The Government must recognise it will be unable to find new jobs for all 30 million redundant workers in state enterprises, a top researcher said.
'It is impossible to re-employ all of them,' wrote Niu Renliang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Mr Niu proposes shorter working hours to create more jobs, redundancy payments for laid-off workers to take them out of the market, making agriculture more profitable so fewer peasants will seek urban jobs, and other policies to promote labour-intensive - rather than capital-intensive - investment.
But Mr Niu, of the academy's Social Development Research Centre, insisted 'the fundamental and key way of re-employment is supporting private enterprises'.
He suggested offering tax breaks to enterprises which hired laid-off workers.
A lengthy analysis from Mr Niu, published in the Guangming Daily, explained how he arrived at the 30 million figure.
On average, 30 per cent of workers had been 'diverted' from their original employers by enterprises which had been privatised during the past few years. Since there were 100 million workers in state enterprises, this meant there were about 30 million redundant workers.
