Promote High-Quality and Full Employment

Promote High-Quality and Full Employment*

May 27, 2024

Today, we gather here for the 14th group study session of the Political Bureau of the 20th CPC Central Committee. The subject of this session is promoting high-quality and full employment. In the context of studying and applying the guiding principles outlined at the 20th CPC National Congress, we will, at this session, review our achievements and experience in employment work in the new era, analyze the current employment situation and prominent problems, and seek appropriate ideas and solutions for promoting high-quality and full employment.

Employment is fundamental to the people’s wellbeing. It affects individuals’ immediate interests, impacts healthy economic and social development, and bears on the long-term stability of our country. Therefore, our Party has always treated it as a matter of great importance. Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, the Central Committee has consistently placed employment issues in a prominent position in national governance. It has strengthened the employment-first policy and improved the employment promotion mechanism. It has effectively responded to external pressures, internal difficulties, and especially the severe challenges brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. On average, 13 million new urban jobs have been created every year, and the surveyed urban unemployment rate has remained at a relatively low level. In a large developing country with a population of over 1.4 billion, full employment has been largely achieved, providing important support for people’s wellbeing and economic development. In this process, we have expanded our understanding of the factors influencing employment issues in the new era and accumulated a great deal of experience, including: adhering to the Party’s overall leadership over employment work; regarding employment as the foundation of people’s wellbeing; continuing to implement the employment-first strategy; relying on development to promote employment; expanding employment capacity together with improving the quality of employment; focusing on the employment of key groups; promoting employment through entrepreneurship; creating a fair employment environment; and building harmonious labor relations. This is valuable experience that we must follow in the long run and enrich on a lasting basis.

At the same time, it should be noted that we still face many prominent problems. China’s development has entered a period in which strategic opportunities coexist with risks and challenges, and uncertainties and unpredictable factors are on the rise. The pressure on stability of growth and employment persists. Trends such as the declining birth rate, population aging, the divergence in regional population growth and decline, and the digital transformation of the economy are having an increasing impact on employment, and structural unemployment is becoming more acute. The people’s expectations for the overall quality of life are growing, and improving the quality of employment has already become an urgent aspiration.

With this in mind, at the 20th CPC National Congress, the Central Committee has made major plans to promote high-quality and full employment, with a view to promoting high-quality development and common prosperity for all the people. At the macro level, this mainly entails sufficient employment opportunities, a fair employment environment, a sound employment structure, a good match between individuals and job positions, and harmonious labor relations. At the micro level, the requirement is that people are not only employed but also enjoy stable jobs, reasonable incomes, robust protections, occupational safety, and so forth. This, of course, is an ambitious goal, and its realization will be a gradual process, but we must do all we can within our capacity to attain it. We must fully arouse the people’s enthusiasm, enterprising spirit, and creativity, and guide them to create a better life through hard work rather than sit idle and enjoy the fruits of others’ efforts.

Promoting high-quality and full employment is a new mission on our new journey in the new era. We should adhere to a people-centered philosophy of development and fully implement the guidelines on self-employment and market-oriented employment, and on the government’s role in boosting employment and encouraging business startups. With high-quality development as the base, we should prioritize an employment-first strategy, strengthen related policies, and drive deeper reform of employment-related systems and mechanisms, ensuring sustained qualitative improvement and viable quantitative increases in employment. This will heighten working people’s sense of gain, fulfillment and security, and provide strong support for building a great country and advancing national rejuvenation on all fronts through Chinese modernization. In this regard, I would like to emphasize five points.

First, we must always prioritize employment. We must implement the new development philosophy and be more conscious of high-quality and full employment as the priority goal of economic and social development, so that the process of high-quality development becomes the process of improving the quality and expanding the scale of employment, thus boosting development-driven employment. We should foster new quality productive forces tailored to local conditions. We should upgrade traditional industries, cultivate and grow emerging industries, plan for future industries, improve the modern industrial system, and create more high-quality jobs. We should support the development of industries and enterprises with a large hiring capacity to maintain and expand employment capacity. In line with new trends in economic and social development and the people’s new expectation for a high-quality life, we should continue to refine the social division of labor, make greater efforts to develop new business forms and models, and actively identify and nurture new occupations, in order to foster new sources of job creation. We should evaluate the impact on employment of major policies, major projects, and the distribution of major productive forces, and promote coordination and synergy between fiscal, monetary, investment, consumption, industrial and regional development policies and the employment policy, in order to form an employment-friendly development model.

Second, we must work hard to tackle structural problems in employment. Imbalanced supply and demand of human resources is currently the main problem faced by China. The key to resolving this problem lies in accelerating the cultivation of modern human resources that are of high quality, sufficient in quantity, optimized in structure, and reasonably distributed. We must adapt to the ongoing revolution in science, technology and industry, and accurately identify changing trends in labor development dynamics. We should therefore strengthen our overall planning and do a better job in education, training and employment, and dynamically adjust the programs of higher education and the structure and distribution of related resources. It is important to vigorously develop vocational education, improve the system of lifelong vocational skills training, and promote integration between vocational education and general education, between industry and education, and between science and education. Our goal is to make our workforce development initiatives more future-oriented, targeted and effective.

We should also improve the supply and demand matching mechanism, and strive to ensure that people are matched with suitable positions, and that they can maximize their talents and capitalize on their capabilities. All this will help strengthen the quality and stability of employment. We should increase public awareness and education, and guide the public towards a sound understanding of employment. We advocate that all occupations are equally valuable, and all work deserves respect, that one may distinguish oneself in any trade, and that excellence can be achieved at the grassroots level. Promoting these beliefs will help us shape favorable public opinion and an inclusive social environment, ultimately boosting employment and encouraging business startups. With this in mind, we will open up new horizons. We should conduct in-depth analyses of the causes of the relatively large labor shortages in some industries, find effective ways to fill these gaps, and start with addressing the issue of “jobs available but no one to do them” in order to solve the problem of “people available but no jobs for them”.

Third, we must improve our employment policies to support key groups. We must prioritize the employment of young groups such as college graduates. We should create more job positions that will allow them to leverage what they have learned and what they are good at; encourage young people to find work or start businesses in key fields and industries, in urban and rural grassroots communities, and in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises; and broaden market-oriented and society-wide employment channels to ensure that the overall employment level of young people remains generally stable. As we advance new urbanization and rural revitalization, we must attach equal importance to helping people find jobs locally or elsewhere. We should adopt various measures to boost migrant workers’ employment, and make special efforts to encourage higher-end talent to return to their hometowns, and urban people to start businesses in the countryside. We must ensure that employment opportunities are plentiful for those who have been lifted out of poverty, and that they provide good incomes, and we must prevent large-scale relapse into poverty due to unemployment. We should strengthen assistance to groups with employment difficulties due to age, disability or prolonged unemployment. We should implement employment assistance measures and make good use of public welfare posts to ensure that the number of families with no one in work is steadily reduced to zero. We should also focus on securing employment for specific groups such as veterans and women.

Fourth, we must further the reform of employment systems and mechanisms. We must enable the market to play the decisive role in the allocation of human resources, and the government to better fulfill its functions. We should focus on resolving bottleneck problems and blocking points that hinder the improvement of employment quality, the expansion of employment capacity, and the optimization of the employment structure. We should refine the public service system for employment, building it into a comprehensive, convenient and efficient system that covers the entire population, the whole employment process, and every region of the country. We should make public services for employment more accessible, equal and professional. We should improve the support system for promoting employment through entrepreneurship, optimize entrepreneurial services, and boost the quality of business startups. We should build a unified and standardized labor market system, foster a fair employment environment, and resolutely remove institutional barriers that hinder the flow of labor and talent, thus enabling everyone to have the opportunity to realize their career development through hard work.

Fifth, we must better protect workers’ rights and interests. We will improve labor laws and regulations, establish labor standards for new forms of employment, and improve our social security system. We will protect workers’ lawful rights and interests involving such matters as labor remuneration, working hours and holidays, workplace safety, skills training, social insurance and welfare. We should do more to protect the rights and interests of those in flexible employment and new forms of employment, expand trials of occupational injury insurance, promptly review our experience, and establish relevant institutions. We should reinforce market oversight, strengthen labor protection supervision and law enforcement, and eliminate irregularities such as discrimination in employment, withholding wages or salaries, default on social security contributions, and illegal layoffs.

Employment is a matter that impacts both families and the nation. Party committees and governments at all levels should make employment the top priority in improving the people’s wellbeing. We should strengthen organization and leadership, improve systems and mechanisms, and increase our synergy in work. We must accelerate our pace in developing China’s employment theory, tell accurate and engaging stories about employment in China, and amplify China’s international voice and influence in relevant fields.

* Main part of the speech at the 14th group study session of the Political Bureau of 20th CPC Central Committee.

(Not to be republished for any commercial or other purposes.)