Educational pain for job seekers

Nothing can better illustrate the failure of education in this country than the contrast between millions of college graduates finding it hard to get a proper job every year and the dearth of workers in the more industrialized regions.

According to news from Dongguan, one of the key manufacturing centers in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in South China, "over 90 percent" factories have said they are finding it difficult to recruit people from the second half of 2009, when the economy began picking up and overseas orders restarted pouring in. Running to full capacity seems a dream the factories had in the long past.

Since the country's demographic structure is no longer youthful - because of the one-child family policy practiced since the late 1970s - a shortage of workers could become a problem in all manufacturing cities on the country's coast.