Labor market is imbalanced

Many Chinese cities have made it a practice to hold two separate recruitment fairs simultaneously - one for college graduates, the other for migrant workers. But the dividing line between graduates and migrant workers is no longer as clear as before. At a recent recruitment fair for migrant workers in Rizhao, Shandong province, more than 50 percent of the applicants were graduates. Similar cases have been reported from many other cities.

With jobs getting scarcer, an increasing number of graduates have taken up jobs that don't require a college diploma. Earlier, such jobs used to be taken up only by migrant workers. The latest survey of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) shows that about 20.4 percent of the migrant workers have a college diploma. The percentage is even higher, 25.3, among the younger group.

This trend reflects the imbalance between demand and supply in the country's labor market and will continue for some time, says Zhang Juwei, a professor at and deputy director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics, affiliated to the China Academy of Social Sciences.