China’s jobless elite
Feng Jianhua

On November 8, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and the National Development and Reform Commission jointly launched a study on labor and social security development for the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10). This is the first long-term outline on employment and social security by the government and its focus is measures to relieve unemployment pressures in the country.
An important goal is to keep the registered unemployment rate of township and city residents below 5 percent. According to the study, by the end of 2005, the unemployment rate stood at 4.2 percent while the figure in 2000 was only 3.1 percent.
The study predicts that Chinese towns and cities will have new supply of labor of 50 million people by 2010. Meanwhile, there will only be 40 million new job vacancies, which leaves 10 million out of employment.
A report in the China Economic Times says the population engaged in agriculture will be reduced to 700 million by 2010, which means almost 200 million farmers have to move to towns or cities in search of a job. The employment situation looks worse when laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises and ex-servicemen are taken into account.
A recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences shows that among the issues of top concern for city residents in 2005 were the yawning wealth gap, financial risks and unemployment.
Losing shine
Luo Feng, a 40-year-old, has been out of a job for one year now and describes his situation as desperate.
Besides an MBA degree from Napier University in Scotland in 2002, Luo has rich work experience gained in multinational companies. His resume shows he has served as assistant general manager and deputy sales manager at a large German company.
Luo’s friends told him he would never have to go jobless. Only several years ago, the fact of an overseas study stint was almost guaranteed to land one with a handsome pay in a big company.
Yet Luo Feng is jobless-and he is not alone.
Recently, the Chinese Ministry of Labor and Social Security released a report that showed the number of jobhunters with a Bachelor’s degree and above was growing steadily. According to a recent survey by Beijing-based World Human Resources Lab (WHRL) covering 1,500 jobhunters with overseas study experience, more than 35 percent found it difficult to find a job. Another WHRL survey at the end of 2004 showed that only 58 percent of jobhunters who had studied abroad found employment within six months after their return to China.
Luo Feng has been counting on friends and posting his resume online in his job hunt. He believes that for a person with his qualifications and experience, headhunters should be knocking on his doors rather than him crowding into job fairs.
“Maybe my resume is too shiny and the companies I worked for are big names, which scares people away,” he said. He is now trying to “dumb down’’ his resume.
But Luo has also been restricting his choices by leaving out Chinese private companies as prospective employers. His argument is that his Western education has shaped him perfectly for positions in a multinational company. He thinks he will be a misfit in a homegrown Chinese company.
Management graduates from foreign universities returned to China in droves between 2001 and 2004. A large majority of them had no work experience or knowledge of local markets. They tried to plant borrowed models on local companies and their failures dealt a severe blow to the reputation of overseas MBA graduates in China.
“This stereotyping has also greatly inhibited my job-hunting,” Luo Feng told Beijing Review.
Shao Wei is deputy director of the China Scholarship Council and Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange directly under the Ministry of Education. He identified a new trend in Chinese graduates returning home from abroad: the total number is climbing steadily and a rising proportion of them are Master’s degree holders in management and economics.
Lucrative positions for these majors are relatively limited as Chinese universities are also producing a large number of graduates in these majors. In the fierce competition between overseas-trained talents and home-trained talents, the latter group usually has the upper hand as it is prepared to accept a lower salary owing to relatively lower educational expenses.
“Even if finding a job is difficult, I will not become a salesman,” said Luo Feng. “I am too old for that.”
Prolonged internships
Yu Xiaoli graduated from the advertising department of the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in July 2005. She has been working as an intern in an advertising company for nearly a year but is yet to receive 1 yuan in pay. But she is still reluctant to quit the job.
“It is the company’s regulation that every recruit has to work on a two-month internship without salary. But the company always tries to prolong the internship on some excuse or the other. We all feel we are doing a good job and will soon be absorbed as a full-time employee,” said Yu Xiaoli. She said if she quit now, she would have to start all over again in another company, which could well do the same thing.
In China’s highly competitive labor market, many college graduates are in the same situation as Yu. A report on job-hunting by fresh university graduates for 2006 shows that about 100 of the 12,600 surveyed were working without any pay.
“I have worked for almost a year and still rely on my parents for my expenses. I am beginning to wonder whether I should have gone to college,” said a dejected Yu.
Since the 1990s, the focus of China’s employment work has been on creating job opportunities for laid-off workers and migrant workers. However, Zeng Xiangquan, Dean of the School of Labor Relations and Human Resources of Renmin University of China, thinks the focus of employment strategies is gradually shifting to the absorption of college graduates into the labor market.
The harsh reality for college graduates is that those with a job still cannot make ends meet. Fresh graduate from the Beijing Forestry University Li Heng said one needs at least 1,600 yuan per month in Beijing, including 800 yuan for rent, 500 yuan for food and 300 yuan for transportation and telephone bills. But many fresh graduates in Beijing work for less than 1,600 for the first year. They are forced to rent basement areas and eat for cheap off the street.
For a long time, sending children to university has been the only hope for poverty-stricken rural families in China. But with more and more graduates finding it difficult to get a job or in jobs with low salaries, the financial burden on these families could become unbearable.
An editorial in the Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily City News says a series of social problems could result from jobless college graduates and could further widen the wealth divide.
Wrong focus
One reason for the rising numbers of unemployed graduates is demand-supply imbalances in China’s labor market. There is an oversupply of low-level general talents and a shortage of high-end talents. In terms of geographical location, talents are crowded in cosmopolitan cities and coastal cities and they are unwilling to move to the smaller cities.
This has led to the situation where many graduates and post-graduates are jobless but many companies cannot recruit enough technicians.
According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, China now has 87 million technical workers, of which technicians and senior technicians are 3.6 million, accounting for only 4 percent of the total. Meanwhile, companies’ demand for technicians is 14 percent of the technical pool, presenting a staggering gap of 10 percent.
China’s renowned economist Liang Xiaomin attributes this imbalance to the imbalance in the deployment of educational resources.
Liang believes as one type of social resources, the distribution of educational resources should be guided by efficiency, which means training should be directed toward those talents that are most needed by society. He pointed to the explosive expansion of higher education and the shrinkage of middle-level vocational education and training as a case in point.
“China is still a developing country with limited educational resources. It is transcending its development stage by putting its resources into developing and popularizing higher education,” said Liang Xiaomin.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review  Articles Exchange Item)


The missing Muslims of India
Momin Iftikhar

Six decades have passed since the Indian politicians, including titans like Gandhi and Nehru, have been extolling secular credentials as the bedrock of Indian democracy which provided level playing fields to all minorities. The Quaid had challenged this enticing chimera by claiming that Muslims in an undivided India would always be at the mercy of the Hindu majority unless constitutional guarantees were provided to secure the community’s political and economic interests. He set the course for the struggle’ for Pakistan by enunciating his Two Nations Theory after exhausting all options of reconciliation with the Hindu leadership and trying out all options and avenues for a political settlement. How farsighted and true was he in his analysis of the complex situation is brought out by the statistics gleaned by the Sachar Committee, whose leaked out details have begun to rake trouble by reflecting the grinding misery and squalor in which the Muslims in India are finding themselves.
Sachar Committee, headed by Justice (Retired) Rajinder Sachar, owes its existence to the electoral promise of the incumbent UPA Government and has been mandated by the Indian Prime Minister to carry out a national survey of the social, educational and economic status of Muslims in India. Committee’s report is based on facts collected from eight States; namely Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka,Kerala, Andhara Pradesh and Delhi. The Muslim population in these St<=:1tes comprise 56% of the around 14 million Muslim population of India. The Report was due to be published in June this year but leaking out of some of its findings caused such a furor that compelled the Indian Government to stall its formal presentation on one pretext or the other. It is now scheduled to be released. during the current month. Leaked o!Jt findings of the Sachar Report make appalling statement concerning the pathetic state of Muslims living in India. If education forms the basic block of social advancement of a community then Muslim community stands out starkly as the lowliest of the low - even behind the scheduled castes (SC) and Scheduled tribes (ST) of India. As many as 54.6% Muslims in rural India and 60% in urban areas have never attended any school and are illiterate. Only 0.8% of Muslims in rural areas are graduates while this figure is 3.1 % in urban areas. Only 1.2% Muslims are post graduates. Officialdom in India and the political hierarchy across the spectrum of ideological divides is likely to shrug off such harrowing backwardness to Muslim propensity for Madrassah education and lack of motivation and cerebral vigor. However the inadequate or rather abysmal state of educational facilities provided by the Government in the Muslim majority areas in various towns and cities tells a totally different story. The Sachar Committee has Cited the case of a suburb of Jaipur where, for about 1.2 lac Muslims, there is only one primary school with “improper building” and insufficient number of teachers. This state of neglect and marginalization is an apt reflection of trickle down effect that is reaching the Muslims Community in a supposed “India Shining”.
Discrimination in the education sector, as brought out by the Sachar Report, is only matched by the scanty share of Muslim population in Government jobs and Public Sector Units (PSU) vis-a-vis their population percentages (12 % at national level). As a sample of the obtaining state of affairs it is instructive to browse through the share of Muslims, in the jobs pie, in States having the greatest share of Muslim population. Assam (30.9% Muslim population - highest in any Indian State), West Bengal (25.2% - second in Muslim density) and Uttar Pradesh (18.5 - 4th in Muslim preponderance) have only 11.2%, 4.2% and 5.1 % share of Muslims in the State sponsored jobs. It should be instructive to note here that the low percentages of jobs tell only partial story of Muslim deprivation and backwardness. This is so because bulk of the jobs held by the Muslim community belong to the lowest strata of the organizational ladder. The highest percentage of
Muslims in “higher positions” in State PSU is in Kerala (9.50/0) - the most forward looking and liberal of the Indian States - while the lowest is West Bengal which has zero representation of Muslims in the higher echelons of the management.
Sachar findings that there is no state where - representation of Muslims matches their population share illuminates another dimension of the Indian politics and the Muslim marginalization. A stark picture emerges where no political party seems to concern itself with the’ decrepit state of Muslim affairs. While the BJP led Government can’t really be blamed for ignoring the welfare of the Muslim community due to its communal leanings, it is the idealistic political segment viz the Leftist Parties and the Congress - patron
saint of secular elements of political dispensation in India - that appear to be doing the maximum damage to the Muslim interest. Or how else one explains the .sorry state of affairs in West Bengal where Left Front Governments have held un interrupted sway for three decades and where second largest preponderance of Muslims (25.2%) is contrasted against one of the lowest share (4.2%) in the Government employment? This also holds true for UP and Bihar where for the past 15 years Governments have been led by political leaders which claim themselves to be the champions of the Muslim interest. The statistics however poignantly serve to lay bare the major culprit for Muslim deprivation that has always pretended to remain in forefront in claims to champion their cause - the Congress Party, which has remained in power during three fourth of the period since partition with scant regard to their welfare and advancement on the social ladder.
If one gets overwhelmed with the depressing statistics reflecting poorly upon the condition of Muslims in India, at least one set of figures provide comic relief - depending upon one’s propensity to indulge in dark humor. Against their share of 120/0 population, prisons happen to be the only place where Muslims are over represented. While Sachar Commission has: made public no figures regarding West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Andhara Pradesh, those indicated by remaining states are symptomatic of the disgusting state of the prevailing affairs. In Maharashtra, jails hold a chunk of 32.4% of inmate population who are Muslim against a population share of 10.6%; while in Gujarat, percentage of Muslim inmates is 26.2 against a population segment of 9.1. %.
Muslim community constitutes bottom of the heap in India and the reality is lost upon no one. The Sachar Committee is not by any means the first attempt by an Indian Government to gauge the depth and extent of Muslim marginalization in India. A similar Commission; headed by Dr. Gopal Singh was set up in India in 1980, when Indira Gandhi was in power, and which came up with very identical findings. The fact that there has been no action by any following Indian Government to initiate measures to arrest the downward slide of Muslim community stands out to outline the institutionalized apathy that marks the Muslim affairs in India.


Russia marching back toward totalitarianism
Johann Hari

The best sound-track to the slow-motion murder of Alexander Litvinenko — leaving a corpse so radioactive there may never be a post-mortem — comes from the Beatles: “We’re back in the USSR. Been away so long I hardly knew the place.”
To those who stopped following the news from Russia when the Cold War thawed out, the thought of a Russian Bond being dispatched to London to take out a dissident in a Mayfair Hotel seems like an inexplicably retro moment. But for those who have cared to see, it has been clear for some time that under Vladimir Putin, Russia is marching back toward totalitarianism.
The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote three years ago, “The shroud of darkness from which we spent several Soviet decades trying to free ourselves is enveloping us again.” For talking this way, she was swiftly poisoned, and when that didn’t kill her, she was found last month with three bullets in her skull in a Moscow lift-shaft.
Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Victor Yushenko — one poisoning of your enemies could be a misfortune, but three begins to look like carelessness.
Or, rather, a deliberate strategy, and the list of victims goes on. But at first glance, this latest attack seems an extraordinarily inefficient way for the FSB — the successor to the KGB — to murder a dissident. They had to smuggle radioactive poison into Britain, and within 130 days administer it so carefully that they killed Litvinenko and nobody else. Wouldn’t an anonymous bullet in an alleyway have been smarter? But like the previous attacks, this is a way of saying to all critics of Putin: Wherever you are, we can get you, and you will die in agony, and you will know you are dying, and you will know it was us.
In case this sounds too presumptuous — do we really know Putin is responsible for murdering a British citizen on British soil? — it is worth looking at the origins of Putin’s power, as documented by his dispatched critics. In 1999, he was appointed prime minister by the semi-conscious President Boris Yeltsin. It was assumed he was merely the latest in a string of bland functionaries who passed through the premiership. But then there was a slew of explosions in apartment blocks across Russia, killing more than 300 people. Putin established himself as the president-designate with response, immediately blaming Chechen fundamentalists and restarting the uniquely vicious Chechen War which has, according to some human rights organizations, killed a third of the civilian population since 1991.
But there is considerable evidence these bombs were not planted by Chechens at all. On the day of the apartment explosions, in a town called Ryazan 100 miles south of Moscow, a local engineer spotted another huge bomb, and three suspicious men nearby. They were quickly arrested by the police and revealed to be FSB agents. They claimed that, while the country was under attack, they were planting real bombs in yet another apartment block as part of a “training exercise.”
A slew of highly respected journalists, from my colleague Patrick Cockburn to Channel Four’s Dispatches team, have suggested that the bombings were Putin’s Reichstag fire.
Yet the British government has a vested interest in not acknowledging these bleak realities about Russia, and in doing anything they can to avoid the conclusion that Litvinenko was killed on the orders of the Kremlin.