Five Decades Of Chinese Anti-unemployment Policy Research (1949-1999)

Unemployment has become the difficult problem that troubles China current social and economic life. It is of somewhat difficult to tackle the problem of unemployment of China just depending on the market mechanism. The government should shoulder an inescapable responsibility for the settlement of unemployment. In order to improve the government's efficiency in eliminating unemployment, it is remarkably necessary to study and sum up the practices of unemployment settlement in the past, and to get useful experiences and lessons. It is just based on this consideration that I choose "Research on the anti-unemployment policies in China's fifty years (1949-1999)"as my Ph.D. thesis.The whole article is divided into seven chapters, including the following four sections: First is the introduction to unemployment and its theory (chapter 1); Second, the study and analysis on anti-unemployment policies during six unemployment climax, since the foundation of the P.R.C (chapter 2-5); Third, the analysis and learning from foreign governments'anti-unemployment policies (chapter 6); Fourth, suggestions to China's anti-unemployment polices at the early phase of 21st century (chapter 7). The section three is the emphasis of this article.Chapter 1 introduces basic definitions and main theories about unemployment, analyses the functions of unemployment, and then puts forward a should-be unemployment value. In order to find out suitable measures to eliminate unemployment, we first should understand the implication, causes and categories of unemployment. Connecting with a dispute against the trend of thought-arguing in favor of today's unemployment in China, I adhere to the social attitude orientation of "Unemployment is a evil". In addition, I put forward some proposals to remedy defects of China's contemporary unemployment statistics.Chapter 2 studies on the causes, status of three times of unemployment climax and contents of Chinese government's anti-unemployment policies in the planned economy age. I make an overall inspection on the process, policies and measures, effects of the three unemployment settlements which respectively took place in the early 1950s, the 1960s, and the late 1960s to the early 1970s. A conclusion can be drawn my analyses: In the first unemployment climax, 'the policies and measures that Chinese government carried out to reduce unemployment rate are suitable, and its effects also are remarkable. The fault is that we forsook a positive method that should have been kept-enlarging employment through development of diversified economy, but magnified and fixed a passive method-the policy of "all taken on by govemment"that made the employment become passive gradually. During the second and third unemployment settlements, a passive "inverse citifiation"method was adopted. Though this method relieved the pressure of urban unemployment, the government was led astray: transferring urban unemployment to rural area continuously, transforming open unemployment into disguised unemployment. In view of the whole pfocess of this period, the government's many "institution arrangements"brought about full employment outwardly. However, seen from the dynamic angle, those methods did not do well to the enlargement of the channels of social employment.Chapter 3 inspects the two unemployment settlements in the early 1980s and the early 1990s. The government began to reform traditional systems to treat the fourth unemployment climax after "The Culture Revolution". In the early 1990s, the fifth climax was temporarily reduced with enforcement of the planned management and dismissal of peasant workers.Chapter 4 focuses on the settlement policies of the sixth unemployment climax in the late 1990s, also studies on the changes of the digesting methods to the rural labor surplus since the foundation of P.R.C. I have realized that the government has been using the "discriminative employment policy"that discards peasants to safeguard urban workers.Chapter 5 makes a deep research on the major factors influencing China's...