jobs in china

hey people

today i realised that i almost never write about the weather...maybei am losing my britishness! Anyway this is because it rarelychanges; around -3 average. today it was -5 though, grrr. neverrains (maybe twice in 4 months) although if it did rain now, itwould be snow, but it has only snowed for a few days whilst i was onholiday and a few hours a few weeks ago.

we met a lady at the intercontinental hotel today. she explainedanother side to the labout conundrum in china. Yes, there is alabour conundrum, because there is a labour shortage in China.Normally I read about this being a problem in the south, where wagesare so low (pushed down by MNEs), not enough migrants are moving into take the jobs; where there is still some restrictions onmigration, where there is not enough skilled labour and many otherreasons.

the lady today explained another situation: there are lots ofgraduates in China, but they all want gradaute level jobs with thesalary, title etc. None of them want to be bar staff or waiters,even though actually in her hotel you can earn practically as muchdoing that. The other problem is that Chinese people seem to have areputation for not working very hard. For sure a few do, but thislady for example has over 90 positions available and cannot findgood enough people to do them. I will endaevour to discover more,but it seems most students all go abroad for masters, expecting tobe able to return and get a hihgly paid job for little work -thereseemes to be lots of over qualified people without jobs. Anyway theyare under pressure from their family to earn lots and get a good job(not a waiter!); oh well, even a waiter nowadays is called amanagement trainee!

finally it brings me to another point i have muted before, thatthere is probably a lot more capaity in china's big cities to managemore people. although there are lots of cities with over 3 millionpeople in them, non have more than 15 million...you would presumethat the world's biggest populated country would have the world'smost populated city, but it doesn't. for the moment its a goodthing; in that there are no slums etc like there are in the world'sbiggest cities; but i think that once the restrictions on movementsand registrations relax, which they will have to be to enable aflexible labour market, then the populations will grow, and chinacan (i thiink) absorb more people in its cities -well in beijing andShanghai anyway....if only people would take the 'crappy' jobs.

i have been out way too much recently, spending way too much money(although it was fun) and even went ice skating and stuff on afrozen outdoor lake -awesome fun). Found an appartment todya toshare with a chinese lady whilst i study; with dvd, tv, internetetc; its great :))

there was some other stuff i was going to write about, but i forgot,so until next time....

Adam