While the majority of employment sectors in China have the opportunity to benefit from the country's entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO), some sectors will face harsh challenges in the near future.

Li Binsheng, deputy director of Policy Research Department under the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), forecast that employment opportunities in agriculture will decrease sharply, while the volume in the tertiary industry is expected to grow by a large margin. In the secondary industry, the job opportunities will increase in some sectors.

Li said WTO membership will not only produce "far-reaching implications" for Chinese workers, but also pose challenges to the Chinese trade unions and their work. Li spoke at an international workshop on China's WTO entry and its impacts on the labour market on Wednesday in Beijing.

The workshop was sponsored by Germany's Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), a renowned foundation founded in 1925 as a political legacy of the first democratically elected president of Friedrich Ebert, who died that year. The two-day workshop, which attracted about 40 foreign and Chinese trade union officials and researchers, is scheduled to end today.

According to Li, workers of different sectors and industries will be affected to various degrees by China's WTO entry.

"The industries, including computer, automobiles, electronics, petrochemicals, steel and machinery, were started late in China and are not very developed or competitive," said Li. "They are more likely to be badly influenced."

With a huge population, China has been under employment pressure for a long time. Many workers have been laid off or transferred to other jobs when their enterprises have been restructured or reorganized.

To cope with the inevitable intense WTO competition, restructure and retrenchment measures will continuously be adopted in the industries, which will lead to a larger number of redundancies, Li said.

WTO membership will also bring great changes to the employment structure.

Bernd Reddies, FES resident representative for China, said all the participants of the workshop discussed the social implications brought by China's entry into WTO and will strive to seek solutions to the adverse impacts.

"WTO and its rules have offered the members a fair stage to enhance global trade but, meanwhile, it doesn't have rules to prevent economic crisis and employment problems nationally and internationally," Bernd said.

Through international co-operation, the final solutions to the crisis and problems can be found, Bernd concluded.