According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics, 10.97 million new jobs were created in cities and towns across China in the first three quarters of 2019. That's 99.7 percent of the full-year target of 11 million.

In September, the surveyed unemployment rate in urban areas stood at 5.2 percent, lower than the full-year expected target of around 5.5 percent. At the end of the third quarter, the total number of migrant workers from rural areas working in cities and towns amounted to 183.36 million, up 2.01 million or 1.1 percent year-on-year.

Economic headwinds have dampened growth in China, with GDP growth slipping from 6.9 percent in 2015 to 6.6 percent in 2018 and 6.0 percent in the third quarter of 2019. So how exactly has the country continued to create massive new employment opportunities in spite of the economic slowdown?

First, employment is top of the priority ladder when it comes to government policies aimed at improving people's livelihoods. China has implemented an employment-first strategy and adopted proactive employment policies with the overriding aim of stabilizing employment. The 2019 Government Work Report said the government would "for the first time, elevate the employment-first policy to the status of a macro policy in order to increase society-wide attention to employment and support for it".

Second, the Chinese government regards the pursuit of relative full employment as its priority. China's basket of macroeconomic goals include a uniquely Chinese metric - the number of "newly-created urban jobs" in addition to the set of internationally agreed statistics on employment. This metric focuses on new entrants to the urban workforce in a year. The 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) proposed to create over 10 million new urban jobs every year. The actual result has been even more impressive: 13.14 million new jobs were created in 2016; 13.51 million in 2017; 13.61 million in 2018; and 2019 is expected to see more than 14 million new employment opportunities created.

New job creation has remained above 13 million for many consecutive years while the surveyed unemployment rate and registered unemployment rate in urban areas have been at a continuously low level. These numbers testify to China's relative full employment.

Third, China actively backs the creation of jobs through entrepreneurship. It is now home to the world's largest number of entrepreneurs. The number of registered market entities nationwide grew from 77.47 million in 2015 to 109 million in 2018, up 31.53 million; and the number of registered enterprises increased from 22.63 million in 2015 to 34.35 million in 2018, up 11.72 million. Among them, the number of private enterprises exceeded 31.05 million, accounting for 90.4 percent of the total number of enterprises in the country. China has created the most employment opportunities through the largest cluster of market entities in the world.

Fourth, the service industry has risen to become the main provider of new job opportunities. The weight of the secondary industry dropped from 30.3 percent in 2012 to 27.5 percent in 2018 in China. The country has thus moved to a "post-industrial" era in which labor is shifting from manufacturing and industry to services. From a micro perspective, the proportion of people involved in the actual production of products in enterprises in the secondary industry has be declining while the proportion of service-oriented employees has been rising.

In the meantime, the total number of people employed in the service industry grew from 329.39 million in 2015 to 359.38 million in 2018, up 30.99 million, which means an annual average increase of over 10 million. The service industry has become both the primary provider of new employment opportunities and a major absorbent of labor shifting away from the primary and secondary industries.

China is the world's most populous nation. It accounts for 18.3 percent of the world's population. It also boasts the world's largest labor force, 22.7 percent of the global total. What is worth mentioning is that China's share of the world's labor force is higher than its share of the global population. Also, the country's labor force is 4.8 times that of its US counterpart and 1.2 times that of the 36 OECD countries. Creating employment for such a massive working-age population does not just pose a tremendous challenge for China, but also reflects a universally imperative goal.

In response to the array of challenges, the Chinese government has made relative full employment the overriding objective of its employment policy; implementing an employment-first policy; creating a favorable employment environment; incentivizing entrepreneurship; guiding new entrants to the workforce in seeking employment; and offering assistance to disadvantaged groups in securing employment.

China's employment policies have always placed the interests of the people, especially that of the 100-million-strong entrepreneurial community and the 780 million workforce, in front and center, and demonstrated the superior virtues of the socialist system. The resources of the nation are effectively mobilized to address the needs of its people.

The author is dean of the Institute for Contemporary China Studies and a professor at the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University.

The author contributed this article to China Watch exclusively. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of China Watch.

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