China's job market battered since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome earlier this year began to recover in the third quarter, according to the Ministry of Personnel.

The ministry's statistics show that in July-September, the job markets in 37 major cities across the country registered 2.358 million jobs and 5.164 million job seekers, a job/candidate ratio of 1:2.19, compared with 1:2.48 in April-June.

Jobs in the top ten professions on the recruiting list, including those related to marketing, engineering accounted for 68.8 percent of the total posts and attracted 57.7 percent of the total job seekers.

The number of people seeking popular jobs relating to media, foreign languages, education and finance was twice the number of available jobs, but demand for jobs related to enterprise management and marketing remained higher than the number of applicants.

The total number of employers, posts and job seekers registered in these job markets increased by 52.8 percent, 64.5 percent and 45.3 percent, respectively, on a quarterly basis. People with college and post-graduate degrees made up a significant ratio of job-hunters.

Meanwhile, the major ten job websites of the country registered1.01 million posts provided by 107,000 employers and 1.88 million job seekers.

In west China, the number of posts and job hunters increased by18 percent and 10 percent, respectively, from the second quarter of the year.

As the most populous country in the world, China faces a pressing unemployment problem. This year, 24 million people are expected to need jobs. They include 10 million new job seekers such as college and technical school graduates, 6 million workers laid off from state-owned and collective enterprises, and 8 million registered jobless people, according to statistics from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

In rural areas, there are 150 million redundant laborers who need jobs.

The Chinese government is trying to encourage job creation. According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, 8.12 million people found jobs in the first nine months this year, including 6.5 million newly created jobs mainly in the burgeoning service industry.

This represented the fulfillment of 81 percent of the government employment target for creating 8 million new jobs for the jobless and laid-off workers this year, said Minister Zheng Silin.

China's State Council, or the cabinet, has a plan to bring the country's urban unemployment rate under 4.5 percent this year, which Zheng said would be realized.

(Xinhua News Agency November 4, 2003)