Senior workers merely account for 3.5 percent of China's 70 million industrial workers, compared with the average of 40 percent in developed countries.

The lack of skillful workers and technicians has hampered the development of the manufacturing and processing industries, and the problem has becoming even more protruding after China's entry into the World Trade Organization.

Currently, China has some 1 million technicians and senior technicians, but many of them are old, and there is an urgent need for a large number of senior blue-collars to meet the requirements of a booming manufacturing industry in the country, said Xiong Shengwen, a deputy to the National People's Congress (NPC), the top legislature of China.

Sun Jusheng, a NPC deputy and vice-director of the Jiangxi Provincial Statistics Bureau, said 63 percent of the 44 industrial enterprises in the provincial capital, Nanchang, are badly in need of senior workers. The situation is almost the same in such industrial cities as Shanghai, Wuhan and Taiyuan.

Statistics show that China now needs 600,000 operators of numerical control machine tools. Experts say the demand for skillful workers in China is expected to grow by 25 percent in the next few years, with that for technicians and senior technicians being doubled.

China's Ministry of Labor and Social Security launched last October a national program to train highly skilled workers and technicians, aiming at increasing the proportion of senior workers, technicians and senior technicians to the total number of skillful workers by 3-5 percentage points in 3-5 years.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of enterprises have begun to raise the pay to senior workers and technicians, in an effort to keep a stable army of blue-collars. In the First Automobile Works Group, for instance, highly skillful workers are paid the same as engineers or managers.

(People's Daily March 10, 2003)