China to start releasing proper unemployment figures in 2018 after decades of downplaying the problem

Beijing will start to release proper jobless figures next year, a state statistician has said, as the authorities seek to address a previously taboo subject.

The only official jobless rate released by the Chinese government on a regular basis is the labour ministry’s quarterly “urban registered unemployment rate”, which covers only part of the labour force and systematically underestimates unemployment.

The National Bureau of Statistics will start to release survey-based jobless data from 2018, which will be more comprehensive and more comparable to indicators in other countries, Sheng Laiyun, the chief statistician of the National Bureau of Statistics, was quoted by Xinhua as saying on Monday.

Sheng said the improvement was partly intended to reflect the “high quality” growth concept promoted by President Xi Jinping, which focuses more on people and the environment rather than headline GDP figures.

The Chinese government denied the very existence of unemployment in the country until mid-1990s for ideological reasons, arguing that “unemployment” was a child of “capitalism” and an alien concept to socialist China.