China official says 20 million migrants lost jobs

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - About 20 million Chinese rural migrants have lost jobs as the nation's economic growth has faltered, a senior official said on Monday, promising policies to boost incomes and a softer approach to potential unrest.

Chen Xiwen, director of the Office of the Central Rural Work Leading Group, told a news conference that a recent survey showed 15.3 percent of the 130 million migrants moving from villages to cities and factories had returned jobless to the countryside.

Adding this year's 6 to 7 million new entrants into the rural labor market, Chen added, China will this year have about 25 million jobless and potentially restive rural unemployed.

For the ruling Communist Party, which has yoked its authority to decades of rapid growth, these new rural jobless -- amounting to more than Australia's total population of 21 million -- are a worry, especially if migrant workers find their farmland has been taken for development.

"There's a considerable number of rural migrants who are unemployed. After they return to villages, what about their incomes? How will they live? That's a new factor concerning social stability this year," said Chen.

"Protecting employment and protecting people's welfare is protecting rural social stability."

Chen, who advises national leaders, was speaking a day after the government issued its first big policy document for 2009, which as in past years was devoted to rural development.

That document laid out policies intended to shore up farm incomes, generate jobs for rural unemployed, and extend welfare and healthcare spending in villages.

Chen's estimate of migrant worker unemployment was about double an official projection reported by a Chinese magazine early last month.

NUMBER COULD DOUBLE

Yiping Huang, chief Asia economist for Citigroup, said even that number could double if government stimulus plans fail to offset slowed exports and general gloom.

"It is a big number coming from an official source but a lot of people are expecting even bigger numbers," Huang said of Chen's estimate.

"These are pretty difficult to check reliably, but people are talking about 30 or 40 million eventually."

China has about 750 million people in its countryside -- more than the combined populations of the United States and European Union -- and their incomes and willingness to spend will be crucial to government efforts to boost domestic consumption.

Spending plans to extend the electricity grid, upgrade roads and infrastructure, subsidize domestic appliance purchases, and extend rural access to healthcare and schooling will help boost rural incomes and spending, Chen said.