Manufacturing activities expanded in China in October 2020 for the sixth consecutive month amid a strong recovery of business confidence.
According to official statistics, China's Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index stood at 53.6 percent in October compared with 53 percent in September. Such an increase also indicated that with the resurgence of manufacturing and other industries, more job vacancies will be created in the traditional labor-intensive sector.
As we all know, China's rapid and steady development during the past four decades has never been confined to a fixed or set model; rather it is more like an endless exploration of theories and practice, which quickly change with the changes in different times and situations.
Compared with advanced economies in the world, China is still in the middle or even lower reaches of the global production and value chains, relying heavily on upstream raw materials, core technologies and core components from other countries, and mainly serving as a global manufacturing center. That is also the main reason why China is still attaching great importance to a job market focusing on labor-intensive manufacturing industries
To change the situation and move higher in the global value chains, China should strengthen its science and technology sectors, enhance innovation capacity, help talents unleash their potential and improve the comprehensive investment environment.
These improvements will surely change the job market and job structure in China. Frankly speaking, the COVID-19 pandemic has quickened the process. Lockdowns, which banned most outdoor activities at the height of the outbreak, have left a profound mark on the lifestyles of people even after life returned to normal as the pandemic ebbed in China. For example, the habit of ordering daily necessities through WeChat groups still continues among many Chinese people because of its convenience, cheaper prices and delivery with no physical contact.
The emergence of such lifestyle habits has created many new job posts such as group purchasing managers and online store planners, new professions that sprouted amid the pandemic after the lockdowns greatly hampered traditional offline trading between stores and customers and urged stores to go online to reach potential customers.
According to experts, the number of people engaged in new professions such as online shop planners and digitalization service providers is expected to reach 100 million in China at the end of 2020. Moreover, over the next decade, four major metropolitan clusters are expected to be formed in China and more than 20 percent of the country's total workforce is likely to be re-employed in the high-end or service sectors.
The pandemic has accelerated automation and digitalization processes, further reducing reliance on human labor and halting job creation especially in those sectors involving person-to-person interactions. This will surely lead to more job losses in these sectors. With more work done at home, by robots and remotely, the future job market will give more weight to expertise in digital technologies, create more novel professions, and probably require workers to engage in lifelong learning of new techniques. New skills such as the ability to show, promote and trade online will become important elements.
It also means that with the acceleration of digitalization, only those people who are adaptable to the new online market demands can retain their jobs, resulting in a large number of less-skilled workers being laid off and becoming a so-called "useless class."
Facts have proved that the pandemic has hit people with low wages and low skills much harder than those earning high incomes; thus simply giving direct subsidies to affected industries is very expensive and not sustainable. What the government at various levels should do is to make sure that financial aid is distributed to needy families and cash-strapped small and medium-sized businesses to support their return to normal life and basic operation.
(The author is the editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Daily with a Ph.D. from the Journalism and Communication School of Wuhan University.)