Laid-off workers in their 40s are being given a helping hand by labour leaders to restart their lives and find new jobs.

Labour and social security departments across China have pledged to make more efforts to help laid-off workers, those aged above 40 in particular.

More than 8 million new jobs will be created this year across the country to help laid-off workers, including 1 million posts for the middle-aged.

"Helping middle-aged people find jobs again is the ministry's key task this year," Zheng Silin, minister of labour and social security, told a working conference in Beijing on Tuesday.

Creating more jobs for laid-off workers and providing effective services to help them start their own businesses will help guarantee the country's overall plan for economic and social development, Zheng said.

Middle-aged people - women above 40 years of age and men above 50 - are the groups in China that find re-employment most difficult.

Most of the country's labour and social security departments have adopted policies to enhance re-employment of laid-off workers and the middle-aged in particular, Zheng said.

An increasing number of middle-aged laid-off workers in Northeast China's Liaoning Province has found new jobs thanks to the efforts of the local government and organizations.

According to Liaoning Provincial Labour Bureau, 750,000 people left their jobs last year alone and half of them were women.

The Liaoning Women's Re-employment Foundation has helped more than 3,000 laid-off women to establish 83 small businesses, such as knitting mills, food and beverage processing and packaging factories, and woollen products factories.

Shanghai launched its first official employment website earlier this month to enhance re-employment and has pledged to keep the city's registered unemployment rate within the 5 per cent range this year.

In the past three years, Shanghai has created 100,000 new jobs annually and this year the government will quadruple the number, said local government officials.

Employment in China reached 737.4 million last year, absorbing 7.2 million more workers than the previous year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Service and construction sectors absorbed more employees last year, each employing 300,000 more people than the previous year, according to the bureau's latest report.