China employment stable despite slower economy

BEIJING - China has seen stable employment growth in the first five months of 2017, helped by an expanding service sector and emerging new business models, official data showed Wednesday.

Some 5.99 million new jobs were created in China's urban regions from January to May, up 220,000 from the same period last year, said Liu Aihua, spokesperson of the National Bureau of Statistics, at a press conference.

That means China already fulfilled 54.4 percent of the official goal of creating 11 million new jobs this year, Liu said.

Meanwhile, both the national urban surveyed unemployment rate and the surveyed unemployment rate in 31 major Chinese cities stayed below 5 percent in May, Liu told reporters.

He described China's employment situation as "very stable" and "in a positive trend."

Despite a lower speed of growth in the past two years, the sheer size of the economic expansion continued to increase, making it possible to create more jobs than before, Liu said.

A larger share for the service sector in the economy, as well as the rise of Internet-inspired new business models, also lent strong support to employment, according to Liu.

However, he cautioned against pressure in helping college graduates become employed, as a record high of 7.95 million college graduates will enter the job market this year.

China added 13.14 million jobs in 2016, and the registered urban jobless rate stood at 4.02 percent at the end of the year.