parts of China’s manufacturing sector. Rawski

documented the decline in urban staff and worker manufacturing

employment in China from 1993 to 2002. Utilizing detailed data

from several engineering sectors producing widely used industrial components, he showed a 52-percent increase in labor

productivity (value added per worker) in the short period from

1996 to 2000, while employment in these sectors dropped steeply

by the year 2000, to 63 percent of the 1996 numbers, and output

was nearly stagnant. According to Rawski, “These data reveal

industries in the throes of restructuring rather than dynamic

growth.”23 China’s manufacturing sector is shedding surplus

workers and becoming more productive and competitive.

Meanwhile, Rawski pointed out, laid-off manufacturing workers

in China and in developed countries such as the United States

and Japan are experiencing similar dislocations in their personal

and family lives.

The U.S. Conference Board has emphasized that China is

losing many more manufacturing jobs than the developed world

(including the United States) is—and in many of the same

industries in which the developed world has seen the greatest

declines.24 Manufacturing industries in China with the greatest

job losses during 1995–2002 were textiles, steel processing,

machinery, and nonmetal mineral products.25 China’s manufacturing job losses can be traced to the restructuring of extraordinarily inefficient state-owned and urban collective-owned

factories and to rapidly advancing labor productivity.26

The next five sections of this study delve more deeply into

some of the topics raised in the foregoing analysis. Enterprise

employment data are contrasted with data from the 2000

population census, supporting the conclusion that the enterprise reports undercount millions of manufacturing workers.

Then the problematic categories of urban and rural manufacturing workers are explored in more detail, leading to a

statistical anomaly that goes further into the data on the TVE’s.

Finally, key export regions are examined and migrant manufacturing workers are discussed, because many of China’s

manufacturing workers have migrated into the export zones in

search of jobs and there is some evidence that they are not well

enumerated in China’s labor statistics.

Data discrepancies

This section presents a comparison of manufacturing employment data from the 2000 census of China with the annual

enterprise data for the same year and attempts to explain the

discrepancies between the two sources. The comparisons here

show that the regular administrative reporting system misses

many millions of workers, not only in the manufacturing sector,

but also in many other sectors of the economy. In addition, a

discussion of the census results highlights an apparent tendency on the part of rural households to report household members as agricultural workers, even if they work in manufacturing

part time or for part of the year. Therefore, although the census

achieved more complete reporting than did the official annual

compilations from enterprises, the census, too, appears to have

undercounted manufacturing employment, especially outside

the cities and towns.

The 2000 census of China discovered more manufacturing

workers than were reported from annual administrative data.

Both the 1990 and 2000 censuses asked respondents information

about the employment of all persons aged 15 years and older. In

the 2000 census, the data were gathered in a long form filled out

by about 10 percent of civilian households in every locality and

chosen to be representative of the population as a whole. Figures

cited in the rest of this article are extrapolated to the entire

counted civilian population aged 15 years and older.27

Employment data from annual enterprise reporting and from

China’s 2000 census do not agree with each other. For example,

table 3 shows the estimated numbers of employees in each major

sector of China’s economy at or near the end of the year 2000
18 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

from the two major data sources. On November 1, 2000, the

census recorded a total employed population of approximately 709.7 million workers. Two months later, administrative

compilations of data from enterprises, economic units, and

self-employed individuals recorded a total of 629.8 million

workers, 80 million fewer than the census. (See table 3.)

What are the sources of the discrepancies between these two

sets of data? We can see from table 3 that the census recorded

123 million more workers in agriculture than did annual

administrative data. One reason for this large difference is that

the census asked about employment only in the last week of

October 2000, the week just prior to the date the census was

taken. The census surely detected individuals who work in

agriculture during peak planting and harvest seasons, but not

the rest of the time, and these workers were counted as employed

in agriculture during the peak autumn harvest season.

The way employment questions are asked in China’s censuses and the instructions for filling out the census forms

apparently bias rural household respondents in favor of reporting all household members as agricultural workers, even if

some adults in the family actually work in nonagricultural sectors

of the economy most of the time.28 Therefore, the decennial

censuses may overreport employment in agriculture and underreport employment in many industrial and service sectors of the

economy. In particular, the censuses of 1990 and 2000 probably

underreported the total number of manufacturing employees in

China.

In most other employment categories outside of agriculture,

the census also estimated a larger employed population for the

latter months of the year 2000 than did enterprise data compiled

by the Labor Ministry and the NBS. This may mean that the

census detected millions of workers that the administrative

reporting system is regularly missing. (See table 3.) For example,

in services, the annual reporting system seems to be leaving out

millions of workers, perhaps because many service workers are

in the informal economy. By contrast, the regular administrative

reporting system recorded more workers than the census did in

construction, in transport, in the small categories of geological

prospecting and water conservancy, and in research and

technical services. The annual system also reported 56 million

people at yearend 2000 in the category of other unclassified

workers, while the census was able to classify most workers into

one of its standard employment categories. (See table 3.) Some

of these “other” workers may in fact work in two parts of the

economy, such as agriculture during peak seasons and

manufacturing during another, or even the same, part of the

year.

The discrepancy between census and enterprise data on the

number of manufacturing workers in China was not large in the

year 2000, at least if census data are compared with the total

employment figures by sector compiled by China’s Labor

Ministry and the NBS and reported in table 3. The two data

sets are as close together as they are because the census

also likely undercounted rural manufacturing workers. (See

 Employment in China: comparison of census and enterprise data, 2000

 Sector Census data Enterprise data Difference1

Total employment ............................................................................... 709.71 629.78 79.93

Farming, forestry, animal husbandry, and fisheries ..................... 456.89 333.55 123.34

Mining and quarrying ..................................................................... 7.41 5.97 1.44

Manufacturing ................................................................................ 88.43 80.43 8.00

Production and supply of electricity, gas, and water................... 4.44 2.84 1.60

Construction .................................................................................. 19.05 35.52 –16.47

Geological prospecting and water conservancy .......................... .90 1.10 –.20

Transport, storage, post, and telecommunications ...................... 18.30 20.29 –1.99

Wholesale and retail trade and catering services ........................ 47.48 46.86 .62

Finance and insurance .................................................................. 4.19 3.27 .92

Real estate trade .......................................................................... 1.64 1.00 .64

Social services. ............................................................................ 15.27 9.21 6.06

Health care, sports, and social welfare. ...................................... 7.53 4.88 2.65

Education, culture and arts, radio, film, and television ............... 18.16 15.65 2.51

Scientific research and polytechnical services ........................... 1.59 1.74 –.15

Government and party agencies and social organizations .......... 16.69 11.04 5.65

Others ........................................................................................... 1.74 56.43 –54.69

1 Difference is census figure minus enterprise figure.

NOTES: Enterprise data are for yearend 2000; census data are from

November 1, 2000, which was 2 months earlier. Therefore, the numbers from

the two sources are not expected to be exactly the same. Census figures

are derived by the author from the census long-form sample and refer to

population aged 15 and older.

SOURCES: Census data are from China National Bureau of Statistics,

Tabulation on the 2000 Population Census of the People’s Republic of

China, vol. 2 [in Chinese] (Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2002), pp. 1569–

70. Enterprise data are from China National Bureau of Statistics and China

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

China Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 8–9.

[In millions]

Table 3.
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 19

later.) The census estimated 88.43 million persons employed in

manufacturing the last week of October 2000. On the basis of the

national employment totals published by the NBS and the Labor

Ministry, economic units reported that employment in manufacturing totaled 80.43 million at yearend 2000.29

What can account for this discrepancy of 8 million manufacturing workers between census data and the officially

compiled enterprise data? First, the census counted each parttime worker as an employed worker. Anyone who worked more

than 1 hour for pay in the week before the census was counted

as one employed worker. Of manufacturing workers counted in

the census, 3 percent worked fewer than 4 days in the previous

week, and 97 percent worked full time or overtime. More

specifically, 39 percent of manufacturing employees worked for

income 4 or 5 days in the previous week, and 58 percent worked

6 or 7 days during the 7 days before the census.30 It is possible

that annually reported employment figures tend to neglect those

who work less than full time. Therefore, part-time manufacturing

workers might explain some of the discrepancy—no more than 2

to 3 million—between the census-based estimate of manufacturing workers in late 2000 and the official NBS-Labor Ministry

compilation of yearend-2000 enterprise data on manufacturing

employees.

Temporary workers in manufacturing who happened to be at

work during the last week of October 2000 would have, or at least

should have, been reported by the census as employed in manufacturing. Annual enterprise data also capture some temporary

workers. For example, it was reported that, within the category of

on-post urban manufacturing staff and workers in state-owned

enterprises in 2002, 9.31 million (95 percent) of 9.79 million were

in long-term manufacturing employment, while 0.47 million (5

percent) were in temporary manufacturing employment.31

However, long-term or temporary status is reported only for this

10 million of China’s reported total of 83 million on-post

manufacturing workers in 2002. The annual enterprise reporting

system classifies all urban on-post employees as either “long

term,” defined as having been working for 1 or more years, or

“temporary, provisional,” defined as having worked for less than

1 year.32 Many of the latter employees may simply be workers

who have not yet been on the job long enough to qualify as

long-term workers, even though that is the intent of both

employer and employee. It is possible that the census included

more of China’s actual temporary manufacturing workers than

are included in the annual enterprise reports, although there does

not appear to be any proof that such a bias or shortfall exists in

enterprise data.

A minor cause of differences in manufacturing employment

between census data and annual data is that the censuses of

1990 and 2000 recorded employment of the population aged 15

years and older, whereas compiled annual data are supposed to

refer to the population aged 16 years and older.33 According to

2000 census data, China had a total of 334,000 manufacturing

workers who were exactly age 15 in the last week of October

2000.34 Therefore, 0.33 million of the 8.00 million differential

between census and annual enterprise numbers of manufacturing workers in China in 2000 could have been caused by

the inclusion of workers aged 15 years in census data and

their apparent exclusion from annual employment data.

At the older end of the working ages, the census was supposed to include as employed everyone aged 15 years and older

in the long-form sample population who had worked for income

either part time or full time in the week before the census, no

matter what their age. China’s regular employment statistics

define working ages as 16–59 years for men, 16–54 years for

women working in white-collar jobs, and 16–49 years for women

in blue-collar jobs. In theory, with regard to urban workers, only

those in these age groups are included in the category of staff

and workers. Employed people who are still working beyond the

statutory working ages or who have been rehired after retiring

from a job are supposed to be included in the category of “other”

urban employment, in a subcategory of retirement-age workers

who have been rehired or who have continued working. The

aforementioned working ages do not apply to agricultural

employment, and it is not clear whether they have any relevance

to rural or town manufacturing employment. In theory, annual

employment statistics, as well as census employment statistics,

should include all those people in their fifties, sixties, and older

who are working to earn income. Therefore, at the older working

ages, there should be no age cutoff in employment statistics

and no definitional difference between census figures and

annual enterprise data on manufacturing or other employment.

Urban and rural manufacturing workers

In China’s annual statistics on employment in manufacturing,

the categories “rural” (xiangcun) and “urban” (chengzhen) are

profoundly problematic.35 If these employment statistics followed

China’s official statistical definition of urban and rural places and

populations, then urban would include manufacturing

employment in cities (chengshi or cheng) and in towns incorporated as urban places (zhen). The urban manufacturing figures

should include actual workers in manufacturing in cities and

towns, regardless of whether the workers have or do not have

their permanent residence or registration there. If rural villagers

are employed full time in manufacturing in an urban town (zhen)

or in a city, then, on the basis of the NBS statistical definition of

urban, these manufacturing employees should be classified in

the data as urban manufacturing workers.

Indeed, China’s census of November 1, 2000, reported that the

nation had 41.96 million manufacturing workers in cities and 18.41

million in urban towns (zhen), for a total of 60.36 million urban

manufacturing workers, constituting 68 percent of all the

manufacturing workers in China. The census also counted 28.07

million rural (xiangcun) manufacturing workers, 32 percent of
20 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

the enumerated manufacturing workers.36 As it is, the 2000 census

may have underestimated the urban proportion of manufacturing

employment because rural workers who had moved to towns or

cities within the previous 6 months and who were working in

manufacturing there would be counted for the census back in

their villages and therefore might be called rural manufacturing

workers or even rural agricultural workers.

Table 1 shows, however, that the annual statistics for yearend

2000 recorded urban manufacturing employment at only 39

million (fewer than the 2000 census counted in the cities alone),

just 49 percent of the reported national total, while rural manufacturing employment, at 41 million, constituted more than half of

China’s manufacturing employment. The category of manufacturing employment in urban units was reported at only 33 million

that year, and that of urban manufacturing staff and workers was

reported at 32 million. China’s 2000 census used a comparatively

careful definition of urban population and employment that has

been refined by the NBS during the last two decades. The NBS

official statistical definition of urban and rural populations and

employment is arguably the best standard for other Chinese

statistics. Interestingly, the breakdown of China’s annual

manufacturing employment statistics into the rural classification

and the various urban categories is inconsistent with China’s

own statistical definitions of urban and rural.

The inconsistencies between census data and annually

reported data on urban and rural manufacturing employment

arise in part because annual data are “administrative.” The regular

statistics are based on administrative geographical boundaries,

rather than on statistical distinctions between rural and urban

employment. In the administrative data, urban encompasses only

cities and perhaps also the political county seat (called the

“county town”) of each county in China, while rural denotes

everywhere else, including all other towns that are officially

established as urban.37 In the annual manufacturing employment

statistics, however, the word urban appears to be a misnomer.

The data ostensibly refer to manufacturing employment only in

China’s cities and perhaps some of their immediate suburbs and

the county towns. Apparently, almost all of China’s manufacturing employment in urban towns (zhen) and rural areas is

lumped together as rural manufacturing employment.

In truth, the discrepancy between the annual administrative

data and the census data is even greater than the preceding

paragraph asserts. According to the NBS, some “urban” data on

manufacturing employment include data from units that are not

in fact located in any urban area.38 Specifically, if a state-owned

factory is located in a remote rural area, its data might still be

included in urban data on employment and wages in manufacturing. This categorization is a legacy of the planned-economy practice of reporting data by administrative subordination

rather than geographic locality. In addition, according to the

NBS, there is at least one case of a rural county in Guangdong

province that was reclassified and established as a city, after

which all the factories in the new “city” continued to be classified

and reported as TVE’s; indeed, it may still be that no manufacturing employment or wage data from this new “city” are reported

as urban.

Fortunately, of late China has been making a gradual transition

to compiling statistical data on the basis of geographic locality

rather than administrative subordination.39 Still, there appears to

be no concrete information that can help quantify what proportion of the reported data on “urban” manufacturing employment

and wages is actually from rural locations or what proportion of

“rural” or “TVE” manufacturing employment or wages actually

refers to manufacturing units located in cities.

A major statistical anomaly

China’s statistics on manufacturing employment suffer from an

important inconsistency. The Labor Ministry concerns itself

primarily with city employment, while the Ministry of Agriculture

is responsible for data on rural and town (zhen) employment.

This division of responsibility is a legacy of the Maoist commandeconomy era, and it has not yet been corrected. Therefore, the

Labor Ministry publication China Labor Statistical Yearbook

concerns itself almost entirely with city employment and wage

statistics; even within cities, the Labor Ministry focuses its data

collection and reporting on the rapidly declining urban stateowned and collective enterprises. The Labor Ministry calls these

data “urban” statistics. Meanwhile, the Agriculture Ministry

collects employment and wage data from the TVE’s, including

those engaged in manufacturing, and publishes the data in its

own publications. It appears that there is no coordination between

the two ministries. For example, in calculating total manufacturing

employment in China, NBS and the Labor Ministry seem to ignore

the Agriculture Ministry data from the TVE’s.

This problem is illustrated in table 1 and chart 1. The rightmost

two columns of the table report Ministry of Agriculture data on

employment in industry (gongye) TVE’s since 1978. This

category is almost all employment in manufacturing. (The rest of

“industry” employment comprises the two relatively small

categories of mining and the production and supply of electricity,

gas, and water.) In 2003, a Ministry of Agriculture publication

reported for the first time the number of TVE manufacturing

employees (for yearend 2002), and that number constituted 92.4

percent of TVE industry employment. Arbitrarily using that same

percentage for the years starting in 1990, the far right column of

the table presents estimated TVE manufacturing employment

during 1990–2001.

It is important to note that TVE industry employment data had

an abrupt definitional shift in 1997 in which the total reported

dropped sharply, only to rise again the following year. Part of the

jump in the number of TVE manufacturing employees in 1998

may be associated with the unexplained statistical loss of 7

million urban manufacturing staff and workers that year, as
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 21

discussed earlier. In 1998, the NBS reclassified the group of

directly reporting enterprises to those with annual sales revenue

above a certain amount and exempted smaller enterprises.40 As

reporting requirements were reduced for small and medium-sized

enterprises in urban areas, 7 million manufacturing workers

inexplicably dropped out of the urban numbers entirely and were

not picked up anywhere in the official rural or in the official total

manufacturing employment series. However, they may have been

added to the TVE employment category, boosting its manufacturing employment numbers in 1998.

It is unclear just what the TVE industry employment numbers

actually mean and do not mean or how part-time or part-year

employees are treated in the data. Therefore, it is unclear whether

TVE industry employee numbers are overstated, understated,

or about right. Nevertheless, the TVE data must be considered

in evaluating China’s manufacturing employment levels and

trends, and evidence discussed in the remainder of this article

argues for using those data, rather than the official series on

rural manufacturing employment, to estimate noncity manufacturing employment in China. In addition, the TVE data provide

the only figures on rural earnings, and those earnings must be

used in constructing earnings and compensation estimates for

all of China.41

The column giving data on total manufacturing employment

in table 1 does not include all the reported TVE manufacturing

employees. How do we know this? The reason is that all or

almost all of the reported “urban” manufacturing employees in

China are not in TVE’s. The category of urban “staff and

workers” explicitly excludes all TVE employees.42 The rules about

how to report the “other” urban enterprise employees who, together with staff and workers, constitute “employment in urban

units” have nothing to do with TVE’s.43

It may be that some of the residual 8.21 million “urban”

manufacturing employees who were self-employed or who

worked in private enterprises in 2002 also were called TVE

employees, but this overlapping of categories appears unlikely,

given the way urban and rural employment data for China are

reported.44 These workers are in cities, whereas TVE manufacturing employees generally work outside the cities, in rural

areas and in towns. In fact, instructions for filling out China’s

labor force survey specifically state, “TVE employees are

only those who work in enterprises located in rural townships

and villages.”45 Among manufacturing workers in 2002, there

were 21.35 million employees in private enterprises (siying

qiye) or in individual or family enterprises (geti duzi qiye). Of

these, 8.21 million were in the cities, while 13.14 million were

classified as “rural,” meaning noncity; it is likely that the

latter group was included in 2002 TVE manufacturing employment and wage statistics.46

If the 29.81 million manufacturing employees working in

urban units at yearend 2002 are subtracted from the total

manufacturing employment figure for the same year (table 1),

the result is 53 million manufacturing employees who could be

working in TVE’s. Yet the Agriculture Ministry reported 70.87

million TVE employees in manufacturing that year. (See table 1.)

Chart 2 graphs two different estimates of total manufacturing

employment in China. The “reported” series is that constructed

by the NBS and the Labor Ministry and titled “Total manufacturing employment” in table 1. The series titled “Urban and

TVE” in the chart assumes that the columns for derived urban

manufacturing employment (referring to cities) and TVE manufacturing employment (referring primarily to towns and

villages—the rightmost column in the table) are mutually

exclusive and do not overlap; the chart series is the sum of those

two sets of data. (Data from the two series in Chart 2 are given in

table 4.) Both series indicate that (1) total manufacturing employment in China peaked in the mid-1990s; (2) there was a slow

decline in Chinese manufacturing employment in the late 1990s;

and (3) beginning in 2001 or 2002, there was a slight increase in

national manufacturing employment. (Note that there were

definitional shifts in TVE industry employment data, and then in

urban manufacturing employment data, from 1996 to 1998.)

The “urban and TVE” series in chart 2 and table 4 suggests

that China had 109 million manufacturing employees by yearend

2002, whereas the officially compiled series reported 83 million, a

difference of 26 million. Which series is correct or, at least, more

nearly correct?

On the one hand, if the yearend-2000 totals from the two

series in the chart and the table are compared with 2000 censusbased estimates of manufacturing employment, it becomes

evident that the census found about 8 million more manufacturing workers in China than did the NBS-Labor Ministry

compilation that year (see table 3), but 20 million fewer than the

TVE and urban manufacturing employment total for that date.

The census number is closer to the official series, which would

argue in favor of that series.

On the other hand, the urban and TVE series agrees with the

results of the 1995 industrial census, which counted 147 million

workers in industry (gongye) nationwide. China’s official

administrative data series for the whole country (not only for

TVE’s) reported that, in 1995, 89 percent of all of China’s “industry” employees were in manufacturing. Applying this percentage to the industry employment data from the 1995 industrial

census would translate into 131 million manufacturing workers

nationwide that year.47 The total of urban and TVE manufacturing

employment for yearend 1995 was 128 million. Therefore,

evidence from the 1995 industrial census of China argues for

using the urban and TVE series to estimate total manufacturing

employment in China.48

More information is needed to determine which series is more

nearly correct for total manufacturing employment in China

during 1990–2002. Tentatively, it would appear that the urban

and TVE series on manufacturing employment would be more

useful than the official series. One reason is that the NBS and

the Labor Ministry have little usable information associated

with their figure of 45 million “rural” manufacturing workers.
22 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

Nothing is published except that one number, and no information is available on how this number was derived or estimated.

By contrast, a branch of the Agriculture Ministry has gathered

and published some information on the TVE manufacturing

employees and on the earnings paid to them. The only regular

reporting system that collects detailed data for rural enterprises,

including manufacturing enterprises, is the data collection

system run by the Township Enterprise Bureau of the Ministry

of Agriculture:

The Township Enterprise Bureau of the Agriculture

Ministry collects detailed data on township-run and

village-run collective enterprises, and basic statistics on

co-operative enterprises, private enterprises and individual-owned enterprises. The NBS assists the Township

Enterprise Bureau in the design of the statistical reporting

forms. The Township Enterprise Bureau collects the data

and makes some of them regularly available to the NBS.

The NBS relies on the Township Enterprise Bureau’s data

and has no independent regular reporting system for

rural enterprises.49

If the urban and TVE series is the more nearly correct one,

then the 2000 census long form may have underestimated the

true number of manufacturing workers in China on November 1,

2000, by about 20 million (108,000,000 – 88,000,000). (See tables

3 and 4.) One study has pointed out that the census questionnaire and the instructions for enumerators may tend to bias

the responses of rural households in favor of reporting all

members as engaged in agricultural employment, even if a family

member is working in manufacturing.50 Another problem is that

when the 2000 census enumerators located migrants, they

probably handed them a short census form to fill out, whereas

households were sampled to decide which would receive the

long form. The result of these procedures might be that employment in industry or service sectors favored by migrants is

underestimated by the census long form.51 Also, in some parts

of China, the last week of October is still a heavy harvest season,

and the census might have counted as agricultural workers

millions of manufacturing employees who were only temporarily

diverted into agriculture.

If the urban and TVE manufacturing series is the preferred

one, then China reported about 105 million manufacturing

employees at yearend 1990, a figure that rose to 128 million at

yearend 1995 and 130 million at yearend 1996. (See table 4.) In

1997 and 1998, statistical changes and corrections, as well as

redefinitions, in both TVE data and urban employment data

resulted in a drop in China’s total manufacturing (urban and

Chart 2. Manufacturing employment in China, yearend 1990–2002

Millions Millions

Reported

SOURCE: Calculated from Table 1.

Town and village enterprises; manufacturing employment in this sector is derived from reported TVE industry employment. 1

Urban and TVE1

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

60

70

80

90

100

110

120

130

140

60

70

80

90

100

110

120

130

140
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 23

TVE) employment figure, to approximately 112 million by

yearend 1998, of which 44 million were called “urban” and

about 68 million “TVE.” (See table 1.) Since then, TVE manufacturing employment apparently rose slowly each year, to

71 million at yearend 2002, while on-post (not laid-off) urban

manufacturing employment dropped from 44 million to 38

million. Total urban and TVE manufacturing employment in

China declined by 4 million, from 112 million in 1998 to 108

million in 2000–01, and then rose slightly to 109 million by

yearend 2002, as shown in table 4 and chart 2.

Manufacturing in key export regions

Many establishments in China engage in manufacturing that is

part of global trade. These manufacturing enterprises import

large quantities of components, inputs, raw materials, and

machinery, primarily from other Asian countries, and they employ

large numbers of nonnative managers and professionals. They

export some of their final product to the global market, chiefly

the United States, Europe, and developed countries in Asia.52

The two leading manufacturing regions producing for the global

market today are the Pearl River (Zhujiang) Delta (near Hong

Kong and Macao) of Guangdong Province, which includes 9

cities, and the Yangtze River (Changjiang) Delta, which includes

15 cities in Shanghai Municipality, Zhejiang Province, and the

southern half of Jiangsu Province.53 Both areas include many

noncity manufacturing centers.

At yearend 2002, on the basis of the NBS and Labor Ministry

compilation, these four provinces reported a total manufacturing

employment of 2.69 million in Shanghai Municipality, 7.81 million

in Zhejiang Province, 7.45 million in Jiangsu Province, and 7.81

million in Guangdong Province.54 Except in Shanghai Municipality, the majority of the manufacturing employees were

classified as rural in these export-oriented provinces. Rural

manufacturing employees totaled 1.09 million in Shanghai

Municipality, 5.82 million in Zhejiang Province, 4.61 million in

Jiangsu Province, and 4.25 million in Guangdong Province.55

If the Agriculture Ministry were to report the numbers of TVE

manufacturing workers by province, the numbers for those

four provinces would undoubtedly be much higher than the

reported numbers of rural manufacturing employees there. If

their TVE manufacturing workers constitute about 92.4 percent

of their TVE industry workers, then the four provinces have

approximately the following numbers of manufacturing workers

outside their cities: Shanghai, 1.50 million; Zhejiang, 8.00 million;

Jiangsu, 6.96 million; and Guangdong, 7.61 million, for a total of

about 24 million.56 These numbers are far greater than the

numbers of rural manufacturing workers reported by the NBS

and the Labor Ministry for those provinces.

Of China’s reported 70.9 million TVE manufacturing employees in 2002, only 13.4 million were reported to be producing

for export, while 57.5 million were apparently producing only for

the domestic market. Most of the TVE employees producing for

the export market probably were located in the Pearl River and

Yangtze River Deltas.

Migrant manufacturing workers

Where are the migrant manufacturing workers in China’s

statistics? Most published data on manufacturing employment

do not single out migrants. Therefore, it is difficult to discover

how many migrant manufacturing workers there are and

where they are.

Many of China’s urban manufacturing workers, especially in

the export-manufacturing zones, have migrated into cities and

their suburbs from rural areas. These rural-to-urban in-migrants

are supposed to be included in 2000 census figures on urban

manufacturing employees if they have been in the city for 6

months or longer. Also, annual enterprise data for urban manufacturing units are, in theory, required to include workers from

rural areas in the category of urban manufacturing “staff and

workers.” Specifically, the urban employment classification “onpost staff and workers” includes the category “workers whose

population registration is in rural areas”; all these figures are to

be reported monthly, quarterly, and annually.57 According to the

NBS, the official series on manufacturing employment in urban

units (see table 1) included a total of 4.59 million migrant

manufacturing workers (whose household registration was still

in rural areas) at yearend 2002. The 4.59 million figure constituted

15 percent of the 29.81 million manufacturing employment in

urban units; the number of in-migrant manufacturing workers

with rural population registration increased to 5.46 million at

yearend 2003, or 18 percent of manufacturing employment in

urban units at the end of that year.58

Many millions of young rural workers have migrated to

China’s export-manufacturing zones in the most recent decade

and a half to work in factories. Sometimes these factories are

Manufacturing employment in China: two

Urban and TVE1 Official reported

manufacturing manufacturing

employment employment

1990 ..................... 105.45 86.24

1991 ..................... 109.44 88.39

1992 ..................... 114.94 91.06

1993 ..................... 123.46 92.95

1994 ..................... 121.98 96.13

1995 ..................... 128.24 98.03

1996 ..................... 130.09 97.63

1997 ..................... 112.64 96.12

1998 ..................... 111.69 83.19

1999 ..................... 109.91 81.09

2000 ..................... 108.35 80.43

2001 ..................... 108.25 80.83

2002 ..................... 108.88 83.07

1

 Town and village enterprises. SOURCE: Calculated from table 1.

[In millions]

 alternative series, yearend 1990–2002

Table 4.

Year
24 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

within city administrative boundaries, but often they are

located in industrial parks, suburban areas, built-up periurban

industrial zones, towns, or rural regions where agricultural

land is being taken over for manufacturing zones. Both

foreign and domestic employers who are eager to keep down

their labor costs and statistical reporting requirements may

prefer that their export-processing factories be classified as

rural or TVE.

59 Under such a classification, they need meet

few, if any, requirements to pay social insurance and other

welfare obligations for their hundreds or thousands of production and hand-assembly workers, and, at the same time,

data-reporting requirements for their enterprises are minimal.

Many of the migrant manufacturing workers in these factories

may be counted in China “rural” manufacturing employment

figures or in the TVE manufacturing industry employment

numbers. (See table 1.)

There is, however circumstantial evidence that not all migrant

workers are included in China’s official annual employment data.

China’s November 1, 2000, census estimated that there were

already 14.60 million migrant rural-to-urban manufacturing

workers, constituting 25 percent of all manufacturing workers in

cities and urban towns.60 Worker migration has been increasing

since then, especially for manufacturing, so the number likely

was larger by the end of 2002.

Other indirect evidence from one province points to the

same conclusion. Shanghai Municipality carried out a

detailed survey of its “floating population” (liudong renkou)

as of August 1, 2003.61 The survey estimated that in-migrants

from other provinces who had been in Shanghai Municipality

for a day or more totaled 4.99 million. Of these individuals,

3.75 million were employed, yet the Shanghai Statistical

Yearbooks exclude even long-term in-migrants from their

figures on the total population of the municipality and,

therefore, probably from the total employment figures (7.43

million at yearend 2002; 8.13 million at yearend 2003) and the

manufacturing employment figures as well.62 Data on manufacturing employment in Shanghai Municipality in the China

Labor Statistics Yearbooks are based on the data in the

Shanghai Statistical Yearbooks. Shanghai Municipality

reportedly had 2.69 million manufacturing workers at yearend

2002 and about 2.61 million at yearend 2003.63 As of August 1,

2003, there were 1.27 million floating in-migrant manufacturing workers in Shanghai Municipality. It appears that

these migrant manufacturing workers were largely excluded

from the official data series on Shanghai. Unless they were

counted in China’s official data series as manufacturing

workers back in their home provinces, they also were missing from the official national manufacturing employment

series that is compiled from provincial data.

A global perspective

Table 5 gives BLS compilations of levels and trends of manufacturing employment in the Group of Seven (G7) developed

countries; in 2002, these countries had a total of 53 million

manufacturing workers. China’s official data showed 83 million

manufacturing employees that year, but, as mentioned earlier,

that figure was likely an understatement, and the true number

was probably closer to 109 million. (See table 4.) Most of the

countries listed in table 5 have had declining numbers of

manufacturing workers, as did China in the late 1990s, because

Manufacturing employment in G7 countries, 1995–2002

 Year G71 total United States Canada Japan France Germany Italy

1995 ......................... 59,825 20,493 1,907 14,520 4,115 9,017 4,831 4,942

1996 ......................... 59,437 20,518 1,926 14,420 4,073 8,643 4,781 5,076

1997 ......................... 259,567 2

20,835 2,016 14,390 4,035 8,521 4,746 5,024

1998 ......................... 259,204 2

20,733 2,102 13,790 4,047 8,688 4,820 5,024

1999 ......................... 258,024 220,070 2,202 13,410 4,031 28,591 4,820 4,900

2000 ......................... 257,353 219,644 2,254 13,180 4,081 8,646 4,796 4,752

2001 ......................... 55,606 18,434 2,230 12,800 4,127 8,626 4,774 4,615

2002 ......................... 53,321 17,233 2,291 11,990 4,059 8,491 4,814 4,443

[In thousands]

Table 5.

1 The G7 countries are the United States, Canada, Japan, France, Germany,

Italy, and the United Kingdom. 2 Break in series. For the United States, all breaks are due to updated population

controls. Furthermore, data for 2000 forward for the United States are based on

the 2002 North American Industry Classification System; data for earlier years

are based on the 1987 Standard Industrial Classification. The 1999 break for

Germany reflects the incorporation of an improved method of data calculation and

a change in coverage to persons living in private households only.

 NOTE: The data in this table are obtained mainly from household

surveys, such as the Current Population Survey for the United States.

Household surveys are more comparable across countries than are

establishment surveys.

SOURCE: Comparative Civilian Labor Force Statistics, Ten Countries,

1960–2004 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 13, 2005); on the Internet

at http://www.bls.gov/fls/flslforc.pdf.

 United

Kingdom
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 25

of both rising productivity and increasing global competition in

manufacturing.64

In addition, the share of manufacturing in total employment

has been declining in most of the G7 countries.65 In 1990,

manufacturing employment ranged from 15 percent to 32 percent

of total employment in these developed countries, but by 2002,

the share was down to 12 percent to 24 percent of total employment. In China, meanwhile, official data showed that

manufacturing constituted only 14 percent of total employment

in 1990, after which it declined to 12 percent in 2002. The

difference between China and the developed countries, of

course, is that agriculture still employs a large proportion of the

working population in China. Chart 3 shows that, even though

manufacturing employs a similar proportion of workers in the

United States and China, most other workers in the United

States are in services, whereas in China the service sector is

comparatively underdeveloped and agriculture continues to

employ more workers than services.

Why does China have so many more manufacturing workers

than other countries? First, much of China’s manufacturing

production is still labor intensive rather than capital intensive,

so more workers are required in China to produce the same

output. Second, China is extremely competitive in the global

market for manufactured products and is able to sell its

manufactures around the world, not only because it pays low

wages, but for many other good reasons as well. Third, the

manufacturing sector in China serves the country’s own huge

domestic market as well as the international market.66

Summary and conclusions

This article has collected and assessed the available statistics

on manufacturing employment in China. Official data from the

China National Bureau of Statistics and the Labor Ministry show

a steep drop in urban manufacturing employment in China from

1995 to 2001 and in total manufacturing employment from 1995

to 2000, after which the numbers stabilized or began to rise. The

declines in Chinese manufacturing employment in the late 1990s

were caused by (1) massive layoffs and early retirements of

redundant workers in China’s urban state-owned and urban

collective-owned manufacturing enterprises, (2) a change in

coverage starting in 1998 that has included only on-post (not

laid-off) manufacturing workers in the urban employment

numbers from 1998 to the present, and (3) another definitional

shift from 1997 to 1998 that has not been explained. The analysis

presented here has shown that, even after adjustment for the

definitional shifts, China has lost millions of manufacturing

workers since the mid-1990s.

12.6

7.7

78.0

1.7

United States

12.3

6.6

32.9

48.2

China

Chart 3. Employment by sector in the United States and China, 2002, in percent

 SOURCES: U.S. data are from Comparative Civilian Labor Force Statistics, Ten Countries, 1960–2004 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 

May 13, 2005); on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/fls/flslforc.pdf. Chinese data are from official yearend enterprise reports as 

published in China Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2003), pp. 128–29. 

Agriculture

Agriculture

Manufacturing Manufacturing

Mining and 

construction

Mining and 

construction

Services

Services
26 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

Published labor statistics for China continue to emphasize

data for the declining urban state-owned and collectiveowned enterprises, while neglecting the healthiest and most

dynamic parts of the economy. This approach means that the

employment numbers put out by the Labor Ministry and by

the National Bureau of Statistics are becoming ever more

irrelevant. In manufacturing, the action has moved to the

private sector. In urban statistics, the booming private domestic, foreign-owned, and multinational manufacturing enterprises and corporations are lumped under the umbrella term

“other ownership units.” Privately owned and family-owned

urban siying qiye manufacturing businesses are ignored in

the employment data from the Labor Ministry and the NBS,

and the same is true of self-employed manufacturing workers

in the cities. Yet it is the urban private sector that has seen

ever-increasing manufacturing employment. “Other” urban

manufacturing ownership units had only 1.35 million employees in 1990, but the number has grown every year since

then and reached 15.82 million by yearend 2002. Meanwhile,

the residual category of urban manufacturing workers employed in the privately owned siying qiye and getihu rose

from less than 1 million in 1990 to 8.21 million by yearend

2002. It appears that government statistical and labor agencies do not pay adequate attention to the private-sector

manufacturing corporations and the small manufacturing

businesses in China’s cities.

China’s employment statistics focus on the cities, while

the expanding “rural,” town, suburban, and industrial park

manufacturing enterprises all over the country are almost

entirely left out of the statistics. Apparently, virtually all of

China’s manufacturing enterprises and factories located outside

strict city limits are lumped together under the category “town

and village enterprises” (TVE’s). This term is a misnomer for all

the employers, both private and collective, both domestic and

foreign, of the 71 million noncity manufacturing employees in

China who are referred to as TVE manufacturing employees.

Most TVE’s were privatized by the late 1990s; therefore, the

private sector has become important in employing TVE workers

as well as urban workers.67

In a holdover from the Maoist decades, the Ministry of

Agriculture is responsible for supervising and collecting

statistics on all the industrial enterprises located outside city

limits in China. In 2003, for the first time, one of the agency’s

publications, the China Village and Town Enterprise Yearbook,

published the number of TVE manufacturing employees in

China.68

Adding together official manufacturing employment numbers

for the cities and estimates for the TVE’s suggests that China

had about 105 million manufacturing employees in 1990, and the

total increased in the early 1990s to a peak of 130 million in 1996.

This large number may have included some overreporting of

TVE manufacturing employees, along with the surplus urban

manufacturing employees not yet deleted from the total urban

manufacturing employment figures. After statistical corrections

in both urban and TVE data, China was estimated to have

approximately 112 million manufacturing employees at yearend

1998. The number declined to about 108 million in 2000–01 and

rose slightly to 109 million by yearend 2002. All of these estimates

are based on the supposition that there is no overlap between

TVE and official urban manufacturing employee figures.

This article has demonstrated that manufacturing employment in China increased during the 1980s and early 1990s, peaked

in about 1995–96, declined during the late 1990s until 2000–01,

and increased again in 2002.

Future research priorities

The following areas should have high priority for future data

collection in China and future research on Chinese manufacturing:

1. Migrant manufacturing workers. Publicly available

data on China’s manufacturing employees do not provide enough information about how many migrant

manufacturing workers there are in China and where they

are working. Yet migrants from the rural areas are fueling

the country’s manufacturing boom, and there are tens or

hundreds of millions more surplus workers in agriculture,

some of whom could migrate to join factories in the

future. Migrant workers help keep China globally

competitive in manufacturing. Further collection and

dissemination of information on China’s migrant manufacturing workers are needed.

2. Rural manufacturing employment. Much better data

collection and reporting, and much more research, are

needed to try to fill in some of the missing information

on rural and town manufacturing employment. Reporting

is routinely more thorough for city manufacturing units

in China.

3. Conflicting data. More work is needed by China’s

statistical leaders and by analysts of labor force data to

reconcile and make sense of the conflicting sets of

manufacturing employment data so far released. Communication, coordination, and better statistical oversight

are needed among the NBS, the Labor Ministry, the

Ministry of Agriculture, and the State Administration

for Industry and Commerce and with scholars who utilize

China’s official labor force statistics.

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

and publish results of labor force surveys using international standards and definitions. The surveys should

cover the rural as well as the urban labor force. China

has been conducting experimental labor force surveys,
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 27

but most of the results have not yet been released.

Reportedly, China will conduct a regular labor force

survey in 2006 and begin publishing data from that

survey.

5. National economic census. During 2005, with

reference year 2004, China is conducting its first

national census of the economy. This census is expected to refine, correct, and update data on who works

where in manufacturing. The census “is sure to find

that private-sector employment is much higher than

is currently reported.”69 When results of the economic census become available at the end of 2005,

the new information should be used to update

research on China’s manufacturing sector.

Notes

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: This article was written under contract to the

U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in order to

further the knowledge of China’s manufacturing labor statistics. The

views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect

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

valuable feedback of Chinese and foreign colleagues on China’s

economy and on 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.

Official statistical organizations in China have helped to correct some

errors and point to missing pieces of information. BLS economists—in

particular, Constance Sorrentino, Aaron Cobet, Susan Fleck, Marie

Claire Guillard, Erin Lett, Gary Martin, and Ann Neff—have supplied

their expertise and graphics for international comparisons of manufacturing employment. 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; any

became classified as TVE’s. Now the TVE category, in addition to encompassing small local enterprises, can include very large factories in

industrial parks outside cities, as well as suburban, town, and rural

factories. Indeed, companies have incentives to have their factories

classified as TVE’s because mandatory social insurance payments are

very low, statistical reporting requirements are minimal, and many

legal and taxation benefits accrue to TVE’s.

8

 See Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in

China.” Some of the terms are defined in the “Glossary and Definitions” section of this paper.

9

 China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry of Labor,

compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003 (Beijing, China

Statistics Press, 2003), p. 638.

10 See also China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, pp. 13, 230.

11 Ibid., p. 249.

12 Enterprise statistical reporting forms, 2004; wage-reporting

instructions, 2004.

13 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, p. 169.

14 China State Administration for Industry and Commerce, Zhongguo gongshang xingzheng guanli nianjian 2003 (Yearbook of the

Industry and Commerce Administration of China 2003) (Beijing, China

Industry and Commerce Press, 2003), pp. 583, 587.

15 See also Ming Lu, Jianyoung Fan, Shejian Liu, and Yan Yan,

“Employment restructuring during China’s economic transition,”

Monthly Labor Review, August 2002, pp. 25–31; on the Internet at

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/08/art3full.pdf.

16 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, p. 10.

17 Ibid., p. 20.

18 Ibid., p. 243. See also Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and

Compensation in China.” The terms laid-off staff and workers, noton-post staff and workers, off-post staff and workers, and on-post staff

and workers are defined in the “Glossary and Definitions” section of

that paper.

19 Ray Brooks and Ran Tao, “China ’s Labor Market Performance

and Challenges,” IMF Working Paper WP/03/210 (Beijing, International

Monetary Fund, November 2003); on the Internet at http://

www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2003/wp03210.pdf; see also

Robert H. McGuckin and Matthew Spiegelman, China’s Experience

with Productivity and Jobs (New York, The Conference Board, 2004),

p. 12.

20 See Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in

China.” The term unemployment rate is defined in the “Glossary and

Definitions” section of that paper.

21 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, pp. 96, 126.

22 Ibid., p. 637.

6

 Copies of the enterprise statistical reporting form (laodong

qingkuang biao, or “labor situation form“) for 2004 were submitted

mistakes or errors remain my responsibility.

1

 Judith Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation

in China,” on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/fls/#publications.

2

 See Jeffrey R. Taylor and Judith Banister, Statistical Reliability in

China (U.S. Census Bureau, 1989).

3

 Carsten A. Holz, The Institutional Arrangements for the Production

of Statistics, Statistics Directorate, OECD-China Governance Project,

OECD Statistics Working Paper STD/DOC (2005), 1 (Paris, Organization

for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2005), p. 5.

4

 Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in

China.” (See “Ministries” in the “Glossary and Definitions” section of

that paper for a list of the ministries involved in the collection and

reporting of manufacturing employment in China.)

5

 For relevant Chinese language terms, see Banister, “Manufacturing

Employment and Compensation in China.” “Actual situation,” “labor

situation,” and “yearend number of workers” are defined in the

“Glossary and Definitions“ section of that paper.

to urban authorities by the end of February 2004 and reported 2003

data for urban companies and work units; wage-reporting instructions

(laodong gongzi—tongji taizhang, or “labor wages—statistical

accounts”) for 2004 were from the Beijing Municipality Statistical

Bureau. (See especially p. 2-1 of the latter.)

7

 The TVE’s were originally 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 practice allows the modernization of China’s vast countryside

without necessitating massive migration from 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
28 Monthly Labor Review July 2005

Manufacturing Employment in China

23 Thomas G. Rawski, Recent Developments in China’s Labor

Economy (Geneva, International Labor Office, November 2003)

(revised from a report prepared in January 2002).

24 McGuckin and Spiegelman, China’s Experience, p. 5.

25 See Changming Li, China Industrial Development Report 1997

(Beijing, Economic Management Press, 1997), especially Chapter 11,

“China’s textile industry: From size to strength”; also in Christopher

Howe, Y. Y. Kueh, and Robert Ash (eds.), China’s Economic Reform:

A Study with Documents (London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 165–

75.

26 McGuckin and Spiegelman, China’s Experience, pp. 4–5, 11–13,

17.

27 The calculation procedure for estimating the nationwide employed

population from the long-form sample sidesteps the problem that

there was a severe undercount of children below age 10 or so in the

2000 census. The count of the population aged 15 years and older in

the 2000 census was quite complete, in that it matched the expected

adult population as projected from the 1990 census and taking into

account all available demographic information for the interim period,

even though there is controversy about whether some young and middleaged adults were counted in the wrong places. (See Weimin Zhang and

Hongyan Cui, “Dui Zhongguo 2000 nian renkou pucha zhunque xing

de guji“ (“Estimates of the accuracy of China’s 2000 population

census”), Renkou yanjiu (Population Research), vol. 27, no. 4, 2003,

pp. 25–35; Kam Wing Chan, “Chinese census 2000: New opportunities

and challenges,” The China Review, Fall 2003, pp. 1–12; Daniel

Goodkind and Gregory Robinson, “Intercensal evaluations of year

2000 censuses: Issues and surprises in the United States and China,”

paper presented at the International Seminar on China’s 2000 Population and Housing Census, Beijing, April 2004.

28 Alwyn Young, Gold into base metals: Productivity growth in the

People’s Republic of China during the reform period, NBER Working

Paper Series no. 7856 (Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic

Research, 2000), pp. 22–23.

29 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, pp. 8–9.

30 China National Bureau of Statistics, Tabulation on the 2000

Population Census of the People’s Republic of China, vol. 2 [in

Chinese] (Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2002), pp. 1578–79.

31 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, pp. 23, 362.

32 Wage-reporting instructions, 2004, p. 1-2.

33 Compare “Di wu ci quanguo renkou pucha biao chang biao”

(“The fifth national population census form, long form”) (Beijing,

China National Bureau of Statistics, 2000), columns R17–R22, with

China National Bureau of Statistics, China Statistical Yearbook 2003

(Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2003), p. 181.

34 China National Bureau of Statistics, Tabulation on the 2000

Population Census of the People’s Republic of China, vol. 1, p. 570;

vol. 2, pp. 800, 1269.

35 See Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in

China.” The terms urban and rural are defined in the “Glossary and

Definitions“ sections of that paper.

36 Tabulation on the 2000 Population Census of the People’s

Republic of China, vol. 2, pp. 888, 942, 996, 1050.

37 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), p. 27.

38 Most of the information that follows is from an interview with

NBS statistics officials in Beijing Jan. 10, 2005.

39 Holz, The Institutional Arrangements, p. 12.

40 Ibid., p. 17.

41 See Judith Banister, “Manufacturing earnings and compensation

in China,” Monthly Labor Review, forthcoming, August 2005.

42 China Statistical Yearbook 2003, p. 181.

43 Enterprise statistical reporting forms, 2004; wage-reporting

instructions, 2004, pp. 1-1 to 1-2.

44 China Statistical Yearbook 2003, p. 123; Loraine A. West,

discussant, BLS seminar, Washington, DC, Nov. 8, 2004.

45 “2004 nian chengzhen laodongli diaocha zhidu” [“The 2004

Urban Labor Force Survey System”] (China National Bureau of

Statistics, Nov. 17, 2004), p. 20.

46 China Statistical Yearbook 2003, pp. 146–47.

47 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, p. 8.

48 Young also showed that the official NBS and Labor Ministry compilation of national manufacturing employment in 1995 was highly

inconsistent with the 1995 industrial census results. (See Young, Gold

into base metals, 2000, p. 22 and table XI.)

49 Holz, The Institutional Arrangements, pp. 15–16.

50 Young, Gold into base metals, 2000, pp. 22–23.

51 Daniel Goodkind, personal communication, Nov. 8, 2004.

52 Nicholas R. Lardy, “United States-China 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.

53 Zhong Wu, “Guangdong keeps foreign trade lead,” The Standard,

Greater China’s Business Newspaper, May 18, 2004.

54 China labor Statistical yearbook 2003, p. 8.

55 Ibid., p. 26.

56 Ministry of Agriculture, China TVE Yearbook Editorial Committee,

eds., China Village and Town Enterprise Yearbook 2003 [in Chinese]

(Beijing, China Agriculture Publishing House, 2003), pp. 156, 174.

57 Wage-reporting instructions, 2004; enterprise statistical reporting

forms, 2004.

58 Personal communication with NBS officials, Jan. 10, 2005; table

1, this article; China National Bureau of Statistics and China Ministry

of Labor, compilers, China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2004 (Beijing,

China Statistics Press, 2004), p. 9.

59 Fox and Zhao, “China’s labor market reform,” pp. 13–14.

60 “Chengzhen jiuye yu shiye wenti yanjiu—2000 nian di wu ci

quanguo renkou pucha shuju fenxi” [“Research on Urban

Employment and Unemployment Problems—Analysis of Year 2000

5th National Census Data”] (Beijing, Chinese Academy of Social

Sciences, CASS Population and Labor Economics Research Institute,

2003), p. 47.

61 “Shanghai Shi 2003 nian wailai liudong renkou diaocha—shuju

shouce” [“Survey of the Floating Population of Shanghai in 2003—

Data Handbook”] (Shanghai, Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau,

2004).

62 Shanghai tongji nianjian 2003 [Shanghai Statistical Yearbook

2003] (Beijing, Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau, China Statistics

Press, 2003), pp. 62, 98; Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 2004 database.

63 China Labor Statistical Yearbook 2003, p. 8; Shanghai Statistical

Yearbook 2003, pp. 78–81; Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 2004 database.

64 For manufacturing productivity trends in the advanced industrial

countries, see International Comparisons of Manufacturing Produc-
Monthly Labor Review July 2005 29

tivity and Unit Labor Cost Trends, Revised Data for 2003 (Bureau of Labor

Statistics, Feb. 25, 2005), on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/

news.release/pdf/prod4.pdf; and International Comparisons of

Manufacturing Productivity and Unit Labor Cost Trends, Supplementary

Tables (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Feb. 25, 2005), on the Internet at

http://www.bls.gov/fls/prodsupptabletoc.htm.

65 Comparative Civilian Labor Force Statistics, Ten Countries, 1960–

2004 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 13, 2005), Table 6; on the

Internet at http://www.bls.gov/fls/flslforc.pdf.

66 See Banister, “Manufacturing Employment and Compensation in

 China,” for a discussion of China’s domestic market, of factors

enhancing and factors inhibiting China’s competitiveness, and of the

question whether China has an “inexhaustible” supply of labor.

67 Fang Cai, Albert Park, and Yaohui Zhao, “The Chinese labor

market,” paper presented at the Conference on China’s Economic

Transition: Origins, Mechanisms, and Consequences, Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, November 2004, p. 17.

68 China Village and Town Enterprise Yearbook 2003; data were for

2002.

69 “China, no right to work,” The Economist, Sept. 11, 2004, pp.

27–28.