China's job market still blossomed in the fourth quarter of 2003, while the number of offered posts in Beijing unusually went down, according to the Ministry of Personnel.

The ministry's statistics show that in the October-December period, the job markets in 37 major cities across the country registered 2.371 million jobs and 5.106 million job seekers, up by27.8 percent and 1.5 percent respectively over the same period of 2002. The job/candidate ratio of 1:2.15, compared with 1:2.19 in July-September of 2003.

The posts offered in Beijing in the fourth quarter declined by 21 percent on a quarterly basis while the posts in other big cities, like Shanghai, Guangzhou and Tianjin increased by 30 percent in the same period.

The posts and job seekers in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou reached 1.14 million and 2.19 million, respectively covering 48.1 percent and 42.9 percent of the total, according to the statistics. People with college and high school degrees made up most of the job-hunters while those with post-graduate degrees only accounted for 1.6 percent of the total.

The top ten professions on the recruiting list included those related to marketing, mechanical and electronic engineering, computer science, architecture, economics, enterprise management, administrative assistant and finance and accounting, which accounted for 91 percent of the total posts and attracted about 80percent of the total job seekers.

The demand for jobs related to enterprise management remained higher than the number of applicants.

Meanwhile, the major ten job websites of the country registered 858,000 posts provided by 96,000 employers and 1.835 million job seekers, respectively decreased by 15 percent, 10.3 percent and 2.3 percent on a quarterly basis.

The statistics show the western region of China kept a flourishing demand for applicants with marketing, management, computer science and architecture backgrounds.

As the most populous country in the world, China faces a pressing unemployment problem.

In 2003 alone, there were about 24 million people who need jobs in cities, including six million workers laid off from state-owned and collective enterprises, and eight million registered jobless people, and about 10 million new job seekers such as college and technical school graduates, according to statistics from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

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

(Xinhua News Agency February 5, 2004)